A Streetcar Named Blue Jasmine: Reading Woody’s Williams

In Blue Jasmine Woody Allen’s echoes of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, are so frequent, central and apparent that they warrant special attention. The effect recalls the process T.S. Eliot described in “Tradition and the Modern Talent” -- and recently resurrected as “inter-textuality.” Every new work of art can draw meaning from its relationship to all other world art throughout history and can in turn inflect both what came before it and what may follow. But Allen’s use of Williams goes beyond that. The allusions are so structural that his film takes almost every step in the context of the earlier work. His meaning per force lies in how he specifically adheres to or --  even more significantly -- divagates from the earlier text, either the stage version or Elia Kazan’s Brando/Leigh film.

     Of course Allen does not acknowledge the Williams source. He doesn’t have to. The play and film are so well known the text is part of our cultural atmosphere. More importantly, Allen is not adapting the play. He only evokes it from time to time. His film can be read entirely independent of Williams. One can have a full experience of Blue Jasmine without having ever heard of Streetcar. But the film will be richer if one has and reconsiders it. In any case, to name the play as a source would invite the viewer to judge how closely the film adheres to it, which of course Allen doesn’t have to do at all. (Allen says he didn’t even see his star Cate Blanchett’s pre-casting Broadway performance as Blanche.)

In Williams, the pathetically faux-glamorous Blanche du Bois interrupts her sister Stella’s happy marriage to the brutish Stanley Kowalski. Allen’s Jasmine also pretends to a false lost glamour, from her assumed name to her last emblem of wealth, her pile of Vuitton baggage. Jasmine’s flashbacks and her talking to herself parallel Blanche’s mental crumbling. Indeed Jasmine has already had the shock therapy that lies in Blanche’s future when she’s carried off at play end. 

Where Williams’s women are sisters, effectively contrasting Stella’s constructive pragmatism to Blanche’s doomed romanticism, Allen’s are not quite sisters, both having been adopted. Ginger says Jasmine had the better genes, but Ginger outstrips her humanity and character. Jasmine’s betrayal of Ginger -- first financially, then domestically, in her unfair abuse of Ginger’s devoted men -- undercuts her anger at her women friends‘ betrayals by their affairs with her husband Hal.   

Clearly, every similarity opens into more telling differences. Jasmine has already wrecked her sister’s marriage to Augie and now shivers her relationship with Chili. That’s like Blanche warning Stella against “hanging back with the brutes.” Augie exposes Jasmine’s past to her fiance Dwight, as Kowalski tells Mitch about Blanche. Ginger’s attraction to the “sweet” (but secretly married) Al contrasts to Stella’s fidelity to Kowalski.

More significantly, Blanche’s animating delusion involves her clinging to her family’s lost glory, Belle Reve, the beautiful dream of the family’s old plantation. Though she has lost the land and the status it provided she believes Stella has debased herself by settling for the Polish laborer. She has no respect for their “fireworks,” Kowalski’s passionate engagement with Stella. To Blanche “Stella” could be a cold remote star but to Stanley she is an earthy sensual woman. Because of Blanche’s romantic fantasies her homosexual husband killed himself and she was fired from her teaching job for seducing a student.  

As she attempts to seduce Mitch into marriage Blanche strives to hide her age and her past. She sets up Chinese lanterns to keep her in the flattering shadows. Jeanette picked the name Jasmine, after the flower that blossoms at night. Indeed as hostess she did blossom in her glittering soirees. But Allen shows her primarily in the harsh light of day. Cate Blanchett is utterly selfless when she appears bloated from crying and haggard and sweaty from her exertions. She spends much of the film in the rending exposure Vivien Leigh suffers once, from Mitch’s harsh use of the “naked light bulb” she has struggled to avert. And in the dark night of her suffering Jasmine doesn’t blossom but wilts. In contrast to the star Stella and the flower Jasmine, Ginger is rooted, fertile, healthy. Ginger is so real and rooted Allen gives her a specific San Francisco address, in contrast to Jasmine's generality, the lost Hamptons and the desired Marin County.

Kowalski shatters Blanche's romantic fantasy not just by disillusioning Mitch but by raping her. At the end Stella has to force herself into not believing Blanche’s true report, in order to continue with her Stanley. In Allen’s repeated phrase, that is the culture of “looking the other way.” In contrast to Williams, Kazan’s film gave Stella the at least temporary resolve to believe Blanche and to leave Kowalski. He made the change to satisfy the censor’s demand a rapist not go unpunished. But the change also served Kazan’s faith in the informer. He made a point of facing the uncomfortable truth, as he problematically demonstrated when he testified before HUAC and as he dramatized in Panic in the Streets, A Face in the Crowd, The Harder They Fall, and On the Waterfront. Allen leaves Jasmine suspended, utterly alone, no last hope in sight, having exhausted even the clinical treatment awaiting Blanche. Perhaps the shadow of Blanche implies Jasmine's bleak future, shuffling among traveling salesmen or their contemporary equivalent.

Jasmine’s lost glory is the wealth and status she enjoyed as a result of husband Hal’s ponzi scheme.Though not as old and defeated as Blanche, she’s in the same crisis: struggling to survive her fallen fortunes and shattered self-esteem. Allen replaces the lost ideals of Williams’s tattered Old South with today’s white collar high stake banking fraud. He traces America’s decline from even the ambivalence of the slave-based plantation to the shimmering venality of corrupt Wall Street. 

While the Polish laborer Kowalski splits into Augie and Chili, respectively Ginger’s husband and fiance, as the male centre Stanley gives way to Hal. American energy has declined from Kowalski to this Hal, from the primitive life force Marlon Brando projected to Alec Baldwin’s venal slick. The smooth businessman seems antithetical to the brutish laborer but Hal proves as venal, savage, lustful and callous as Kowalski. 
     Instead of rape Jasmine is finally humiliated -- not by Hal’s career of affairs with her friends -- but by his abandonment for an au pair. That sexual violation drives her over the edge. Where Blanche tells Stella, Jasmine betrays Hal to the FBI. Even at the end Jasmine feels guilt -- not for having abetted Hal’s fraud but -- for turning him in. Her own act of conscientious citizenship was vengeful, not moral, and she regretted it for its cost to her. Lacking Kowalski’s animal resolve Hal kills himself, yet another index to the decay Allen traces in American energy and integrity.  Hal’s arrest in the street pales beside Kazan’s cut in the film from the rape to a hose washing garbage off the street (after a neighbor recalled the police turning the firehose on a rampant Kowalski).

      These larger contrasts established, smaller scenes accrue new meaning. Jasmine’s self-unaware, adult conversation with her two young nephews is an innocent replay of Blanche’s scene with the newspaper boy. In both she indulges her own adult needs insensitive to her much younger listener and unaware of her impropriety. The card game gives way to the lads’ noisy TV boxing match, both testing Blanches/Jasmine’s nerves.The street noise that torments Blanche becomes the rowdiness of Ginger’s children. Jasmine’s haunting by “Blue Moon,” the song that attended her meeting Hal, softens Blanche’s haunting by the fairground tune she associates with her husband’s suicide -- and foreshadows Hal’s. Allen’s atmosphere contrasts to Williams’s. The play opens on the squalid tenement, but in the film Kazan introduces Blanche emerging in a cloud of steam from the New Orleans train station. Allen’s first shot is of the cool high plane, in which Jasmine babbles to the helpless stranger beside her.

Like Blanche, Jasmine struggles to suppress her embarrassing memories and her guilt. She especially has to deny -- especially to herself -- her complicity in Hal’s fraud. Despite all the soap bubbles she is exposed in the bathing scene. Jasmine is in the tub when Hal brings her an expensive bracelet to reward her for “doing your duty” -- drawing Augie’s windfall $200,000 investment into his scheme. The gift makes her forget her initial hope Hal will make Ginger some money. If Blanche has always depended on the kindness of strangers, Jasmine depends on the (mutual?) exploitation of friends. Jasmine ruined her sister’s last hope of financial improvement and consequently her marriage, in return for another ornament. As if this exchange were not sufficiently revealing, Jasmine’s vanity and greed are emphasized by our memory of Blanche’s long baths, albeit offstage, which irked Kowalski  but which she needed to ease her exploded nerves. Blanche’s pathetic weakness undercuts Jasmine’s greedy comfort. 

Out of the tub, where Blanche is trying to recover a lost dignity, Jasmine is bent upon recovering a life of stolen glamour. She functions as an ornament for the dentist and hopes to for the wouldbe politician, Dwight. She aspires to be an object of shallow beauty, a useless bloom like the jasmine. She studies computer science so she could become an interior designer, as if a room were the only interior she needed to design. Dragging her Vuitton, flying first class, finding another rich man to adorn, Jasmine is concerned with the surface of her life while inside she disintegrates. In Dwight she finds one last hope for reviving her lost shallows, like Blanche’s desperate play for stolid Mitch (“Sometimes -- there’s God -- so quickly”).

  Allen is rather less concerned with romantic fantasy, the tension between the ideal and the flesh, than Williams. Allen rather focuses on social criticism. Jasmine’s disillusioned Dwight is less troubled by her role in Hal’s fraud than by her lying to him. The politician would live with fraud if only he knew about it. Dentist Flicker wants her beauty in the office but also in an adulterous affair. While Allen’s film is rich in his central characters‘ psychology -- and Jasmine is as intriguing an enigma as Blanche -- his target is rather the amoral political/economic climate of current America. Post meltdown, the wealthy transgressors have escaped punishment, their exploitative system continues unchanged but for their myriad ruined victims   -- “Some people can’t put things behind so easily.”  
      Finally, Jasmine like Blanche might be read as a projection of the author. Blanche embodies the  vulnerable, fragile dreamer for whom the coarse, realistic world allows no refuge, a plight with which Williams -- especially after his sister Rose's suffering -- could easily identify. Perhaps there is some Woody in Jasmine. He no longer plays the neurotic, ever questioning, ever insecure nebbish himself. But when he turned to the tragic mode, as in Interiors, he usually worked through the feminine aspect. Perhaps the 78-year-old Allen, at the top of his game, puts into Jasmine his own questions about the solidity of his achievement, the integrity of his self-examination and how honestly he has lived his life on and off screen. Like Streetcar, this is a deeply felt film whether we read it as anatomizing a society or a soul.