A little research about the names of it main characters reveals a lot about the central themes of this Tennessee Williams' play-turned-film. The anti-heroine, a beautifully fragile, albeit aging, English teacher desperately clinging to the genteel ways of her aristocratic past, is named Blanche DuBois - French for "white forest" and the anti-villain, a strong, rough laborer whose persona requires the word "animal" is named Stanley Kowalski - separately translated as "stony meadow" and "blacksmith". Such stark contrasts of approaches to Human Nature, one desperately refined and whimsical and the other, irresistibly raw, and menacingly uncontrolled, serve as the gasoline and gun powder lined avenue for the fiery Streetcar named Desire.
I first watched this as a play in the Cultural Center of the Philippines, translated entirely into the local vernacular, and although they are separated by language and the limitations of 1950's cinema that sanitized the crucial rape scenes and details of homosexuality, both the play and the film capture what pornography can only fantasize about- Sex as a palpable force of nature in its unbearable subtleties as well as its unstoppable ferocity.
I still remember having raunchy dreams days after the play and now, after watching the film, I not only have a new found respect for Marlon Brando for a performance that absolutely cannot be duplicated, I also now have an inexplicable desire to look as good as him in greasy shirt- And therein lies the genius of Tennessee Williams, in having created a story about real humans that sweat and bleed and telling it in the same way that real humans behave- intelligent and seemingly contrived with its literary devices and social commentaries on one side but also undeniably visceral in its ultimate effect.
Here's when Blanche meets Stanley for the first time. Talk about tension.
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