No I’ve never watched the move with Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and Vivian Leigh as Blanche Dubois. It’s not out on Netflix. And it’s not available in YouTube, even though it’s like a hundred years old. Off tangent, you can watch heaps of good black and white movies in YouTube for free. A Streetcar Named Desire is that type of book where the reputation precedes the substance. It’s like yeah, I know Barack Obama. I know he’s like America’s black president, but it’s not the same like meeting him in person. I know that gut-wrenching cry of STELLAAAAAAA that every male actor try to wrench out of every drop of their acting sweat, and I still have no idea what the play is about.
Boy oh boy. Plays about broken people make for compelling reads don’t they?
A streetcar banging through the poorer New Orleans
Much of the play is based on Williams’ recollections of the neighbourhood he lived in while he was in New Orleans. There really was a streetcar named Desire that takes you from the hullabaloo of central New Orleans to its poorer parts. There was also another streetcar named Cemeteries which was Desire’s counterpart. The juxtaposition between desire and death is not a coincidence — it is the underlying motif of the play. The play is simultaneously oozing sex and reeking death. These two opposing forces are also ever present in every one of its characters.
Blanche Dubois is a faded Southern belle with a jaded history. After losing the family home from mismanagement, she plans to stay with her sister Stella in New Orleans, basically squatting there until she figures things out or she gets kicked out. She hasn’t seen Stella for a while and has not met her husband, and didn’t realise that Stella is heavy with child. Stella is a passive, domicile wife of Stanley the manly-man Kowalski, a former vet, an alpha male who thinks with his mouth before his brain, but at the same time, cuts through the bullshit.
Williams admitted that there was little plot in Streetcar, that the drama is derived from the tension from the main characters, in particular between Blanche and Stanley. They didn’t start off on the right foot. Blanche is an alcoholic and takes a swig of Stanley’s whiskey. Stanley was subtle when he noticed this, but he makes his judgement early on. Blanche, though practically homeless herself, tries hard to convince her sister that Stanley is not the man for him. The battleground between the two is Stella — to sway her opinion against the other, I believe more for the sake of their own survival than the destruction of the other.
This is especially true for Blanche, who wanted to put her dubious past behind her and to latch on to the next bloke that shows any keen interest on her. She’s ageing but she’s still a bit of a looker, so she landed Harold Mitchell, a veteran friend of Stanley. Therein lies the problem, as they’ve served in the war together, Mitch is a bit of a bros before hoes kinda guy, so he is easily swayed by whatever dirt that Stanley serves up on Blanche. And to be fair, Stanley isn’t all tosh. He did a pretty thorough research on Blanche and the skeletons in her closet are just stacked through the rafters.
The rusting engine of the streetcar
Like any great American plays, Streetcar is about American rot. Think Miller plays such as The Crucible and The Death of a Salesman. The rot is here undoubtedly, just taking form in a slightly different shape. Blanche is the Southern belle which echoes the old plantation America, the old money dwindling turbulently. Blanche, unable to manage the property she inherited, was effectively thrown into the streets.
The decay is fine. Heck everybody decays. It is the nature of her decay that’s spectacular to watch, as she is unable to accept that life has left her behind. She clings to the glories of her fading youth instead of willingly age gracefully. She loves her vanities, which doesn’t really do her much good. And perhaps, we can see this mentality in America even now: America is clenching desperately to her glory days (think MAGA), unwilling to accept that her best days are behind her. America is not left on the streets just yet however, even though her credit ratings are falling apart like Blanche’s belongings in her suitcase.
Stanley, the alpha male, is the new modern America, shaped by migrants like himself and adopting the American identity, though still conflicted with his foreign origins. The fact that he served in the war entrenched this American identity. However, he could not shake off his surname, and the fact that Stella married into his name is perhaps symbolic of this modern America superseding the old, taking her over. Stanley’s eventual defeat of Blanche just puts the stamp on the page even thicker, not to mention the nature of his sexual savagery on the Dubois sisters.
The commentary of the Methuen edition also aptly put that the battle between Stanley and Blanche is fought with the weapon of language — Stanley with his brash idiomatic drawl, Blanche with her condescending sophisticated tone. Though Blanche holds her own in the initial part of the play, Stanley’s linguistic aggression eclipses Blanche’s poetic eloquence as he closes to victory. His language may seem commonplace and outdated now, but the effect is the same: his language is used to isolate and alienate Blanche.
Streetcar breathes hot and heavy
The beauty of the play is not only in the constant back and forth between Stanley and Blanche — it is a play with a fully realised setting, unmistakably heavy in its New Orleans atmosphere, and the setting is often picturesque. These are the golden streets near twilight in the poorer parts of the city, the vendors screaming out their tamales RED HOT, the use of the jazz and the “blue piano” not just adds to this atmosphere but is also purposeful and drives the play and the character’s psychological landscape. It is a sultry play because of it.
And it is not a play that is structured conventionally. It is not the standard three-act play, or the Shakespearean five acts. There are oddly eleven scenes, each which increases in tension and crescendoes, like the music used implied within it. Its breadth is cinematic, and the popularity of the movie with Brando confirms this.
It is a play that deals a lot more than just the battle between the new and old, masculinity versus femininity and the examination of human passions. It taps into the American psychology more deeply than its audiences might expect, a forewarning of self-delusion and the slow rot which is still decaying under the American foundation to this day.
