Mitch is most impressed by Blanche and behaves like a gallant gentleman, putting a protective “adorable little paper lantern” on one of the bare light bulbs at her request to soften the glare: “I can’t stand a naked light bulb any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.” With the paper lampshade and the proper atmosphere of subdued lighting, Blanche creates a soft, exotic, romantic dream-like world in the room: “We’ve made enchantment.” Symbolically, she is physically, psychologically, and emotionally fragile – and hypersensitive to glaring bright lights which would reveal her declining beauty. With the radio playing waltz music, Blanche dances while gesturing romantically in the air – Mitch moves next to her like a dancing bear.
Suddenly, after losing a poker hand, a drunken Stanley bursts into the room, and throws the music-playing radio crashing out the window. Stella thinks he has gone completely beserk: “Drunk, Drunk, animal thing you!” Stanley charges after his wife and assaults her with a few blows, causing a fight to break out to control his “lunacy.” His poker buddies hold him under a cold shower to sober him up.
Dripping wet with water, Stanley realizes he has struck and abused Stella, and feeling repentant, he searches for her. Stella and Blanche have sought protective refuge in the upstairs apartment. Animalistic and virile in a wet, torn T-shirt, he bellows repeatedly for Stella from the street in front of their building, begging for her return:
Hey Stell – Lahhhhh!
This scene is one of the most regularly-chosen clips played in film excerpts from cinematic history. With the low moan of a clarinet, Stella finally responds to her contradictory impulses – her anger melts into forgiveness, her fear into desire. She leaves the shelter of the upstairs apartment and stands staring down at him from the upper landing. Then, she surrenders herself to him – she slowly descends the spiraling stairs to him and comes down to his level. He drops to his knees, crying. She sympathizes with him as he presses his face to her pregnant belly, and they embrace and kiss. Stanley begs: “Don’t ever leave me, baby,” and then literally sweeps her off her feet – he carries her into their dark apartment.
Blanche comes looking for them, and finds them inside – she stops and catches herself before entering into the flat. Outside the building, she finds Mitch, who asks if everything is “all quiet along the Potomac now?” He assures Blanche that the feuding couple are “crazy about each other,” and things will be fine between them. Blanche thanks Mitch for his concern: “…so much confusion in the world. Thank you for being so kind. I need kindness now.” Blanche has found that Mitch offers her one final chance to realize her self-preserving fantasy.
The following morning, Blanche (who has spent a sleepless night upstairs) is surprised to find that Stella has forgiven Stanley so quickly: “He was as good as a lamb when I came back. He’s really very, very ashamed of himself.” Still lying in her bed under a sheet, lounging there following blissful submission to Stanley the night before, Stella winsomely reminisces about Stanley as a destructive smasher – he had smashed things before, like on their wedding night when he triumphantly broke all the light bulbs in their place with Stella’s slipper: “I was sort of thrilled by it.”
Blanche suggests a plan to get them away from the mad, crazy man (”You’re married to a madman”) but Stella defends him and their love – not willing to sacrifice the stability she has found in her life with Stanley: “I wish you’d stop taking it for granted that I’m in something I want to get out of.”
Blanche: What you are talking about is desire – just brutal Desire! The name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.
Stella: Haven’t you ever ridden on that streetcar?
Blanche: It brought me here. Where I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed to be.
Stella: Don’t you think your superior attitude is a little out of place?
Furtively, Blanche betrays an envy of her sister’s sexual involvement with her earthy husband. (Stanley, wearing a grease-stained undershirt, has returned from outside and overhears their conversation – in which he is condemned.) Then, Blanche describes him as obscene, bestial and common:
May I speak plainly?…If you’ll forgive me, he’s common!…He’s like an animal. He has an animal’s habits. There’s even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is! Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you – you here waiting for him. Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you, that’s if kisses have been discovered yet. His poker night you call it. This party of apes!
Blanche contends that there has been progress in the human race with the development of the arts, poetry, and music – cultural elements which bring light to the darkness. She admonishes her sister: “Don’t – don’t hang back with the brutes!”
Antagonized by Blanche’s attempts to destroy his home, Stanley is increasingly hostile and unfriendly to his sister-in-law. Determined to unmask Blanche’s dishonest masquerade, Stanley begins to learn of Blanche’s tawdry past through information from a friend named Shaw. Shaw, who regularly traveled to Mississippi, reported that Blanche had been seen at the squalid Flamingo Hotel. When confronted, Blanche denies any association with the place, asserting:
The Hotel Flamingo is not a place that I would dare to be seen in…I’ve seen it and, uh, smelled it…The odor of cheap perfume is penetrating.
Stanley threatens to have his friend check again in the town of Laurel to verify whether or not it was her.
Nervous and on edge, Blanche is paranoid of “unkind gossip” from her past, confessing to her sister: “I haven’t been so awfully good the last year or so, since Belle Reve started to slip through my fingers.” She is morbid about the unpleasant realities of life and the impediments that face her in forming a permanent bond – her declining fortunes, her decreasing allure and beauty, and her advancing age:
I never was hard or self-sufficient enough. Soft people, soft people have got to court the favor of hard ones, Stella. You got to shimmer and glow. I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick. It isn’t enough to be soft. You’ve got to be soft and attractive. And I-I’m fading now.
When Stella pours Blanche a drink – a coke with a shot of whiskey – it overflows and spills foam on Blanche’s dress. Upset by being sullied and violated [a symbolic suggestion to foreshadow the climactic rape scene], Blanche screams with a piercing cry about stains on her pastel-colored dress: “Right on my pretty pink skirt.” She is reassured and recovers when the skirt is gently blotted and the stain comes out:
Stella: Did it stain?
Blanche: No. No, not a bit. Ha-ha (hysterically) Isn’t that lucky?
Stella: Why did you scream like that?
Blanche: I don’t know why I screamed.
Blanche confides in her sister of her affection for Mitch, believing that she can be rescued, “waited on” and taken away from her problems by marriage:
Mitch is coming at seven. I guess I’m a little nervous about our relations. He hasn’t gotten anything more than a goodnight kiss. That’s all I’ve given him Stella. I want his respect. A man don’t want anything they get too easy. On the other hand, men lose interest quickly, especially when a girl is over, over 30…I haven’t informed him of my real age.
“Because of hard knocks my vanity’s been given,” Blanche is sensitive about her age, and she wants to keep living by illusion: “He thinks I’m sort of prim and proper, you know! I want to deceive him just enough to make him want me.”
When a young newspaper delivery boy comes to the door to collect the bill for The Evening Star [Stella's name means 'celestial star'] one rainy afternoon, Blanche is attracted to him as a lonely woman pathologically desperate for sexual attention. He reminds her of her young husband who committed suicide [in her head, she hears polka music again - a flashback reverie of his suicide], and still neurotically grieving, she wants to subconsciously make up for his death. She causes the bashful young man to linger with small talk, first asking for a light for her cigarette and then asking for the time:
Young man. Young, young, young. Did anyone ever tell you you look like a young prince out of the Arabian Nights? You do, honey lamb. Come here. (She seductively offers herself for a maternal kiss – he walks to her.) Come on over here, like I told you. I want to kiss you just once, softly and sweetly on your mouth.
But she catches herself after seductively pressing one kiss into his lips, knowing she has a weakness for young males:
Run away now quickly. It would have been nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good – and keep my hands off children. Adios. Adios.
Immediately thereafter, Mitch comes around the corner, arriving in the young man’s place. She demands that he court her chivalrously: “Look who’s here. My Rosenkavalier!” He presents her with flowers, bows chivalrously, and they go on a date to a dancing casino. Feeling dismal and depressed, they wander to the outside porch of the pier/dock where they talk under a lamppost. She apologizes for not being able to “rise to the occasion…I don’t think I’ve ever tried so hard to be gay and made such a dismal mess of it.”
Mitch doubtfully asks permission for a kiss, but Blanche declines expressing her natural feelings, explaining that it would encourage other familiarities: “…a single girl, a girl alone in the world, has got to keep a firm hold on her emotions, or she’ll be lost.” Mitch open-heartedly confesses: “In all my experience, I have never known anyone like you.” Blanche reacts with a laugh. To fulfill more of Blanche’s romantic dreams, she wants them to pretend that they are sitting in a little bohemian artists’ cafe on the Left Bank in Paris. To create a make-believe atmosphere, she lights a candle stub on the table and asks for “joie de vivre.”
Apologetic for sweating profusely, Mitch is persuaded to remove his “light weight alpaca” coat and then he explains why he has such an imposing physique and muscular strength – he lifts weights and swims to keep fit. He expects a kiss and fumbles to embrace her after putting his hands on her waist and raising her off the ground, but she evades him, calling him a “natural gentleman, one of the few left in the world.” Then, she excuses herself as having “old-fashioned ideals.” She slowly rolls her eyes up toward him. Mitch turns from her to cool off, and there is a long, awkward silence between them.
She asks Mitch if a hostile Stanley has talked about her and what his “attitude” is toward her. Uneasy, Mitch soon changes the subject and asks how old she is. An overgrown mama’s boy, he explains that his sick mother wants to know all about her, wishing him to settle down before she dies (in maybe just a few months). Reminded of a past love affair when she was sixteen, Blanche reveals her discovery of love –
All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky – deluded.
In a very veiled account in the foggy surroundings of the dance casino, she tearfully recalls the details of her tragic early marriage to a handsome youth named Allan. Her memories are a painful reminder and she struggles to talk about how she judgmentally failed to be loving toward him:
· He was homosexual: “There was something about the boy, a nervousness, a tenderness, an uncertainty that I didn’t understand.”
· Blanche wished to satisfy her need to protect and help the young boy: “He lost every job. He came to me for help. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything except that I loved him unendurably.”
· He was possibly impotent with her, his new bride: “At night, I pretended to sleep. I heard him crying. Crying, crying the way a lost child cries.”
· She regretfully blames herself for driving her husband to suicide by cruelly rejecting him – at another dance casino: “I killed him. One night, we drove out to a place called Moon Lake Casino. We danced the Varsouviana! [the polka dance] Suddenly in the middle of the dance floor, the boy I had married broke away from me and ran out of the casino. A few minutes later – a shot! (A distant shot sounds) I ran – all did – all ran and gathered about the terrible thing at the edge of the lake. He stuck a revolver into his mouth and fired. It was because, on the dance floor, unable to stop myself I said – ‘You’re weak! I’ve lost respect for you! I despise you!”
Metaphorically, the merciless exposure of the revelation about the young man extinguished the momentarily-illuminated searchlight, dimming Blanche’s world ever since:
And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light stronger than, than this yellow lantern.
Afterwards, Mitch comes over to stand by her and he tentatively consoles her.
You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be you and me, Blanche?
He thinks about proposing to her and kisses her forehead. They huddle together and embrace, feeling a mutual need for each other – they kiss on the lips.
In a short scene in the machine shop where both Mitch and Stanley work, Mitch expresses shock and anger that Stanley has “wised” him up and revealed the truth about Blanche:
Stanley: You’re gonna kill who, you dumb jerk? You don’t even know when you get wised up. Come on.
Mitch: You don’t have to wise me up!
After five and a half months have passed, Stanley’s patience has grown thin with Blanche – he thinks “her time is up.” A vicious interplay of distrust and suspicion continues between the increasingly unsympathetic Stanley and sister-in-law Blanche. By now, Stanley has verified Blanche’s shady past in the town of Laurel:
She is as famous in Laurel as if she was the President of the United States, only she is not respected by any party!
While Blanche is in the bathroom taking a long, hot soak for her nerves, Stanley tells Stella of two major lies that he has discovered about his sister-in-law. After losing Belle Reve, Blanche turned to prostitution while at the Flamingo Hotel, and then was eventually evicted from there and run out of town. With no other place to go, Blanche was forced to take refuge in New Orleans with them:
She moved to the hotel called Flamingo which is a second class hotel that has the advantages of not interfering with the private and social life of the personalities there. Now the Flamingo is used to all kinds of goings-on. But even the management of the Flamingo was impressed by Dame Blanche. And in fact, they were so impressed that they requested her to turn in her room-key for permanently. And this, this happened a couple of weeks before she showed here…The trouble with Dame Blanche was that she couldn’t put on her act any more in Laurel because they got wised up. And after two or three dates, they quit and then she goes on to another one, the same old line, the same old act, and the same old hooey! And as time went by, she became the town character, regarded not just as different but downright loco and nuts.
Secondly, she lost her teaching position and was forced to resign her school position as a result of an affair with one of her students, a seventeen-year-old high school boy:
She didn’t resign temporarily because of her nerves. She was kicked out before the spring term ended. And I hate to tell you the reason that step was taken. A seventeen-year-old kid she got mixed up with – and the boy’s dad learned about it and he got in touch with the high-school superintendent. And there was practically a town ordinance passed against her.
Stanley has also poisoned her relationship with his poker-playing, bowling, and work buddy Mitch, dutifully telling him about her past (”he’s wised up”), and destroying what might have been between them. He breaks down any belief Mitch had expressed in Blanche’s worthiness as an object of his love: “He’s not gonna marry her now. He’s not gonna jump in a tank with a school of sharks.”
In the tense, memorable scene of Blanche’s birthday dinner, Mitch has been invited to the party, but he deliberately doesn’t appear. His absence is conspicuous. Blanche jokes about being stood up – playing a rejected woman, not knowing the real truth. During the party, Stanley eats greasy chicken – even Stella calls him a pig (”Mr. Kowalski is too busy making a pig of himself…Your face and your fingers are disgustingly greasy.”)
Viewing both of them as invaders of his territory, Stanley intimidates both women. He is threatened that Blanche may remind his wife of his lower-class breeding and limitations. He tells them off as he clears the table in his own way:
Now that’s how I’m gonna clear the table. Don’t you ever talk that way to me! ‘Pig,’ ‘Pollack,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘vulgar,’ ‘greasy.’ Those kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister’s tongue just too much around here!