Realism as Cruelty in “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams

In the transition from stage to screen, A Streetcar Named Desire retained its long-running Broadway cast with a single exception: the role of Blanche Dubois, which passed from Jessica Tandy to Vivien Leigh. Like Blanche, Leigh was the odd woman out. A symbol of the glories of the studio system, married to the symbol of English stage acting, her classical training ran contrary to that of her Method-trained co-stars. Thus to the clash of wills between Blanche and Stanley Kowalski was added a clash of acting styles— and the struggle between the death of Old Hollywood and the birth of Brando and the New. Which principle— Blanche’s fantasy or Stanley’s realism— makes for superior art? Can the conflict between magic and truth ever be resolved? And is all realism a form of cruelty? Wes & Erin analyze Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.   Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:08 Erin: In the transition from stage to screen, A Streetcar Named Desire retained its long running Broadway cast with a single exception, the role of Blanche dubois, which passed from Jessica Tandy to Vivien Leigh. Like Blanche, Leigh was the odd woman out, a symbol of the glories of the studio system. Married to the symbol of English stage acting. Her classical training ran contrary to that of her method trained co star. To the clash of wills between Blanche and Stanley Kowalski was added a clash of acting styles and the struggle between the death of old Hollywood and the birth of Brando. And the new which principle, Blanche's fantasy or Stanley's realism, makes for superior art? Can the conflict between magic and truth ever be resolved? And is all realism a form of cruelty? Today we're talking about Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes, you know, I love Nichols and May and I try to bring them in whenever I can. One of their sketches that I don't think was ever recorded, so there's no record of this other than what reviewers and people at the time have written down. They used to do send ups of various literary styles. And one of their most popular was a parody of Tennessee Williams. And basically it was Mike Nichols giving a lecture as a Tennessee Williams figure, but he was renamed Alabama Glass. And he'll give this lecture and describe this new play. And in it the heroine had taken to drink, prostitution and putting on airs. And her husband Raul had killed himself on being unjustly accused of not being a homosexual. I don't know, thinking about that kind of made me think about how this one time I was watching Streetcar, it was right before the end. Blanche is in the middle of her breakdown. Everyone I was watching it with was like super invested in this, super into it. And someone walked into the room at that moment, saw what was happening on screen and started laughing. And I think the absurdity of Tennessee Williams is something that we don't. I don't know, maybe people talk about this a lot, but like there is a lot of suspended disbelief, I think that goes into watching it. Or rather like you kind of. You kind of sink in, like into a hot tub, you know, and once you're in, you're like used to it. But to someone who's just passing by during a heightened moment of gothic camp, who hasn't been properly primed for it, it's a little bit silly. I don't know if you agree with that. 2:42 Wes: Gothic camp. I really like that, you know, I Never thought about it that way. Exactly. I guess I think one part of it is sort of Blanche dubois has kind of become a cultural meme. So if someone is new to the film or the play and you return to it, you return to it as if it's. Someone might think if they didn't know that this was the origin of that type of character, they might think of it as a cliche. We can always ask the question of whether is it Blanche who's kind of over the top, or is it Tennessee Williams? In some ways, she gives him a nice opportunity to have someone give cool speeches. Right. And to be like her highfalutingness and her kind of pseudo erudition and wanting to say things fancy. All of that stuff lends itself to some really great speeches and turns of phrase for her. So it's, you know, you can see Tennessee Williams having fun through her. And we can also, you know, we can always ask the same question that we. That we typically ask in one of these episodes, which is the extent to which the artist appears in the play through a character or the extent to which there is some sort of commentary at work on the role of the artist. 3:59 Erin: Yeah. I think that this heightened sensibility, though, is true of all of his plays. I think Blanche is just like the most recognizable and parodyable figure. Didn't Woody Allen do like a send up of her? Okay, I'm not giving that up. I think he did. 4:15 Wes: In his recent autobiography, he calls A Streetcar Named Desire the perfect play. His favorite and the perfect play. Did he do a send up? 4:25 Erin: Why do I have this? 4:25 Wes: I'm surprised. I hope he did that. 4:28 Erin: I have this thing in my mind's ear of him doing a Blanche voice. I don't know. Someone can find that out. Once we release this, they could help us out. 4:37 Wes: Oh, you mean as like a passing joke in one of the films? 4:40 Erin: Yeah, I think so. 4:41 Wes: That does sound very familiar. Yeah. 4:43 Erin: Yeah. 4:44 Wes: She's perfectly suited to one of his movies in a way. You know, there's some sort of relationship between the neuroticism of his characters. Right. And her neuroticism or her hysteria. Really. 4:57 Erin: Sure. I think of Blue Jasmine as being maybe something like that. Cate Blanchett's performance in that the way 5:04 Wes: you started is not far off from the way I would have started. I thought I might be doing the intro for this. I always procrastinate at the very last minute. I start thinking about a title for the episode sometimes while I'm reading or thinking about it. And the phrase the fate of gentility. That's what came to my mind, even though I'm generally not interested in reading plays as social commentary, except to the extent that I want to read back any social implications back into the character. So the social stuff for me has implications for character and for aesthetics. But of course, it's very popular for theorists or literary critics these days to kind of turn literature into a vehicle for cultural analysis or sociology or however you want to put it. So I bring that up with a different intent, although I did kind of go down a rabbit hole and I started. I was thinking about what is Southern gentility? And just this whole shtick that she has going. I wanted to think about that and understand that. And I found someone's master's thesis online. It's called the Assessment of Southern Gentility by British Traveler, 1776-1820. 6:24 Erin: Oh, interesting. 6:25 Wes: This is by Chelsea Larson. I might as well give her credit. First of all, it's cool that these travelogues even exist. Like, there's a guy named Cooper who wrote Some Information Respecting America, Weld Travels through the States of North America, Bernard Retrospections of America, and many, many more. So you get these firsthand accounts of what America was like at the time, and in particular, the South. And these travelogues are focused a lot on the extent to which Southerners, whether they have any kind of gentility, because in a way, there's a weird thing going on with Southern gentility where you have people who are essentially, they're not like the British landed gentry, but they're doing a poor person's imitation of that, not that they're poor. These are people who end up having lots of enormous amounts of wealth very often, although according to these travel writers, they're typically not good at managing it. And they go through a lot of boom and bust type of cycles in a way that I think they're trying to imitate landed gentry. So when the colonists came to the United States, it really was kind of a leveling thing. And there's an opportunity for upward mobility. And except for the distinction between slaves and non slaves, there were not a lot of class distinctions. And so Southern gentility sort of is almost a conscious attempt to restore some of that. And I bring this up because one of the things that these travelogue writers took note of, the thing that was most glaring to them was Southern hospitality. People in the north stayed in hotels when they traveled in the South. It wasn't necessary, because if you were an aristocrat or if you were part of the Upper class. It wasn't necessary because people, before they would even ask you their name, would offer you a place to stay, food and lodging, basically. This impressed them a great deal. I think they thought it was even more pronounced than it would be back in England. So I didn't get exactly what I thought I would get out of going down this rabbit hole. It occurred to me while reading about hospitality, well, that is precisely this dependency on the kindness of strangers, which is one of the things I wanted to figure out, really what that means and how it's related to Blanche's shtick. 8:49 Erin: And that's something that I hope that we're also going to cover in our episode of Gone with the Wind, which I'm now really eagerly anticipating, the movie version of this. And just as a side note, I don't know what exactly we want to put our focus on here. 9:05 Wes: I think the movie is a good focus, and we can mention where there are deviations from the play. 9:09 Erin: Good. 9:09 Wes: There are a few things cut out, and there are a few deviations to meet the moral code of the time, but I don't think they're so numerous that it's gonna be hard to mash them together. 9:19 Erin: Yeah. And just for listeners, there was so much tinkering done, too, with the dialogue that many sections are taken entirely from the play. Many sections are just, like. Words are changed here and there, and it's kind of maddening. So I ended up just sort of choosing the movie because I love this movie so much, and I think of it as such an important historical document, in a way. But anyway, all of that being said, 9:44 Wes: I think some of that is Brando. Right. Just improvising some. 9:48 Erin: And some of it is Kazan and Williams sort of tinkering with things. And. Yeah, if you think of this as I do, as sort of the ultimate form of stunt casting, or the original, the OG stunt casting, having Scarlett O'Hara 12 years later, sort of, like, wash up on the beach as the sole survivor of an earlier age. Even though, fascinatingly, there is one other person who was a cast member on Gone with the Wind in this cast. It was the sailor at the beginning. He played Beau Wilkes, one of the children of Ashley and Melanie. Anyway, one can imagine this. And many, of course, very many contemporary viewers of the film imagine this as Scarlett has lost Tara. You know, insert Tara for Belle Reve, and everyone is dead, and she is seeking refuge now in the New South. Of course, that timeline obviously doesn't match up, but they mean in terms of, you know, thinking about this on some Kind of a continuum. So that really interests me. And this idea of Southern gentility. And that didn't occur to me what that means. I know very much what that means in Gone with the Wind and how important that is in Gone with the Wind and how false it can be, of course, too. And that falseness, I think, comes through as a through line here. But for me, that contrast between the old and the new south, it takes on a different meaning when you have Vivien Leigh thrown in with all of these method actors. Because now old and new south means old and new Hollywood. That's the thing that for me makes. I mean, Tennessee Williams couldn't have possibly thought of this when he was writing the play. And in a lot of ways, this is my reading of the movie. That is my particular idea of how actors, Personas, inform their roles in ways that they're not even conscious of and maybe that they don't realize until after the fact. But that clash is what interests me, which is also, in a way, a clash of cultures. And it's about, I think, what we're both getting at here about the clash between, you know, putting on airs and cutting the rebop as. As Stanley will tell Blanche to do. Which is one particularly dated line that stuck out to me. 12:04 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting because I looked up some interviews with Vivien Leigh and was very surprised by her posh English accent. 12:13 Erin: Oh, you didn't know she was English? 12:16 Wes: I might have known at some point, but I hadn't thought about who she was in a long time. And I didn't. This is not ever something I paid a great deal of attention to. 12:25 Erin: Oh, my gosh. You are so opposite of me. This is like all I know. 12:29 Wes: Yeah. By the time I looked at the interviews, I knew she was English, but I just didn't expect such a posh accent. 12:36 Erin: Very. 12:37 Wes: Yeah, it surprised me. And then I went back and I watched this 10 minute YouTube reel of Scarlett scenes from Gone with the Wind. Because I haven't seen the movie ever. I don't think so. If I have, it's been so long and I'm excited to see it now. 12:53 Erin: Oh, my God. Well, you know, that's one of my top two. 12:56 Wes: We could do it next. You want? 12:58 Erin: Oh, I would love that. 12:59 Wes: Let's do it next. That makes. That makes sense. 13:02 Erin: Okay. We're working backwards here, but because I 13:05 Wes: am very impressed with Vivien Leigh. 13:07 Erin: Well, who could not be? I used to sit as a kid and just stare at her face. I mean, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I hate it. Whatever. Anyway, sorry. Continue. 13:16 Wes: She is extraordinarily beautiful. As long as you don't put a harsh light on her. Just kidding. 13:23 Erin: Hey, 13:26 Wes: but Scarlet's very feisty, right? It's hard not to think about this transition from Gone with the Wind to Streetcar and to try to think about Blanche as sort of some sort of broken down version of Scarlett. I can't say much about this until I've seen the movie. But what I saw in that reel was Vivien Leigh is playing a much more feisty character who also seems quite, you know, they have in common the manipulativeness. But do you see some continuity there between Scarlet's feistiness and Blanche's psychotic dream world thing? 14:03 Erin: Sure. Yeah. I suppose a lot of Scarlet's power comes from, you know, she's a man's woman. We'll say that about Scarlett. 14:14 Wes: And we'll say what that means, too. 14:16 Erin: She operates on the same wavelength as men do. Or rather, she's the kind of woman that has few to no female friends because she's interested in. In gracious. So I mean this. In the. In there are lots of degrees of men's women and women's women and all that sort of thing. But I mean to say that she's the extreme version of this. Not just that she is chummy with men and she gets along with them well, but that she is, I think, fundamentally too competitive and obsessed with jockeying favor from men to adequately have friendships with other women. In fact, this is one of the tensions of Gone with the Wind. And she's very interested in appealing to men. And in Scarlet's case, I think this is a way to feel powerful because she knows her effect on men. And it's a way of sort of flexing her superiority. Because with a lot of the men in Gone with the Wind, in fact, almost all of the men, with one exception, she's superior to them in a way, right? She's stronger than they are. A lot of them are very weak, and they. They fold under pressure. And she can exert this influence on the basis of extreme personal charm and her kind of flirtatious feistiness and her looks. And so Blanche is what happens when that person no longer has the looks part to rely upon and discovers that charm is not enough. Now, I don't think that she has the certain elements maybe, of the innate strength that Scarlett has. I mean, Scarlett loses Tara and gets it back and, you know, is actually able to make a success of it when other people are not able to make a success of their estate. And she has a real survivor thing going on. Blanche is obviously not a survivor, but we never see. We never see in Gone with the Wind a Scarlett that isn't the most gorgeous woman you've ever seen. 16:21 Wes: So. 16:22 Erin: And of course, Vivien Leigh at 36 in Streetcar had to be kind of made up to look older and to look a little bit ghoulish. I'm taking a long time to say this, but what I'm trying to say is that she's still. So. She's still drawing upon these resources and this idea that she is a woman who appeals to men in a certain way. But what's been hollowed out, or rather the. What she would say is, you know, the outside has been tarnished, but the inside is still just as beautiful. In fact, it becomes more and more beautiful with time, as she'll say. But as long as that. That veneer has been tarnished, she has lost her ability to make problems go away. And the big problem that she has ultimately can't get resolved. Though, interestingly, it's not because of her outward appearance. 17:14 Wes: There's that line from Stella at one point, which I find very poignant in a way where Stella says, why are you so sensitive about your age, Blanche? Something like that. Why are you so sensitive about your age? Which gives you. I think that and several other parts of the play give you a clue that she's overemphasizing the extent to which her predicament is a product of her aging. She's acting like she's an old maid at 30 or. I think she's supposed to be 30. Right? 17:44 Erin: Yeah. 17:44 Wes: People may have thought of her that way if this were said in the 1860s, but now that seems like an anachronism. And I think people are treating that as an anachronism. And her whole. Not that the Southern belle routine has gone away by the 1940s or that there isn't that among certain people, the Southern gentility shtick, like it exists today. I've met Southern belles, but the way that Blanche does it is extreme enough that I think that's an anachronism as well. But you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that it's so pronounced that people understand that this is kind of a crazy routine. You know, it's like one step away from her pretending that she's a princess out of King Arthur or something like that. 18:29 Erin: Right. 18:30 Wes: Her focus on appearances and looks are part of her self concept, and they're Connected to this idea that the only way she can get a man is to deceive. This is actually quite close to where Stella says, why are you so sensitive about your age? This is in scene five. Stanley has just told Blanche that he knows about her past before taking off to the bar. And now Blanche is a nervous wreck and she's talking to Stella. And Stella gives her that Coke and Blanche wants a shot in it. You know, a shot never hurt a Coke. I love that line. She explains this to Stella by saying she's nervous about Mitch. So Mitch is coming at 7. I guess I'm just feeling nervous about our relations down a little bit. I want his respect. And men don't want anything. They get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly, especially when a girl is over 30. I love all these dashes, by the way, that Tennessee Williams puts in to kind of give the cadence of her speech, like a girl's over 30 or whatever. To me, it's meant to indicate a pause, perhaps, or something. So they think a girl over 30 ought to. The vulgar term is put out. I'm not putting out. Of course, he. He doesn't know. I mean. I mean, I have informed him of my real age. And then Stella says, why are you sensitive about your age, Blanche? Because of hard knocks my vanity's been given. What I mean is, he thinks I'm sort of prim and proper, you know. SHE LAUGHS OUT SHARPLY I want to deceive him enough to make him want me. So I remembered this word deceive. And then I was doubting myself, so I didn't. That's not the word I was searching for. But, yeah, she directly uses that. And then Stella says, blanche, do you want him? So I was bringing this up because the whole thing about her looks is really related to a more general point of view about. About how it is she is supposed to go about getting men. And the idea that that must involve deceit and the focus on tricking men. She uses the phrase turn the trick at one point. Yeah, like she's a prostitute. But the. The idea that this is the way to elicit desire in men. So this is. And this is one of the things we'll be trying to figure out, this whole Streetcar Named Desire metaphor, which very helpfully is right in the title of the play. I always depend on the frankness of authors. Or. So I think what we'll have to try to figure out is Blanche's relationship to Desire. And in particular, what Stella is suggesting here is that Blanche is Kind of divorced from her own desire and very focused on. She sort of inhabits the desire of others and thinks that she has to adjust herself to that desire in order to get what she wants. Which is not completely crazy. Right. There's a lot of, like, femininity itself is a kind of language that is predicated on that. That kind of notion. But when it's taken too far, the psychoanalyst might call it hysteria, or if they're Lacanian, a hysterical character structure where the desire of the other becomes so important that it eclipses her ability to comprehend her own desire. So she loses her own desire, she loses her own will, and all she is is kind of fodder for the will of others, just mere appearance. And what she's trying to do is to control other people's wills and other people's desires instead of using her own desire and using that to shape the world around her. And this is not unrelated to the question of gentility, which we started with, because the language of femininity and the language of class are related. You use this word superiority, which I think is very apt. I've said this before on the podcast, and I think it's worth saying again, which is just that class distinctions often map onto femininity, masculinity distinctions where femininity is representative of the upper class. And that's where her conflict with Stanley becomes really relevant. But in particular, gentility is kind of a feigning of class where it doesn't really fully exist. Right. Because they're not really English landed gentry. Right. 23:03 Erin: It's amazing how parallel this runs to my own particular interest in clashes of acting styles here and the gentility of classical training and the theatrical tradition versus the method tradition, which is maybe I should just say a little bit about. About the actual. The literal differences between those things. So Vivien Leigh, who was English and really considered herself a stage actress, primarily, though I think she's better on film from contemporary accounts of. Of her stage acting, oddly enough. And she's married to. In real life, was married to Laurence Olivier, who, of course, is like, you know, the representative of the classical tradition. And in fact, before she played Blanche on screen, she played Blanche in a West End production of Streetcar directed by Laurence Olivier, which became one of the. One of the big sort of points of contention for her and Elia Kazan when she came to Hollywood and wanted to do it Larry's way and not Kazan's way. So what you're talking about with this. With this idea of gentility, I think is something that's built into the class classical stage tradition. Classical training. Which. Which method acting? Well, the Stanislavski method and then a capital M Method Acting supplanted was built on vocal training and, you know, moving your body and. And being able to, you know, perform sword fights if you had to perform sword fights or dancing and, you know, basically any of the tools that you would need to adequately perform Shakespeare. And that would often include poetic training and, you know, an understanding of things like scansion and where to put the emphasis in the poetry of Shakespeare and textual analysis. So it's very fitting that Blanche is an English teacher. And the idea is to create a performance that you can really, you know, repeat night after night after night, to have it be exactly the same, so that the performance is one sort of whole and complete repeatable event often built from the outside in. You know, famously, Olivier would think about the appearance of his character and build that appearance as a way to get into the character. So he would try on different. I don't know, this is. I'm just making this up, but this is the kind of thing he would do, you know, maybe try on different prosthetic noses for Richard III and try different hairstyles and different capes. And based on that, he would sort of feel his way into the character through this outward facade. Method, of course, is very opposite of that in a way. Leigh represents, like, you know, if you work hard enough, you can become that character, whereas Brando and the method is more like, you know, you are that character. You just have to find it inside yourself. And you don't have to work to you, you do have to work to bring it out. But it's a different mindset. So it develops from emotional realism and from finding emotional moments within yourself and connect those into your performance, which tends to be not very repeatable, which tends to be more spontaneous, which tends to be very exhausting and difficult to repeat because it is so quote, unquote, authentic. And it does not rely on vocal training and other things that. That in a literal way kind of would take money and a certain kind of breeding, you know, to like Marlon Brando, though he can speak well and enunciate his words properly, doesn't have to have a very developed vocal register in order to play the roles that he plays, right? He plays bums who can just sort of elide all of their consonants. And he doesn't have to have that crisp, stage trained voice because that's not the kind of role that he's playing. And he's creating something New. So Blanche's, you know, her vocal flexibility is something that always I admire in this role. I mean, really, my two of my favorite screen performances of all time are her in Gone with the Wind and her in this movie. You know, she has this. This breathy, flirtatious upper register, and it deepens into that really rich lower register when she's being real, quote, unquote, and telling the truth. This chameleon property is really indicative of classical stage training. And to be a stage actor, you have to be able to have a wide repertoire and to become different things and to be very false, you know, and the stage is. Is smoke and mirrors. You know, the stage, you're far enough away from people that they really can't tell how old you are. So you can go on playing ingenue roles into your 40s. You know, it's distance and illusion. You know, film is the close up. And as we see with Mitch and Blanche, you know, some of the close up can be unforgiving. It can be kind of, we might say, cruel. So the English teacher, college educated elements of Blanche's personality, the fact that she does come from a very educated family is part of this class distinction that I think is also inherent in the classical stage acting tradition. But it is also very closely, you know, because of this connection I'm making or trying to make between classical stage training and old Hollywood. It very much is a retreat into fantasy. You know, she mentions Poe and Arabian Nights. Stanley compares her to Cleopatra. And in fact, Vivien Leigh played both Shakespeare's Cleopatra on stage and Shaw's Cleopatra on film. So the femininity of that and the fantastical element of that, I think, are really closely linked. The old Hollywood, you know, not needing to have any kind of realism. And then we see with Brando this break into what will become new Hollywood method. The real, the emotional experience, the talking, however it is that you talk and not making any kind of particular effort, not trying to show yourself to best advantage, but just sort of letting it all hang out. You know, all of this stuff is. You know, we could take it as a. As a clash of acting styles, but also, I think, as you're suggesting, this clash between the ultimate feminine and the ultimate masculine characters. And also a really sharp class distinction and also kind of an ethnic distinction, too, which is gonna be really important of. 29:21 Wes: He is 100% American. Remember, keep that in mind. 29:24 Erin: He is 100% American. Yes. But as the ethnic stars come to 29:29 Wes: be, people from Poland are Poles, not Polaks. 29:32 Erin: Right? Right. 29:34 Wes: Yeah, that's good. I mean, I think all of these polarities kind of line up. The one I hadn't thought about is this one that you've brought up between the classical training and method acting. Which lends itself perfectly to the raw, animal, instinctual nature of Stanley. Who's someone who inhabits his desire. Right. And just sort of without any self consciousness, acts on it, lets things out. And then the refinement of Blanche, which may be a pseudo refinement in a way. And her relationship to desire is complicated because I've painted her as a hysteric in a way. Which suggests that what she wants is to be desired. But she's not interested in consummation. Consummation is too dangerous. So what really happened in Laurel, or as they call it in the play, Oriole? They changed the name because they didn't want to insult the real town of Laurel, Mississippi. But what happens in Laurel is a bit unclear. Right. The suggestion may be that she's just a hypocrite and she's sexually ravenous and hides it. Which I think, given her character, is probably not what's going on. So even if she is involved, as she seems to confess at the end in lots of liaisons with men. I think her account of that is probably accurate. Which is that she's desperate and she's looking for protection. So it's not sex, per se, that she's out for. She's been reduced to using it to get what she wants. At some point, she even says that, you know, she'll go out on the streets if she has to because she's so destitute. That's sort of the very primal conflict in this play between Stanley's. Which, again, we can read in terms of class, masculinity, femininity, our relationship to desire, however you want to think about it. But these two are an explosive combination. It's there right from the very beginning when the minute that Stanley walks in and sees that someone's been drinking his whiskey and said, oh, you know, this really good liquor really goes fast during the summer when it's hot. Something like that. And then he offers Blanche a drink. And I think she says she doesn't touch it, Right? 31:49 Erin: Yep. 31:49 Wes: And he has that great line about, you know, some people don't touch it, but it touches them often. Yep. And, of course, she's already had, you know, she's already been drinking it. So it's a perfect beginning to a troubled relationship. 32:01 Erin: I know Kazan and maybe, to a certain degree, Tennessee Williams both realized that in different versions or stagings of the play. One's sympathies, depending on the vision that the director has, may tend toward Blanche or they may tend toward Stanley. I think that what Kazan was interested in was kind of a bait and switch, maybe halfway through, where at first you're really annoyed with Blanche and then you realize. Or you think that she's kind of the villain, maybe, and then you realize that she is superior to, as I said before, superior to the other characters in the play, which we can talk about, whether or not that's true. But that the personal magnetism of Brando is still such a. Such a tremendous draw, that one's sympathies are cloudy and ambivalent in the way that is, you know, beneficial to the art of the film. And so I've watched this movie with people who say Brando is so disgusting. How, you know, the character, I should say Stanley, is so disgusting, except for the fact that he's handsome. How could anybody be charmed by him? Like. Like he's so gross. Like, even just when he sprays the beer on himself, like, he's just disgusting. So. Word. 33:15 Wes: Well, there's a very fine line between disgust and desire. 33:19 Erin: That's true. 33:20 Wes: And sexiness, like, that's true. There's a very. Yeah. Important relationship between sex and disgust or. Or lust and disgust. 33:29 Erin: So my question is, are, you know, are you riding the Brando train? Are you. Do you understand why? Yeah. Or the Brando streetcar. 33:38 Wes: I've been railroaded by his raw masculinity. When I first saw this, I was just blown away by Brando's performance. Whatever attractions there are in Stanley's character, it just, you know, his looks and then also his vitality, basically, and his masculinity, his aggression, all of those things. I can understand why some people would be. Find that exciting. And I think I probably found it exciting too, in a way. Although I think he becomes a villain for me pretty early on in the play. I mean, the whole thing with Napoleonic law. He's such a moron. And then he just becomes progressively more villainous until there's a rape, which is much more obvious in the play. But it's still pretty strongly suggested in the movie as well, or somewhat hinted at. For me, that's a devastating moment. Because as villainous as he is, there's a logic to it. You can make sense of that in terms of the relationship between him and Blanche and their differing characters and a kind of primal conflict between them. Like these are two forces of nature in a way. At work, that goes off the rails, pardon the pun. If we're on a streetcar, that goes off the rails with the rape, the logic completely breaks down because that can't be explained in terms of their conflict. It has to be explained in terms of Stanley's basic sociopathy. So that's an interesting turn to play. So it's hard for me to say. I couldn't say I'm sympathetic towards Stanley at any point. I'm impressed by him, but not sympathetic towards him. And with Blanche, she's formidable in her own right, too. So I think there's a lot of. To her, despite the fact that she's not so overtly aggressive as Stanley. At one point, she says to Stanley that as they're in it, they're fighting over. Yeah, this is the whole scene where he's been rifling through her trunk. And it starts out with Stanley talking to Stella. Have you ever heard of the Napoleonic Code? And I just love this scene in the State of Louisiana, we have the Napoleonic Code, according to which what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband. And vice vers. And he's going through the trunk, genuine fox fur pieces a half mile long. Finding her costume jewelry, the treasure chest of a pirate. This whole thing with him treating this cheap costume stuff as if it's precious and an indication that she's sold Belle Reve and is swindling them. And then we get Blanche come out and says, it looks like my trunk has exploded. It's a really interesting response. Right. There's an element of sophistication in what Blanche is doing. She doesn't just come out and confront him and say, what the hell are you doing going through my trunk? She sort of excises his agency from the situation. It looks like my trunk has exploded. As if he's not there in a way, or it's so in a way that exonerates him, but it also potentially castrates or emasculates him. It says, you didn't do this. This is not your power at work. And eventually it ends up with her telling him that he's a little on the primitive side, which is where her restraint with him, it breaks down. And right after that, Stella's upset by the. You know, Stella comes in on this as upset by their fighting. And then she sends Stella off to get a lemon Coke for her. So she does something where she's protecting Stella and standing up to Stanley by herself. So right after she sends him out for the lemon Coke, she says to Stanley, the poor little thing was out there listening to us. And I have an idea she doesn't understand you as well as I do. All right now, Mr. Kowalski, let us proceed without any more double talk. I'm ready to answer all questions. I have nothing to hide. What is it? And then he talks about Napoleonic Code. And she's like, my. You have. But you have an impressive judicial air. So I guess there's something formidable about her and her willingness to stand up for herself in this situation and protect Stella. And initially, like I said, the whole trunk exploding thing, her sort of indirect approach to Stanley. But what it becomes is condescension. And that is her undoing. Because Stanley's response to that condescension. This sets in motion the whole chain of events where essentially Stanley's gonna try to destroy her. And succeeds. Because he obviously finds Blanche's treatment humiliating. I mean, in the beginning with the whole Napoleonic Code thing, what is that really about? Does he really care about the estate? I think you could say that probably has something more to do with the idea that his marriage kind of extends beyond the boundary of that particular relationship with Stella. That it encompasses or nullifies or supersedes all Stella's other relationships. He has to have her entirely to herself. And that's what the Napoleonic Code really represents. And that. That jealousy and that. That threat of Blanche intruding. Right, is a big part of the play, including intruding on the sexual relationship. He'll talk about how things will be better again when they can get the colored lights going and Blanche is not there to overhear them having sex. But beyond that particular conflict, I think it's really Blanche's condescension which is her undoing. I guess I'm trying to say that there is a tragic hero quality to her in this respect. There's something impressive. She's not just crazy and hysteric. There's actually something impressive about her character. I don't know if you agree with that. 39:32 Erin: Oh, totally. A little bit. After what you read, the impressive judicial air, Stanley says, if I didn't know you was my wife's sister, I would get ideas about you. And she says, such as what? Don't play so dumb. You know what? And then that's when her voice kind of goes down a little bit. She says, all right, cards on the table. I know I fib a good deal. After all, a Woman's charm is 50% illusion. But when a thing is important, I tell the truth. And this is the truth. I never cheated my sister or you or anyone else on earth. As long as I lived. And he says, where are the papers? In your trunk? And she says, everything I own is in that trunk. So that's true. I mean, I don't think she has cheated anyone, really. She believes that what she's doing is personal charm and she knows that she fibs. But she has legitimately lost the house. Because you feel actually looking at the text of the play, I think this comes across even more so. Stella has done the equivalent of leaving Blanche in charge of the care of, say, the parents, the elderly parents. And Stella's just left. 40:39 Wes: And I'm very like, I'm very curious about how all that went down. You know, what happened at Belle Reve. And that's left a mystery, right? 40:48 Erin: And actually, in the same way that you're describing with Blanche being clever with Stanley and not accusing Stanley, Blanche is being maybe a little bit more accusatory with Stella, but nowhere near the level that she should be. I mean, she should have. And I think she does have a lot of aggression towards Stella. It comes out passively, but I think she has every right to feel as though she's been left in the lurch or maybe she has taken on more than she should have or become a martyr for this lost cause in a way that isn't entirely necessary. But like for instance, when they're in the play, it's in the apartment and the play, all the action takes place in the apartment. In the film, it's when they're talking in the bowling alley. Blanche has this really clever bait and switch where she says she's telling Stella she has something to tell her and it's the fact that she lost Belle Reve. Stella asks, what is it that you want to, to tell me? And she says, well, Stella, you're going to reproach me. I know that you're bound to reproach me. But before you do take into consideration, you left, I stayed and struggled. You came to New Orleans and looked out for yourself. I stayed at Belle Reve and tried to hold it together. I'm not meaning this in any reproachful way, but all the burden descended on my shoulders. So I love that, that little paragraph because she uses the same word, you're bound to reproach me. 42:05 Wes: But. 42:06 Erin: And then at the end, I don't mean this in any reproachful way. So somewhere in the middle of that, she's gone in self accusatory track and then halfway through turned it around, you know, turned the knife on Stella. And she's very clever in the Way that she tries to manipulate Stella emotionally or passive aggressively tries to get Stella to. To do what? Ultimately, to give her sympathy and to give her a place to stay until she could get on her feet. I think those are kind of reasonable, you know, reasonable things. I mean, what ultimately does she want from Stella and from Stanley? Does she want something different from either of them? I think maybe she wants some version of the same thing. I mean, she wants to be complimented. She wants to be appreciated, I think. And for her looks and also evidently for what she did in trying to hold on to the house, Stella never gives her any credit for it, which is maddening, actually. 43:09 Wes: Stella's very preoccupied with her man. 43:12 Erin: Right, right. 43:13 Wes: Well, what would happen if Stanley wasn't there? 43:16 Erin: I mean, I think that Blanche and Stanley are both trying to pull Stella into a relationship with them that is the status quo. So for Stanley, that is obviously a sexual relationship where she's so in love with him or satisfied with him sexually that she doesn't even have to bother to really think about anything else. And with Blanche, maybe it's being Blanche's pet and being her younger sister and, I don't know, being the obviously the less attractive younger sister who's there to prop up Blanche, maybe, I don't know. But she doesn't do it even in a satisfactory way for the sake of politeness. If you had a sister who stayed and took care of everybody. Well, apparently everyone was dropping dead around her and she had to pay for all their funerals, which Stella apparently didn't even show up to because she wasn't aware of the fact that the house was gone or that all these people had died than to not even say, gee, thanks for doing that. You know, I mean, it occurs to me right now how terrible that is and how Stella is just like drunk on Stanley. She's too blotto to even know what's going on. It's bizarre. 44:22 Wes: Yeah. The way she puts it, I took the blows in my face and my body. All of those deaths. The long parade to the graveyard. Father, Mother, Margaret, that dreadful way, so big with it. It couldn't be put in a coffin. 44:35 Erin: Oof. 44:36 Wes: But had to be burned like rubbish. You just came home in time for the funeral, Stella. Oh, so she did go. Okay, okay. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths, not always. I'm using the play, so the film might have left that part out, that Stella goes home for the funerals. So funerals are quiet, but death's not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles. And sometimes they even cry out to you, don't let me go. Even the old sometimes say, don't let me go. And she'll go on to say, and now you sit there telling me with your eyes that I let the place go. Death is expensive. And then moving down, just a very long speech. So I won't read all of it, but it ends with, where were you? In bed with your Polack or in bed with your Beat Pollock? I was reading more of that because this whole question of death becomes very important, right. Where Blanche will say, death is the very opposite of desire. So I want to make sense of that at some point. Going back to our speculation about what would have happened if Stanley weren't there, it's unclear whether Blanche is to blame for the loss of Belle Reve. She blames it on the fornications of her forebears. Forebears. Fornications of her forebears. 45:54 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 45:56 Wes: Which is probably true, you know, but we get the idea later on that Blanche has been among the fornicators. That still doesn't make it clear to me whether she's responsible for the final loss of the estate, whether she's living whatever, some kind of lifestyle that she couldn't keep up. I'm reminded of these travelogues again, by the way, where they said very frequently these Southern planters were living lifestyles that they simply couldn't sustain and would do this very boom and bust thing where they would sustain it for a while, keep up appearances, and then they'd be poor for a while until the crops came in. 46:28 Erin: How pathetic do you have to be that you have slave labor and you still can't make the ends meet, Like God, anyway. Yeah. 46:37 Wes: So I think there is an element of a survivor in Blanche. You know, if we want to compare to Scarlett in that sense, you know, she ends up at the Flamingo and she's doing what she needs to do to survive. She ends up in New Orleans, destitute, but she has a sister that she can ask for help. And she runs into a. It's not a pothole, it's a landmine. Right. In Stanley, she steps on a landmine that closes her whole repetition, brings all of that to a very sudden end. But if he hadn't been there, I think she would have continued her game with men without ever finding the husband that she supposedly wants. Right. So there's a reason why she married a gay man when she was 16. They don't make that obvious in the film. But in the play, it's obvious that she married a boy who turned out to be gay. And when she told him that she was disgusted by that, he killed himself. 47:27 Erin: I thought it was because he likes poetry. 47:32 Wes: Same thing. 47:32 Erin: And he's very sensitive. 47:34 Wes: Erin. Same thing. 47:37 Erin: It was like one of the stupidest things about the rewrite in the movie. Like a boy who likes poetry. 47:43 Wes: Yeah. He was such a gentleman soul, and I didn't like that. 47:48 Erin: And he had to die because of it. 47:51 Wes: And I told him he was a pussy and killed himself. Yeah. It's not very well motivated in the film, but there's a reason why she married that kind of guy, which is because I think in her relationship to desire as such, that she really doesn't want consummation. She wants to remain at the level of appearance. She wants to stay away from the Stanley esque discharge of impulses and keep things at that genteel sort of level permanently. Which there's arguably something deathlike about that. So when she says death is the opposite of desire, it's a little confusing because her relationship to desire is confusing. There's the famous scene with, you know, Flowers for the Dead. Right. Where she says, not yet. What is she saying there? What is it that's coming for her? And what is it she's saying by saying not yet? 48:51 Erin: Sure. Well, I mean, there's a sense in which she is already dead. Right? 48:55 Wes: Yeah. 48:55 Erin: She's a ghost now. It's like she's outlived the narrative of her backstory. So in a way, she's like post desire. I mean, so she takes the streetcar to what, cemetery and then to Elysian Fields. 49:10 Wes: Yeah. 49:10 Erin: So she's already dead. She looks like a ghost throughout the whole film. 49:15 Wes: Yeah. The idea of fading looks and being a fading personage are related, but. Yeah, go ahead. 49:20 Erin: Right, right. And you get the sense that she's living this postscript life after the suicide of her husband. But there's a sense in which everything that she's doing doesn't really count, you know, like, it doesn't really matter. Like, first of all, you never see any of it. It's all just part of this backstory. Belle Reve is just this shadowy, ancient place. It's only referenced by Stella and Stanley in terms of a photograph. You know, you showed me a photograph of a place with columns. It's like nothing really matters because it's like she's dead. So nothing she's doing. It almost justifies her sort of flight to fancy and her. I think she has the sense that none of this is really real. Like, I'm not really here. I didn't have to go to New Orleans and do any of this because it's so beneath me. She doesn't even really believe it's happening. And so I think that's part of this. This escape into fantasy that she can't deal with. But I'm sorry, I'm getting off of your train of thought. 50:21 Wes: No, no, I think that's right. I mean, what's the relationship between death and desire? I mean, you mentioned the. Her being a ghost, and I said something about fading looks. And there's this idea that she wants to be desired, but she doesn't want to consummate it. 50:36 Erin: Well, she has consummated it. 50:38 Wes: I mean, my argument is that she's consummated it for the sake of getting protection, but she's not into it, basically. 50:45 Erin: But she has to be in order to have that push pull with Stanley. I mean, she has to love it and hate it at the same time, because that's what Stanley is. Stanley is consummation. Right. And she has to be equally attracted and repelled by him. And we have to know that she's capable of consummation. But it's not really. She couldn't have possibly expected protection from the men she was having sex with in the tarantula arms. 51:11 Wes: Well, here's the question. Why didn't she. And this will lead us back to the relationship between death and desire, but why didn't she find a husband again after, you know, she lost her first husband, who wasn't really a husband in a way, you know? So why didn't she find a husband during that time? Is it just trauma? Just the trauma of the loss of her first husband and the trauma of taking care of all the dying people in her family? Or is it something more where she's in a pattern where she's just not. That's just not gonna happen. And even if Stanley weren't there in New Orleans, it's not like things would have worked out with Mitch. That's my thesis. 51:46 Erin: That's a really good question. I mean, I guess I have a mental image of her becoming a spinster as she's taking care of these. You know, she's been put into this caretaker or parental role almost for these people who are dying. And it's also. 52:02 Wes: She could have pulled a Stella, though, right? 52:03 Erin: And she could have. Yeah. But I think that the part of that is maybe fanning the flames of this dying society, trying to keep it alive by keeping These people alive. And by keeping the house intact. This is where Gone with the Wind is helpful as it. As a way to understand this. Like, you know, in Gone with the Wind, like she cares more about Terra than she does about any person. You know, because of the obsession, the Southern obsession with the land. She'll do anything to keep the land. 52:29 Wes: Also, Stella is slumming it, right. So maybe the consummation of desire just means slumming it. It means losing status in a way. He's. You know, Stanley says, I ripped you down off of those columns. Right. 52:40 Erin: And what's more genteel than a boy who likes poetry? 52:46 Wes: Yeah. 52:46 Erin: I think that what Stanley finds false in her is. Is her rejection of the animal nature, even as that is very much within her. So she's still having sex with men in the tarantula arms. You know, I think she still wants that, but I think that she almost has to be taken, you know, and this is where we get into the whole rape thing. But what is the point of her flirtations but to push that off? Right. To keep the guy interested, but also to push him away or to keep him at arm's length. 53:19 Wes: Right. 53:19 Erin: Because you have to. It rests on this illusion of virginity. So you have. Well, for her, it's an illusion at this point, but. So you have to entice the guy enough that he's interested, but keep him away so that he will respect you. I mean, she says something like this in the play. 53:33 Wes: Yeah, but I think she's just using that to really. She's just keeping guys at bay. Unless they're gay. 53:41 Erin: Well, see, I think it's both. I think it's both because I think that's become the only way that she knows how to function. That falseness and flirtatiousness has become her reality. She doesn't know what to do with it once she's caught it. You know, like she. She's playing with something and. And doesn't know what to do to a certain extent. But then at the same time, we have this. At this subterranean level, you know, in terms of her consciousness, that part of herself is still having an outlet, but it's just the part that she's lying to herself about. And consciously, she's still doing this flirtatious thing. I think that's what Stanley hates. Right. 54:18 Wes: Yeah, that's the interpretation. It's probably more plausible, but it's the one that I'm trying to argue against. My interpretation is, yes, it's definitely much more speculative and not on the firmest of Ground. But what I'm inclined to say is that she is someone who's not into sex per se, and that's part of the problem. And that she's this whole idea of using her charms and feigning virginity or whatever to get men. It's really, really what she's ultimately doing is driving them away. 54:52 Erin: But it works. It works with Mitch. 54:56 Wes: It does temporarily, but I think it wouldn't. Even though Stanley is the one who blows all this up, that scene with the newspaper boy makes it pretty clear what's going on, which is that she is going to do very self destructive things that will end up ruining these relationships and giving herself a bad name. There's no real reason she had to get a bad name in Laurel by associating with all these different men, except that she was in a pattern of drawing them in and then repulsing them. She calls herself a tarantula, ironically. Yeah. So those are two possible interpretations, I think. In either case, the question is how is death the very opposite of desire? And how does that apply here? I think in one sense there are some pretty obvious ways to cash that out. And one of them, death is the end of our existence as strivers and desires, but also the idea of getting old. Her idea is that her aging and her approach towards death means she can't be the object of desire. And if I'm right, if my interpretation about her relationship to desire is right, there's something deathlike about that in the sense that she can't inhabit that vitality that Stanley has. But I think she sees that as threatening. So I think she, you know, so she recognizes maybe something deathlike in consummation, in the discharge of desire, where it's something. There is a streetcar element to that. There's something almost mechanical. And she's all about high culture and higher consciousness. And the discharge and consummation reduces you to something physical and ape like. She talks about apes and maybe we should read that speech. He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits, eats like one, moves like one, talks like one. There's even something subhuman, something not quite to the stage of humanity yet. Yes, something ape like about him. Like one of those pictures I've seen in anthropological studies. Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by and there he is, Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle. And you, you here waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you. That is, if kisses have been discovered. Yet night falls and the other apes gather there in front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking. His poker night, you call it, this party of apes. Somebody growls, some creature snatches at something. The fight is on. God. Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image. But Stella, my sister, there has been some progress since then. Such things as art, as poetry and music, such kinds of new light have come into this world since then. And some kinds of people, some tender feelings have had some little beginning that we have got to make grow and cling to and hold as our flag in this dark march towards whatever it is we're approaching. Don't. Don't hang back with the brutes. So a dark march towards whatever it is we're approaching. Hints of death there, right? And the idea is that she can avoid death by not being brutish, by not giving in to desire, by staying at the level of appearance and gentility and cultural sophistication and all that stuff. But then there's the countervailing idea that that is just what it means to be deathlike. And what it means to live is to. Is to actually give in to desire and be ape like and be, you know, discharge impulses and all that stuff. So those are. What I find really interesting, is those. I don't think the play resolves that. And so we get two conflicting visions of the relationship between desire and death that we can't really. There's kind of a point to both of them. 59:01 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. I think which of these two characters, Blanche or Stanley, is a survivor of the Stone Age, you know, because I think we have with Stanley, like, you know, the modernity and the progress that she's talking about is actually running counter to the way that the culture is going, which is a more naked and frank and open relationship with sexual desire or, you know, whatever, like the sexual revolution is about to break through. And partially, you know, I think what we've been getting at is that a lot of what Blanche is after in her flirtatiousness and her aping of virginity is the pretending that those elements are dead in you, right? Or maybe like hinting at them, but keeping yourself safe from them. It's almost as though what Blanche is advocating in this speech, as I said before, is like this idea of keeping death alive, right? Or keeping the. The idea of putting death to these impulses alive. In a strange way, she's advocating the idea that to dampen these passions underneath Art is the thing that we have to perpetuate. The death is what we have to perpetuate. Obviously. Like, you could argue that art is built on top of those more natural impulses, or that it's like a purification 1:00:29 Wes: of those things and culture and politeness and gentility. All of that stuff is a sublimation of those things. And. And is more. You could argue they are more alive. 1:00:37 Erin: Right. But I think Williams complicates that by tethering those principles to someone who is related to this dying culture, you know, and by making Stanley the live one, the one who is the most alive and the most in touch with his animal impulses. It becomes a strange. I don't know, I think it, oddly enough, you know, turns that on its head and suggests that art and music and higher things are just as dead as Belle Reve and all the collection of skeletons there. 1:01:10 Wes: You're elaborating on the conflict that I was pointing out, the conflict between two different conceptions of the relationship between desire and death and which one is more deathlike? Discharge or repression? Sublimation. And I think it's hard to arbitrate, you know, it's hard. There's a point to both positions. 1:01:29 Erin: Well, I wonder how this relates to the idea of cruelty. Obviously, Stanley is. Blanche accuses him of being deliberately cruel and says that that's the one thing that she's never been guilty of. The idea of deliberateness versus things that are unintentional is a strange one, because I think deliberateness implies forethought, which Stanley has none. And everything is just very immediate with him. And he doesn't really think about anything, whereas Blanche is the calculating one. But cruelty, of course, runs contrary to that. I mean, Stanley is obviously quite cruel. We see him beat up his pregnant wife and, of course, rape Blanche. 1:02:11 Wes: Is she talking about Mitch there or Stanley? Maybe she's talking about both, in a sense. Yeah. 1:02:17 Erin: I think so. 1:02:17 Wes: Yeah. So scene 10, she's. 1:02:19 Erin: She's telling this to Stanley about Mitch, right? 1:02:24 Wes: Yeah. This whole story about him coming back to beg her forgiveness, but him rebuffing him. Some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. 1:02:33 Erin: But she says this accusatorily to Stanley and telling. She changes. 1:02:37 Wes: That's good. I mean, arguably she's talking about Mitch, but really she's talking about Stanley to Stanley as well. 1:02:43 Erin: Right. And what Mitch has done that's unforgivable is repeating the slander and vicious stories from you. She says to Stanley. 1:02:52 Wes: So Mitch isn't really the one Being deliberately cruel. Stanley is. I mean, there's nothing. 1:02:56 Erin: Right. 1:02:57 Wes: He's just responding to these stories. But. 1:02:59 Erin: Yeah, right. And also, there's a difference. There's a tension between. So she says to repeat slander and vicious stories. So the stories may be vicious, but they're not slanderous. I mean, they are true. So that's another kind of tension. Of course, this whole idea of him coming back to beg her forgiveness is all invented by her. She's lying to Stanley about Mitch's actions here. 1:03:18 Wes: But you were talking about. So the nature of cruelty. And in your introduction, you mentioned the relationship between cruelty and reality, which I thought was really interesting. 1:03:26 Erin: Yeah. What Blanche shrinks from is exposure. Right. And she seems to think that part of being cruel or the things that are most cruel to her are the exposure of her body, her past, or in Stanley, the naked cruelty of his actions and of his vices. So there's this idea that by couching things in a kind of fantasy, Blanche is making them less cruel. That cruelty increases with reality and decreases with fantasy, or something like that, if we think of it as a knob. 1:04:06 Wes: So what is Stanley's cruelty other than trying to, you know, actively trying to destroy Blanche? He doesn't want to play along with her game. You know, in a way, his cruelty is the rejection of social niceties and the rejection of gentility and the rejection of the element of lying involved in those things. So there's an honesty to Stanley. Right. Because he's just being who he is, even if that's a brute. There's an honesty to brutishness. But that honesty is also a form of cruelty. Right. It leads, you know, he beats Stella. It's honest to act on your impulses, in a sense, and to bring them to light, but it also is inevitably cruel. And to avoid cruelty, we do have to repress. And that also implies that we do have to, in a way, hide and lie. We refrain from just saying everything that comes to our mind around people, because that would be cruel if we just didn't keep that under wraps. I mean, ultimately, there's a point where. Where Stella says to Stanley, you didn't need to be. I think it's in scene eight. You didn't need to be so cruel to someone alone as she is. And Stanley says, delicate piece, she is. Stella says she is. She was. You didn't know. Blanche is a girl. Nobody was tender and trusting as she was, but people like you abused her and forced her to change. Stella's responding to Stanley giving Blanche the birthday remembrance, the ticket back to Laurel. 1:05:31 Erin: Yeah, that's so mean, so horrible. 1:05:33 Wes: But there's some connection between this and the kindness of strangers, right? Because Stella's making this connection between cruelty and aloneness. Aloneness, or being a stranger is supposed to elicit kindness, I think, in Blanche's world. And Stella is supporting that idea here, which is that. And this is one of the things, right, about Southern hospitality, which is that hospitality is all about how you treat strangers. It's all about going out of your way to give them food, to give them lodging, to be kind to them in various ways, to show them respect, even though you don't have any familial or personal or intimate connection. And so it becomes an expression of status. It becomes an expression of one's superiority and independence that you can be so giving to a stranger as opposed to treating them as some sort of threat. You're strong enough and you have enough resources that they're not going to be a drain on those resources and they can't be a threat. So you can invite anyone to eat at your table, but that's still a very distant relation, right? That's another way of avoiding consummation, to keep things at that kindness level. And so cruelty, again, kind of lines up with descending into the situation that Stella is in, where desire is associated with cruelty, where she has a very dynamic and sexual. You know, she has a very strong sexual connection to Stanley, as she said. You know, she says, like things happen under the sheets, right, or something that make everything all right no matter what the actual relationship is like. So she has that. That's compensation enough for the fact that socially that's going to manifest itself as cruelty. So Stanley's sexual dynamism, his raw masculinity, is sexually exciting, but it's inevitably cruel outside of that cruel and other social context. So do you choose the cruel but close, or do you choose the distant stranger connection but kind and genteel? I think that's kind of the opposition here. And I was going to try and get that. Get us back to the relationship between cruelty and reality with that. I don't know if I've. 1:07:53 Erin: I like what you're saying there. We've talked about how both Blanche and Stanley are trying to exert control over Stella. I mean, I would say that the cruel but close is certainly true. But the other quote you gave about how, you know, everything is better or it makes it all better or what, or whatever. I mean, there's a papering over the reality that's also happening in that Sexual relationship, relationship. So, you know, she gets drawn back to him after he's beat her up with the famous Stella scene on the sort of hypnotism that he has her under with this physical relationship that they have. In the same way, I think that that thing that you're talking about with Southern hospitality, the flip side of that is the falseness of that, actually. Right. That person that you let into your house and are very kind to is actually not someone you're close to, and it's not your family, and it's not someone to whom you owe a particular loyalty. So I think that's where people, at least for me, as a Yankee, I don't know you can. You can. We have this north, south thing going on here between the two of us. You can defend your own. But, you know, a lot of. A lot of people in the north, north find that to be false, right? Like this. Like, Southerners are very quick to become friends with you, but it's a very shallow relation. Not. Not always. But I'm saying, you know, the. The stereotype is that they are super friendly to you and invite you in like you're one of them, but really they're talking about you behind your back. Whereas, like, the Northerners will just, like, tell you to your face that they don't like you. And they'll keep you out and keep you out and keep you out. And then one day after you've, like, paid your dues, suddenly you'll find that you're in. And then once you're in, you're really in. And they won't talk badly about you behind your back. Right. I'm trying to draw a connection here to the. To the fact that they're both kind of like a distortion actually of reality. So, like, Stella is in an abusive relationship. It's. It's weirdly a relationship that kind of works for them. It's actually a happy relationship, which I. Is a very odd thing to say. I know, and I'm not. I'm not saying it makes it okay. I'm just saying that the. The sexual aspect of their relationship is. I mean, I think that she acts drugged during. During a lot of the. At least the film. 1:10:08 Wes: Yeah, the way. The way Tennessee Williams describes it is narcoticized. Stella's lying down in the bedroom. This is the beginning of scene four. Her face is serene in the early morning sunlight. One hand rests on her belly, rounding slightly with new maternity. In the other hand is a book of colored comics. Her eyes and lips have that almost narcotized tranquility that is in the faces of Eastern idols. 1:10:32 Erin: Yeah. It's like she's drugging herself with the sexual aspect of their relationship to be able to bear the other elements of it. Though she does say that she gets a thrill out of the fact that he likes to, I don't know, break things and be disgusting. 1:10:47 Wes: Yeah, yeah, she says that. 1:10:48 Erin: Yeah. What I want to draw the connection to, and I think this is also going to go back to you're talking about is when Mitch comes and accuses Blanche and they have that confrontation. One of the key quotes of the film for me is Blanche says, I don't want realism, I want magic. Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be punished for it. I try to give that to people. She says the magic, like a form of hospitality, is to give people magic and to not tell the truth. And she tells what ought to be true. So the odd thing about Stanley's reality is that it's keeping Stella narcoticized or whatever the word is. And that seems to be the magic for them, right? The colored lights, the idea that there's some sort of hidden magic between them. 1:11:42 Wes: So this is his argument right after being accused of cruelty to Blanche by Stella in saying delicate piece and. And Stella saying how tender she was as a child. This is Stanley's counterargument. When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it, having them colored lights going. And wasn't we happy together? Wasn't it all okay till she showed here? And wasn't we happy together? Wasn't at all okay till she showed here. Hoity toity describing me as an ape love that he thinks this directly addresses the question of cruelty towards someone who is soft and tender. And his argument is just that Blanche's fragility and susceptibility to cruelty, they represent an impediment to their relationship. So in a very obvious sense, it's just about her being there and annoying Stanley and getting in between them and their relationship and probably making it difficult to have sex because there's no privacy. But on another level, it's the fact that her world of magic is entirely antithetical to Stanley's world of acting Impulsively, the two things are. So if we think of the impulsivity as reality, in a way, and Blanche's magic as some sort of transformation of that. Stanley understands that her magic is, for him, is a kind of dark magic. It's kryptonite. It takes away everything that he wants out of a relationship, which is just for things to be right there on the surface, to be obvious. When you have an emotion, you express it. When you feel violence, you do it. Not all this social obfuscation and these social niceties. 1:13:40 Erin: Right. And he accuses her fragility of being a show, but really she is that fragile. Right. Like she really is. Well, first of all, I love the contrast between. And I think you get this more with Vivien Leigh than you did with Tandy, even though Tandy is also a small woman. Not as small as Leigh, though. But you get this real contrast between Stella's body and Blanche's. And Blanche just looks like you could just break her in half, you know. But she is also mentally fragile. I mean, and she really is, because ultimately she can't handle. She can't handle the truth. And she has to make up a fantasy in order to deal with what. What, you know, with. With her being committed. The truth that is thrust upon her in the end is what makes her. Her crack. She really can't deal with it. Or maybe she chooses to. I don't know. As soon as I say something, I argue the opposite. Maybe she chooses to retreat and to the realm of fantasy completely. But still, that's an inability to deal with the reality. The cruelty of Stanley's committing her in the end. And also Stella has a part in that, too. And also with the reality and the cruelty of the rape perpetrated against her, which is, you know, I can only see that rape is symbolic, ultimately. 1:14:58 Wes: Yeah. It kind of ruins the play, in a sense. 1:15:01 Erin: It does. 1:15:01 Wes: If you read it. Literally. 1:15:03 Erin: The only redeeming thing about Stanley is that he actually really does love Stella, I think. And then she's at the hospital giving birth, and he goes home and rapes her sister. 1:15:12 Wes: Yeah. 1:15:13 Erin: Like, you can only think of that in terms of. 1:15:15 Wes: I think that's a violation of the Napoleonic Code. 1:15:18 Erin: I think. I think it is. And he. And he just becomes such a complete villain. Williams says in a. In a letter to Kazan that, you know, Stanley isn't a. Like a dyed in the wool villain or something like that, that there is no black and white, there's only gray. Well, in that moment, he becomes a 100% black hearted villain. And so I can only see that in terms of symbolism, which is Stanley is going to. In the act of. The symbolic act of rape, is going to bring reality to Blanche's flirtatiousness, reality to appearance. 1:15:57 Wes: So it becomes, he says, we've had the state from the beginning. So the rape works at a metaphorical level as between two forces of nature or two fundamental philosophical principles. You could even call it will and representation, if you really wanted to get philosophical. But, yeah, reading it literally is. I think it's not good for the play. 1:16:18 Erin: I agree. 1:16:19 Wes: It ruins everything. 1:16:20 Erin: Yeah. So just the idea that the cruelty of that, like, literally, of course, rape is cruel. 1:16:28 Wes: Yeah. 1:16:29 Erin: And the fact that she's been trucking in these modes of enticement and keeping men at arm's length and toying with them in this fantastical way means that Stanley has to, like you say, you know, elementally. He has to force reality and cruelty upon her by taking what was for her just a plaything and making it like, this is the consequence of what you're doing. You know, you're toying with men and now you're gonna get raped, you know, which is terrible, obviously. But like I said, it can only work symbolically that she's been leading up to this. She's been dancing up to the line, and he's going to force her to cross it, basically. 1:17:07 Wes: Right. 1:17:08 Erin: One thing that we should talk about that we really haven't is Mitch. Mitch and his mommy. I'm guessing you have a lot to say about that. What's really kind of a cool element. Not a cool element, but a really interesting element of the film and the play is the fact that this cruelty is really pronounced for Blanche when it's directed at her and Stella, I guess, but only to the extent that she sees Stella as an extension of herself. Maybe. But Stella and Stanley have, like, counterparts in the Upstairs Neighbors, you know, Eunice and Steve. I really like the moment when Steve is, like, beating up Eunice or whatever. And from downstairs, Stella and Blanche are laughing at it. So it becomes like a comic thing for them. Like, it becomes like the Honeymooners or something. Like, they're like, ah, look at them. And they're. They're Punch and Judy show or not, that the Honeymooners is ever. I don't want to say that because I hate how people are down on the Honeymooners. 1:18:06 Wes: He only threatens to hit her. Pow. Right in the kisser. But. 1:18:10 Erin: And it's all a joke. It's whatever. Anyway, people think that that's, like joking about abuse. But it's not. 1:18:16 Wes: I know. I know. 1:18:18 Erin: I'm, like, such a big honeymooners, too. 1:18:19 Wes: Yeah. I love the honeymooners as well. We should watch that sometime. 1:18:23 Erin: We should. But anyway. Yeah. So it becomes, like, an object of fun for them. And in the same way, we realize that, like, for Mitch and I guess the guy. The other apes at the poker table. Poker. I hardly know her. The whole interplay between Stanley and Stella is also kind of a joke where they're like, oh, don't worry. He consoles Blanche and is like, oh, don't worry about it. They're crazy about each other. They all just think that this is okay, you know, and. And Stella thinks that it's okay, which is just, like, really strange. But I like that contrast between what's going on with the upstairs neighbors and what's going on with Stanley and Stella. Because you. You could see that in. In Blanche and Stella's mind, when there's a little bit of distance, it becomes like they're watching, you know, the colorful neighborhood characters putting on some kind of comedy routine. When it's happening to you, it's. It's very terrible and immediate. Even though Stella bounces back from it quickly and is ready at Stanley's beck and call. But I guess what I'm interested in, in that is the idea of Mitch's character. And Mitch is being like a spectator to what's going on with Stanley and Stella in the same way that Stella and Blanche are spectators to what's going on upstairs. And how that kind of contrasts, I think, with his susceptibility to Blanche's charms. I don't know. Maybe I'm inventing attention where there is none. But how can he be like, oh, Stella and Stanley, aren't they just so cute? And it's okay he could beat her up, but they really love each other and kind of be okay with that. Or even just be friends with Stanley and deal with Stanley and then also be taken in by Blanche. I mean, I guess you could say, like, it's because he's a mama's boy. And there's something appealing about Blanche is nice girl that you could take home to mother routine. But then why is he hanging out with Stanley? Like, why is he part of Stanley's crowd? I don't understand that. 1:20:17 Wes: Well, he likes to play poker, right? Yeah. I mean, there is tension between him and Stanley, I think, from the very beginning. I guess it's towards the end, when he's bitter, that he accuses Stanley of bragging. Right. Stanley says, luck is believing you're lucky you. You. You brag, Brag. Bull. Bull. But Mitch is involved in the very beginning. He's pissed off by Stanley beating Stella. And he repeats this line about poker shouldn't be played in a house with women. He is kind of a foil to Stanley, but he's a weak one in the film and in the play, he comes across as quite bland. He endangers the play in a sense, because he's boring. And he is. I think maybe you disagree, but like when he first meets Blanche, I think he's coming out of the bathroom. And then he goes back to the bathroom, which very quickly after that, which you can only assume is, you know, he's pretending to need to go to the bathroom. And then because he has to go through Blanche's to get to it. And then they have that conversation and she's acting quite oddly. And ultimately he says, I've never met anyone like you before. You get the sense that he's commenting, he's aware of her oddness as a person and he's commenting on it, but he's allowing himself to see that as charming because he needs to. I think they both have a vulnerability in common that's predicated on having lost someone. Right. He also had a girl that he 1:21:49 Erin: died, even though he doesn't seem that broken up about it, which is really weird. 1:21:54 Wes: And he's also taking care of his mom in the way that Blanche took care of her relatives at Belle Reve. It's a believable portrayal for me that he would get taken in by Blanche because he is, in a way, they're both in a desperate circumstance. And there's that, you know, after she tells him that weird story about having married someone who's gay and him killing himself, you know, you think Mitch might have said, okay, this is a little much for me. Right. He says to her, you need someone, I need someone. Could it be us? Something like that. So it's clear that they bond in their desperateness and in their need to have someone. 1:22:39 Erin: Well, and yet his not to rank pain, but he's clearly so incapable of feeling as deeply as she does. I mean, he's clearly so beneath her. I think that's why he has to be. I mean, I agree that he's very bland, but I think that's really necessary because he has to. To be so obviously less than her. It's like she's slumming it emotionally in a way, or intellectually in a way. 1:23:04 Wes: And she messes with him. Right. She'll say in French to him. Do you. It's not in the film, but in the play, you know, do you want to sleep with me tonight? She says in French, and then she'll say, do you speak French? That's too bad. Or that's a shame. When he says he doesn't. Of course, if he had understood that's a very risky thing to do. Right. If he understood that French phrase. 1:23:22 Erin: I don't think she was taking a risk at all. 1:23:24 Wes: That's the. Yeah, so. Okay, yeah, so she understands her audience. She does, but that just gives you an example of the fact that she. Yeah. Intellectually, she feels herself to be in a very superior position to him. 1:23:37 Erin: And is. And is. I think. I think that's fair to say, you know, she's rather. Rather cultured. Of course. You know, Stella, too, though, she's put that part of herself totally to sleep and anesthetized it. 1:23:51 Wes: It awakens at certain moments in her diction, like, she'll start to speak more. Like Stanley's speech when they're arguing will get more basic and she will get a little bit more formal in the way she speaks. I can't think of exactly where. 1:24:05 Erin: But that's a great observation that I hadn't noticed. And of course, we've talked about something in Blanche, maybe that attracts her and repels her to Stanley. But there has to be something in Blanche that also attracts Stanley as it repels him, too, and is that, you know, he has to bring Stella down off the column. He has to bring Stella down to his level. I take that as his desperate desire to not have anyone be superior to him, that he's very insecure. 1:24:37 Wes: I mean, in the same way that Blanche seems to think that sex would be slumming it, he seems to be excited by sex as a means to robbing someone of their status, which is not unusual for men, because that's part of the dynamic. Because, like I said, femininity maps onto status, and part of the dynamic there, at least sometimes is destructive. It's like it's wanting to defile, which is related to wanting to bring someone down to one's level. 1:25:08 Erin: So you think that's innate in Stanley's? See, I'm looking for a reason why he's so insecure. Like, why can't he just let Blanche do her thing? Why does he have to stomp on her? 1:25:20 Wes: Well, yeah, it's accentuated by his insecure. Like the. He's intolerant of having someone who's superior in class to him around. 1:25:28 Erin: Does that mean that he has to be more aware of his lack of breeding than he lets on. Or there's, you know, like, what is making him into. You know what I mean? Like, what's the engine for that? Because if he really is just an ape, and if he really doesn't care about any of the things that he's not supposed to care about, then he wouldn't be threatened by someone who is asserting superiority over him. In other words, what is the lack that he's perceiving in himself? 1:25:54 Wes: Yeah, well, that's his one. That's the sign of some basic refinement in him, that he can be insecure slightly more than an ape. 1:26:04 Erin: Right. But what is that? Is that what attracted him to Stella in the first place? And then when they're fighting, as you say, is she using that as leverage against him? A little bit and keeping him a little bit in his place? So it shows that she has a little bit of control over him. Not much, but that's a way for her to exert some kind of control, is by exploiting that insecurity a little bit. 1:26:27 Wes: I think in a way that Stanley and Blanche have the same idea, which I kind of alluded to just a second ago, but. But about sex as either slumming it or bringing someone down to one's level or being defiled or defiling. And there's a great speech for Blanche near the end, but right before she's about to be taken away, where she goes off into this fantasy that it's triggered by an unwashed grape. So part of. By the way, speaking of defilement, there's a scene in the middle of the play. After Stanley has found out these rumors about Blanche, Stella asks him for a kiss. And he says, not in front of Blanche, as if the fact that she is now defiled, you know, he's the one who suddenly becomes modest. Before, it was Blanche worried about the indecency and the lack of privacy. And then suddenly that turns and there's kind of a Lady Macbeth element to Blanche, except it's about sex. Right through the whole play. She's always taking baths. Her name, you know, blanched. A kind of artificial, purifying. She's not really a virgin, but she's trying to accomplish that retroactively by all sorts of cleaning rituals. It comes out at the very end when she asks whether the grapes are washed. And Eunice is baffled by that. The idea that anyone would wash grapes. And she says they're from the French market. And Blanche says that doesn't mean they've been washed. And then the cathedral bells chime so you get this signal that, right, death is near. Where death will in this case mean being taken to the mental hospital. Those cathedral bells, they're the only clean thing in the quarter. Well, I'm going now. I'm ready to go. And then she doesn't want to pass in front of the men, so they get her to wait and that's when she tells the. She has the speech that's kind of predicated on. That's an association from the unwashed grape. So she says, I can smell the sea air. The rest of my time I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? She plucks A grape. I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean, I will die with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond mustache and a big silver watch. Poor lady, they'll say the quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven. The cathedral chimes are heard and I'll be buried at sea, sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard at noon in the blaze of summer and into an ocean as blue as chimes. Again, my first lover's eyes. 1:29:07 Erin: And that isn't in the film, we should say, oh, that's all cut out. 1:29:12 Wes: Okay. She does ask about the grapes in the film, but we don't get that speech. 1:29:16 Erin: We don't get the speech, no. 1:29:18 Wes: So I really love that speech because it really digs into. It's really not emphasized in the play, the whole question of cleanliness and trying to. It's not like at some point Blanche is ever doing out damn spot or something like that. She's just taking a lot of baths and there's her name. And we really don't get a lot of her obsessing about her own purity. She kind of makes a joke of the fact that she's pretending to have virginal values. Like she rolls her eyes over Mitch's shoulder when she says she has kind of. Of old fashioned values. Something like that. But here this relationship to desire is really articulated very well in this speech because this idea of a lack of cleanliness in this fantasy, she's basically killed by desire. So here again we get this relationship between death and desire. Because she's eating, she's satisfying the desire to eat. But the thing that she eats is unclean. And yet it's by dying that she's purified, and it's also by dying that she gets a kind of cover for love. Right, so it's with the Doctor who. This is a kindness of strangers moment. Right. She's holding the hand of a nice looking Doctor and this is a kind of prophecy of what's about to happen with the Doctor that shows up to take her away. 1:30:37 Erin: Oh, of course, yeah. 1:30:39 Wes: So she's enjoying the kindness of this ship Doctor and that's the guise under, or the cover under which she can have a relationship. It can't be direct, it can't be consummated. It has to be in this indirect way where and now we see that that indirectness is connected directly to death. Death is like an alibi for her and it can purify her after the fact because we get to the point where she's sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard. This is a fantasy of the conditions under which she could, I think, enjoy her sexuality or enjoy her animal, brutish, Stanley esque nature, which she can't do without this idea of the kindness of strangers and dying in a purification ritual and all that stuff. 1:31:28 Erin: That's really great. 1:31:30 Wes: Are we ready to drop ourselves into the ocean in a white sack? 1:31:34 Erin: I think so. The whole time that I, when I watched the film and now hearing you talk, I was thinking about that time that you came over and you were about to eat unwashed fruit. And I was like, wes, you've got to wash that. And you're like, oh. 1:31:47 Wes: And I was just as uncomprehending as Eunice. I'm like, what? You wash fruit? The animals don't wash the fruit. Why should I? All right, thank you, thank you and, and thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed for The Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. 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