Movie vs. Script, general thoughts.

So in the director's cut of A Streetcar Named Desire, there were quite a few changes that highlighted certain aspects of the play or changed them altogether. I'll just go through a bunch of the things I noticed (in bullet points) and talk about how they affected the theme and the play.

• Blanche goes to the bowling alley, instead of going into the house alone
• Personally, I would have preferred her in the apartment alone, because I believe that in this version they missed Blanche's awkwardness in the house, and failed to introduce her as very different from society and separation from her home city and people in general.
• However, I realize that making a movie is actually quite difficult (surprising, I know), and by allowing Blanche to go to Stella in the bowling alley, they emphasized other things, such as:
• Stanley
• They introduced him differently, with him making a ruckus in the bowling alley and clearly defining him as alpha male and quite primal, which would have been hard to do with him merely coming home.The way the director did it, there was more of a focus on the relationship between Stanley and Blanche than Blanche and the rest of society.
• Blanche was clearly less stable than I had previously thought just reading the script
• Blanche's obsession with being in the dark was clear, and (maybe it was because the movie was in black and white) the shadows on her face were always obscuring what she looked like, and often contrasted her with everyone else. That was pretty well done.
• The sounds and the music added a lot to her insanity, especially because she reacted to the music while everyone else didn't. It also created the mood, for instance sadness, or the tension between Stanley and Blanche, where certain patterns would come up to highlight a certain mood. Also, the sounds were prevalent, like the train sounds- a more obvious interruption to the mood and converastion.
• Stella doesn't seem so in love
• This foreshadows the ending, but in general she is less patient and in love with Stanley. I guess this ties in with the ending, where she leaves Stanley in the end.
• I'm not sure I agreed with this ending, because in Tenessee's interview with himself he was talking about how people can choose illusions or something, and I think Stella leaving destroyed this theme. People often don't choose to change their lives, and I think Stella staying in a family where she ignored Stanley's actions with Blanche was important to the theme, of how to move forward it isn't necessarily the best, and how society was becoming more and more violent and doesn't really make much sense.
• That being said, I much preferred it because it makes more sense to me- maybe it was the time difference and how the director didn't want to leave it on a very negative note, but leave the viewers a bit happy inside, since he needed to make some money too. I mean, I don't think the director wanted to influence people to stay with their abusive spouse.
• This is a question I had when reading and watching the play: what are the tamales for?
• Random fact: There was a lot of smoking, part of the time period, but I guess what's interesting is that it's mostly Stanley and Blanche who do most of the smoking, and then a little bit from Mitch when he talks about his lighter and then during the poker table. I don't really see any other women smoking, although we don't really see Eunice much and Stella shouldn't really smoke when she has a baby.
• Eunice is more fiery, and really supports Stella in the end. I just thought it was nice, because I didn't really see her much as a character in the script.
• There were a lot of moments where it was clearly Stella having to choose between Stanley and Blanche, and Stella did have less patience for Blanche than I had thought just reading the script. And of course, in the end, Stella does not choose either one- Blanche goes to an asylum and Stanley is left alone.
• In the Stella! scene, where Stanley and Stella have their fight, it's really well done to emphasize the weird animal love the two have, with not only their actions unhuman but trance-like movements, but their clothes (especially Stanely's shirt) being all torn up. Stanley's shirt was torn and weirdly put on, I'm not really sure what was going on there but it definitley made it primitive.
• Flores para los muertos: This really blurred lines between reality and nightmare for Blanche, as the first time it seemed real but she was scared and then the second time the guy was surrounded by smoke and mysteriousness, the director really played on this scene (although the police people banging on her door was different, it helped to show me the relevance of the "flores para los muertos" bit), and it was a reminder too of her old age, and perhaps her fear of death and having it all end with her alone. She's had a bad experience with death (her husband and her parents/relatives), and along with her guilt, she's probably fearful of what lies on the other end.
• Stanley's rudeness was quite prevalent here. His voice too, accentuated his primitive-ness. Also, he was very unpatient of Blanche and pretty much ruined all of Blanche's acting roles.
• Blanche was crazy, but it was Stella's character who lives in an illusion (although not in the movie, ay?)
• Blanche's clothes, where she dresses up, seem out of place, but helped me to understand that she was putting on roles to avoid her own self- for instance before the rape scene and after Mitch dumps her, she is feeling really down and so she dresses up like a princess and pretends to be someone else.

And that's it, in a nutshell.