The Reactionary Nature of Streetcar

Watching A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) again the other night, I couldn't help but think that even though it was written by a gay dude, it was a profoundly reactionary work, a compliment in these quaters. Abandonment of chivalric codes was one of its main themes.

Blanche DuBois and her sister, Stella Kowalski (née DuBois), are of the old aristocratic order of the American South, fallen tragically into terminal decline. The villain, wife-beating rapist lumpen proletarian Stanley Kowalski, in his decidely Yankee accent, claims he's "not a Pollack" but "one hundred percent American.... born and raised in the greatest country on this earth and... proud of it." Yet, he's obvioulsy rootless, as are his friends of various ethnicities.

In the one, brief, fleeting moment of hope the viewer is offered, Blanche says, "Sometimes—there's God—so quickly!" Later, on hearing the tolling of the bells from St. Louis Cathedral, she says, "Those cathedral bells — they're the only clean thing in the Quarter." It's a horror to watch her lose the last bits of dignity on to which she holds.