Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois

            On Wednesday evening I made sure I bundled up for my ride to 20^th Century US Literature class. I left home at 17:00 but when I got to University College there was another class in room 161. A young woman looking at her phone was selfishly stretched out on the only cushioned bench and so I had to sit on the hard stairs.

I started reading Toni Morrison’s “Ricicitif”. It was about a young Black girl who had to live in a group home because her mother preferred dancing all night to being a parent. She made friends with a White girl whose mother was too sick to take care of her. The group home mostly served as an orphanage and so all the other girls hated Twyla and Roberta because their parents were alive.

Twyla had grown up and was working as a waitress when the other class let out. I’ll get back to the story next time I’m sitting and waiting for something or in March when we get around to Toni Morrison. All of the other texts we have to read are digital until then.

When our instructor, Scott Rayter arrived he put the information for our upcoming (in two months) essay on the screen and then started roll call. It has to be six to eight pages or 1500 to 1800 words long. There are several topics listed for one of which we must compare two or more texts. Usually I have to go through all of the required reading before I can choose a topic that I think fits with my talents, but the one on comparing the sexuality of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” hit me right away as being the one for me. I can’t wait to start writing about it. We’re to use MLA citations and our TA is Ira Halpern. I’ll go to see him once I’ve got a first draft.

On plagiarism, Scott said, “Don’t fucking cheat!” He retold a story that he’d related at the beginning of the course about a student who’d copied an online essay word for word, but had simply switched the sentences around. She explained to him that for some strange reason, when she went to print the essay all of her reference notes accidentally fell into it.

I asked if it would be all on paper, meaning, is there an option to hand it in online, but maybe I wasn’t clear because he kind of made fun of the question and asked another one, “Can you do a painting?” I see now from the syllabus that email submissions are not permitted.

We were about to watch Elia Kazan’s adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Scott said that the film is important because of how it was done. Marlon Brando had already played the part of Stanley for two years on Broadway along with Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois, but the producers decided that Vivian Leigh would have more box office appeal than Tandy because of Gone With the Wind. She was good but I’ll bet Tandy would have been better.
            Scott commented that the Hollywood southern belle is a British construct.

Streetcar was one of the first films with a mostly jazz score.

The bar scene is the set of King Kong.

Kim Hunter, who played Stanley’s wife and Blanche’s sister was later blacklisted during the Red Scare because Elia Kazan named names. He ruined a lot of careers. He had been a member of the Communist party for a year and a half and then quit and so he was asked to testify. Refusing would have ruined his career. When he was given a lifetime achievement award in 1999, Marlon Brando refused to present it.

The character Stanley Kowalski was a war hero and a bowler. He bowled when he was angry. The scene in which Brando was crying for Stella was a new thing in cinema because men did not emote.

William’s at first did not think that Brando was right for the part because he was too young. But when Brando went to privately audition for the part, Williams’s pipes coincidentally exploded. Brando knew how to fix them and so he won Williams over.

The movie was different in many ways from the play. In the beginning of the movie, Blanche goes to find Stella in the bowling alley where Stanley is playing. But in the play, Blanche waits for Stella alone in the two-room apartment. Enclosed scenes are meant to create tension so it’s a betrayal of the playwright’s vision to restring an important point like that. They did the same thing in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”. The entire play is supposed to take place in George and Martha’s home but they ruin it in the film by having them go out to a roadhouse.

In the play she says to Mitch, “Je suis la dame aux Camillias. Vous etes Armand”. She’s referring to the 1948 novel, La Dame aux Camélias” by Alexander Dumas, which later became the play “Camille”. The lady in the play is Marguerite, a courtesan. There is a parallel between the two stories as Marguerite also loses love, is abandoned by everyone and her story ends tragically. But after Mitch tells Blanche he doesn’t speak French, in the play she asks, “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?” perhaps they took it out of the film because the original was too risqué.

They had apparently tried to cut the rape scene but Williams and Kazan threatened to remove their names from the production unless it was kept in.

In the play, Stella doesn’t leave Stanley but she seems to at the end of the movie.

The end of the movie in which Blanche is taken to the asylum teared me up a bit, but thankfully Scott didn’t turn the lights on and so I was able to leave with less embarrassment.

It was nasty cold when I stepped outside and the ride home was very uncomfortable. I stopped at a light near Queen and Palmerston and let the green come and go again as I struggled to find the strings to tighten my hood over my ears. It was very much a relief to get home.

I watched an episode of Star Trek Discovery in which Burnham, Suru and the new security officer are on a planet called Pahvan where the trees sing. There is also a natural tower made of crystal that they hope to use as a transmitter to utilize the unique sonic properties of the planet as a means of overriding the cloaking capabilities of Klingon ships. The problem is that they encounter a swarm of energy beings that turn out to be the life of the planet. Since they turn out to be sentient, the Discovery crew needs to follow the rules of first contact. They can’t use the transmitter without permission. The universal translator does not pick up the Pahvanian language but Suru forms an empathic bond with the creatures. Because the constant noise from the trees was driving Suru crazy, the Pahvanians bonded with his mind so that he could feel peace. The nature of Suru’s species is that they are at the bottom of the food chain on their native world. They are designed to evade predators and so they never know a moment of their lives without fear. But suddenly Suru had experienced peace for the first time and it affected him adversely. He tried to use violence to stop Burnham from using the transmitter because he didn’t want the Klingons to destroy the Pahvanians. In the end the Pahvanians allowed Burnham to use the transmitter but the Pahvanians, thinking they were helping resolve the conflict, sent a signal to the Klingons to tell them where Discovery was. I wonder what happens next.