Ultimate Intimacy

I am a Marlon Brando fan. Maybe I should rephrase. I was a Marlon Brando fan. After tonight’s episodes I have nothing but disgusted pity for him. Having been quite infatuated with his raw (albeit very sexual and violent) expression, I wanted to get a better taste for him and rented A Streetcar Name Desire.

It was at once disturbing and thought-provoking. Two of the three main characters drove me to insanity. Blanche DuBois, a delicate, superficial, yet neurotic and tainted southern-belle tries to cover over a life of promiscuity and pretentiously clings to posh ancestry. She denounces her sister for forsaking their heritage by marrying a commoner, a violent “Pollack” and dwelling in the squalor of the French Quarter of New Orleans. Her sister’s husband, Stanley (Marlon Brando), is a raw, animalistic brute. One evening he strikes Stella in a rage, but she returns to him, her anger turning to lust, and forgets any offense. Stanley, however, has no time to waste with airs and fancy ways. He questions Blanche’s superficiality, her reasoning for escaping home, her complaints of “the nerves”. After learning of her past as a prostitute frequenting the Flamingo Hotel, he presses Stella to accept Blanche’s pageant as a sham.

Stella is caught between the irony of both husband and sister demanding her withdrawal from any relations with the other, based on the same basic element: character. One is a prostitute living a pretense of refinery, the other dwelling in an acceptance of a life of commonness and lustfully violent ways. They are two worlds, but both a breed of perverted swine. Blanche (her name an irony itself) begs her sister not to “hang back with the brutes” while in the climax (intimated only) Brando, in his rage at the whore prancing about his house in pretty clothes and enticing respectable friends with her stories, confronts her foolery and in his anger rapes her – his way of calling out her true self. This act defines their characters and leaves Stella with no choice but to separate herself from both, sending her sister to a mental institution and leaving her husband permanently, newborn in arms.

The theme - the act of sex dissolving any hopes of love and the intimacy it was designed to celebrate - runs throughout. Blanche had been lost in the world. She explained to her sister of her need to be around people. She was turning to her last hope in the world for love and security, after the disillusionment of the counterfeit intimacy with strangers in the night. Brando, in a vicious act, finally severed her last hope of love when he, who hated her most, committed the most intimate of acts with her in his wrath, driving her to complete insanity.

A friend let me borrow Last Tango in Paris this evening as well, and after mulling over the meaning of A Streetcar Named Desire, I was overly curious about any connections between the two films, and especially Marlon Brando’s conduct in comparison. I am ashamed to even admit that I started the latter movie. There grew a sadness in me, a pain of loss, as if with every minute more I watched the film, my innocence, my joy was drained and all was hopeless, and the beauty of sex turned to a sour soulless animal that drives humanity to irrationality, to violence, and manipulation. Needless to say, after fast-forwarding lude scenes and bearing it for a time, I sank into such utter despair and disgust that I could take no more and stilled the house from its pollution.

In so many ways the movies were alike, parallels of brute, animalistic sexual desire. “I’m better off with a grunt or a groan for a name. Why do you want to know my name?” demanded Brando to the young girl, “do you want to hear my name?” he asks and proceeds to make ape-like sounds. Men were portrayed and described as pigs, women as helpless, delicate or young figures to cower beneath brutality. In each existed a hope that sexual encounters (absent of any love or relationship) would bring relief, a shelter, an escape from life, and yet in both, it only brought more hopelessness, agony, despair and anger.

The opposite of such despair, of the rejection of love, violent, depraved, bestial behavior is fundamentally, inexorably Christ. It is God, the giver of life itself; He who is truth and grace; He who is perfection and beauty and love so unconditional we cannot fathom – we who are foolish, unloyal, faithless, treacherous, ungrateful and bestial sinners. He is the antipole of depravity.

True intimacy that all humanity longs for can only be ultimately fulfilled in the presence and love of our Creator and Lord. Sex in its most perfect, love-enveloped form is the closest glimpse we will have on this earth of the rapture of His presence and love. Heaven and God are untouchable here on earth. We cannot see God. We have no brochures or advertisements for heaven’s glories, much less the ability to experience its pleasures while going about our pithy mortal lives. The burning longing inside us craves fulfillment and we seek it in human love, romance, and sexual intimacy. Those who have so perverted every element of love and beauty, and of the hope of God’s love and eternity, are still pressed with an undeniable longing for intimacy. Though shunning the very idea of love in its conditional, hurtful human form, they seek out fulfillment in sexual encounters of more perverse nature such as rape, molestation, pedophilia, or homosexuality. We pervert even the simple acts of life. Concern turns to flirtation; selflessness to sexual attention. Let us draw our eyes and hearts back to Him who alone can ultimately fulfill our need for intimacy, and let us live in the hope and joy of eternity with Christ.

Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

Lamentations 24 “I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him."

Psalms 33:18 “But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose
hope is in his unfailing love.”