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Stanley's costume reflects .......

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a streetcar named desire stanley costume - Google Search

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For instance, one only has to glimpse Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski to perceive that he typifies the tough, unprivileged working class male of the time period ...

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The original set designer suggested that....

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Symbolism - Blanche 's Lantern - illusion of youth

After Mitch sings “The Fairy Song” with tap-dancing actors dressed as Chinese lanterns, Blanche loses patience with metadrama and replays: “I want to be in a real play! With real scenery! White telephones, French windows, a beginning, a middle, and an end!” (33) to which Stella replies, echoing Blanche’s famous line in Scene Nine of Streetcar, “I don’t want realism. I want magic!”

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For Tennessee Williams, the relentless passage of time is the central fact of life. But, unlike Thornton Wilder who treated that passage of time with serenity, Williams finds it desperate and tragic. Having defined his characters-and himself-as "the fugitive kind," Williams' life was a drama of flig

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the phrase “blue piano,” was supplied by a four-piece jazz band composed of piano, clarinet, trumpet, and drums

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Williams worked on A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke at the same time, between 1945 and 1947, exploring his sense of the split self from opposing vantage points.

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Blanche avoids strong light (Act 2, Scene 1)

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Scene Eleven

Stella: I—just told her that—we’d made arrangements for her to rest in the country.

Stella: Yes, Blanche. [To Eunice] Tell her how well she’s looking.

Blanche: I can smell the sea air.

Stanley: She says she forgot something.

Stanley: You left nothing here but spilt talcum.

Steve: This game is seven-card stud.

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misogynist? He is a victim?

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How do you react to the character of Stanley Kowalski? Chances are that if you know Elia Kazan's 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, or even if you have merely encountered publicity shots and stills from the film, your view will be coloured by Marlon Brando's interpretation of the role. This is hardly surprising as all drama is, in the words of one critic, `a collaborative activity' between, among others, dramatists, directors and actors (Shiach, p. 55). A play is never just words on a page, it is written to be staged. Nevertheless, some critics have been surprised by Brando's charismatic rendering of Stanley, arguing that there is too great a gap between page and performance. Brando's Stanley, they say, is too engaging, too `sensitive' (Griffin, p. 75). The audience identifies too strongly with Stanley's distrust of Blanche, with consequences for their response to the film as a whole.

What sort of consequences? Any reading of the play prompts all kinds of difficult questions. Is Stanley a brutal monster or a pragmatic survivor? Is Mitch a beneficiary of Blanche's `temporary magic', or, as Stanley claims, simply a victim of her `lies'? If Stanley is played as being `sensitive', these questions resolve themselves fairly straightforwardly. What may be lost, however, is the thought-provoking ambiguity of Williams's original play. Do these critics have a point? Does the play provoke a more ambivalent response towards Stanley than the film?

It can be an intriguing exercise to compare the Marlon Brando version with the presentation of Stanley in the play, and then to speculate why certain changes were made. In fact, the film offers plenty of evidence of a coarse, aggressive Stanley. For example, he is heard--though not seen--beating up Stella, he eats meat with his bare hands, and he is first shown, in a change to the play, at the centre of a violent `ruckus'. Williams, who wrote the screenplay, skilfully sets this commotion in the context of the bowling alley, thus linking Stanley's aggression to his highly competitive nature. We may compare the similarly economical way in which Stanley is introduced in the play, heaving up a blood-stained package to Stella. The vigorous physicality, the echo of the primitive hunter-provider, the coarse sexual connotations of the contents of the package (`Meat!'), and the visible blood, suggesting passions close to the surface, all provide the audience with a condensed impression of Stanley's character.

In both play and film, Williams is adept at using such elements as scenery, props, music, human movement, sound effects, costume and lighting to convey meaning and character-points. Nevertheless, the detailed verbal cues provided in Williams's eloquent stage directions are only one contributing factor--albeit a crucial one--to the final `construct' that is the character on stage or on screen. Audience reaction may also be influenced by the director's input, what he chooses to emphasise and to ignore. Important lines may be cut. The censors and the film studio may have to be appeased. Much depends, too, on the personal qualities of the actor, the tone in which he delivers the lines, his appearance and bearing. As we have seen, Brando's Stanley is by no means always `sensitive'. In certain key scenes, however, he can seem surprisingly controlled and dignified.

Stanley and Blanche at war

Let's take as an example the first confrontation between Stanley and Blanche, over the loss of Belle Reve. In the play, this occurs in Scene 2. At the beginning of this scene, Stanley's domestic authority is carefully established by means of the `lordly composure' with which he accepts Stella's kiss, his demands for supper and Stella's request for money. As the scene progresses, this order is shown to be threatened by the intrusion of Blanche into his `territory'. Stanley's composure vanishes and his vision is so distorted by jealous rage that he appears to mistake her cheap `costume jewellery' for ropes of pearls.

Blanche's arrival in Stanley's domestic kingdom, her eloquence, her accoutrements and her strangeness, all work to expose his ignorance and shortcomings. He is unaware that rhinestone is `Next door to glass'. His clumsy grasp of legal matters might impress Stella (`My head is swimming!'), but the audience is more likely to share in the mockery of Blanche's flirtatious exclamation: `My, but you have an impressive judicial air!' His attempts to convey the impression of a well-connected man of the world (`I have a lawyer acquaintance who will study these out') appear idiotic even to Stella. In the end, becoming, as the stage directions inform the reader, `somewhat sheepish', Stanley resorts to telling Blanche about the baby--an arguably cruel bid to restore his compromised dignity. After all, Stella has asked him to keep the baby secret on the grounds that Blanche is in too nervous a `condition' to hear the news. The play, then, offers many cues that might serve to undermine the character of Stanley in the eyes of the audience.

The film, however, ignores these prompts and presents a much less compromised Stanley. Brando's character is seen doggedly, even confidently, asserting his rights under the `Napoleonic Code'. When he tells Blanche: `You see ... a man has to take an interest in his wife's affairs--especially now that she's going to have a baby', his tone is far from `sheepish' but is rather that of a man quite reasonably protecting the interests of his family. The film-Stanley's dignity and `reasonableness' throws into sharp relief negative aspects of Blanche that are already present in the scene--for example, her artifice and manipulation--but in so doing, downplays the rich ambiguity available in the text.

Another example of Brando's surprisingly dignified delivery comes as Stanley reveals Dame Blanche's `pack of lies' to Stella. In the play (Scene 7), Stanley can barely contain his glee. His loss of self-control and tendency to exaggerate are once more on display. He uses crowing and exultant exclamations (`No, sirree, Bob!) and colourful imagery (Blanche is `a school of sharks'). At times, his language fancifully evokes the ethos of Wild West folklore, as he imagines her being run out of town: `Yep, it was practickly a town ordinance passed against her!' In stark contrast, Brando's tone in the film is calm, measured and righteous. Tellingly, some of Stanley's more gloating lines (e.g. `Boy, oh boy, I'd like to have been in that office when Dame Blanche was called on the carpet!') are omitted. Indeed, Brando's Stanley only becomes heated when talking about the need to protect Mitch, thus suggesting that he is motivated purely by the male code of loyalty that has sprung out of their shared wartime service.

What is the effect of Brando's change of tone here? In this scene, Williams juxtaposes Stanley's presentation of the `truth' about Blanche, his `thoroughly checked facts', with Blanche's `contrapunctal' singing in the bath. The song's refrain, `But it wouldn't be make-believe/If you believed in me!', is no doubt whimsical and escapist, but points to another kind of truth, one that is subjective, `poetic' and more forgiving of human failings. Blanche later tells Mitch, `I didn't lie in my heart', and while this is open to question, it is also the case that the unrestrained Stanley of Scene 7 might cause the audience to question his command of reality. Is the picture he paints of `Dame Blanche' accurate or an unfair caricature? How well does he know his own motivations? Is it significant that by the end of the play, his marriage to Stella will be founded on a lie? It could be argued that the play maintains an ambivalent attitude towards the two versions of `truth' presented through the characters of Blanche and Stanley, perhaps suggesting that everyone's `take' on truth is shaped by their own needs, prejudices and fears. This section of the film, on the other hand, appears to endorse Stanley's scornful attitude to Blanche's `imagination' and `lies', and this is largely on account of Brando's restrained performance. Once again, the film has shed some of the play's interesting ambiguity.

Costume is also used to influence the audience's response to Stanley. In Scene 5 of the play, he is described as wearing typical garb, `his green and scarlet silk bowling shirt', symbolic of competitive instincts and vivid manhood. The film springs a surprise. Stanley, last seen covered in oil, enters wearing a smart jacket, and proceeds to change into a shirt and tie. Why is Stanley associated with these images of respectability? One answer is that this is perhaps not such a deviation from the character of Stanley as depicted in the play. As quiet survivor Stella remarks, Stanley is `the only one of his crowd that's likely to get anywhere'. Perhaps his smart attire is an intimation of the social respectability soon to come for this aspiring couple.

In some ways, Stanley presents an attractive image of social mobility celebrated as part of the American Dream. His ability to change, to adapt, so necessary for survival, is made evident. In the previous scene, Blanche has begged her sister not to `hang back with the brutes', but `brutish' Stanley's ability to look civilised exposes her assessment as naive. Ironically, it is while wearing these clothes that he hints to Blanche that he has learnt something of her disreputable past. For a moment, in a stunning transformation, the coarse, poker-playing drunk becomes a bastion of American decency. Furthermore, Stanley's smart clothes are later echoed by those of the Young Man (very young and innocent in the film), with whom Blanche flirts. Through costume, Stanley is subtly linked to a world of respectability, which immoral Blanche threatens. Again, Stanley's distrustful attitude to Blanche is validated by the film.

Stanley: predator or sex-object?

The possibly distorting effects of Brando's attractiveness should not be underestimated. In the text, Stanley is described as being highly-sexed. The stage directions tell us that sexual pleasure is the `centre of [Stanley's] life'. Sexuality itself is a driving force in the play. For example, the `things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark' create a powerful bond between Stanley and Stella that Blanche cannot break. However, one critic (Hern, p. xxxiii) has argued that Williams may actually be mocking Stanley's limitations. Certainly the descriptions `gaudy seed-bearer' and `richly-feathered male bird among hens' suggest something base and comically grotesque.

In the film, however, this element of criticism disappears in the emphasis on Brando's good looks and stunning ability to wear a torn tee-shirt. It could be argued that the film fails to distinguish between being highly-sexed and being sexually attractive, indeed connives in Stanley the rapist's own delusion that his advances are being welcomed. In its treatment of the rape, symbolised by Blanche's image frozen in a cracked mirror, the film seems very unwilling to convict Stanley. There is almost a sense that Blanche's panicky expectation of rape puts the idea into Stanley's head. Certainly, Brando's movements are not as threatening or full of intent as they seem in the stage directions. The film even omits Stanley's unambiguous line, `We've had this date with each other from the beginning!'

Maintaining the American Dream

Brando's sympathetic portrayal of Stanley may reflect the needs of America in the 1950s. For all his faults, Stanley is proud to be `one hundred per cent American'. He represents the life-blood of immigration that kept America's vast manufacturing industry strong and competitive, and maintained the material prosperity of the American Dream. His own competitive instincts, aggressive need to be best and pragmatic approach to life ideally suit him for success in this milieu. Through the baby, he and Stella are associated with progress and the future. Perhaps Americans wanted to see this embodiment of their success in a more attractive light and did not want to be reminded that such a society inevitably victimised vulnerable `soft people'. For Williams, the rape represented `the ravishment of the tender ... by the savage and brutal forces' of his society, but the film cannot sustain this interpretation. By omitting the images of the `human jungle' that precede the rape in the play, the film is less explicit in its criticism of social factors. Blanche is presented less as a victim of a ruthless, dog-eat-dog culture than as a neurotic woman.

Brando's Stanley, then, denies a sympathetic response to Blanche, and is too aesthetically pleasing to represent savage society. Ironically, however, the ending of the film indicts Stanley far more fiercely than the play does. Williams did not want to make a `black-dyed villain' out of Stanley and bitterly criticised the ending of the film, which has Stella reject Stanley with the words: `Don't ever touch me again.' Williams called this `a total contradiction to the meaning of the play'. In what way? Hollywood had demanded the imposition of a conventional moral framework in which Stanley the rapist is seen to be punished. But this is a cosy denial of the play's much harsher `meaning' that `life has got to go on', and life is blind and amoral. While victims like Blanche are forgotten, Stanley is the survivor in all of us, an instinctive force, at once brutal but necessary. Perhaps this accounts for the play's fascinating ambivalence towards Stanley, an ambivalence which the film simplifies, first by being dazzled by the force that Brando's Stanley represents, and then by turning around and hypocritically condemning it.

References and further reading

Griffin, A. (1995) Understanding Tennessee Williams, University of South Carolina Press.

Hem, P. (1984) Commentary to `A Streetcar Named Desire', Methuen Drama.

Shiach, D. (2000) American Drama i900-1990, CUP.

Christopher Holland teaches A-level English at D'Overbroeck's College, Oxford.

Source Citation

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Stanley Kowalski: from page to performance: Christopher Holland shows how the famous 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire subtly altered the slant of Tennessee Williams's original stage play

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How do you react to the character of Stanley Kowalski? Chances are that if you know Elia Kazan's 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, or even if you have merely encountered publicity shots and stills from the film, your view will be coloured by Marlon Brando's interpretation of the role.

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historical context............WW2, New Orleans, stinky...

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Why the Setting of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Is Important

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The two-room flat where “A Streetcar Named Desire” is set is viewed in sharply contrasting ways by the play’s characters, mirroring their conflict.

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happened? Read your text for 3 times

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Reality and Illusion...blablabla