![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Streetcar Named Desire Revisited
Jun. 15th, 2006 05:17 pmAs I aquired the DVD, I rewatched A Streetcar Named Desire. Which reminded me of several things, such as that Elia Kazan is my case for "can't stand the creator, but love the art" (something debated in Neil Gaiman's blog last week, I think), Tennessee Williams, iconic performances, and different buttons pushed in different decades.
Streetcar the film is still powerful and disturbing to watch. If it were a new film, or a new play for that matter, I think it couldn't get made, though for different reasons than the ones that caused censorship to strike when the play was transformed into a film. Today, references to homosexuality or promiscuity, and on screen rape would not be a problem. But there is no way the ending would be the same (and the film already changed the ending from the stage version). I can't even decide whether that's a bad or a good thing.
It's easy to see why his performance as Stanley Kowalski made Marlon Brando a star, and the sexual magnetism, the aura of danger still work today. (Meta wise, it also gives you a sense of waste regarding Brando, especially if one has "met" him first in his numerous cameos in dozens of bad movies to make cash. I was lucky enough to see him first in The Godfather, so I knew he could actually act.) At the same time, it's disturbing to recall this film made his Stanley the 50s equivalent of a sex idol, considering he's also an unrepentant rapist, your classic abusive husband who is in a codependent relationship with his wife whom he both beats and later apologizes to by make-up sex, and revelling in utter destruction of another human being. One wonders how much of that came across back then - Louis B. Mayer, whose daughter Irene had produced the play on stage, said to director Elia Kazan it was very good that the "nice couple" got a happily ever after after that "awful woman who tried to break them up" was packed off into the madhouse she belonged.
Blanche DuBois, whose tragedy both play and film is - Stanley is just her catalyst - is one of Tennessee Williams' neurotic and fragile women sliding into madness. Williams famously used his own sister as the model for the sister in Glass Menagerie, the first of these ladies, and himself at least in parts for Blanche in Streetcar. Given that meta knowledge, one is bound to see Blanche's desperate promiscuity during her last years in her hometown, that sexual history she's ashamed of and has to hide in her last gamble to find safety until it is dragged out in the open and used to destroy her, as a metaphor for homosexuality. Within the play, Blanche's husband, whom she married when she was 16, turned out to be homosexual and killed himself, which she never stopped blaming herself for - the film, being forbidden to make the reference explicit, only lets Blanche allude to this very cryptically, though of course a 50s audience would have understood what she meant with him being "very very sensitive" etc. - but the link from that to Blanche being condemmed to one night stands thereafter seems somewhat farefetched today. Conversely, Blanche's reaction to seeing her sister's marriage with Stanley, her urging Stella to get out of it after witnessing Stanley beating her (and Stella is pregnant - btw, this is another case of film censorship, where we don't see the actual strike but have to guess from the reactions), today appears as the only sensible reaction to the situation.
Vivien Leigh won her second Oscar for this performance, and it's one of my minor pet peeves that comments like Blance being just an extension of her Scarlett O'Hara keep turning up - Scarlett and Blanche are two very different women, most crucially by Scarlett being a survivor who would have bought herself a pistol and shot Stanley at an early opportunity. Or got someone else to do it for her. But she would have gotten rid of Stanley. The other pet peeve is how incredibly patronizing Kazan is about Leigh in his memoirs. It's understandable that he resented not having been able to bring his own Blanche from the New York production, Jessica Tandy, but that wasn't Vivien Leigh's fault. They had different takes on the character. Now, Leigh had played Blanche about 100 times in the London production. But Kazan, macho that he was, naturally concludes the only reason why she didn't agree with him about Blanche was that her husband, Laurence Olivier (who was in Hollywood as well, shooting with William Wyler), was secretely directing her behind Kazan's back. It couldn't be her own opinion and experience, oh, no.
(If you read the press interviews with Vivien Leigh at the time of the film production, you see Kazan's attitude was shared by a great many reporters. Though she had her way of replying. Choice example:
Q: Do you read your lines to Sir Laurence?
A: No, I always know my lines.
Q: Does Sir Laurence read his lines to you?
A: Yes, it's perfectly wonderful because he puts me to sleep.)
She has the more difficult part, because Blanche with her pretensions and snobbery and on-the-edge-of-breakdown-ness is not an obvious character for the audience to identify with. But the vulnerability, the encreasing desperation under the Southern Belle manners shine through, and in by the time Mitch has found out about her past, it's impossible not to emotionally agree with her "but I don't want reality - I want magic". Blanche's lies, her fantasies are never malicious, and as opposed to, say, an Arthur Miller play, where truth is something that might hurt but ultimately is the better choice for the characters to take, Stanley exposing Blanche's deceptions comes across as needlessly cruel. Or rather, serving Stanley's needs to get rid of Blanche, but he's not even content with that; he has to destroy her. Kazan had to accomodate the Hayes code, and so you get a smashed mirror at the point where Stanley starts the rape (and his line from the play "we've had this date from the beginning" is cut), but we saw him already pushing her to the bed and tearing some of her clothes off earlier. And yet the most brutal image of the movie isn't one from the rape scene. It's later. When the doctor and the nurse from the asylum has arrived, and the nurse wrestles Blanche down, saying "these nails will have to be clipped", and Kazan shows Blanche on the floor, her arms held behind her back, her face looking up, desperately, with the camera straight looking down. The sheer horror of Blanche's fate isn't "just" the rape itself but that her sister betrays her and consigns her to an asylum rather than to believe her.
In both film and play, Stella tells neighbour Eunice she couldn't believe Blanche and continue to live with Stanley, so she couldn't believe Blanche, and Eunice agrees, saying "never believe it". To me the implication always was that this, as much as the rape, was what pushed Blanche over the border for good. The film sometimes gets critisized for giving in to censorship by slightly changing the ending, so that instead of Stanley being completely triumphant, fondling Stella while Blanche gets carried off and his buddies deal out new cards, we get Blanche still carried off but his buddies giving Stanley uneasy and/or disgusted looks and Stella saying "don't touch me again". But allow me the heresy of preferring this ending. (Since the last thing we see is Stella going upstairs and Stanley starting to cry "Stella!" again, the implication is that she'll return to him anyway; she did it before, in one of the most famous sequences of either film or play.) Watching all these very intense performances, I don't think I could have stomached Stanley triumphant.
One last mercy Williams extends to Blanche is something that Billy Wilder later echoed in Sunset Boulevard: at last, Blanche manages to incorporate the doctor in her fantasies, and accepts his arm, exiting with her famous last line, "I always depended on the kindness of strangers". In the overall context of the play, of course, it's as dark an irony as you can get.
Streetcar the film is still powerful and disturbing to watch. If it were a new film, or a new play for that matter, I think it couldn't get made, though for different reasons than the ones that caused censorship to strike when the play was transformed into a film. Today, references to homosexuality or promiscuity, and on screen rape would not be a problem. But there is no way the ending would be the same (and the film already changed the ending from the stage version). I can't even decide whether that's a bad or a good thing.
It's easy to see why his performance as Stanley Kowalski made Marlon Brando a star, and the sexual magnetism, the aura of danger still work today. (Meta wise, it also gives you a sense of waste regarding Brando, especially if one has "met" him first in his numerous cameos in dozens of bad movies to make cash. I was lucky enough to see him first in The Godfather, so I knew he could actually act.) At the same time, it's disturbing to recall this film made his Stanley the 50s equivalent of a sex idol, considering he's also an unrepentant rapist, your classic abusive husband who is in a codependent relationship with his wife whom he both beats and later apologizes to by make-up sex, and revelling in utter destruction of another human being. One wonders how much of that came across back then - Louis B. Mayer, whose daughter Irene had produced the play on stage, said to director Elia Kazan it was very good that the "nice couple" got a happily ever after after that "awful woman who tried to break them up" was packed off into the madhouse she belonged.
Blanche DuBois, whose tragedy both play and film is - Stanley is just her catalyst - is one of Tennessee Williams' neurotic and fragile women sliding into madness. Williams famously used his own sister as the model for the sister in Glass Menagerie, the first of these ladies, and himself at least in parts for Blanche in Streetcar. Given that meta knowledge, one is bound to see Blanche's desperate promiscuity during her last years in her hometown, that sexual history she's ashamed of and has to hide in her last gamble to find safety until it is dragged out in the open and used to destroy her, as a metaphor for homosexuality. Within the play, Blanche's husband, whom she married when she was 16, turned out to be homosexual and killed himself, which she never stopped blaming herself for - the film, being forbidden to make the reference explicit, only lets Blanche allude to this very cryptically, though of course a 50s audience would have understood what she meant with him being "very very sensitive" etc. - but the link from that to Blanche being condemmed to one night stands thereafter seems somewhat farefetched today. Conversely, Blanche's reaction to seeing her sister's marriage with Stanley, her urging Stella to get out of it after witnessing Stanley beating her (and Stella is pregnant - btw, this is another case of film censorship, where we don't see the actual strike but have to guess from the reactions), today appears as the only sensible reaction to the situation.
Vivien Leigh won her second Oscar for this performance, and it's one of my minor pet peeves that comments like Blance being just an extension of her Scarlett O'Hara keep turning up - Scarlett and Blanche are two very different women, most crucially by Scarlett being a survivor who would have bought herself a pistol and shot Stanley at an early opportunity. Or got someone else to do it for her. But she would have gotten rid of Stanley. The other pet peeve is how incredibly patronizing Kazan is about Leigh in his memoirs. It's understandable that he resented not having been able to bring his own Blanche from the New York production, Jessica Tandy, but that wasn't Vivien Leigh's fault. They had different takes on the character. Now, Leigh had played Blanche about 100 times in the London production. But Kazan, macho that he was, naturally concludes the only reason why she didn't agree with him about Blanche was that her husband, Laurence Olivier (who was in Hollywood as well, shooting with William Wyler), was secretely directing her behind Kazan's back. It couldn't be her own opinion and experience, oh, no.
(If you read the press interviews with Vivien Leigh at the time of the film production, you see Kazan's attitude was shared by a great many reporters. Though she had her way of replying. Choice example:
Q: Do you read your lines to Sir Laurence?
A: No, I always know my lines.
Q: Does Sir Laurence read his lines to you?
A: Yes, it's perfectly wonderful because he puts me to sleep.)
She has the more difficult part, because Blanche with her pretensions and snobbery and on-the-edge-of-breakdown-ness is not an obvious character for the audience to identify with. But the vulnerability, the encreasing desperation under the Southern Belle manners shine through, and in by the time Mitch has found out about her past, it's impossible not to emotionally agree with her "but I don't want reality - I want magic". Blanche's lies, her fantasies are never malicious, and as opposed to, say, an Arthur Miller play, where truth is something that might hurt but ultimately is the better choice for the characters to take, Stanley exposing Blanche's deceptions comes across as needlessly cruel. Or rather, serving Stanley's needs to get rid of Blanche, but he's not even content with that; he has to destroy her. Kazan had to accomodate the Hayes code, and so you get a smashed mirror at the point where Stanley starts the rape (and his line from the play "we've had this date from the beginning" is cut), but we saw him already pushing her to the bed and tearing some of her clothes off earlier. And yet the most brutal image of the movie isn't one from the rape scene. It's later. When the doctor and the nurse from the asylum has arrived, and the nurse wrestles Blanche down, saying "these nails will have to be clipped", and Kazan shows Blanche on the floor, her arms held behind her back, her face looking up, desperately, with the camera straight looking down. The sheer horror of Blanche's fate isn't "just" the rape itself but that her sister betrays her and consigns her to an asylum rather than to believe her.
In both film and play, Stella tells neighbour Eunice she couldn't believe Blanche and continue to live with Stanley, so she couldn't believe Blanche, and Eunice agrees, saying "never believe it". To me the implication always was that this, as much as the rape, was what pushed Blanche over the border for good. The film sometimes gets critisized for giving in to censorship by slightly changing the ending, so that instead of Stanley being completely triumphant, fondling Stella while Blanche gets carried off and his buddies deal out new cards, we get Blanche still carried off but his buddies giving Stanley uneasy and/or disgusted looks and Stella saying "don't touch me again". But allow me the heresy of preferring this ending. (Since the last thing we see is Stella going upstairs and Stanley starting to cry "Stella!" again, the implication is that she'll return to him anyway; she did it before, in one of the most famous sequences of either film or play.) Watching all these very intense performances, I don't think I could have stomached Stanley triumphant.
One last mercy Williams extends to Blanche is something that Billy Wilder later echoed in Sunset Boulevard: at last, Blanche manages to incorporate the doctor in her fantasies, and accepts his arm, exiting with her famous last line, "I always depended on the kindness of strangers". In the overall context of the play, of course, it's as dark an irony as you can get.
