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March 31, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:35:28
4333 The Truth About "A Streetcar Named Desire" Dr Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, I'm here with Dr. Duke Pesta for the latest in our exciting explorations of, I guess in this case, American theatrical literature.
We're going to be talking about A Streetcar Named Desire.
I must confess, it has obsessed me for many years.
So, this may not be the shortest show in history, but hopefully we can make it not last longer than the actual play itself.
Thanks for taking the time today, Dr. Pesta.
I'm glad to be with you again, Steph.
It's good to see you.
So what's your history with the play?
It is so canonical that when I was in theater school and we were doing the history of 20th century, well, we were doing the history of theater as a whole, and I remember the instructor came to the 20th century and immediately one of the actors went, Stella!
And everyone's just like, because you know, that's the pivotal moment.
It's sort of arguably the most important play of the 20th century.
And what's your history with the play?
When did you first see it and how does it strike you?
You know, I'm kind of a snob, I have to admit.
My specialist is English literature.
I focus on Milton, Shakespeare, Dante.
And so I've always kind of had an underwhelming appreciation for American literature.
I mean, Moby Dick is a fantastic novel, but 20th century American literature in particular leaves me cold with, I must say, the exception of Tennessee Williams.
I mean, when I think about Tennessee Williams and I lay him alongside Arthur Miller, And you think about what happens in the 20th century with regards to drama.
The epic hero is gone.
The great epic tragedies of Shakespeare are gone.
And the 20th century goes to great lengths to make heroes out of really complicated but fallen nobodies.
You think about Death of a Salesman and you think about this play.
And to me, the comparison of the two plays demonstrates what a great masterpiece this play is.
And what a great artist Tennessee Williams really is.
I mean, when I read Arthur Miller and then I turn around and read a play like Streetcar, I'm blown away by how sophisticated Williams is in his use of language and the pathos he's able to generate from people who are otherwise, in many ways, just broken and fragile.
There are no King Lears here.
And so, for me, when I think of drama in the 20th century, it all leaves me cold.
American drama, really, except for Tennessee Williams.
Well, where do you stand on Eugene O'Neill?
I like him.
He's a little bit pedantic for me, but O'Neill would probably become the closest, I would argue, after Williams to what I would consider an American drama that's worthy of the great Western tradition of drama, going back to Sophocles.
With this play, and I'm interested about you, the thing that blows me away is some of the standard lines that everybody knows from this play, when you hear them in the context of the play, they're depressing, right?
I mean, you know, I've always relied on the company of the kindness of strangers.
It's a classic line, right?
And everybody's heard it, even though many people don't remember where it comes from.
But when you actually, when I went back and reread the play to talk to you today, because it'd been a while since I'd read it, And it's just so devastatingly sad how some of those great lines are when you see them in context.
Well, kindness of strangers means those who haven't learned enough about Blanche DuBois to not trust any damn thing that comes out of her lying, conniving mouth.
But there's an amazing thing about the 20th century in theater where there was this transition From heroic or ennobling or higher standard aspirational drama to kitchen sink drama to this sort of everyday, like you're at the fourth wall, you're just peering into someone's house and seeing the drama.
And I see Tennessee Williams kind of as a transitional figure insofar as he definitely has the kitchen sink drama style.
But there's such an elevated sense of language.
It's like maybe a third of the way to Shakespeare, as far as the poetry and the passion and the power of the language that even his common characters use.
And in Streetcar Named Desire, there are these amazing speeches.
These don't-hang-back-with-the-brutes, remember how we used to get the colored lights going, and these poetic and powerful speeches that are somehow transposed into this New Orleans quarter with its stench and its smells and its violence and its drunkenness and its abuse and so on.
And that to me is a very transitional figure because I think that the left which came up with the sort of Stanislavski movement and the method acting movement really scrubbed a lot of the beauty and poetry out of theatrical language and I view sort of Tennessee Williams as one of the last people who was able to get poetry into the mouths of characters that we could believe in.
Yeah, I think your comparison to Shakespeare is apt.
My primary teaching subject is Shakespeare.
I have to convince my students, even my advanced literature students, that the plots of these plays don't matter all that much.
That in great drama, it's much less about what happens than it is about how it's said.
That the great plays going back through history were all about the language.
And most of these great plays, of course, were written before we had modern computer technology and all of the stage and lighting facilities we now have, the microphones on the actors.
All of this had to be done primarily with the imagination.
And I think drama has suffered in the 20th century by becoming too close to being like real life.
That willing suspension of disbelief has been so minimalized now by technology and the advances we've made That the poetry is gone, I agree with you.
And I think that when I think about the way, as you said, Tennessee Williams creates mood and creates atmosphere.
And he has a sensitive ear to the poor people living in the quarter and to these rich affectations.
He does remind me of Shakespeare in his ability to match the language to the character and let the language Reflect more about the inner working of the character than their actions do.
Right.
So I first read the play in my late teens.
This is before I went to theater school.
And I'll just give you a straight up Freudian confession.
Blanche DuBois is my mother.
And that has always been a real... So I'm gonna be straight up with you, man.
I am rooting.
I am rooting for Stanley Kowalski until the end.
And we'll sort of get to the end.
But I'm really rooting for him because He is a solid, stolid, no bullshit, no delusions, don't lie to me.
I don't care about the sort of perfumes that you're spraying around and the new doilies and I don't care about the paper lanterns that you're putting around the lights.
I want to see things straight up, empirical, reality-based.
And so this sort of gaudy seed-bearer that Tennessee Williams talks about as far as Stanley Kowalski, I was rooting for him.
It's like, yeah, you get that crazy woman, man.
You expose her.
You tell her how things are going.
And I think it was kind of one of the last times where you could have a powerful, although dysfunctional, male character slowly peeling back the delusions until the core crazy is exposed.
I think that's a really good point.
And again, if you go back to my comparison between Death of a Salesman, the utterly forgettable salesman in that play, and this character of Stanley Kowalski, you have two kind of very macho men, career men, but they're so much different with Stanley Kowalski.
And this is going to be an interesting discussion, Steph, because I come at it from a completely different perspective.
In some ways, Blanche Dubois, some ways, is my wife.
I married a Southern girl.
Her favorite city is New Orleans.
Daddy!
Wait, okay, we'll get all four of you later, but go on.
We're going to.
And so I always do see, having lived down in the South with my wife, and the one thing I admire about my wife is her ability in the midst of tragedy, in the midst of death, that horrifying speech, right?
That death is not pretty.
My wife has the ability to retain this genteel sense of propriety.
And it's not a put-on, it's not a come-on, but it's mythmaking is what it is, right?
I mean, one of the things I love about Southern Gothic culture in particular is the mythmaking.
I mean, and you ask yourselves, are we primarily Stanley Kowalski's.
I mean, and it doesn't surprise me that I go for the poetry and you, as an English professor, and you go for the philosophy, right?
What you love about Stanley is he's a deconstructionist.
He cuts through the shit, calls a thing what it is, no bullshit.
And for me, as more of the drawn to poetic language and things like Shakespeare, I look for how we use language to civilize us in some ways, right?
To take those brute positions, which are, while they're bracingly honest, they're also crass, And they're also fatalistic.
And they're also brutal.
And to me, I think that, and I watch this in my wife, it is that ability, that elegant ability that she has, that Blanche has, before she descends into madness.
To sort of see the world, see it for what it is, in her frank talk with Stanley, but preserve this mythic element of civilization and culture and refinement and artistry and the great poetic language that you said that she speaks.
Almost all the poetry, almost all of it, every great, great line is hers, really, in the play.
Outside of Stella, almost all the rest of the language is pretty forgettable.
And so I think that when you think of Southern Gothic, and Flannery O'Connor did this well in her short fiction, how do you deal with the tragedies and horrors of animalistic life?
That part of us, you've called it before, the meat machine, right?
Walking meat, talking meat.
How do you deal with those realities, and then yet still have aspirations to higher art and culture?
And to me, Blanche really does straddle those two things very well, and it's why I'm kind of rooting for her from the beginning, because I, again, having a Southern wife, I kind of get that ethos on a daily basis.
What struck me early on is that Blanche is kind of like a head without a body, because she's so disconnected from physical reality.
We can get into some of the Whore of Babylon stuff, not to reference your wife, but of course to reference Blanche Dubois.
We'll get into that stuff later, but she's very platonic, she's very abstract, she's very Poetry and diaphanous gowns and dancing and pretending that the guy who's coming, Mitch, is coming to date her is some French knight or the creepy scene with the kid coming for a newspaper payment who she refers to as a young prince from the Arabian Nights.
She's very platonic and abstract.
And she's sort of like a head without a body.
And then, in a sense, there's this opposite of Stanley Kowalski, who's like a body without a head, who's just base mammalian animal lust.
You know, I love that opening line that he has when you first hear him, where she says, Oh, I'm from this area.
He's like, Oh, this area.
That's not my territory.
He's a roaming animal, and he's got territory, and his wife is his territory, and what does he keep talking about?
He keeps talking about property, the Napoleonic Code.
What happened to the property in the country that my wife was supposed to inherit?
And like Huey Long says at the scene at the dinner table where he smashes the plates, he says, a man's home is his castle, and I'm the king around here, and don't you forget about it.
This territorial aspect and this protective aspect To me it's always been quite powerful and then in comes Blanche Dubois who immediately is a bipolar shit disturber in his relatively comfortable, though of course somewhat dysfunctional, nest.
And I've always found that kind of fascinating that he senses at a very deep intellectual level, sorry, a very deep instinctual level, which his wife doesn't, what a threat Blanche Dubois poses.
to his marriage because his wife is fleeing from the decay of the old aristocratic South into the vitality of the lower class, working class fertility, right?
All that's in the South is death and she keeps talking about death is expensive and we've all one by one heading to the graveyard and she was nursing all of these dying people.
It's just death Yeah, I think that's well said.
and the baby is in the future.
The fertility in the future is in the muscularity of the working class, which is really disruptible by the abstract ideals and, in a sense, damning of the body that Blanche brings with her when she arrives. - Yeah, I think that's well said.
And, you know, the first animal that's referenced with regards to Stanley is an ape.
When you think of Stanley you think of Harry Knuckles.
You think his arms are a little too long.
Here's a guy who's hulking.
And the first animal that's referenced with regards to her is a moth.
Right?
She's described all in white.
And you think about the skittish nature of the moth, its flightiness, its delicacy, how it hovers around light.
Light is a huge image in the story.
They say this about, sorry, they say this about Tennessee Williams females, these moth females, right?
That they're attracted to the light that burns them up.
That burns them.
And I think that's right.
I think the light is the visceral reality that you were talking about.
this gutter existence, this existence of this sort of bacteria filled, roll up your sleeves sweat, right?
When she says to Mitch, "I like a man who sweats," right?
And the idea that she has that almost pheromonal attraction to it as this flittering moth.
But again, I would say, and I wouldn't call her, I get your point, I would call Stanley body, I wouldn't call her head, it makes her too intellectual.
I would call her the soul or something, right?
Something very ethereal and flittish.
But I think your broader point is right.
The only thing I would say, though, is it's not just a decaying South.
It's not just the idea that the South, with all of its aristocracy, is dead.
I think there's an ideal, a chivalric ideal, that has died too.
She refers to, as you pointed out, the young boy as kind of a chevalier, right?
A knight.
I think, while there are many aspects of Southern culture that needed to die, the, of course, slavery, the noblesse oblige, the radical, class-bound nature of Southern culture, one thing that I think, Tennessee Williams, who was an esthete, right, and a poet, one of the things that he's also lamenting, and I think it's worthy of lamentation, is the death of chivalric codes and chivalry and all of this idea that we're talking about with
With her, that suggests the effete, the artistic, the delicate, the sensitive, the emotional.
The death of that too is a loss of something.
And what you get at the end, and we'll come back to the end, I know, but Stanley's behavior at the end I think exposes the dangers of putting too much faith in the opposite of what she represents.
Oh, that's what's so frustrating about this play for me, is, okay, I don't want to be an insane Southern woman, and I don't want to be a wife-beating rapist either.
You know, but I can see value in both of the characters' perspectives.
I can see value in the, let's make things nice, you know, like I'm a married man, so I live in girly world, which is a paradise of well-structured living and beautiful things around and art on the walls and so on, which is not how I lived when I was a bachelor.
So, I get this, let's make the world beautiful, it's a lovely thing.
But at the same time, I don't want to be insane and manipulative and drunken and whoring and so on.
At the same time, with Stanley, I want to be solid.
I want to look people in the eye and tell them the truth.
I do want to peel back delusions from people and so on.
But at the same time, I don't want to be a wife-beating-rapey guy.
So, it's really kind of frustrating.
Like, with a lot of The older plays, you could look and say, you know, that guy's really cool.
That's aspirational for me.
And there's not a lot that's aspirational.
You've really got to pick and choose.
It's quite the contradictory buffet in a Tennessee Williams world.
Like, yeah, that's really cool.
Like, Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when he talks about mendacity and how boring people are and he drinks to escape being bored.
It's like, Yeah, I think, you know, smart people have that experience from time to time, looking around saying, you know, the old George Carlin line, you know, think how dumb people are.
Well, half of them think how dumb the average person is.
Well, half of them are dumber than that.
So I can sympathize with a lot, but you just would never want to live in that world in its entirety.
No, I agree.
And honestly, to tell you the truth, at the end of the play, I'm much more sympathetic to her delusional madness, what she sinks into to avoid the crass realities.
than I am towards his visceral rape of her.
And I think that, for me, what Tennessee Williams is ultimately saying, that the death of this southern gothic way of life, that the death of this all, it was, we perhaps lost more than we retained by going to this sort of full-throated, earthy, Stanley Kowalski existence.
earthy Stanley Kowalski existence.
And in the novel, by the way, the novel at this time period that strikes me the most similar to this in tone is The Great Gatsby.
And in the novel, by the way, the novel at this time period that strikes me the most similar to this in tone is The Great Gatsby.
Gatsby is at once a newcomer to his wealth.
Gatsby is at once a newcomer to his wealth.
Gatsby is sort of ethereal and almost borderline mad the way that she is.
And you have all these other characters that are sort of leeching around him.
And if I think about what Fitzgerald did in The Great Gatsby and I think about what Tennessee Williams did here, again, it's not surprisingly a very Southern thing.
This wishful thinking for the kind of aspirational, as you say, aspects of art and aesthetics and love and relationships that you see that she's dreaming and pining for.
That he just rips them apart.
He literally rapes those.
He literally rapes away her last illusions.
And I don't think we can miss the point that it is her madness, what was drunkenness and affectation, and wish fulfillment after the rape becomes bona fide madness.
He literally punctuates the end, the death, of that southern chivalric code with a vicious rape.
Well, let me tell you, we'll do this end part because it really bothers me, so forgive my passion at this point.
I loved the dismantling of her delusion scene, right?
So Blanche at the end is like, she imagines that Shep Huntley's going to come and take her away on a Caribbean cruise.
I think you don't know if she believes it or she's just saying it to win in the moment.
We've all had people like that in our lives.
They're pretty exhausting after a while.
But he comes in.
Now, he's got a clean house, right?
Because he's just gone away and his wife is going to give birth.
Right?
And when you are going to have a kid, you've got to clean up the nest, right?
Women do this.
Men do this as well.
You've got to clean up the nest, right?
And so he's got this crazy woman in his house who is dangerous and delusional and so on, and trying to snag one of his friends into a destructive, predatory, exploitive marriage, I would assume, by lying to him about her age, about her history, about her sexual history, and so on.
So he's coming home.
He's got to clean the house.
And she tells him all of this malarkey about, she got a wire, she's gonna go on some Caribbean cruise with some guy who just wants her for her companionship and her sophistication and her education and so on.
And he doesn't believe it at all.
He doesn't believe it at all.
Now, in the stage directions, certainly the Brando film is worth watching, but in the stage directions, it's not particularly clear.
In the Kazan film, Brando's leaning over at Vivien Leigh, Stanley Kowalski's leaning over and half-humping her, Ha!
You know, yelling at her delusions and saying, look at yourself.
You know, you're like a crazy woman.
You're in some Mardi Gras dime store outfit with, you know, 50 cents worth of rhinestones on your head.
And you're pretending like you're some queen of the Nile, like he's just pulling away all of the illusions that she has, which I found a ferociously satisfying scene.
You know, I mean that's a really really powerful thing because people's craziness is kind of infectious and sometimes you have to push back pretty damn hard in order to maintain some barriers or boundaries of sanity.
So from there, I'm like, you go!
You know, you got him!
He got her the ticket to send her back home.
His wife's going to come home with a baby.
She's going to be out of there.
And so to me, and I remember talking about this in therapy.
Believe it or not, I used to talk quite a lot about literature in therapy because that's how I worked out my issues.
And I remember saying to my therapist, it drives me crazy because he won already!
He's won.
His wife's gonna come home with the baby.
He's already bought her the ticket.
She hasn't said, you take a ticket, and you tear it.
His wife hasn't said, you take that ticket, you tear it up.
Kowalski has won, and he's gonna get the crazy woman out of his house.
He's gonna get his wife back.
He's gonna get his piece of household back, relatively.
He's got a baby coming.
Like, he's won.
He's won.
And so, to me, then, why on earth would he rape her?
Like, their values are very much opposites.
This old, oh, you know, opposites attract.
I don't believe it for a second.
And I remember saying in therapy, like, why would he rape her?
He already has won.
And then by raping her, he loses the moral high ground, he commits a grossly immoral act, he poisons the house.
Like, why?
And my therapist said, because Tennessee Williams lost against his mom.
Anyway, we'll do some of the deep stuff in the background, but that's the one part.
I mean, it's the part I dislike in Rand's novels, and it's the part I really dislike in this play, and I've yet to understand it, other than maybe he wanted some big dramatic ending or whatever, but the idea That he would find this aging, hysterical, neurasthenic drama queen who's lying and falsifying and putting his friends in danger and so on, this addict, this drunk, why would he want to rape her?
That never made any sense to me.
In my reading of the play, I don't think he's one.
I disagree with you on that.
I don't think he's one.
In the sense that Yes, he's deconstructed her, but he's not replaced it with anything.
I think the rape is a symbol of his insecurity in the face of civilizational aspects that she represents that he doesn't understand.
I get that she's extreme, I get that she's over the top, but you know what?
If you had transplanted this play from that kind of lower class apartment flat to Belle Reve, to the plantation, he would be the outcast.
It would have been more obvious.
Or he'd be a farmhand or something, right?
A farmhand.
What I mean to say is, what I don't think he's won.
I mean, what has he won ultimately?
He has basically torn her down, but he hasn't built himself up.
He has not learned a lesson.
What is he most worried about, Stanley Kowalski, in my mind?
He's worried that the character we have not talked about yet, Stella, Right?
Stella is a Southern girl.
Stella was born on the plantation.
Stella does see her degeneration, but also admires in her sister the gentility, the artistic sensibility, the poetic soul, the idea of living at a higher plane.
And what Stanley's really worried about is he's gonna lose Stella to her.
That Stella's going, and the thing is, Stella keeps defending her.
All throughout the play, Stella defends her.
And at the end of the play, the funny thing is, is that when it's all said and done and she's being taken to the madhouse, she takes the baby and she sits down, right?
She doesn't go to her husband.
The husband comes to her, and one of the very last scenes in the play, it's described that his fingers, as he's trying to comfort her, as she howls for her sister in ways that she's never shown that kind of emotion about Stanley, except in bed, right?
We keep hearing about their passionate, headboard-rattling sex.
His fingers find its way into her shirt, right?
It's really, really creepy.
And it seems to me, so I don't think that he has won in the sense that he has, absolutely, he's pulled her to pieces.
But it's like the little kid who sets fire, right?
It's like Nero playing the harp while Rome burns, right?
Not recognizing that what you have done has cultural implications beyond your immediate physical satisfaction of having won that battle.
I close this little comment by saying, it seems to me the final point that Tennessee Williams is making is that in the final analysis, We all have our necessary fictions, right?
Very few of us are able to live in the stark light of who we are and what our world is.
I mean, even simple things.
When you hear your voice on a tape recording, that's not me, right?
You see your driver's license picture, no, no, no.
We tuck it in our wallet and never look at it because that's not the me that I see.
I think there is something about necessary fictions.
I think that we all have them.
That we have to believe certain things about ourselves or about culture or about love or relationships.
Or else we would never engage in them.
If we took a Stanley Kowalski view of art, poetry, love, who would ever want to do it?
And so, in the end, to me, I don't think he had won.
I think he had broken her down.
But I don't think he's smart enough to realize what he's lost.
And so, the rape, to me, makes perfect sense.
He had to dominate her all across the board, right?
That after he had pulled down the illusions of who she was and pulled down those illusions, it's almost like Sherman burning Atlanta to the ground, not because he needed to, but to stick a damn exclamation point on who won that battle.
And, you know, there was much more to Atlanta and there's much more to Southern culture than just the nasty aspects of it.
And something big was lost, I think, to me in that reading.
I'm teetering on the edge of accepting the case, but I'll push back with this.
And again, to sort of state the personal, so my mother had been wanting to go out west for a long time and kept talking about it and talking about it and talking about it, and finally I bought her a ticket to BC and put her on a bus and off she went.
When you got a crazy woman in the house and Stanley Kowalski is like, I bought you a ticket so you could leave, you know, when I was reading that.
Of course, you know, there is that familiarity to my own sort of historical example.
And so to me, it's like the idea that I need to not just buy a ticket to my mom, for my mom to go out west, but I gotta, I gotta beat her up too.
Like, once you've got her out of the, you know, you got her out of the picture, you've got your territory, it was a great time after that and all.
So that, And again, I know that there's a Freudian thing because they have sexual attraction for each other in the play, it's hinted at, but nonetheless, if he wants to destroy her, mentally and physically, that seems odd to me, because his goal is to get her out, and he's got that, because when he gives her the ticket, I read this part of the play again just today, when he gets her the ticket to send her back to Oriole, His wife is right there.
Stella is right there.
And she doesn't say, she's not, like, my sister's not going anywhere.
She's staying here with us.
She says, you know, you didn't have to be that cruel, you know, Blanche is a sensitive soul and blah, blah, blah.
But she, the sister of Stella, knew that Blanche had to go as well.
He's got the ticket for her.
It's just another day or two.
He's got the kid coming.
He's, you know, he's really the victor here.
If you're saying that it's more than just the reestablishing of a territory, right?
So once you drive out the invader, you're comfortable in your territory, right?
But if you're saying that he has to destroy her from top to bottom, I'm still not sure how that fits into his reassertion of territory.
Well, again, you said earlier, and I agree with you, that he has nothing but body, right?
He really is body and animal urges.
He is impulses.
is sexual in a different nature.
Sex for her is romance, right?
Even the 17-year-old boy, right?
Why did she come on to him?
And what did she build that 17-year-old boy up to do when she was teaching, right?
Or when she's talking to Mitch, right?
And Mitch is just some guy, her last chance, right?
To win somebody over.
And she has to elevate him in her mind to something else.
And when you think about the nature of it, right?
He is body, and so ultimately, if my theory... You mean Stanley, not Mitch, right?
Stanley.
Yeah, Stanley.
If Stanley has... What I'm saying is correct.
I'm trying to think through my own reading here.
If Stanley is body, and my argument is that he's insecure.
Notice what he's never able to do, even at the end of the play.
He's never able to divorce the affection, which he can understand because it's not physical.
The affection that she has for her sister, right?
That Stella has for Blanche.
He's never able to stop that or to break that.
He never is able to stop Stella from serving her.
You know what's funny in the play to me?
She doesn't serve him.
There's a plate of cold food.
Yeah, where's my dinner at Galatoire's, yeah.
Right, yeah, and so I'm off with her at the... He serves himself.
He takes what he wants.
He reaches across the table and takes the last chop and gets the grease all over his face.
She, his wife, is constantly serving the ideal of what she is.
Nurturing, in some way, the best part of Blanche that has been lost by delusion and age and disappointment and grief.
And so, to me, Stanley can't win.
His only place to win is that sexual... His comment to her?
You and I have had this date from the beginning.
Let that one sink in, right?
So even before everything you're arguing, Steph, everything you're arguing, he had decided before any of that unfolded, before he knew the first thing about her, almost from the moment he had seen her, this is where it was going to end for me and you, baby, right here in the sheets.
So that's why I think he hasn't won, and that's why I think the rape is the final thing a man, the only thing a man like him can do to express in his own way what he considers to be his victory.
All right, I'm going to mull that over.
I want to talk about something that I looked up over the last couple days.
So, this is way, way back in the day.
I read, oh gosh, I read biographies, autobiographies of Elia Kazan, who directed the movie and also directed him in the play.
I've read biographies of Tennessee Williams.
So, I mean, I'm afraid I'm ridiculously steeped in this kind of stuff.
And one of the things that has always troubled me about the play, which is, I think, somewhat under-discussed, is the paperboy scene, which is...
Creepy on the surface, and I'll give you another level here.
So, first of all, Tennessee Williams repeatedly said, I am Blanche DuBois.
And it has always struck me that as a gay man who engaged in rampant promiscuity, that's Tennessee Williams, engaged in rampant promiscuity, you know, whored his way around Mexico and other places, and Lord knows, like at I'm sure Foucauldian levels of degeneracy.
So he said, I am Blanche DuBois, and it always sort of troubled me that Blanche DuBois seems to be some push-to-the-max, hysterical exaggeration of feminine qualities.
Whereas, you know, this one goes up to 11, the push-to-the-max dial on Stanley Kowalski's masculine qualities is sort of hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine.
But the scene in The play, which is one of these scenes that has a really slow creepiness to it, is she's just sitting there saying, ah me, ah my, and a paperboy comes by.
Now in the movie, and I'm sure in the plays, he's a young man.
But he's a paperboy.
He's there collecting money.
This was after the war, the economy was booming, and the idea that a young man would be a paperboy is not to me very believable.
I mean, I had my first paper route when I was 11.
All the kids I knew who had paper routes were in their, you know, early... the tweens and so on.
Like, by the time you were 14, you'd moved on to something else.
You weren't still... So, when a paperboy comes by, I assume that's a child.
Then again, I know he's talked about and presented as being older.
That could be the restrictions of the time or Difficulty casting children and so on.
And then, you know, she's flirting with him like crazy.
This woman, is it ever established?
She says over 30, but I think she's kind of over 40 in the play as a whole.
I don't think her age is ever fully established, but the fact that she wants to stay out of the light to me suggests she's of a certain age, right?
The eggs have dried up and blown away.
So she's in probably her early 40s and this boy comes by and she's Chatting with him and flirting with him, and then she says, oh, I bet you, you know, did you get wet in the rain?
And he says, oh, you know, I went into a drugstore.
And she says, oh, and you had a soda, chocolate?
And he says, no, ma'am, cherry.
Cherry, of course, a symbol for virginity, right?
And then she says, cherry.
And he says, a cherry soda.
And she says, you make my mouth water to this paperboy.
now that is predatory in the max and then she says she's she kisses him she kisses him and and then she says now run along now quickly it would be nice to keep you but I've got to be good and keep my hands off children children she refers to him as a child we now switch the scene to Richard Burton famous actor of course husband I guess twice to to Elizabeth
Taylor.
Now Richard Burton was an obsessive diarist and in one of his diaries he refers to Tennessee Williams making a pass at Richard Burton's son when Richard Burton's son was eight years old which is Nasty stuff.
So, this is from his diary.
It says, uh, have been forced to promise to go to a memorial service, as one of the stars, for Tennessee Williams.
Did two films of his, both goodish, I believe.
I didn't even like the chap.
As a matter of fact, I hardly ever saw him sober, though we were together for months.
A self-pitying pain in the neck.
Also, he made a pass at my Chris when Chris was eight.
So, that is nasty stuff.
So, if what Richard Burton is talking about, you know, that Tennessee Williams may have had pedophilic tendencies and so on.
And then you have Blanche DuBois.
He says, I am Blanche DuBois.
I'm Blanche DuBois.
I've got to keep her hands off children.
That is a very sinister aspect to the play.
That if Blanche Dubois is a stand-in for Tennessee Williams and if Tennessee Williams made a pass at an eight-year-old boy, which is a nice way of saying probably tried to have sex or have, you know, and it gets even creepier insofar as Marlon Brando's son was one of Michael Jackson's bodyguards who would round up children for Michael Jackson and it's like there is
A very dark element that I think came into the stage in the post-war period, and I always wonder, you know they say these dog whistles, so I always wonder if there's stuff in there that you and I are like, well that's an odd scene with a paperboy, but for other people it says something quite different.
You know, I will only say about that scene, and I think you're right, that Tennessee Williams was hugely conflicted.
I think it's interesting, though, that he was a self-pitying son of a bitch, right?
He was very mopey, and I do think it is telling that he projects himself as her, right?
As Blanche, right?
And he sees that association.
But I will say this, you know, the scene with the paperboy, she kisses him and the paperboy stops, right?
He doesn't turn around and leave, he doesn't run away.
There seems to be a budding movement that he is becoming more and more comfortable here, right?
He starts to aver, then she kisses him, he doesn't move, he doesn't try to back off, and then she turns him around and sends him out.
Whatever intention might have been there, she turns him, or something that apparently Williams wouldn't have done with his perhaps pedophilic victims, but she turns him around and sends him out.
And to me, that's a big statement, at least in the inside of the play without necessarily stepping out to the psychoanalytic readings or reading what Burton had to say.
Inside the play, though, she still sends him away.
And I think that the argument that's being made there about her character is, here's the thing, if you're somebody like Blanche Dubois, And you're coming from that old system.
And what is the role of the female in that old Southern system?
It is to be wooed, it is to be pursued, it is to be the belle of the ball, right?
You know, you mentioned Vivien Leigh who played this.
Vivien Leigh also played Scarlett O'Hara, right?
Nice British actress to play all the Southern heroines.
Exactly!
And she was great in both movies, right?
Because the thing that she had that I think anybody who plays this role has to have is suffering.
At one point Blanche in the play says, show me a person who hasn't known any sorrow and I'll show you a superficial.
And I think what to me Blanche represents beyond all of that stuff that we've just talked about is what is the value of suffering, again, in human experience and human relationship and human relationships.
You think about The old notion of a theodicy.
What is a theodicy?
A literary work called a theodicy.
A theodicy is any literary work that seeks to explain the role of suffering in human affairs.
What positive and negative forces it uses to shape people.
In my mind, the play is a theodicy.
It's all about the role of suffering.
Let me read you one more quote about artistry, right?
You think about the degree to which, particularly in the 20th century, artistry became associated with suffering, right?
The idea of the suffering artist in his garret was an Enlightenment idea that pursued into the 20th century.
Before that, we didn't see artists that way.
Here's what she says about artists in the play.
Most writers, and most other artists too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in.
And I think that this impulse is what makes their work, not so much a profession as a vocation, a true calling.
What is the purpose of art and artistry?
It is to separate the complex lies, those necessary fictions that you rightly want to see pulled apart.
This Stanley Kowalski literalism.
Separating the complex lies that we live our lives by from what's true about human existence.
And I think Blanche Blanche defaults to what's true.
I think it's exactly the opposite.
Wait, what?
Blanche defaults to what's true?
Yeah, I think so.
I think there's a greater truth, artistically, in the illusions that she holds on to, because they are illusions of virtues.
They are corrupted, no doubt, by her age and her drunkenness.
But those are the fading ghosts that Tennessee Williams is talking about in almost all of his plays.
What about the ideal of art?
What about the ideal of gentility?
What about the idea of, again, knights and ladies, right?
Is there something about that that ennobles more than the crude Stanley Kowalski, right?
Stanley Kowalski, I know you're going to blanch at this, like the pun, but I'm going to throw this out there.
Stanley Kowalski is a pornographic movie.
With all the close-ups, right?
Blanche DuBois is an opera, right?
And while you can say to me all day long, pornography is the real thing, Pesta.
It's all the clothes are off and all the hair's been shaved, right?
And there's your close-up.
But if you force me to choose an attitude towards love or art or culture that's pornographic or that's operatic, I'm choosing operatic.
All right, all right.
There's an old quote from Jung that always struck me where he says sentimentality is the flip side of brutality, right?
So you can, okay, let's look at the characters of Stanley Kowalski.
I mean, not the play characters, but the moral characters of Stanley Kowalski and Blas de Bois.
So I'm afraid we'll just have to put aside the rape for the moment and we'll sort of circle back to that.
We have a different interpretation to some degree on that.
Okay.
She is a sinner.
And you can talk all, oh, she's got these highfalutin ideals and she talks about art and poetry, but man, she's been written more than Amtrak, for God's sakes.
You know, she verbally abused a gay guy into killing himself.
Now, in the movie she says, I killed him.
I don't think she said in the play, but she was kind of responsible for his death, right?
So the story is that she met this young Physically beautiful man, right?
Now she is very beautiful, at least according to, I think, the way that the play is generally portrayed.
She's beautiful and so on.
So she was like a beautiful person and she found a beautiful person.
He was high status because he was beautiful and he was artistic and so on.
And then she walked in with him having sex with a much older man.
See?
The older and the young.
He was a young man.
An older man is this thing that goes on, right?
And then they pretend nothing happens.
They drive off to some quarry casino place and all that, which she kind of later hints at when she's going crazy and talking about going swimming in a quarry and so on.
And she blurts out, you disgust me!
I saw what you did!
And then he runs off and he shoots himself.
Now in the movie she says, I killed him.
So if she believes that she's kind of a murderer, like Sylvia Plath was also horribly verbally abusive and so on, and all this highfalutin art, it's sort of like a camouflage.
It's like Michael Jackson's gosh shucks darn it I'm just a big little kid kind of persona.
It's designed to disarm you.
It's a form of chameleon-like camouflage.
Because she is an alcoholic, she is a liar, she bears false witness, she is a manipulator, and there's this thing that she talks about which is almost, to me, unbelievable.
Let me just find it here.
It is the soldier story.
Now the soldier story is, she mentions this, I think when she's talking to Mitch.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
All right, here we go.
Not far from Belle Reve, before we had lost Belle Reve, was a camp where they trained young soldiers.
On Saturday nights, they would go into town to get drunk, and on the way back, they would stagger onto my lawn and call, Blanche!
Blanche!
The deaf old lady remaining suspected nothing, but sometimes I slipped out to answer their calls.
Later the paddy wagon would gather them up like daisies the long way home.
So she's talking about going out and having group sex with a bunch of drunken soldiers on the lawn where she lived.
Yeah, my response to this is, and I'm with you, but you said it.
What was it that triggered this self-destructive behavior?
Her responsibility in the death of her husband.
She had married him apparently, right?
They were 17 years old, Steph, right?
And so they were very young.
And she fell in love with him even though she knew there was something inaccessible and distant.
She couldn't figure out what it was.
There was something, just like she is now, that young boy was.
He was gay in a culture where that was forbidden, right?
And as a gay young boy, he had to marry her because that's what was expected.
He had to find a woman in the beard, right?
The sham marriage.
Something, by the way, it's a huge part of Southern culture to this day, right?
When I lived in the South, I was continually blown away by how many men that were gay, were unmarried, were on the down-low running around when I was teaching down there.
But the thing about it is that she didn't recognize what he was.
She married him.
She fell in love with him.
But she recognized the very things in him that we now recognize in her.
He was poetic, and he was sad, and he was tragic, and he was inaccessible.
He was flighty and skittish.
She walked in on him having sex with an older man.
And she ignored it.
They all got into a car, and they went and partied at this casino.
And she got a little bit drunk, and on the dance floor, she whispered to him, you make me sick.
One time, it wasn't a lifetime of berating.
It was one slipped word from her.
He ran out of the building.
They heard a gunshot, and she found him.
What you're describing after that, to me, is a broken woman struggling in any way possible to run away from her sin.
This is very Southern.
Run away from her sin, to potentially, to atone for her sin for the rest of her life, to wallow in the misery of the broken, how she broke him.
I think she's punishing herself.
I think she never loses sight of the gentility of all of that.
But in a way, she becomes what he was, right?
Broken, alcoholic, running from who she really is.
So for me, the whole working out of the play after the event that you mentioned, her destruction of that young man, again, something that she didn't know he was gay.
She found out by watching him with the older man.
And one time on the dance floor, she let those unfortunate words slip.
I think there's a lot of remorse and regret and conscience here.
I think if you think about the great literature of the South, it's a lot of that, right?
A lot of this endless remorse for the things.
And I think Tennessee Williams, you go back to the biographical, Tennessee Williams turned the bottle.
Tennessee Williams became what he was out of remorse for his bad, bad choices.
Choices at the end of his life he could no longer resist.
So for me, she becomes the broken thing that he was, right?
And she's paying a penance for that.
And that's why I think she keeps coming back.
That's, to me, the paperboy story.
It's not just salacious lust for young flesh.
Because you know what?
I do think she could have had him if she wanted him.
At that point, she had kissed him on the lips.
He was stunned.
He was nervous.
He didn't run away.
The room was dark.
She turned off all the lights.
She could have had that 17-year-old flesh.
I think it's more about how that 17-year-old paperboy reminds her of what that other boy was.
And so for me, the tragedy of Blanche Dubois is she's responsible for destroying him, the creature she loved more than any other.
And she becomes a little bit like a Dickensian character, doesn't she?
She's a little bit like Great Expectations and Mrs. Havisham never taking off the wedding dress, right?
In a way, I always think of Mrs. Havisham as a prototypical early version of Blanche Dubois in that play. - Yeah, the female Hamlet.
Yeah, I mean she's being called the female Hamlet, which is not a bad way to put it.
Okay, so let's talk about this because the Christian perspective is really fascinating to me.
When I first read the play, I didn't notice this, but as I have become closer and closer to Christian values, it really, really struck me that I think God is only mentioned once in the play and it's when she thinks that Mitch is going to marry her and she says sometimes there's God so quickly.
Now, the God for her is being wanted, it is romance, it is love, it is a rock in the world, a cleft in the rock of the world she can hide in, security and all of that.
Because there's Not an easy way to mediate guilt in the absence.
of Jesus in the absence of the Christian faith.
And the absence of the Christian faith, to me, leads people into these pathological Freudian, platonic abstractions, or straight into, you know, base mammalian, make the colored lights, get yourself some toe-curling orgasms and feed the flesh.
And the lack of religion is really, really quite powerful.
You can see this, I mean, even back in Shaw's place, there were religious elements.
Of course, they're all over Shakespeare and they're all over Dickens.
But by the time Tennessee Williams is writing.
And again, he comes out of the leftist tradition.
I mean, he comes out of the whole Method Stanislavski thing that I mentioned.
He actually was able to write and produce his first big play on a government grant, right?
It was the artist grants from the Great Depression funds under FDR.
So the lack of religion, to me, it's also saying, look, if you don't have a way to deal with guilt, You're going to go crazy.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Remember the ghosts I was talking about?
All those ghosts of Southern culture?
I think the biggest ghost is the one that hung on the cross.
She has no way to forgive herself.
Not only did chivalry die, not only did this kind of poetic... the life of Tara in Scarlet O'Hara... I mean, you think about it.
Scarlett, you think about Gone with the Wind for a second, and what life was like for the Southerners before the Civil War, and the life that Scarlett lives, you know, Vivian Leigh's character lives afterwards.
It's a Stanley Kowalski life, man.
You got brutish Union soldiers chomping on cigars, raping Southern women as they find them.
You have holding off people with pitchforks.
You're living in a burnt-down old plantation mansion.
I mean, again, To me, the biggest ghost that died for Blanche when the boy died and when all the Southern Gothic went away, the new Stanley Kowalski reality, and let's also be very clear, what drove that new reality in 30s, 40s, and 50s America was immigration, right?
You're bringing these people from these countries, right?
And you are... The way she talks about him as a Polack, right?
And he actually says to her at one point, Poles are from Poland.
I don't know who these Polacks are, he says.
Stop calling me a Polack.
I am 100% American, born in the greatest country in this earth, and damn proud of it!
Damn proud of it, right?
And so, to me, one of the great- the ghost in the machine here that died when all this died was the Christian element that you talked about.
There is no absolution for her in Stanley Kowalski's world.
There is no absolution anymore.
That concept is gone.
This is scrabble up by your bootstraps.
This is social Darwinism, man.
Survive.
Survive by any means necessary.
Don't take any bullshit.
Call out bullshit when you see it.
It's almost like a Stephen Crane novel.
Like the Red Badge of Courage and its realism.
Back to the Civil War thing again.
And so for me, I agree 100% with you.
And the one time God is mentioned, I love it.
It's a flash, right?
That sometimes God comes.
It's almost ambiguous.
Sometimes God is so fast.
The God happens fast, right?
It turns out to be a false illusion here.
But without that, I think that's the point of the play in some regards.
Where does absolution come from?
And there's two answers, right?
You just said it yourself.
One is the toe-curling orgasm wallowing your animality.
The other, perhaps, is the madhouse, isn't it?
The other, perhaps, will lead you into kind of the ethereal realms of delusion, which ultimately lead to madness, right?
And this is where I think King Lear is an appropriate comparison here.
I mean, Lear's sin is so great.
And he laments it so much.
Up until the point where he sees his daughter again, he doesn't think he's forgivable.
And madness is where you're driven with this.
So I think I share that feeling with you.
I mean, I think the fact that God isn't mentioned more overtly in the play is a definitive choice on the part of Tennessee Williams to make it very clear that in this particular place where they are, under the new rules, he's not there.
Well, and she mentions this at the end when she's failed to find any redemption, when she has lost her mind, and she hears the cathedral bells.
Do you remember what she says?
Yep, that's God by the way, right?
It's the clearest, it's the only clean thing in this whole damn quarter.
It's the only clean thing.
And what has she been trying to do the whole damn play?
She's been trying to scrub herself clean with endless baths.
That's right.
She's tried the comfort of the physical.
She's tried to suppress her demons with alcoholism and promiscuity and this endless self-ablution of bathing.
And then, it was amazing to me, I remember I had this pretty good English teacher, Dr. Barry Olshan, back when I was doing English Lit, and we were studying this play, and I'm paraphrasing, but the conversation was something like this.
She can't stand an unwashed grape, but she's been handed around like candy, right?
Like this incredible fastidiousness combined with this absolutely squalid sexuality.
Because, I mean, Stanley Kowalski, he's married, he's monogamous, he's responsible, he's a provider, he's gonna be a father.
He gets to continue in this muscular, working-class Marxist kind of way.
But ask yourself, but Steph, ask yourself, right?
Ask yourself.
She was in love with a gay young man.
I'm pretty sure that that marriage wasn't consummated, or if it was, there was no sex.
So what does she hide her shame and sin from?
Alcohol and sex, right?
What does she turn to to conceal the fact that, and she says many times throughout the course of the play, he's the only thing I ever loved.
But he was unable to love her back.
And so her descent into madness is one that's fueled by alcohol and sex, right?
If you think about the sexlessness or the sham that was their relationship in marriage, it doesn't surprise me that she runs to those things.
Let me read you a couple more quick quotes about where I think she is right.
To point out that there is more than just the animal, right?
She says at one point, I don't want realism.
So in other words, she's aware of what she's doing.
She may be an idiot, but she's a self-aware one.
She says, I don't want realism.
I want magic.
Yes, yes, magic.
I try to give that to people.
I do misrepresent things.
I don't tell truths.
I tell what ought to be the truth.
And then she says that the first thing she does when she gets to the home is put a paper shade over the light bulb, right?
And when the shade is ripped off, that's when Stanley sees her for what she is.
That moment when Stanley tears her down is he rips the shade off and she goes, I can't stand, I can't stand a bare bulb.
Here's what she says, I can't stand a naked light bulb any more than I can a rude remark Or a vulgar action.
That lightbulb without the shade, man, that's relentless philosophy.
Beautiful!
See, that's what we need in the world!
That's beautiful!
Because she says, I can't stand relentless vulgarity, but she's basically, she's a train, she's a whore orgy train for a bunch of soldiers and anything with a penis that walks on two legs that strolls through Ariel.
This is, you see, you say magic and so on, but she says, oh, a woman's charm is 50% illusion.
And she lies and she manipulates and pretends to be something other than she is.
And she's got another great quote here.
I want to deceive him just enough to make him want me, which is a confession of self-loathing that is virtually bottomless.
And so if she's right about all of this magic and illusion and never let them see you in the light and so on, why does she go insane at the end?
Because that's not a very good advocacy for that perspective.
Because I would argue the same thing, the same reason that Stanley rapes at the end.
Because if you carry either one of those worldviews to those radical extremes, you get the ultimate.
The only thing that could have been more brutal was if he ate her after he killed her.
Cannibalism, right?
So you carry the brutality.
Again, that stark lightbulb that is the truth, right?
It's funny that we can't look it in the eye without diverting.
Our eyes are not strong enough to stare directly at it, right?
We're made that way, Steph!
We can't just look at the glare, right?
Sometimes we see the truth best reflected, right?
My favorite image of that, speaking of Christianity, is the stained glass window.
You know, we're not bright enough to look into the sun, so why did Christian churches come up with stained glass windows?
Because when we look at the sun, our eyes aren't bright enough.
The absolute truths that circumscribe our limited humanity.
But think about what happens when the sun hits a stained glass window.
That light now is reflected into a thousand magical colors, right?
That we can see and we can process.
One more one.
This one says this.
And funerals are pretty.
Compared to deaths, right?
She makes a beautiful speech.
It's gorgeous about how, you know, I prefer funerals to hospitals because a funeral is about flowers.
It's about pretty boxes in which we put dead things.
I had to sit there, she says to Stella, while you were here with Stanley, rutting, basically, right?
That's the verb they use, rutting.
You were rutting here with Stanley.
I was sitting while our uncle, my mama, your father, all went to the grave, right?
Stella was rutting, at least with her husband, at the confines of a monogamous marriage.
She's out there on the train tracks with everything that passes through town.
I get it.
Look, I am drawing a distinction.
She was doing some rutting, too.
I'm not appraising her behavior, I'm praising the ideal.
And I think one of the things that drives her mad is how far she gets away, her reality gets, that's madness, right?
How far she allows the reality of her situation to get from her aesthetic values.
But in her commentary, and I go back to that quote, She knows what she is, number one, right?
Wait, Blanche?
Yeah, I think she does know what she is.
It's a common issue.
She says, look, I try to give it to people.
I do misrepresent things, she says.
I think that's what art does.
It's not in some way.
All art, nothing but that.
To take one step back from scientific reality, biological reality, and figure human suffering one step removed from truth.
Right?
I mean, we could not stand to see what happens to King Lear.
We could not stand by and watch as somebody gouges Lear's eye out with their heel.
But on stage, through the artistic medium, we can watch and learn, right?
She's an artist, man.
It's not Lear's eye who gets gouged out.
I just wanted to point out.
It's not Lear's eyes who gets gouged out.
I played that role.
I get it.
But let me ask you.
Let me ask you.
Name one serious artist who wasn't a tortured fuck in real life.
I mean, so if you're going to condemn her, then let's condemn Van Gogh.
And let's condemn Tennessee Williams.
And let's condemn Caravaggio, right?
Let's just put them all on an ash heap and burn them!
Because this is my point, and this is a very Christian point!
Wait, I'm burning artists now by criticizing Blanche DuBois?
Burn them!
At least we haven't gone to extremes or anything!
Caravaggio was whoring around, he was killing people in duels.
I mean, I could go on and on.
Marlon Brando had a complete hellscape of a life.
He had one of his sons murdered, his daughter's boyfriend, and then his daughter ended up killing herself.
I mean, the guy had a completely monstrous... And he actually raped that woman on film!
Yes, he did!
He did not tell her he was going to anally rape her on film in Last Tango in Paris.
That is a cinematographic crime that is still shown on television.
How about Vivien Leigh?
Vivien Leigh ended up in the same sanitarium.
She went crazy, right?
Yes, she went crazy.
Let me just step back.
We're both actors.
I'm being a little sensationalist.
Let me step back from the brink here and simply say again, That the thing about art, and it was that first quote I shared with you, show me a person who hasn't known sorrow and I'll show you a superficial.
I think the purpose of this play is to argue at the final analysis that suffering and imagination and creation cannot exist without each other.
That the truly great imaginative artists are the ones who have suffered deeply.
And while we can acknowledge and should acknowledge in the case of Blanche Dubois, the broken woman she was, she was an artist in a way.
She was definitely an artist at words, yeah.
And that's why Tennessee Williams identified with her.
That in spite of all the brokenness and all the suffering, that's what we all are.
If all we are are Stanley Kowalskis, it always ends in suffering and unremediated Unatoned sin.
But, the single greatest thing we can do as human beings is to try to transmute that suffering into poetry.
To try to improve people's lives.
Again, all artistic mediums.
Again, I insist upon this.
Every artistic medium tries to get as close to nature as possible, but just with enough distance so we don't have to Break down and suffer, we can suffer vicariously.
Okay, now, so the question, okay, the what is art thing, we should do a whole show on that, but just sort of very briefly, to me, art is somebody putting a diseased lung on your desk.
If you're a smoker, right?
And they put this diseased lung on your desk.
This is from the opening of Clerks, right?
They put a healthy lung on your desk and say, oh, look how pink and lovely and fresh it is.
And then they put this wizened little golem of a lung on your desk.
And it's like, well, that thing is black and coley and nasty.
And so you shouldn't smoke.
And to me, that's what art is for.
Art is to say, OK, if you make these choices, if you go this road, here's where you're going to end up.
It's moral.
I'm with you on that.
But let me ask you this.
Let me play the game, all right?
Let's say that the guy who got the lungs We found out that he went and hijacked a bum and skid row five minutes before he laid them on the table and cut that burnt lung out as part of it and lived a crappy life.
And then he found a perfectly healthy choir boy and suffocated him to death and then hacked the lung out and walked into the clerk's counter and slapped the two lungs.
Now you've got Blanche DuBois.
Does the message of the two lungs completely get nullified because of how he got them?
Right?
I mean, you can be a bad person and do bad things, but the lungs still make an artistic statement that transcends how he got them, it seems to me.
I can love the message of the lung and be horrified by how the artist got them, right?
I can love Blanche Dubois' message and condemn the woman who suffered to be able to have those insights.
Can't I?
No.
Yes, of course you can.
Now, here's another thing that really bothered me about Tennessee Williams.
And this is not just Tennessee Williams.
He was heavily, heavily influenced by Freud, who was a complete charlatan.
I'll do a whole presentation on that at some point.
So Freud had this idea that a lot of the suffering you see, that especially women go through, is because they don't get enough sex.
Or they don't have a penis.
Yeah.
He did say about his mother's hysteria, And his sister Rose, Laura in The Glass Menagerie, ended up going crazy.
She had frontal lobotomy, they wheeled her out, you know, end of a cuckoo nest, Randall Patrick McMurphy style.
And he said, Williams attributed his mother's hysteria and his sister Rose's mental instability to sexual repression.
They were both victims of excessive propriety.
And this idea that we could just bang our way into sanity is, to me, absolutely astounding.
That we just have this seething whoredom bubbling down underneath us, and keeping that down drives us crazy.
But if we go and completely exercise all, not exorcise, but exercise all of our demons out there in the world, and we bang everything with a pulse, and half the things that recently had a pulse, we're just gonna be wonderfully happy.
So this was his belief.
And it's almost like he summoned Blanche Dubois to scare him away from this belief, because she, I mean, she fulfills more sex than most porn stars, right?
So she fulfills all, she's not repressed sexually at all, could stand to be a little bit more repressed sexually according to her history.
And then she goes insane, she has no one, and she says, my youth has gone up the water spout.
It's kind of a weird way to put it, because things normally come down the water spout, if I remember that Itsy Bitsy Spider song.
A woman who squanders her youth, her fertility, and her beauty on empty, meaningless sex with strangers gets run out of town for having an affair with somebody underage.
And now she says, I don't know how much longer I can turn the trick.
I don't know how much longer my youth is going.
I've got to stay in the dark.
I'm like a mushroom now.
I'm like a bat.
I've got to stay in the dark so that nobody sees me.
And I just have to try and get the last guy with the fading embers of my beauty.
And that is, you know, my mother.
Very, very beautiful when she was younger.
And I didn't understand this until actually not too long ago that when I was young, in my early teens, she took to bed and just wouldn't get out of bed.
Just wouldn't get out of bed.
I remember I'd make her tea in the morning, come home at lunch from school, make her another tea, see she just wouldn't get out of bed.
And I actually realize now, looking back, it's when she turned 40.
It was actually on her 40th birthday because she recognized, you know, 40 is the big age, right?
30 is like you panic and 40 you give up, right?
And I think Blanche Dubois has relied on her looks and we know people like this and it is such a dangerous thing.
There's nothing wrong with looking good, there's nothing wrong with staying fit, it's all great, but the people who over rely on their looks, who use their looks as a bait to get others outside of their own personal qualities is a very dangerous thing.
And she married her husband, the 17-year-old boy, because he was very, very handsome.
And she said he didn't look effeminate, so he didn't look, you know, he wasn't totally effeminate looking.
But she just relies on looks.
And again, it's a very, very Christian message that you do not judge a book by its cover and you do not rely on external fertility symbols rather than inequalities of character.
I agree.
I agree with you.
And again, I would only preface that by saying, again, this was not just willful, rancid, she-couldn't-keep-her-pants-on stuff.
It seems to me that the paper boy triggered that 17-year-old boy she was married to.
The 17-year-old boy that got her fired from the teaching job, was that just, again, her lust for young flesh?
Or is this a way of trying to connect where she couldn't connect with that gay husband of hers?
So to me, if you say everything you said, but you also preface it by saying, what triggered her in this behavior?
It would be, I think, the devastating nature of that relationship, his suicide, the fact that she blames herself for it.
And you know what else, Steph, lives in the dark besides bats and vampires?
Ghosts live in the dark.
She's a ghost, man.
She is herself a walking ghost in some ways.
Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but that's a very powerful thing, and I know that because I've got goosebumps that that's how I measure these things, which is kind of sad.
But what's terrifying, and it's hard to get it from reading the play, it's quite well done in the movie, Which is, flowers for the dead, the flowers for the dead.
Right, so as she begins to lose her mind, this woman shows up.
I don't think anyone else notices the woman, so we don't know if it's real, we don't know, but flores por amor, it's like flowers for the dead, flowers for the dead.
And she says, no, no, not yet!
Not yet.
And this idea of being dead in life, that the bullet that took her husband's life also took her life, but she has been kind of like an undead manipulator.
And to me, if you're not a primary producer yourself, and you're not out there earning things or creating things in the world, and those things can be children in a household, you can be a wife dependent on the husband financially, that doesn't matter.
She tries to gain everything out through manipulation, through pretending to be something that she's not, through lying, through faking, through hiding her wrinkles from the sun.
And this has struck me so importantly when I was young, Duke, that you've got to tell the truth.
You've got to be honest to who you are, and you've got to tell the truth about who you are.
Because otherwise you end up in this kind of living death, where everything is this weird, complex chess game.
And the actress, Vivien Leigh, she gets this incredibly well in the movie.
She's always calculating.
Nothing she says is spontaneous.
Nothing she says is genuine.
It's always a chess move to see what she can maneuver, to see what she can get, to see who she can fool.
She's just moving everyone like a puppet master around.
And this, to me, that that is a form of living death that you don't have any spontaneous existence if your whole existence is based upon manipulating and controlling others.
You're kind of like an empty person who's trying to possess everyone else and only the dead can inhabit another person.
You know, and I think she was such a good actress in that mode because of her illness, right?
Because she was going crazy too, right?
What else?
That she was an actress precisely because she was mentally ill, right?
She was sick in the same way that in some ways I think Blanche was sick.
And you go back to what you said before.
I would make the argument that she's more than a ghost.
She is a ghost from the beginning of the play.
And at the end of the play, in that denouement scene, right after she's stripped down to nothing, right?
You've got the flower girl.
You've got the Spanish flower girl outside the door, right?
Flowers for the dead, right?
Flores for la muertos, right?
Flowers for the dead.
You have the cathedral bells.
So you've got the bells of the cathedral chiming a funeral.
You've got the flowers for the dead.
You've got the candles.
The candles on the birthday cake at that last scene, right?
It's interesting that it's her birthday that she gets exposed here, right?
I mean, the whole second half of the play is a funeral for a ghost, you know?
And when Stella runs out of the room and she can't be in the room, right?
When the doctors show up to take her to the asylum.
It is really a moving scene.
I think what you've got going on there is an exis- The lightbulb, in some ways, that we keep talking about.
This exposed lightbulb that appears again and again and again.
It's like those existential paintings from German romanticism in the German expressionist paintings in the Middle Ages.
Think about the gory pictures of Christ on the cross.
Or think about Albrecht Durer's Christ in the Tomb, where he shows Christ laid out in a very narrow frame.
The dead Christ is in the tomb.
And you see, he actually fished a body out of the river that was dead and painted it as Christ.
And you see all the blue-green blotches.
You see the horrible swelling around the lips.
Right?
And this is the existential moment, right?
This is that light bulb.
Is this all there is to the human animal, right?
And in the painting, of course, when you see it, the Christ has the middle finger extended.
Right?
As he lays there.
And in German mythology, of course, that middle finger summarized the number three.
Like three days, right?
And so, what I think about at the end of Tennessee Williams' play is that, with that lightbulb being exposed and her horror shrinking at that light, it's existential to me.
It's this idea that... The dead flee from the light, right?
Right, exactly!
The shades flee.
Yeah, the vampire, but the ghost, the undead as you called it, the zombie.
And think about zombies in southern gothic culture.
I think, I step back now and I say, if you think about the role of ghosts in southern culture.
Read Toni Morrison's novels, my God.
Ghosts are huge tells for the history of slavery, for the suffering of African American people, the ghosts.
Think about the play ghosts, right?
There's something about Southern Gothic culture.
It took its Christianity, the South does.
It still does, much more seriously than almost any other aspect of the country did.
There are aspects of Christianity alive in the South today that haven't been alive in New England or the West Coast ever, right?
Not since the Puritan days.
It's a Hawthorne story, man.
The Scarlet Letter is real in the South.
And I'm telling you, what ghosts mean to them and how people can become shelled-out ghosts, I think that whole southern Gothic history does help us explain a lot about what Williams is doing through the character of Blanche and why in some ways, again, I feel comfortable understanding her moral misdeeds in conjunction.
Her moral misdeeds, to me, do not cancel out.
her spiritual message.
In fact, they frame it.
It's only people, go back to that quote, it's only people who've suffered much, right, that have that kind of recognition of how much we need to take suffering and to artistize it, right, to turn it into art so some sense can be made of it.
What is suffering without art?
I go back to my comment again, literally a theodicy, t-h-e-o-d-i-c-y.
Any work like King Lear or the Book of Job or this play, that seeks to explain the role of suffering.
Right?
And I go back to my state.
And we should do that.
Let's have our next talk, whether it's one month or six months, whenever we get to it, about what art is.
But I go back to this and I say simply, you know, art and suffering go hand in hand.
It seems to me that the greatest art, the most telling art, the most illuminating art, can only be created by people who have suffered immensely.
I find it very difficult.
And my wife is a bit of an artist, I gotta tell you.
My wife has had a horrible, horrible... She was sexually abused as a little girl by a police officer down south.
She was then locked away in a sanitarium because she stopped talking for an entire year when she was in third grade.
And for that she was beaten, right?
And she was finally put in an institution for a couple of years, for about a year, where they treated her very badly.
I mean, you could not write a story that would reflect this.
But now, as I deal with my wife, now she's come a long way.
She's made great strides.
She's the best Christian I know in the sense that she is connected.
Her suffering, I say this without any shame or humiliation, her suffering has given her an insight.
She'll tell me when people are going to die.
She's about to die and a week later we get a note.
There's a connection here with her and her religion and her suffering that has made her the most transparently artistic person I know.
And I believe deeply in those things.
My Christianity has always been intellectual.
I'm an intellectual, right?
I marvel at the faith that she lives and what she's suffered.
And so for me, when I read this play, we go back to your mom, right?
And we go back to my wife, perhaps.
And how they have shaded our reading of these plays.
But I think in both instances, what you talk about it with regards to your mother, and how you suffered, too, when your mother suffered.
And I think about my relationship with my wife, and the time that I did live down South, and the suffering she endured.
That's, to me, that's what's going on in this play.
And so I'm able to see, and I must also point out that my wife, when she got old enough to take care of herself, right, and no one believed her that she had these horrible things happen, how did my wife rebel?
She became addicted to drugs.
And her drugs led her to do things sexually that she now terribly regrets.
So in other words, promiscuity and addiction were what were her way to run away from the horrors that she experienced.
And so I look at her life now and I see that, you know, that behavior was no conscious choice in some ways.
I mean, it was a conscious choice, but she was running away from demons, right?
She became, in her own words, she used the words, she, I became a ghost.
I mean, there were so many times I should have been left for dead.
And so when I just step back from those, my personal experiences with her, And she's a strong enough woman now that I know that she won't mind me telling you this.
Yeah, I was just going to ask that, but go ahead.
No, no, she won't.
And I see in Blanche DuBois a lot of what she went through.
And so what her, and she, of course, when she went to college, she became an art history major, right?
Because it's connecting with that beauty.
And I tell you, when I walk through a museum with her, you could see, she'll point out by brush strokes, the suffering of the artist, right?
Here's what these people were going through.
And so for me, what ties it all together is the Southern.
And I'll close on this remark.
When you think about what the South has suffered, right?
And you think about the tremendous sin of the South.
And you think about the tremendous punishment that the South has undergone because of it, right?
And you think about it, it's the only place in the Americas that I can think of where Christianity is still treated literally true.
Not just metaphorically or philosophically, but literally true.
Yeah, and so I think these spirits and these ghosts and these hauntings and the suffering that breeds art out of it is a way of life for them.
And I'll go back to the Middle Ages.
You think about what life was like in the Middle Ages, the suffering, the brutality, the shortness of life, the plague.
You think about how that was churned, that horrible experience of death was churned into this beautiful, the building of cathedrals, the beautiful gregarion chants, right?
The beautiful paintings of the Madonna.
To me, I'll put my cards on the table, I've said it once, suffering and art are inextricably linked.
They have to go hand in hand.
Any art, to me, that does not know suffering, take Nazi art.
The Nazis didn't suffer a damn thing, which is why they produced no great art.
The Bolshevik communist leaders who enslaved millions and killed millions more, they never suffered anything.
They produced no art, right?
But the expats, Solzhenitsyn made art, right?
The expats from the Nazis, they made a lot of art.
I think that there's a really causal link between understanding and having suffered and the ability to transmute that into what we would call art.
It reminds me of something a Christian friend of mine said, that Christians are at their best when they're being persecuted.
Yeah.
Christianity was never meant to be a religion of power and politics.
It was meant to be a religion to comfort suffering people.
And that's why American Christianity, Western Christianity, has lost its way.
We became too rich And we became too reliant on technology and materialism.
And this is why I'm very optimistic, by the way.
If things start to take a very nasty turn in Western culture, as Western values become commuted, perverted, and Western culture begins to wane, I think when that happens, the allure of Christianity is going to go up.
Remember, after 9-11, churches were full for six months.
They had been empty.
For six months they were full, and then there was no second attack, and the churches were empty again.
Christianity will rise again, even among, I think, some of the most ardent atheists, when there is nothing better to turn to.
All right, so let me ask you this.
I know you said we'll finish, so let me just ask you this.
Because I was really struck by the backstory to the play, when Tennessee Williams was sitting in this New Orleans flophouse, and there was actually a streetcar that went back and forth in front of his room and he saw it out through his window while he was trying to think of what to write and you know the streetcars they have the destination, right?
What's the destination?
And the two places one was going to a place called desire and the other was going to a place called cemetery and he was really struck by this and Blas de Bois says this, he says death the opposite is desire not the opposite is life the opposite is desire the opposite of death is desire although in the pursuit of her desires she has become as we talked about dead in life and to me I know when someone is not spiritually alive, when I can predict everything that comes out of their mouth.
You know, one of the reasons I love our conversations is, I don't know what the hell you're gonna say next, but I know it's gonna be good!
But you know, we have, this is the NPC meme, like the people who are programmed, you know exactly what's gonna come out of their mouth, and that to me is a kind of, it's a walking deadness, there's no spontaneity, there's no thought, there's no vividness in the moment, there's just, you know what people are gonna say, it's very, very boring.
Now, in the struggle, to save my mother's mind which was something that engaged me for the first fifteen years of my life and then on a full-time basis, on a live-in basis and then probably for close to another twenty years on a part-time basis.
You know, sort of bungeeing in and having lunches and trying to talk her back for the brink and so on.
I failed.
Now in that failure I gained closure and I gained a I think, you know, you might argue overstrong, but let's just say a very strong commitment to rationality and so on.
Mental illness runs in my family, which is why, for me, it was philosophy or bust.
Like, I knew what happens if you can't organize your thoughts.
And if you drive fast, you need to be a very good driver.
You can't be instinctual.
You have to be rational.
You have to have a map and so on.
So, my mother, now, she was institutionalized, and then she has decayed in terms of where she is now.
And that to me is the big question, right?
So Tennessee Williams is wrestling with this, what is the purpose of life after Christianity?
Well, you're going to die or you're going to pursue your mammalian lusts.
And both of those are dead ends.
And I think spiritually we know that.
We know that both of those are dead ends.
So this death and life stuff, this MPC, it's not gracing the gift of life with any respect.
And this mere pursuit of hedonistic pleasures is You know, a slippery staircase straight to hell, or an asylum, which is a kind of secular hell.
I mean, not just in Sartre's sense, but in, I mean, having spent some time in asylums visiting my mom and other people, they're living hells, as far as I can see.
Not because of the staff, necessarily, although with your wife apparently it was, but just, it's really, really broken people, dangerous people, and it is a kind of hell.
So I guess that's, the answer is not, the problem, I think, is well explicated in the play.
The solution is not.
Now, again, he's an artist, not a philosopher, so I think it's more up to people like myself to try and give people a path that is the third way, you know, rather than dying or just... Let me throw this at you.
But what do you think the answer is, if there is one, about the difference between your wife and my mother?
Because someone was able to save your wife, I was not able to save my mother.
That's a burden I will always carry, and I think I'm trying to honor it as best I can by speaking reason in the world.
But I still don't know the answer, other than I can say, free will!
But that's not an answer.
Let me give you my two cents worth, starting by where you began your comment.
You missed one thing.
You left one thing out.
You've got the streetcar named Desire.
And Desire, for Williams, it's not life.
It's Desire that's the answer to death.
Because on the one hand, you got the streetcar named Desire.
On the other hand, you got the cemetery, but you missed what was in the middle.
The Elysian Fields.
That's the name of the flats where all the action of the play takes place.
And if you remember, in Greek mythology, the Elysian Fields was a place of body, wasn't it?
What happened to the great heroes who didn't deserve Hades and a bloodless existence?
The great heroes were sent to the heaven, the Elysian Fields, where they got to eat and drink, and even though they were dead, they got to experience the Kowalski-like experiences of the body.
So, you have the desire, which I think is his answer, and I'll explain that in a minute, is the answer to death.
You've got death on one hand, you've got desire on the other, or like you just said, you've got the body existence of the Elysian Fields.
So, I think that he accounts for that in the play by naming that middle place the Elysian Fields, a place that can't be, it's not death, it's life, but it's also not desire.
And so, for me, what the streetcar named Desire means is the ability to be perfect and do perfect and to live the perfect moral life is beyond us.
Sin is too much of... This is where, to me, secular philosophy fails and religious Christian philosophy succeeds.
We can account for, as Christians, the fact that we can't be perfect.
The endless thing that drives the secular philosopher nuts is why can't everybody just listen to reason and the world get along?
It's because... No, no, just give me the answer to that.
Forget the rest of it.
Just tell me that part and then it'll be perfect.
We'll just hit that switch and the world will be perfect.
But in Christianity, we have an answer for that, right?
It's because perfection is not of this world, it's the next.
So Blanche's desire to elevate for the magical, right, for the romantic, for the chivalric, that is the best we can do.
And by the way, that desire is also the desire of God.
When you parse it at its farthest angle, you take that streetcar as far as it goes, right?
It's the desire to turn sex into romance.
The desire to turn romance into chivalry.
And you go farther down the road, and sooner or later it becomes the desire of God, right?
Only he who can fulfill which is broken here.
Now to answer your second question, outside of the play, I would humbly submit that maybe what my wife had, and never lost, even though she was tempted to, that maybe, I don't know your mother's background, but My wife, the only thing she had was Christianity.
The only thing she had in her suffering was a direct connection to the immediacy of what Christ meant in Southern culture.
Christ was not an icon hanging a wall.
He was a personal thing.
The idea that she got baptized, people in the South get baptized by being taken to a river and dunked in it, right?
It's much more visceral.
By her own admission, it's what kept her alive.
Also known as the country songs are not kidding.
And they weren't!
Think about Johnny Cash's gospel songs, right?
God's gonna cut you down, boy.
God's gonna cut you down.
I mean, they believe that stuff, and I've come to believe it too by watching her.
I would suggest, is it possible, and I don't know your mother's upbringing, it doesn't sound like you got a lot of Christianity as a boy.
Did you have a lot of religion?
My mother was born in the late 30s, in 1937 in Berlin, and she had a Christian mother, a Jewish stepmother, and it was a A big mess.
And, of course, it was the war.
My wife's families were full of intellectuals and they had to go into hiding.
They weren't allowed to publish.
I mean, it was a tyrannical Nazi regime, of course.
So, yeah, she went through the war, Germany being bombed end to end.
Her mother was killed in the raid in Dresden, actually, perhaps by a plane flown by one of the Husbands of my father's sister, so it's all convoluted pan-European history.
But yeah, her first seven, eight years lead up to the totalitarian regime and then the Second World War and she did speak occasionally of her war experiences and they were, as you can imagine, god-awful, beyond measure.
But I was Raised Christian and I went to church, not so much under my mother's tutelage, but when I was in boarding school, I was in the church choir and I went to church twice a week and read the Bible just about every day and that lasted until the nihilism of my early teens kicked in for a variety of reasons.
But yeah, that was sort of my early, but my mother, yeah, it's interesting, if my mother had been able to find her way back to the Christian faith, I wonder if that might have given her, because it seems like it's the old Socratic argument that it's far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
And with Blanche, the fact that she felt responsible for her husband's suicide, that's the doing wrong.
And that's, you can almost look at, she was punishing herself through sexuality, punishing herself through disassociation, through fantasy, through alcoholism, in the same way that Tennessee Williams, an alcoholic and a pill popper and so on, and it always, just by the by, before I forget, it struck me that he keeps talking about bottle caps in the play, right?
So Stanley Kowalski talks about his cousin who could only open a bottle cap with his teeth, that's all he could do, and his teeth broke out and he wouldn't leave the house, so he left the house whenever company came over, and then when The final fight is between Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois.
He says, you know, take off that bottle cap, take off that bottle cap.
And then, of course, Tennessee Williams died by choking on a bottle cap when he was high on drugs, I believe.
So I wonder if my mother had been able to find her way back to religion, if she perceived that she did wrong during the war in order to survive.
Which she may have done, right?
I mean, it's a brutal time and it's, you know, it's not a live and let live kind of situation usually, and if she believed that she did great wrong in the war, then through Christianity she could have found a path through to forgiveness that may have taken that pressure of self-loathing away from her and allowed her to relax more into the present.
You know, I will simply say that all of our historical studies, clinical studies, show that people who were old enough to understand what was going on during the trauma of World War II, many of them did suffer serious depression crisis later in their lives, right?
I mean, even if she didn't believe that she did anything particular, perhaps watching the horrors that she saw would have been enough.
Right, and the fact that she was German, and the fact that she has Jewish blood, or there's Jewish blood in your family.
Stepmother, but yeah, there's Jewish associations for sure.
Associations, right.
Who knows, but I do think, as in the case of my wife, the other thing I'll say about German Christianity in the 1930s is it was awfully stoic.
And it was a little bit bookish, right?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer aside, the Germans weren't known in the 20th century for the charismatic nature of their Christianity.
My wife had that.
So, I mean, an intellectual engagement with Christianity might not have done it, but one wonders if there was a spiritual connection there.
And so I don't know, by the time she hit 40s and got really depressed, sounds like she had dissociated completely from... She hadn't been to church for as long as I can remember.
Sure, that could be a real serious question.
With that kind of suffering and that kind of trauma, right, and my wife has been to a number of psychiatrists and psychologists, and the one thing, they actually have diagnosed her clearly with post-traumatic stress disorder.
I mean, it's like she's been in a war.
A smell will set, well, she'll disassociate.
She'll smell something and I gotta bring her back.
Cause she'll, it was a smell that triggered her, something horrible happened to her and she'll just go away.
And we gotta bring her back out of it.
And so, again, that kind of trauma that your mom must have lived through.
And then, you know, the sort of emptiness that comes to getting to a certain age in life where you have no husband anymore and your kids are getting bigger to the point that they don't need you anymore and you've lost your looks anymore.
It's a very blanched thing in some ways, I think.
What does one have then at that point?
And if there is no metaphysical way out of that, then, you know, alcoholism, depression, sexual misbehavior, or just comatose paralysis.
seems to set in.
And my wife has lived through that as well, so it's an interesting speculation.
Yeah, I think you really have to commit to something.
There is an energy of youth that has you facing the future at all times.
When I found that I'm just past a half century, it's that line, you know, we are both born backward against the tide, ceaselessly into the past, is something out of the Greg Gatsby.
I do find myself doing a lot more reflection against my will, almost involuntarily.
Like, I want to keep looking at the future, and it's like, But there's something really important about the past, which is why I was so happy to have a chance to talk about this play with you that had such a strong impact on me.
And when I did scene studies in theater school on this play, I found like it really spoke to me.
And I think it is a very powerful play.
So I would certainly recommend.
I mean, the Brando version is very, very good.
I did try watching one with, oh gosh, Jessica No.
I can't remember.
Some Southern belle.
And Alec Baldwin didn't quite grab me so much.
Jessica Lange?
Jessica Lange, that's right.
But the 51 version is fantastic.
It's very good.
Yeah, there's been a Treat Williams version as well.
I mean, there's lots of different ones.
It's going to be tough to beat the Brando one for a variety of reasons.
I don't think anyone's going to do better than Jason Lee.
Vivian Lee, sorry.
But I really, really thank you for your time.
Just give me your vital statistics on the web for people who want to pursue this kind of stuff more.
Well, you know, you've got a great big audience, and thank you for letting me join you.
We're doing, in case your audience didn't know, I do a weekly podcast called The Dr. Duke Show, and you can access it at drdukeshow.com.
And if you like the kind of stuff that you and I talk about, it's an hour a week on education issues from kindergarten all the way through graduate school.
We expose what's going on, the corruption of education, why is it that kids, young kids, can't talk the way you and I do now.
So if you're interested in that kind of stuff, tune in.
You can watch it on podcasts anywhere that podcasts are available.
And thanks again.
Let's not wait too long to talk again.
No, and just do the FPE USA as well.
And just remember for the homeschooling stuff, just remind people of that.
Yep, and we're enrolling students now for fall semester.
Freedom Project Academy is the name of our school.
It's a complete online school, and there's a 10% discount on enrollments through March 31st.
And if you want your kids, you homeschool your kids, or you don't trust what's going on at the public schools, and you should not trust that, we give really good online classes to kids.
Real good history, real good All right, thanks brother.
Really great pleasure.
The kind of things that made you and I care about philosophy and culture you're going to get in this school.
So if you're looking for that option, Freedom Project Academy, fpeusa.org.
All right.
Thanks, brother.
Really great pleasure.
We'll talk soon.
Hope so.
So here I hope the good doctor will forgive me.
I just wanted to put one little addendum in because I put forward the case of something that has always bothered me which is Kowalski's rape at the end of Streetcar Named Desire.
I did a little bit more digging and as it turns out Stanley Kowalski was based on a young man that Tennessee Williams, of course he was gay, worked with at one point and I assume that Stanley Kowalski, the real one,
was full of the same sort of ferocious sexual attraction to Tennessee Williams as he was to the audience and is to the audience of A Streetcar Named Desire so what could be the case just a possibility of course but what could be the case is that
Tennessee Williams was notoriously hyper feminine and effeminate and you know traditionally stereotypically gay and it could be that he was very attracted to the real Stanley Kowalski but the real Stanley Kowalski treated him with contempt in the same way that Stanley Kowalski treats Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams' stand-in, in the play with contempt.
And so it could be that Tennessee Williams really wanted to have sex with the real Stanley Kowalski and had it occur in a rape scene through proxy.
Not with Blanche Dubois and the fictional Stanley Kowalski.
In other words, it was the fulfillment of a sexual fantasy on the part of Tennessee Williams towards a man he was so ferociously attracted to that he created one of the most hypersexual and attractive male characters in all of theatrical history.
So that's one possibility as to why this rape shows up at the end.
It's not proof.
I just wanted to throw it in there before I forgot the idea.
And now let us continue with the end of the show.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
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