Deliberate Cruelty

I think about Blanche a lot now. (And I just stumbled onto STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE on TCM.) Her ferocious sensitivity, her need for illusion, her clinging to desire and memory and magic while the world around her marches toward a big beautiful bill. Vivian Leigh as Blanche locates disappointment and depravity and love and kindness all on the same bleak avenue -- finds both insanity and sanity inside the lacy folds of desperation. That's something I want to cling to: the nuance that fuels empathy, the morality that finds itself in sin. We are living in a Stanley Kowalski World right now, transactional and mean and fractured, full of blustering undeserved comeuppances. Full of bullshit marketed as truth, and that madeup truth fueling all kinds of decisions and rabbitholes we might never escape. Blanche is something to hold onto. Fragile and ghostly and crazy to the point of making you turn away. But she knows what it means to be real by clinging to her need fo...