{"id":218840,"date":"2009-12-23T18:26:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-23T23:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nybooks.com\/post\/297481234"},"modified":"2009-12-23T18:26:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-23T23:26:00","slug":"cate-blanchett-and-blanche-dubois","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218840","title":{"rendered":"Cate Blanchett and Blanche Dubois"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hilton Als<\/a><\/h4>\n
\n<\/p>\n
Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois (Lisa Tomasetti\/Brooklyn Academy of Music)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

At one point during Blanche\u2019s final mad scene in the Sydney Theater Company\u2019s much discussed revival of Tennessee Williams\u2019s modern-day masterwork, which just concluded its sold-out run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a woman sitting across the row from me began to sob uncontrollably. Despite her obvious pain, she could not look away from the stage\u2019s brightly lit scene of daytime disaster. One wondered about the source of that spectator\u2019s tears. Was it the sight of Blanche being led to her dark future, her sister Stella\u2019s flush cheeked confusion, or both?<\/p>\n

You might recall the moment: Stella has just had a baby. Returning home from the hospital, she sets about restoring order to her home. First things first. She commits her older sister to a mental institution. Stella, it seems, cannot live with this truth: that Stanley, her husband, has raped Blanche. Stella prefers to treat Blanche\u2019s report as further proof of her madness. The new mother loves her sister, but she loves her life more. If she believed any aspect of what Blanche had to say, she\u2019d have to leave Stanley, and forego those aspects of her existence that Blanche envies \u2014 and has contempt for. Without a man, though, who would Stella be? Her marriage defines her. To divorce Stanley would mean she\u2019d probably end up as her sister\u2019s custodian, thereby becoming another member of the pitiful, powerless female world Blanche is a member of.<\/p>\n

But as Williams makes clear about half way through his 1947 drama, Stella would never dream of leaving Stanley. His crude, working class demeanor degrades the memory of his wife\u2019s genteel upbringing in Mississippi. (\u201cI pulled you down off those columns.\u201d) As a result, Stanley makes Stella feel alive, turned on, present. And in order not to forfeit that feeling, Stella is complicit in her own brutalization, and, ultimately, her sister\u2019s. In fact, Blanche matters less to Stella than her future as a happily conventional woman, dutifully attending to her home, and honoring her husband.<\/p>\n

Relatively few feminists have yet to articulate\u2014sans ideology\u2014the ways in which some women may find stereotypical male behavior necessary, if only to act out its supposed counterpart, \u201cfemininity.\u201d Part of Williams\u2019s genius, of course, was to recognize this dynamic, and to not overstate it. Still, the playwright\u2019s sensitivity to character\u2014and to female characters in particular\u2014was little appreciated, if not misconstrued and ultimately dismissed altogether, when Mary McCarthy reviewed the show in 1948. In her piece, the writer more or less characterizes Williams as a mincing faggot, dramaturgically speaking, thus unqualified to write about heterosexual lives except as a kind of pornographer. But McCarthy doesn\u2019t stop there; she goes on to equate Williams with his delusional heroine, saying that, as a writer, he seems \u201caddicted to the embroidery lie.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, McCarthy\u2019s distaste for Williams\u2019s work is not unlike Stanley\u2019s for Blanche\u2019s dreams. Nevertheless, McCarthy was criticizing the play for what it isn\u2019t, which is to say Ibsen-inspired realism; in fact, Blanche\u2019s famous claim that \u201cI don\u2019t want realism, I want magic!\u201d was a cry against the stodgy, realist, and I might add heterocentric theatrical style of the time. (The men in Arthur Miller\u2019s post-war world, for instance, are never without long-suffering wives who put their husbands first.) But McCarthy doesn\u2019t much like Blanche, either. The critic takes after her with the single-mindedness of a misogynistic homophobe. McCarthy writes: \u201cThe thin sleazy stuff,\u201d of Blanche\u2019s character \u201cmust be embellished by Mr. Williams with all sorts of arty decorations,\u201d because, in McCarthy\u2019s view, there\u2019s so little to Blanche. She even finds Blanche\u2019s backstory frustratingly contrived, saying: \u201cIt is not enough that [Blanche] should be a drunkard (this in itself is plausible); she must also be a notorious libertine who has been run out of a small town like a prostitute, a thing absolutely inconceivable for a woman to whom conventionality is the end of existence.\u201d<\/p>\n

But part of Blanche\u2019s tragedy is that even though she tries on conventionality when she takes up with Mitch, it doesn\u2019t fit: her intelligence and status as a defiant outsider keep getting in the way. (Stanley and Mitch\u2019s horror and fascination with Blanche\u2019s sexuality is a kind of trope; what really frightens and excites them is her very individual way of seeing things. Blanche can comment on her femininity even as she tries to exploit it. But she knows when she can\u2019t turn the trick, either. Blanche to Stanley: \u201cI cannot imagine any witch of a woman casting a spell over you.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Perhaps McCarthy, like Stanley and Mitch, was ultimately too uncomfortable with Blanche\u2019s queerness. She is unmarried, but she has loved. She has no money, no property, and no social equity, and yet her memories of the boys she took to her breast are a kind of sustenance, too. Williams lets us in on Blanche\u2019s difference by degrees, and by having her speak a recognizably gay language. Queer talk from a queer artist about a queer woman. Blanche to Stella: \u201cI don\u2019t know how much longer I can turn the trick. It isn\u2019t enough to be soft.\u201d Blanche to the Young Man she\u2019d like to trick with: \u201cI\u2019m not a conventional person, and I\u2019m so\u2014restless today\u2026.\u201d Blanche to Mitch about her dead gay husband: \u201cThere was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn\u2019t like a man\u2019s, although he wasn\u2019t the least bit effeminate looking\u2014still\u2014that thing was there\u2026.He came to me for help. I didn\u2019t know that I didn\u2019t find out anything till after our marriage when we\u2019d run away and come back and all I knew was I\u2019d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn\u2019t able to give the help he needed but couldn\u2019t speak of!\u201d Blanche is the forerunner of certain other Williams characters in his gallery of difference.<\/p>\n

There is some Blanche in Brinda, the black woman who must endure the crude advances of a white nurse who feels he can treat her badly because she\u2019s black in Williams\u2019s long 1964 story, \u201cMama\u2019s Old Stucco House.\u201d Blanche\u2019s affectations are less modified in Candy Delaney, from the writer\u2019s 1970 play, \u201cAnd Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens\u2026.\u201d She is also part of the spirit Williams expresses through his verse in his 1966 play, \u201cThe Mutilated\u201d: I THINK THE STRANGE, THE CRAZED, THE QUEER \/ WILL HAVE THEIR HOLIDAY THIS YEAR \/ AND FOR A WHILE, A LITTLE WHILE, THERE WILL BE PITY FOR THE WILD. A MIRACLE, A MIRACLE! A SANCTUARY FOR THE WILD.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cStreetcar,\u201d Blanche is partly undone by the gossip Stanley spreads about her. He tells Mitch about all the men and boys his sister-in-law\u2019s slept with in her hometown, and how she was suspended from her job teaching high school English. Mitch, feeling duped, goes over to the Kowalskis\u2019 and confronts Blanche. He then tries to sleep with her. Why not? She\u2019s cheap goods. To get rid of him, Blanche threatens to scream fire. Given that Mitch is her last hope of ever escaping Stanley and Stella\u2019s home and living a \u201crespectable\u201d life, Blanche should be hysterical for the rest of the play. But under Liv Ullman\u2019s direction, Cate Blanchett doesn\u2019t vibrate with the kind of intensity and need for acceptance that one generally associates with an outsider. Instead, Blanchett\u2019s Blanche tries to engage with, or defy, the male members of the Kowalski-centered community. Ullman and Blanchett\u2019s Blanche is entirely too sturdy a woman. She\u2019s an intellectually superior being who doesn\u2019t so much engage with her sister as lecture her. Ullman uses her vulnerability to advance the plot; in the process, she doesn\u2019t add anything especially insightful to our understanding of Blanche, and seems to find humor in her nearly indefatigable need to connect.<\/p>\n

The actors traverse the large set with little ease, and certainly no understanding of the thick New Orleans atmosphere that Williams insinuates into the action of the play like a minor but important character. Under Ullman\u2019s direction, the Kowalskis\u2019 suffocating apartment is just one more prop, like one of Blanche\u2019s summer furs; Ullman never infuses the rooms with a sense of foreboding, or dread. This is obvious from the moment Blanche arrives. Stella and Stanley aren\u2019t there; their landlady and neighbor, Eunice, shows Blanche in. As Eunice chatters on, Blanche rudely cuts her off. But instead of exhibiting a mix of emotions\u2014gratitude, her own wretchedness\u2014she merely barks at the proprietress, like a drill sergeant. Left alone, the errant schoolteacher spies a bottle of liquor and takes a big, hearty gulp, again less out of a feeling of desperation than as a way of quenching her thirst.<\/p>\n

Enter Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kolwalski. While Edgerton stresses\u2014as he must\u2014Kowalski\u2019s physical appeal he, like the rest of the cast (Robin McLeavy\u2019s Stella Kowalski is especially weak; her Stella sounds and acts like an emotionally underwhelmed schoolgirl) shrinks in relation to Blanchett\u2019s star wattage, her air of unvanquished health. Still, Edgerton doesn\u2019t act with any real sense of urgency; he keeps close to Williams\u2019s text while trying not to mimic Marlon Brando, who still owns the part.<\/p>\n

One requires a Brando-like intensity to play Blanche, but Blanchett doesn\u2019t yet seem to possess the kind of imagination that understands degradation; she is too competitive a spirit to grovel where Blanche has groveled in order to stay alive. In fact, the moments leading up to Blanche\u2019s rape\u2014the cutting of the final chord of reality\u2014rang especially false, because Blanchett plays it as though Blanche is drunk, confused, fitful, and not as a willing female victim to Stanley\u2019s male need for control; she is ultimately relegated to the life of tragic mundanity she has tried so valiantly to escape, while Stella runs towards it.<\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hilton Als Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois (Lisa Tomasetti\/Brooklyn Academy of Music) At one point during Blanche\u2019s final mad scene in the Sydney Theater Company\u2019s much discussed revival of Tennessee Williams\u2019s modern-day masterwork, which just concluded its sold-out run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a woman sitting across the row from me began to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}