That brutal desire.

by Nicholas Magesis

Stella: Stanley’s always smashed things…On our wedding night he rushed about the
place and smashed all of the light bulbs out in the apartment with the heel of my slipper.
Blanche: He did whatttt?
Stella: (Giggling) “He smashed all of the light bulbs out with the heel of my slipper.”
Blanche: And you let him!?!? You didn’t run away? Didn’t scream??
Stella: (grinning ear to ear) I was actually soft of thrilled by it!
(Blanche stares at her in disbelief)
- A Streetcar Named Desire.

This is a scene from the film A Streetcar Named Desire. These lines are said directly after the most memorable scene of the story, where Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) is screaming his wife’s name repeatedly until she comes back down the stairs and launches herself into his arms. Brando in this scene is drenched in water and his own blood, his clothes are tattered to pieces and he is weeping uncontrollably. Moments before, he had just hit his pregnant wife several times in the face with a closed fist, all because she attempted to throw his friends out of their home. He is filled with complete and utter self loathing for what he had just done to his wife, and rightly so. Despite all of this, Stella still cannot bear to be without him. The look of hypnotized love on her face as she descends the staircase to console her kneeling, weeping husband is so poignant that it gives me chills every time I see or read it. If there ever was a way to look up the phrase “Love is blind” in the dictionary, this scene would be played on repeat.

In spite of his glaring faults, Stanley Kowalski has a lot of redeeming qualities as a human being. He’s a veteran of the Second World War, has a decent job, possesses a sizeable intellect and is quite charismatic. This on top of being incredibly good looking and being the poster boy for Type A personalities around the world. But it’s that attraction, that carnal desire which is what draws Stella back to Stanley time and time again. He is her first love, her only love, and she is almost morbidly fixated upon him.

Now even though that may sound bad (as morbid is never, ever used in any kind of positive connotation), it’s really not if you give their fixation of one another a close look. That kind of je’ne se quois love comes around once in a lifetime if you’re lucky, and you better fuckin hold on for dear life if you find it. And that’s what Blanche could never understand, as she’s never truly loved like her sister and brother in law. All of her lover’s have been weak minded, witless feeble young men. Even Harold (Karl Malden’s character) who is slightly older than Blanche but is still a very innocent, naïve man that still lives with his dying mother. Hence why Blanche is so smitten with him; she sees him as just another one of her victims to weave her web of deceit on to entrap them into her self entitled Hotel Tarantula. But because she was able to manipulate all of her lovers into her very own marionettes, she never could truly love anyone. To quote her most famous line, which was then regurgitated repeatedly by the promiscuous character on the Golden Girls who took her name : “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers”.
As Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys so eloquently sings….
“I don’t wanna go to hell, but if I do….
It’ll be cuz of you.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OPeAEnWg1g