Pocket Signals

            I was going to post my blog before leaving for class on Wednesday but the wi-fi was down again. Lately it seems to go off for a few hours every day but not at the same time.

            I left half an hour later than the week before because I figured there’d be a prior class in the lecture theatre anyway. I was at first surprised at how much darker it was outside than the week before, but then I remembered that I had left later. At the Dufferin light I turned on my flashers.

            I was right about there being another class, but I only had to wait about five minutes.

            When Scott arrived I noticed that he had what looked like a brown strip of rope or yarn sticking out and dangling down from his back, right pocket. I wondered if this was part of the Gay pocket code, but I’d always thought those signals involved different coloured and different patterned bandanas in the right or left back pocket. When I looked it up though I couldn’t find anything about a rope or yarn. I found something about fur in the pocket having something to with being into animals. Maybe it was a hanky after all, just twisted and looking like a rope. Since it was in the right pocket it might mean he’s a bottom and the colour brown is supposed to indicate poop sex. But maybe there is a rope symbolism there that’s new and hasn’t yet been written about and it means he likes to be tied up. Then again maybe it means absolutely nothing and he just accidentally had a rope dangling from his pocket.

            We spent the class talking about “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams. Scott said he’d been reading “When Blanche Met Brando” but he said it’s just Hollywood trash. Vivian Leigh only cheated on her husband because he was Gay.

            “A Streetcar Named Desire” is the most produced play ever written by a US playwright. But Williams never saw himself as being part of the US theatre scene.

            The movies have had different approaches for representing the rape scene near the end. The Kazan film switched immediately from Blanche’s reflection in a broken mirror to a hose blasting water down the street. In the version featuring Treat Williams and Ann Margaret the cameras were on the rape scene for ten minutes. There was another version with Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange. The Kazan movie has Stella leaving Stanley because of him raping her sister “because rape must be punished”. But in the play Stella chooses not to believe her sister’s story because then she would have to leave. She doesn’t care what Stanley does. This is evidenced by the scene outside the apartment after he had struck her and then was calling desperately for her. Her descent on the stairs into his arms is slow, seductive and highly sexual. Stella may have no choice but to stay with Stanley, with a new baby and no family to run to, but she wants to stay anyway.

            For film audiences of the 1950s, Brando standing there in just a t-shirt was shocking. It was like seeing a man naked. Scott asked us why it was important for Stanley Kowalski to be portrayed at muscular and handsome. I said that it empowers whatever Stanley says and does. No one is looking at anyone else when Brando is in the frame.

            Streetcar begins as a comedy but ends as a tragedy.

            Blanche bathes all the time because she feels dirty from her past. “I can’t turn the trick anymore” is the language of prostitution.

            The ending reflects a reality of modern society that those that threaten to speak the truth must be declared insane. The same thing happens in the Williams play, “Suddenly Last Summer”.

            Blanche is in control when the young man comes to the door but she’s not in control with Stanley.

            The film censors didn’t want to have Blanche retell the story of her young husband having shot himself after she’d told him he disgusted her after she’d walked in and seen him with another man. They wanted to change the other person to a Black woman.

            She tells Stanley, “I hurt him the way you want to hurt me.”

            Homosexuality in the plays of Tennessee Williams is everywhere but nowhere at the same time.

            The fact that we can hear what Blanche is hearing inside her head renders her more sympathetic.

            Stanley asks, “Are you boxed out of your mind?”

            Blanche’s fate of being taken to the insane asylum is a type of death.

            Eunice and Steve serve as a comic parallel of Stella and Stanley. 

            Scott talks about Stanley having been a war hero but I pointed out that he is depicted as having been in the engineering corps and so he would not have seen any action during the war.

            The GI Bill wanted to give free university education to veterans of the war and so women were discouraged from going to college because it would mean taking a spot that was meant for a man.

            During the break I approached Scott and said, “Scott” but hesitated (I’d addressed him as “Scott” once during our test in the fall to ask him a question but I’d never actually asked him if he’d prefer Dr. Rayter), “I can call you ‘Scott’ can’t I?” He nodded nervously and motioned for me to go ahead. I told him that there are transcripts available online for all of the Voices and Visions films about poets that we’ve been watching. I told him that I found it useful. I thought he might want to share that info with the students but I didn’t say that. I just put it out there. I also told him that I’d found an interview in which Robert Frost is asked about Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and he dismisses it as the type of writing any poet could do. Scott said he’d have to look for that interview.

            After the break:

            Why is Stanley depicted as being Polish? Blanche comments, “That’s like being Irish, isn’t it?” I assume the association has to do with both Poles and the Irish tend to be Catholic. Stanley was Polish because he needed to be other but the way Williams describes him it’s as if he were a Black man.

            Blanche and Stella’s ancestral home is a plantation that the family lost after the end of slavery. During that time the way slave owners saved money that would be spent on buying new slaves was to have sex with their own female slaves and to get them pregnant, then when the children were old enough, to put them to work. The male owners of Belle Reve frittered the property away. Without slavery a plantation had a hard time surviving. Whiteness became unhealthy in the south, especially for women. There has always been a link in literature between femininity and illness.

            The play’s depiction of New Orleans where the races are more freely mixed would have been shocking to audiences. New York was split into Black and White neighbourhoods but there was no segregation in New Orleans.

            Blanche is presented as being like a moth.

            Mitch, on finding that Blanche is not worthy of replacing his mother is both disgusted and turned on at the same time.

            Blanche, though she is a liar, is the only one in the play that admits it.

            Tennessee Williams saw psychiatrists his whole life and he was very much influenced by Freudian imagery.

            Since Belle Reve means “beautiful dream”, I wondered if it was a reference to Stephen Foster’s song “Beautiful Dreamer”. Foster, though a northerner, tried to write southern songs.

            I watched a couple of episodes of South Park. One began with the overdose death of Chuck E Cheese. Stan goes to visit his grandpa in the retirement home and it’s depicted as being exactly like a prison. The head bitch is an old lady that continuously lets out quiet but overpowering farts. She became the head bitch by having collected the most German Hummel figurines. Chuck E. Cheese and other costumed characters have been trading Hummel figurines (which for some reason they hide in their rectums) in exchange for old people’s medication. Finally, Stan helps grandpa get all the figurines, then the old man beats up the old lady and becomes the head bitch.

            In the other episode, it’s the week leading up to Halloween and Randy Marsh, Gerald Broflovsky, Stephen Stotch and several of the other fathers have a tradition of dressing up like witches, going out to the woods and smoking crack while performing fake magic. But one of them gets hold of a spell book and becomes a real witch that flies around and kidnaps children. Cartman sees this as a perfect chance to get rid of his girlfriend Heidi, so he pretends they are going to a costume party and they dress up like Hansel and Gretel, so Heidi is taken by the witch. The kids call up Mr Garrison, who became the US president last season. It turns out that he used to be part of the coven of Halloween week witches. They tell him what’s going on with his old group and so to stop this from coming back to him he arranges for a sattelite to take out the bad witch with a laser. The children are all rescued from a bag of souls, including, much to Cartman’s disappointment, Heidi.