We are all divine souls, we are all pieces of shit
Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire answers the question, "why are you like this?"
[spoilers within for A Streetcar Named Desire]
Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion?
A. Indeed I do think that I do.
Q. Such as what?
A. The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth.
-“The World I Live In”: Tennessee Williams interviews himself
We all know a Blanche DuBois in real life. We all know a Stanley, a Stella, a Mitch. The vain, pathetic, pretentious narcissist, desperately clinging to anyone who is still bamboozled by her fast-fading tricks. The resentful, frail-ego’d man who demands respect and worship simply for his unremarkable existence; who will slut-shame a woman in one breath, and fuck her in another. The weak-willed wife who won’t leave her abusive husband. The middling coward who mindlessly lives out the opinions of others, and can barely entertain a thought of his own before allowing himself to be shot down.
And yet we all know this Blanche DuBois as well: the traumatized romantic who has the bad luck of being desirable. Men are all too happy to scoop her up for a moment and then toss her to the side of the road, much as kittens are abandoned once they become cats, and roses are placed in a vase for one short day, and then left to wither and rot. She’ll peddle her wares to the ravenous fools of the world for a few short years until nature takes its course. Then she will be left with nothing - because she’s never known how to sell anything else.
And we all know a Stanley as well. An everyman, doing his best, who neither needs nor understands the intellectual bullshit of the world. He sits at the receiving end of countless unsolicited insults; that he’s “common”, or “simple”, or any other judgement from someone whose opinions he never asked for. A man who loves his wife to the ends of the earth, but can’t control his inner five-year-old. He has a grown man’s fists, but throws the punches of a little boy.
And we all know a Stella who stays: because past the temper tantrums and the childish rage, she still sees the person that she fell in love with, and who is still very much in love with her. The vows said “til death do us part”, and there were no qualifiers, no asterisks, no long list of exceptions in small print at the bottom of the page. Doesn’t everyone say that this is what love is all about - hanging on when the going gets tough? Does that include black eyes? Nobody ever clarified.
Some plays and stories follow the Joseph Campbell monomyth of challenge, ruin, rebirth, and redemption. We want Frodo to bear the ring to Mt. Doom. We want St. George to kill the dragon and save the princess. Monomyths are aspiration porn: there are few better feelings in the world than seeing someone rise to a challenge, and the most orgasmic thing is actually pulling it off yourself. One of the saving graces of humanity is that deep down, we all want to be heroes. This is why the bestseller shelf at Indigo is constantly filled with biographies of presidents, and Olympic athletes, and Navy SEALs - despite the fact that most of us can’t even be bothered to run, or file our taxes on time, or fire off anything more lethal than a “clever” tweet.
A Streetcar Named Desire is not a Hero’s Journey. There are archetypes in this story, but no heroes. There are simply people who smash their flaws and their insecurities against each other to cause hurt and nonsense. The purpose of this play is not to inspire, nor to encourage us to make the hard choice of being big, and good, and noble. The purpose of this play is to acknowledge that people are sacred, beautiful souls made in the image of God, but also complete and utter Godforsaken shit. We should love people, and they are also the fucking worst.
Sometimes we meet a person who bamboozles us with their utterly incomprehensible awfulness. The question that arises is “why are you like this?”
Williams sees answers to this question. Answers that aren’t just, oh, they’re lazy, or evil, or stupid, or bad. A Streetcar Named Desire shows, through a handful of characters and high-def emotional colour, just how such things can come to pass. How the world’s Blanches became Blanches, and how Stanleys became Stanleys. These characters are detestable. They’re pathetic, and ignoble, and can’t seem to do anything right except hurt each other and make fools of themselves. And yet there is no villain here. Their vices are not extraordinary - in fact, they’re actually very familiar. Their pathetic flailing in the world is understandable, and perhaps even deserving of empathy. As Williams knows all too well, these characters are no worse than us:
Q: You sound as if you felt quite detached and superior to this process of corruption in society.
A: I have never written about any kind of vice which I can’t observe in myself.
Q. But you accuse society, as a whole, of succumbing to a deliberate mendacity, and you appear to find yourself separate from it as a writer.
A: As a writer, yes, but not as a person.
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