A Streetcar Named Desire Response
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is a play written in 1947, which provides us with an insight into a lot of social issues or ideas, as they were perceived to be at the time – mental health, the idea of chastity, homosexuality, among the many others. But, most of all, the reason why this play has consistently been called the greatest play to have been written by any American playwright, is solely due to Williams’s genius in scripting a riveting narrative, which is interspersed with complex characters and resounding, associated instances, becoming his own, very unique interpretation of the human condition. The premise itself is very intriguing in the way Williams sets the tone for the intricate plot that he, later, conjures: a distressed (and later, even deranged) Southern belle, Blanche Du Bois, from Oriole, Mississippi comes to live with her sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Stanley Kowalski, after having lost her family’s ranch “Belle Reve” claiming to have been given a sabbatical from her job as a high school English teacher (when she was actually fired for having been in an affair with a student who was a minor). The cast that I saw on screen as Blanche, Stanley and Stella, couldn’t have been better-chosen, and each of their powerful performances have remained with me: forcing me to only remember Vivien Leigh as Blanche and Marlon Brando as Stanley. A Streetcar Named Desire, the film, mainly consisted of these extremely rememberable performances for me, which successfully stirred up the same emotions and portrayed the different scenes, Williams writes about in the play. Whether it was Stanley’s angry animal spirit or raw sexuality, which Brando could not have portrayed better or Blanche’s insanity spewed by societal misunderstanding and individual complexes that Leigh, so wonderfully captured, these convoluted characters are the reason A Streetcar Named Desire does have a powerful effect on anybody who watches it, and to whatever capacity he/she may choose to interpret it.
There are two themes from this movie that particularly hit me the most, which, coupled, became a central force in its appeal: human desire and flaw. None of the characters are perfect, everyone has flaws: whether it is Stanley’s drunken, violent self, Stella’s overbearing and submissive nature, or Blanche’s severe complexities that force her to the brink of insanity. The second theme, desire, is something all of these characters have in common as well. Individually, it was hard for me to decipher the objective of each character – as I found it be constantly evolving during the course of the narrative. While it was easy for me to identify the sense of desire – which is a quality, I perceived to be prevalent in anyone who has lived and lost. Wanting to “live again” is desire – it was difficult for me to exactly come to understand what each of the characters wanted. In my viewing of A Streetcar Named Desire, I think that the underlying meaning what Williams is trying to talk about is human desire being the largest flaw. It’s something that can make you an animal like Stanley, a mentally-troubled person as Blanche or conceited and overbearing as Stella. And what, I found to be the most memorable end, was that none of the characters got what they desired. This, I feel, is Tennessee Williams’s greatest ode to the human spirit.