Movies: A Streetcar Named Desire

Today is wet, gray, and drippy, recalling the suppressed and sticky indoor lunch hours of fourth and fifth grade when, supervised by eighth graders while teachers smoked their cigarettes under the peeling overhang of the school's back entrance, we were forced to play the popularity game of Heads Up, 7 Up. To play this game, we all sat at our desks with our heads down on a folded arm, hitchhiker's thumb raised, while seven of our classmates - chosen by the power-wielding eighth graders - that choosing the very conference of popularity - walked between us, choosing one person's thumb to press down (a second degree conference). Once each of the seven had turned down one thumb, they returned to the front of the room, an eighth grader called, "Heads Up, 7 Up!" and we seated raised our heads. Those who had been lucky enough to have their thumb put down had three guesses to decide which of the seven had blessed them with the gesture - if they guessed correctly, they replaced that person at the front of the room; if not, they remained at their desk and their thumb-turner at large. This game never interested me, because my thumb was not once turned down. Not once, in all of San Francisco's rainy days.

But that is a far digression from my topic today. Last night was movie night at The Big R's (who's catching up on his classics) and we watched A Streetcar Named Desire, which I don't remember having seen before. I don't really know where to begin a discussion of this. The film is so fraught with melodramatic neurosis that watching it, one teeters between falling into the moody melancholy (much achieved by the excellent cinematography's portrait-like close-ups - cf. the shot of Blanche and Stella intertwined, face-to-face like lovers), and recoiling from the loony absurdity of Blanche's big-eyed, mile-a-minute chatter. The melodrama exists in the play, certainly, but there is something (much explained away by the era - movies from the '50s are rich with overacting that tips the intensity scale in the favor of the in-credible) so hyperactive in Vivien Leigh's performance that our empathy is thwarted.

I wouldn't say the same of Brando, Kim Hunter, or Carl Malden. My grain of salt, here, and no pun intended, is that these three are Salt of the Earth-type characters. Raw, real, and responsive to visceral emotions with which we connect: pride, desire, and neediness - respectively, though interchangeably as well (Brando's Stan shifts from pride to neediness when he cries "Stella!" in the rain; Malden's Mitch shifts from neediness to desire when he woos a coy Blanche outside the nightclub, begging her to go somewhere with him, meanwhile relieving his sexual tension by embracing a wooden post and rubbing his body against it). Blanche's "reality" of magic (as she calls it), however, is a frantic fantasy structure of a constantly collapsing delusion. Her airs denote pride, but it's a put-on, poorly masking her a self-esteem vacuum. Her desire, too, is a sham - the coy flitting of a small pet bird, as opposed to the animal stare of Hunter's eyes as she slinks down the stairs in the rain, where Brando falls to her feet and buries his head in her stomach (Hunter wins for best descent of a staircase in film, ever). Her neediness is true, but it's not the neediness of the other three - a loneliness of the self that is completed by another "half." It is the neurotic neediness (the one that has earned all of women a reputation as "blood-sucking bitches" amongst many a hurt man) that isn't ever satisfied, that must be buoyed tirelessly by a lover/care-taker who constantly entertains her with complementary fantasies. Is Blanche actually crazy? Is she driven crazy by watching her life in Mississippi crumble around her? Is she unstable but sane until raped by Stan?

Blanche's melodrama - although I might need to say Leigh's melodrama, to be honest - hardens my resolutions against her, much in the same way she immediately hardens Stan. I would imagine that, based on dispositions, other viewers will react to her differently. We who are empathetic and given to agape will feel Stella's tender sorrow, and we who are swept up by the beauty and exoticism of her fantasies will be bewitched and betrayed, and ultimately bewildered, like Mitch, sitting and staring at her from the card table while she's led away on the arm of her stranger. But, staunchly in Stan's camp, I don't know if she's crazy, I don't know when she went crazy, but she is more than just a nuisance, and out of sight means out of mind. A major reason I quit my last job was because of what I at the time called the Chicken Little antics ("the sky is falling!") of my boss. What I now realize is that she was trained in the Blanche DuBois school of femininity.

And what of the very end, now, in which Stella, with new found resolution, insists to the infant she shakes in her arms that she'll "never go back. . . not now. . . never again. . ."? I don't believe her. Again, out of sight is out of mind, though we now are driven to wonder whether the love of a man trumps the love of a sister. Being an only child, I will never know, but if Stella left home once, she can forget the past again. The only thing that could change this is an awareness of Stan's transgression against Blanche's body, and it's arguable whether she knows or not.

After the movie, The Big R and I got into a discussion about melodramatic people and "crazy" women (a topic of choice for me, since I have something like a perpetual fear of being "one of those crazy girls," and therefore constantly rein in my actions and words around danger areas (i.e. people for whom I have unrequited affections). I commented on my difficulty relating to the way of life (drinking, brawling, break-up/make-up) the film depicted, and The Big R said, incredulously, "You realize this is how most people function. They have to create drama around their lives in order to verify their existence. So they have a story to tell their friends. So that they feel something." Do I realize it? Yes.* Do I like it? No. Do I want to be a part of it? No. As goes an expression my mom picked off her Southern girlfriend, "I got no dog in that fight."

He and I, though, are always a bit incredulous with regard to the way the average American lives (working to the point of breaking your soul to support a spoiled family that doesn't appreciate your sacrifice, and spending what little time you have to yourself medicating with television, liquor, drugs (prescription and non-), wandering around an ugly reality wondering how it happened - being locked in a present without awareness of how you got there, without a idea of how to get somewhere else, and not even knowing where you'd rather be.) Not that he and I operate in the same way. He has big goals, and big plans, and these (I think) distract him in a way from that existential crisis that nips at every one's heels. But he is driven, too, by a faith (in himself and in the universe, in meaning and in perpetuity) that I don't. To pursue a goal, one needs faith. But without goals, and without faith, I think I'm also doing okay.

*I used to do it. In a way, it was part of why I wrote. Some people fight themselves into a frenzy. My mom talks herself into a frenzy. I would write myself into a frenzy. I think (I hope) I'm done with that.