John Cassavetes / 约翰·卡萨维蒂 · 1974
A Woman Under the Influence
A Woman Under the Influence
Hesitation, excess, and waiting exceed family norms and retain their own bodily time. Deleuze mentions the film only briefly in Cinema 2, so the specific reading of gesture remains the responsibility of this atlas.
Film details
- Original title
- A Woman Under the Influence
- Director
- John Cassavetes / 约翰·卡萨维蒂
- Year
- 1974
- Region
- United States
Film analysis: how shots organize concepts
The harder family commands try to restore Mabel as wife and mother, the more her body reveals times and intensities those roles cannot contain.
- 01Everyday ritual loses measure
As Mabel greets her husband, hosts his workers, serves spaghetti, and gathers the children, her gestures, volume, and pauses exceed situational norms.
Domestic tasks continue, but the sensory-motor schema can no longer stabilize the body as a social role. - 02Commands produce disorder
Nick repeatedly orders her to sit, stop, and speak normally, summoning relatives and friends to watch and correct her.
Speech fails to manage the body and instead turns the household into an apparatus of escalating exposure. - 03Return is not restoration
The homecoming party rapidly breaks down; the couple clears the crowd, settles the children, and tidies the room, but can only provisionally recompose life together.
The ending preserves a fragile capacity after gestural change, not proof of restored normality.
Shots and scenes
Primary texts, scholarship, and locators
Theory coordinate: Cinema 2, ch. 8, p. 199
- 01Cinema 2: The Time-Image
Authoritative source for the standard translation, translators, ISBN, and publication date.
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This film in books and research
The Cinematic Body · Further discussion
Desire exceeds identity; costs are still distributed by identity
pp. 72–73
Claim: Molecular mobility can undo naturalized identities, but it cannot cancel the unequal distribution of law, labor, medicine, and violence through identity categories.
Extension: Rizzo tests Deleuzian embodiment and becoming through feminist analysis; Clover returns cross-gendered spectator identification, pain, and survival to the institutions of horror genre.
Tension: The book's molecular transsexuality and claim that all desire is homosexual are 1993 philosophical provocations, not present-day trans identity theory, and they cannot erase communities, consent, or material sanctions.
Rizzo, Deleuze and Film: A Feminist IntroductionClover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws
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