As always, when I write these up based on films I covered in the past, I make an effort to find something new to say, something that leaps out of the film that I either failed to notice before or didn’t think was worth my observations at the time based on whatever idea I was shooting for the first time around. Sometimes that’s easy. The Best Years of Our Lives and especially Chinatown both had a very intriguing angle I hadn’t followed before. But then there’s something like My Left Foot where I thought I had a lot of new observations until I reread what I said the first time. Sometimes it’s relatively easy, like when age or experience have given me a new angle. Other times, it’s harder, possibly because there isn’t as huge a gap in time since my last viewing or maybe there just isn’t as much to say the second time around.
The point is, I think I have a new angle for my thoughts on this time around for A Streetcar Named Desire, but we’ll see about that as I write. The real challenge is probably going to be Star Wars anyway…
If anything, the person I have to thank for my new angle on this film isn’t really a person: it’s Homer Simpson. In The Simpsons episode “A Streetcar Named Marge,” Homer’s reaction to a play his wife is in, a play whose premise seems remarkably similar to Marge’s own homelife given Homer’s general Homerishness, has Homer conclude that Blanche DuBois would have been just fine if Stanley Kowalski had just shown her some respect. That’s a rather oversimplified view of how Tennessee Williams’s famous play works out, but the Williams’s estate didn’t give The Simpsons permission to use the actual play, so they did a musical parody instead. This is a show that ends with Blanche singing how you really can always depend on the kindness of strangers since a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet, and that is, well, totally not the point of Blanche’s last line. This is a simplified rewrite of Williams’s play, so for that reason, I think we can forgive Homer’s simplified view of the moral of the play.
By the by, before I go any further, I am in no way excusing Stanley’s actions in this film. They are gross, violent, and unforgiveable. Nothing Blanche did or does deserves what he does to her, and his physical abuse of Blanche’s sister Stella is likewise a huge problem. What I am saying here is that while Stanley is very much a monster in many ways, he’s also still a human being and is a more complex figure as a result. Some of his actions are somewhat understandable. I wouldn’t call him sympathetic, but he isn’t doing anything he does only because he enjoys inflicting pain or anything like that. He does it for the same reason people since time immemorial have done the sorts of things Stanley does here, and that’s to demonstrate his power over the women in his household, whether it’s Stella or Blanche, and the reason he does what he does especially to Blanche is, in part, because she defies him in her own way.
That’s a long way of going to say that while Stanley is easily the worse of the two, Blanche isn’t exactly innocent here. The thing is, none of Blanche’s sins merit what Stanley does to her, not by a longshot, and besides, the famous scene of Marlon Brando calling up to Kim Hunter’s Stella to come down after a violent altercation shows Stanley has ways of physically getting what he wants from Stella without inflicting pain.
And yes, I am writing this entry on my work computer and feel I need to be more circumspect with my language. Why do you ask?
Let’s backtrack a bit here: Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh, the English actress best known for playing Southern Americans) is basically homeless and travels to New Orleans to move into the apartment of her sister Stella and Stella’s working class husband Stanley Kowalski. What exactly happened to Blanche and the family estate is something she isn’t willing to share, but she likewise doesn’t want to be seen in bright light that might make it easier to tell she’s not some teenage girl anymore. She’s a widow who lost her husband during the war, and now she’s claiming she lost her teaching job due to nerves. That’s not the truth, of course, but that’s what’s she’s claiming.
Here, as I see it, is where Blanche goes wrong: she is a liar trying to protect a reputation that no one in New Orleans knows much about anyway, and she expects people to respect her as some sort of Southern debutante of some kind. That Stella came from the same family and clearly doesn’t hold to these same beliefs says something about Blanche and her mindset, and she does call to mind another Williams heroine in the form of The Glass Menagerie‘s Amanda Wingfield, a woman who makes claims about what her life in a more genteel South was once like as well, and likewise seems to meet a bit of resistance from the men in her life who don’t quite believe her. The difference here is Blanche is hiding things for certain about herself while Amanda, if she is, never quite lets the cat out of the bag.
But the issue here, as I see it, is Blanche demands respect from Stanley while giving none, denigrating him as beneath herself and Stella, referring to him by a slur for a Polish person, and treating him like he’s common garbage, insulting him when he’s not around and generally being kinda awful to a guy who didn’t turn her out when he first encountered her in his home. Now, the other issue is Stanley doesn’t show her much respect either for much of the film, and the closest the two come to friendly rapport is when Stanley comes home to briefly get a change of clothes while Stella is at the local hospital giving birth to their child. He’s in a good mood. She’s leaving. But then she has to tell more face-saving lies, and he does something unjustifiable.
Would Stanley have done what he did to Blanche had she been honest from the beginning? That’s impossible to say, but I am inclined to think he would. In many respects, he’s awful. But I likewise am inclined to think Mitch (Karl Malden) might have treated Blanche differently had she not lied to him. Granted, I don’t think he would have dated her at all, but he certainly wouldn’t have said she wasn’t marriage material and then put some moves on her like the trip to boudoir was somehow something he could just do. Likewise, I will give Mitch as a character this much: he does seem to be feeling guilty over what happened by the end of the film.
But that, for me this time around, was A Streetcar Named Desire: it’s a film about two people demanding respect they haven’t earned and unable to show it to others for one reason or another.
NEXT: Well, this must be a stretch where pregnant women are in bad marriages. Come back soon for a very different take on that basic concept with 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby.
0 Comments