He himself was described by Kazan as a person without skin, meaning extremely sensitive, just like Brando described Blanche, a broken butterfly.
The streetcar named Desire has epoch-making significance whether it is a stage play or a movie. Its appearance completely put an end to the idealism and romance dominated by the so-called golden age of Hollywood, completely wiped out gentlemen like Gary Grant after the two wars, and has yet to recover.
It can be said that it ended an era and a class.
Ending dreams and fairy tales, presenting the bloody and crude reality before people, raped ideals with desire.
The greatness and profoundness of this play is not only that it embodies the darkness and fragility of human nature, the conflicts between the declining southern aristocracy and the emerging northern industrial workers, men and women, but it also embodies the conflicts between reality and ideals. , Reality finally triumphed in the name of desire, and the soul finally surrendered to desire. Those fragile idealists were eventually destroyed.
Blanche is a thorough idealist, an authentic romanticist. She pursues spiritual perfection and has a strong desire for poetry, art, and the integration of soul. She tried to adapt and conquer the brutal and cruel reality represented by Stanley with her aristocratic elegance and frustration, and tried to bring her sister who had become a slave of desire to a noble spiritual realm.
However, she was finally destroyed in reality.
Because she found that spiritual and soul-level things are worthless in reality. No one can resist the temptation of desire. Human nature is fragile after all, and people are the captives of desire.
In Tennessee's original stage play, Blanche was a somewhat ridiculous character, because she repeatedly lied to cover up her true situation, and laughter often appeared in the theater performances that year. In the movie version, Fei Wenli gave this image a tragic shock with her excellent acting skills and her own broken and weak life. The audience can't ignore Fei Wenli's beauty and charm, and of course can forgive Blanche's absurdity. She is Blanche.
Blanche can run away.
However, the outside world is just as terrible. The appearance of the old lady who sold dead flowers again and again scared her back to two dilapidated houses where she couldn't escape. Whether it was inside or outside, it was death.
This is of course a symbolic treatment. There is no escape for a pure and fragile idealist, either entering a lunatic asylum or dying.
I think this kind of cruel feeling is the heart and lung sentiment of every idealist who has been defeated by reality.
Neurosis is not the result of the modern world, but the result of our separation from the world and our inadaptability to this world.
This is what Antonioni said in an article.
People who do not adapt to this world are patients with mental illness, and mental illness cannot be cured.
To go mad or to destroy is a choice, the purpose is the same, both aim at a complete break with the world.
The brutal reality represented by Stanley is tempting. He is young, tough, and full of desires. He always exposes all the dreams of idealism. Just like Blanche can’t adapt to reality, Stella loves reality. Longing for reality, she needs beasts to satisfy her desires. Because she is a symbol of the continuation of life, she wants to create a new life for desire, so she appears as a pregnant woman. And Blanche is dying.
When Blanche is immersed in dreams, Stanley will expose her dreams, because he thinks that people are beasts and no one is clean. He points to the satisfaction of desire and denies any romantic process. He is reality. , So no matter what, people have to live in reality.
Ten years ago, I hated this movie. It almost broke my nerves. Ten years later, I can enjoy it while eating because I have become a slave to desire.
He couldn't even walk into the lunatic asylum with the dignity of Blanche, but rot in the pigpen of desire.
This is the final fate of a fragile romantic.
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