In the last eight or ten years Americans have been charmed by a new culture hero, with far-reaching effects upon the quality of our spoken arts. In a persistent effort to find a voice for America, to find a language, vocabulary, and intonation peculiarly our own, we have come temporarily to settle for no voice at all. The stage, motion pictures, television, and even popular music are now exalting an inarticulate hero, who—for all the dependence of these media on language—cannot talk.

Of medium height and usually of lower-class birth, his most familiar physical characteristic is his surly and discontented expression. His eyes peer out at the world from under beetling brows; his uncombed hair falls carelessly over his forehead; his right hand rests casually on his right hip. He is extremely muscular and walks with a slouching, shuffling gait. He scratches himself often, slumps in chairs, and almost never smiles. He is also identified by the sounds which issue from his mouth. He squeezes, he grunts, he passes his hand over his eyes and forehead, he stares steadily, he turns away, he scratches, then again faces his adversary, and finally speaks. What he says is rarely important but he has mesmerized his auditor by the effort he takes to say it. He has communicated not information but feeling; he has revealed an inner life of unspecified anguish and torment.

From this description it should be clear that I am talking about a character familiar not through any particular work of art but rather through association with the many actors who impersonate it—Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, Ben Gazzara, John Cassavetes, Montgomery Clift, and the countless others whose identification with sex, violence, and incoherency unites them as a school. What endears this peculiar creature to the general public? Where does he come from, what is his significance, and what has been his effect on present-day dramatic writing?

The inarticulate hero of today clearly finds his immediate origin in Tennessee Williams’ Stanley Kowalski as interpreted by Marlon Brando. His tradition, however, goes further back than A Streetcar Named Desire. Ever since Eugene O’Neill created Yank in The Hairy Ape (1922), American playwrights have been trying to find dramatic expression for the man of lower birth—of Northern urban or Southern rural origin—who was denied the language and manners of his more cultured countrymen. Quite often, in spite of superior physical strength, this man was pictured as a victim. O’Neill’s stoker Yank has the power to make the ship go, but once on land, in the clutch of the cold concrete city, he is overcome by pushing crowds, political complexity, and the ridicule of a high-born woman, and finally is crushed to death while trying to embrace an ape, the only animal with whom he finds intellectual communion. The sharecroppers, migrant workers, and tramps of John Steinbeck are victims too, but since his heroes are more unqualifiedly noble than Yank (for Steinbeck virtue and poverty are almost always equated) their defeat is political rather than personal and implies an indictment of society. In the early works of Clifford Odets, the political note is struck even harder. O’Neill’s and Steinbeck’s proletarian heroes are often characterized by their lack of verbal coherence, but Odets’s heroes are singular for their extreme verbosity. Rather than being speechless in the face of their dilemma, they never stop talking about it.

The unspoken assumption of the Group Theatre, the repertory company that produced most of the proletarian dramas of the 30’s, was that sensitivity, fire, intensity, and sexual potency were primarily the properties of the underprivileged and the uneducated. Using the acting techniques of Stanislavsky in forms altered to suit American needs, the Group Theatre created a style with which to impart the supercharged mood of these plays and an acting company to impersonate the underprivileged heroes. The most representative actors in this company, John Garfield and Luther Adler, rather than being stammerers, were highly articulate; rather than being enmeshed in a world too complex for their intelligence, they were extremely precise about the forces leading them to ruin.

The Group Theatre was dissolved in the early 40’s, but some of its functions were taken over by the Actors Studio, organized in the late 40’s by former members. Unlike the Group Theatre, the Actors Studio was designed not as a production unit but primarily as a workshop where actors could perfect their craft. And yet, because of the widely publicized popular success of some of its members, the Actors Studio has managed to wield more influence on acting styles and playwrighting material than any other single organization, even those dedicated to the actual production of plays. It is in the Actors Studio that most of today’s proletarian heroes are being spawned.

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Although much (if not all) of the acting that emerges from the Actors Studio would seem to indicate that the proletarian is still considered more interesting, more electric, and capable of deeper feelings than the owner of a store or the manager of a bank, this assumption seems no longer accompanied by a political conviction. The proletarian hero of the 50’s has lost his political flavor and, even more important, his power of speech. He combines the inarticulacy of the Hairy Ape with the dynamism (now adjusted from a boil to a simmer) of the Odets hero, and adds to these certain qualities which neither Odets nor O’Neill had endowed him with. Stanley Kowalski is the first character in American drama to unite most of the identifying characteristics of this hero, but it is difficult to determine how much actor Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan, both Actors Studio associates at the time or soon after, contributed to his formation. All drama is a collaboration, and dramatists find their characters subtly changing coloration in the playing. Stanley Kowalski, as he became known to the general public in the original New York production and the excellent movie made from it, was probably the collaborative product of Williams, Brando, and Kazan. Stanley, as written by Williams, is a highly complex and ambiguous character, one who can be taken either as hero or as villain. As a social or cultural figure, Stanley is a villain, in mindless opposition to civilization and culture—the “new man” of the modern world whom Williams seems to find responsible for the present-day decline in art, language, decorum, and culture. As a psychological or sexual figure, however, Stanley exists on a somewhat more heroic moral plane. He is akin to those silent, sullen gamekeepers and grooms of D. H. Lawrence (an early influence on Williams) whose sexuality, though violent, is unmental, unspiritual, and, therefore, in some way free from taint. The conflict between Blanche and Stanley allegorizes the struggle between effeminate culture and masculine libido. It is no accident that Stanley, in the climax of the play, subdues Blanche by a brutal sexual assault. One assumption of the play is plain: culture and tradition are desirable, but breed effeteness and perversity (Blanche is a nymphomaniac) and make one an easy prey to the unenlightened.

It should be clear, even from this brief analysis, that with Stanley, Williams wrought significant changes in the proletarian hero. If one sympathizes with Stanley it is not because he is underprivileged or exploited or victimized—Stanley is at all times an active character, one who manipulates each situation in which he appears. Rather than expressing dissatisfaction with the grubby conditions in which he lives, he exults in them, and he does not indicate any desire to better himself. More important, Stanley, as brute force incarnate, has no poetry or sensitivity or nobility in him—neither John Garfield nor Luther Adler could ever have played this role. His intelligence is mostly animal cunning and his power of speech limited to expressing basic desires.

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And yet, if Williams created an ignoble rather than a noble savage, how do we explain the spectacular success of Brando and the extensive influence his playing of Stanley has had on acting ever since? The answer, I think, lies in the personal values Brando contributed to the role. As played by Brando, Stanley Kowalski somehow emerged as a more appealing, a more sympathetic, and (most important) a more sensitive character than Williams created, and the play became a conflict between two protagonists, one less noble but no less interesting than the other. When Anthony Quinn, taking over the part, played it more like the thick-headed antagonist Williams intended, the focus of the play shifted back to Blanche. There is irony in the fact that, although Streetcar is Blanche’s tragedy, the villain of the piece became the prototype for a hero, the inarticulate hero of popular culture. After Stanley, the brutal proletarian was rarely to be seen again. As he emerged from the Actors Studio and the pens of the writers who began creating parts for these actors, he had once again acquired a helpless attitude in a hostile world. And although he inherited Stanley Kowalski’s speechlessness, his animality, and his violent behavior, these qualities were now seen as marks of profundity of character.

Thus in a period of prosperity and political conformity, the proletarian hero has managed, paradoxically, to accomplish something he failed to do in a period of depression and political radicalism—he has made the audience take notice of him. At a time when America has the largest middle-class population in the world (when, in one sense, it sees itself as entirely middle class), one of its most conspicuous dramatic heroes is poor and uneducated. Although the Broadway audience is predominantly from the cultured, leisured classes, the typical Broadway product (not imported from England or Europe) is peopled with dock workers, drug addicts, juvenile delinquents, prostitutes, pimps, butchers, Southern farmers, seamen, machine shop workers, and drifters. By finding “reality” and “truth” (though not necessarily virtue) in the outcasts of society, playwrights have created a problem they did not have to face in the 30’s: they have estranged their audience from the difficulties of their heroes. I do not wish to repeat the charges made against realism in the drama; its smallness of vision, its prosaicness, and its pedantic re-creation of the least penetrating aspects of life have become all too apparent. I do want to add, however, that when the drama centers on the proletarian and faithfully records his speech, it often becomes mindless, almost anti-intellectual. Ideas and subtle emotions are communicated primarily through speech and even the bluntest emotion loses its meaning if it is not reflected upon. How empty would be the suffering of Lear or Oedipus were it not followed by an illumination of the heart and the mind. In limiting the expression of their heroes, playwrights have limited their heroes’ understanding of their suffering. The difficulties of the modern proletarian hero end on an unresolved question—Why?

That the tongue-tied emotionalism of many modern plays is partly the result of directing and acting techniques is indicated by the fact that even in relatively literate plays, inarticulacy is sometimes imposed by the production. In the recent Broadway showing of Compulsion, for example, the two actors called upon to play boys of superior mental capacities and wealthy backgrounds brought the same verbal hesitation to their roles they might have used in playing a couple of hoodlums. Broadway apparently has still not devised a technique to communicate intelligence. The paradox of the estranged audience applies to acting as well: although the Broadway audience is relatively coherent and literate, the emphasis on our stage has fallen off the spoken word. The actor uses language only as a secondary instrument. His main purpose is to convey the mute feelings within his soul. The effect is admittedly quite explosive. The struggle within an incoherent individual trying to express his feelings can be extremely powerful, for one often has the sense that the character’s stammers, mumbles, and grunts will, like those of Billy Budd, erupt into violence if they continue to frustrate speech. (Much of O’Neill’s power as a playwright stems from his inability to say precisely what he means and his tortuous way of talking round and round a subject.) The consequence of this style of acting, however, is that we presently have an actor’s theater. The actor has taken precedence over the playwright; the play has receded before the performance. One becomes more conscious of the personal problems of the actor than of the character he is playing; in some cases, the actor’s and the character’s problems become inextricably confused.

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The general uninterest in the classics demonstrated by many of today’s actors and directors (a recent Equity symposium had the title: “The Classics: Are They Avant-Garde?”) is closely related to this problem, for most of the classics of dramatic literature depend to a large extent on words. It is significant that one of America’s most able theater and movie directors, Elia Kazan, has only directed contemporary works. When asked if he would ever produce Shakespeare, he replied (albeit in all humility), “I never have and I never will. I am interested in the life that is around me. . . .” This is an extraordinary statement, all the more so because so few people in the theater consider it extraordinary. Apart from the intimation that contemporary playwrights probe more deeply into “the life around me” than Shakespeare (or is Kazan concerned only with environmental truth?), these words yield very interesting considerations. Imagine the conductor of the Philharmonic refusing to interpret Mozart and Beethoven on the same grounds. Considering the appalling ignorance most actors have of the works in their field, try to imagine even the most benighted tenor, violinist, or ballerina in a similar state of ignorance. One would look in vain for the same paucity of classical works on the musical, ballet, or operatic stage as one finds on Broadway. In refusing Ibsen, Strindberg, and Yeats a hearing, the interpreters of the drama have usurped the prerogatives of the creative artist, one of whose permissible functions is to be in revolt against the techniques of the past.

Mr. Kazan goes on to express his admiration for Chekhov (the one classical writer known and cherished by most members of the Actors Studio) and this gives us a clue why traditional drama holds no fascination for him. Although Chekhov was a master of language (the language, be it remembered, of the cultured, leisured classes), it is not always the word that communicates his meaning. More often, the action is revealed slowly in fragments of discourse, and seemingly commonplace statements conceal the intense desires and anguish of the characters. Chekhov thus offers relative liberation to the actor and director; he offers a freedom of interpretation not granted by Shakespeare or Shaw. The indirect techniques of Stanislavsky become a possible method of conveying Chekhov’s fragments and impressions (although Chekhov complained most of his life that Stanislavsky had misinterpreted his plays) because the sub-text, or the feeling behind the word, has gained more importance than the word itself. In less impressionistic plays than Chekhov’s, however, the subtext can be a stratagem by which the actor ignores the playwright’s meaning, substituting the feeling he himself finds to be more compelling. The actor becomes a creator rather than an interpreter, seeking the clue to his performance in his own experience instead of in the experience of the character he is supposed to be playing.1

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Granted the power of a school of acting and production techniques to impose a special kind of theater on the Broadway audience, is this school’s power operative in the movies as well? I think not. Broadway audiences are notoriously pliable and faddist, while the more intransigent mass audiences respond primarily to that which moves or speaks for them. Furthermore, although on Broadway the literate play can be roughed up by the performance, in Hollywood, parts are tailored to fit personalities. What personality did the inarticulate hero assume in the movies? It is obvious that when Brando went to Hollywood he took Stanley Kowalski with him. With very little adjustment, Brando’s Stanley became the paraplegic war veteran of The Men, the ex-prize fighter-dock worker of On the Waterfront, the leather-jacketed delinquent of The Wild One, the peasant leader of Viva Zapata! and even Antony in the filmed version of Julius Caesar (to capitalize on Brando’s box office personality, Antony was changed into a sullen, beetle-browed muscle-man). Although the hero maintained, in almost every case, his identification with sexuality and violence, he could no longer be accused of cruelty or brutality.

Was it merely to the magnetism of Brando’s personality that the mass audience responded, as they had responded in the past to Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper? Again, I think not. Brando’s personality, as he never tires of telling the press, has little in common with that of the character he plays: one of his first Broadway roles was the sensitive poet Marchbanks in Candida and he has lately been attempting roles of a more articulate nature. Furthermore, those actors who have imitated Brando’s inarticulate style have achieved almost as much success as he.

I do not think we can escape the conclusion that Brando’s spectacular film success rests to a large extent on his being one of the images (he was the original image) of the inarticulate hero. It is, in other words, to the inarticulate hero that the mass audience responds.

The most conspicuous thing about the inarticulate hero as a movie figure is that he is invariably an outcast or a rebel, isolated from friends, from parents, from teachers, from society. This is emphasized by his shabby, careless appearance; in a world of suits and ties, the leather jacket and open collar are symbols of alienation and rebellion. The main character in On the Waterfront is, until he is beaten up by labor hoodlums, befriended neither by police nor peers and finds consolation only in homing pigeons. Although the hero of The Wild One begins as the leader of a group of cyclists who terrorize a small town, he repudiates his vicious companions and is, in turn, assaulted by the furious townspeople. The young boy (James Dean) of Rebel Without a Cause cannot gain acceptance by his adolescent contemporaries nor can he come to terms with his family until he is attacked by a juvenile gang revenging themselves for the death of their leader. The son in East of Eden is a pariah, doomed like Cain (with whom he is identified) to be despised by his father and rejected by the town in which he lives. The hero of Edge of the City, on the run from the police and alone until befriended by a paternal Negro dock worker, gets involved in a vicious hookfight with a sadistic dockyard foreman. The schoolboy in Careless Years, anxious to marry before he is old enough, isolates himself from everybody’s love and friendship until he is soundly whipped in a fist fight with his father. The oil worker of Giant lives alone in a dilapidated shack, building a fortune so that he can revenge himself on the smug and settled families of the area. In Jailhouse Rock, the hero spends a year in jail for manslaughter where he learns to play the guitar; upon being released, he becomes rich as a rock-and-roll singer, alienating his closest friends until he is beaten up by his best friend. In each case, although the hero is a rebel against established authority, he is not necessarily identified with the lawless elements of society. He is in the middle, isolated and alone, a victim of forces he cannot understand. Frequently involved with the police, he is often in jail. Society itself is viewed as the outside of a prison, mechanical, forbidding, inhibitive, and repressive; but curiously enough the hero is trying to enter this prison, for it offers warmth and security on the inside. The obstacle is his own rebellion and before he can enter he must get involved in violence, as if in expiation for some sin. Before he can become a member of society, he must first be beaten up. In order to win—to be accepted—he first must lose.

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The pattern of all these films, then, is the same: although the hero starts off on the wrong side, he is almost always converted to righteousness before the end. This is usually accomplished with the aid of his one ally in society, the girl who loves him. The girl (her face is that of Julie Harris, Natalie Wood, Eva Marie Saint, and Elizabeth Taylor, but her character doesn’t vary) is frequently an adolescent and invariably virtuous and understanding. Unlike the boy, she speaks coherently (and interminably), attends school regularly, gets good grades, and is accepted from the outset by her family and friends. Most significant, she exhibits a maternal protectiveness that belies her adolescent appearance and tends to make the hero extremely dependent on her (a situation reflected in much of our popular music where the recurring motif is “I want you, I need you, I love you”). The boy’s actual mother has little personality, little influence on his life, and even less of a role, while the girl friend is the only one who can control him. The disguised family romance usually found in these movies becomes, in Giant, more explicit. One of the main objects of dispute between Rock Hudson and James Dean is Hudson’s wife, Elizabeth Taylor. Only she offers the boy understanding and tenderness, and it is primarily for frustrated love of her that the boy fashions his revenge on the moneyed families of the town.

The antagonism which the boy feels toward society, convention, law and order is, of course, merely an extension of hostility toward his father. While Brando’s films are not concerned much with family life (the isolation of the character he plays is complete), most of James Dean’s films center on the family situation, a fact which accounts for a good deal of his posthumous popularity. In East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, Dean is found in violent combat with his father or father figure. In Rebel Without a Cause, for example, the crucial scene occurs when the boy lashes his father for his weakness and for having no effective advice to offer him in time of trouble. In East of Eden, the boy is alienated by his father’s indifference to him and his inability to see that his best son is not Abel, the conventional good boy, but Cain, the unconventional rebel. The boy’s feelings toward his father, however, are, as we might expect, ambivalent. In one scene in East of Eden, the boy, whipped to indignation by his father’s coldness, begins to pummel and ends by embracing him. The boy’s acceptance by society at the end of these films is usually a symbol of filial reconciliation. The greatest reward the hero can achieve is acceptance by the group and the love of his father. And here we have a glimpse into the meaning of the hero’s inarticulacy, for we are led to believe that his original alienation arose out of misunderstanding. Conflict is caused by a failure in communication; the boy cannot express his true feelings and therefore the father thinks him hostile. In the final scene of East of Eden, the father has suffered a paralytic stroke and is dying. He lies mutely on his bed (the camera shooting from above emphasizes his helplessness), his arms and lips paralyzed, able to signify assent or denial only with his eyes. Only then, when the parental authoritative voice of the father is quiet, when there can be no interruptions from him, when the fear he has instilled has been dispelled by his powerlessness, only then can the boy speak truly, coherently, and clearly, and effect understanding and reconciliation.

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Ambiguous feelings toward the father (leading to hostility toward society in general) is, of course, a classic juvenile dilemma, and there can be little doubt that the inarticulate hero is fostered and cherished by the juvenile elements of our society. The striking thing to note is how effectively adolescents have been able to persuade our culture today to conform with their views of it (a recent ad for Look Magazine promises the life of Jesus as seen “through the troubled eyes of a teen-ager”). It is significant that not only Marlon Brando and James Dean have become spokesmen for the adolescent generation, but Elvis Presley as well; for Presley is the musical counterpart of the inarticulate hero. For the first time in recent memory, popular music has discarded intelligibility, even on the most basic level. Beginning by ignoring language, rock and roll is now dispensing with melodic content and offering only animal sounds and repetitive rhythms. In Elvis Presley, the testament of Stanley Kowalski is being realized, for, besides the physical resemblances and the explicit sexuality they share, both prophesy the ruin of culture. It is no accident that the costume of the inarticulate hero (blue jeans, T-shirts, sneakers) is primarily the same as that of the proletarian hero. The burden of protest has been handed down, as a heritage, from the one to the other. Denied the social and political outlets rebellion once was permitted to take, the adolescent is now seeing dramatized, in his music and in the movies and TV, the only rebellion left him, the Freudian protest. Although this rebellion often has an apparently happy ending with the hero securely ensconced in the bosom of his family, in reality nothing has been resolved: the hero is never seen in a mature action. The adolescent rebel never grows up; when James Dean grows to middle age, in Giant, he merely has some powder added to his hair.

These films, then, give the hero an appearance of growth but derive their success from catering to the anarchic impulses of the young. Inarticulacy is a symptom of this anarchy because speech is an instrument of control. To teach children to speak is to teach them to frustrate their sexual and aggressive desires. To accept this speech is to accept all the difficulties as well as all the glories that speech entails: the teachings of the father, the complexity of the world, the discipline of a developing intelligence, the gifts of tradition, history, science, and art. To reject it is to find consolation in raw feeling, in mindlessness, and in self-indulgence, to seek escape in sex and violence. In the hero’s inarticulacy, we find represented the young American’s fears of maturity, for to speak out—to be a speaker—is to be a man. It is to replace his father, to take the consequences of his hostility toward him, symbolically to kill him. The unnamed sin for which the hero is beaten, at the end of most of these films, is the sin against the father. When this is expiated by physical punishment, then the hero finds his way home, not to independent manhood but to the kind of security which breeds conformity and complacency.

We can see how much of the acting and the writing of the inarticulate hero is not only neurotic but conformist. The need today is not for a hero who seems to be a rebel while really conforming to an established pattern, but for a hero who, without rejecting language, tradition, education, and art—without finding consolation in the impulsive anarchy of Stanley Kowalski—can express the non-conformism which stems from a long, hard, individualistic look at the world.

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1 According to studies, a good segment of the movie audience believes that movie stars “make it up as they go along.” They have lately, to some extent, been proven right. We are told that a few of the scenes in On the Waterfront, for example, were the result of actors’ improvisations. On the stage, A Hatful of Rain was also created to a large extent by actors’ improvisations. The emphasis put on improvisations by the Actors Studio is a sign of the actor’s attempt to usurp the playwright’s prerogatives. Many lazy and inept playwrights are entirely content to let the actors fill in the outlines of their under-written characters.

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