Tennessee Williams

Recently I watched A Streetcar Named Desire on TCM. It was the original one, from 1951, with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. It’s a moving experience as well as disturbing.

Enough has been said about the play and performances that I don’t need to go on about them—this is not imdb and someone can go there if so inspired. My husband had a good insight into it that I wouldn’t have gotten. He suffers from, well, depression and similar maladies, whereas I don’t. Consequently, I sympathize with people who suffer from mental and emotional illnesses but can’t really empathize. I’m not quite of the “just buck up” crowd, but sometimes ….. Anyway, he mentioned how the Stanley Kowalskis of this world are very cruel but usually are looked at as the normal ones, whereas the Blanches are the weak and abnormal. The normal people are allowed to be cruel to the weak. Stanley gets away with rape toward the end because Blanche by then has almost lost touch with reality, and truly does after the assault.
As for me, I never quite got the name of the play—yes, we do see the Streetcar with the nameplate Desire in the beginning of the movie (and let me say it was at least refreshing to see a movie about the deep South where people actually looked miserably hot, not like movies today where no one sweats). It is the juxtaposition of a streetcar—such a mundane, modern, normal item—with Desire, the driving element of human existence. Stanley is the streetcar, Blanche is desire. Because Desire is not lust, and this is what Tennessee Williams, an odd little man, I will admit, with sexual problems, but someone who understood women, this is what TW gets. Blanche desires not sex, not really, but connection, people who aren’t strangers, love, inclusion, acceptance, you can call it a number of things.

Desire. Longing. Yearning. If politicians can be defined by who they pander to, as I wrote a few days back, perhaps humans can be defined by what they long for. And maybe what we long for is what we are most conscious of what we don’t have.

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