Blue Jasmine and the American Drama

Back in 1980, I decided to complete a field of study in 20th century American drama in pursuit of my master's degree in English.  Until I successfully wrote a four hour exam in the summer of 1981, day and night I studied, thought about, relived, and agonized over plays by Thornton Wilder, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee among others.

Prominent in these writers' plays is the idea that we live in illusions, both consciously and unconsciously, as individuals and in our collective identity as Americans.  Our collective illusion takes shape in the American Dream.

Last night, while savoring our dinner at the Falling Sky Pour House Delicatessen, the Deke and I talked for a bit about where illusion ends and lying begins.  How much do we live by illusions that we are unware of as false ways of seeing and doing things and how much do we lie and know we lie?  We didn't arrive at an answer, but we agreed that illusions and lying erode everything:  they erode our sense of ourselves, erode family life, erode relationships with friends and at work, and erode life in business, church, government, and other institutions.

I didn't know when I sat down to watch the Woody Allen movie, Blue Jasmine that it would be a movie about illusions, lies, and madness.

As the movie got underway, though, I was at once absorbed by the story of Blue Jasmine and, at the same time, memories and associations from my studies of 20th century drama began to flood my mind.

At first, it was an American movie that started to play again in my mind:  John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence.  From the beginning, Jasmine's behavior was odd.  She was under the influence of something, not always chemical,  and showed signs of a madness I remembered from this movie and other American plays.

As the movie developed, I was seeing Cate Blanchett playing Jasmine, but I could also see Katherine Hepburn playing two roles, Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night and Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.  As the past kept flashing forward into Jasmine's mind and as she tried to fight its truths with her own illusions of what the past had been, the fracture between what was true and what she wanted to be true was fracturing her sanity, much as it does with Mary Tyrone and Amanda Wingfield, and with the fracturing comes the inevitable mental deterioration, what I think of as madness.

Laura Wingfield rushed in, too.  It wasn't just the verbal parallels between Blue Roses, Blue Moon, and Blue Jasmine, but Jasmine is fragile, she longs for something better and fuller in her life. 

It wasn't too long before the tragic memories of Blanche DuBois, from A Streetcar Named Desire took over. When I used to teach this play, students' responses to Blanche were mixed.  Some felt deep sympathy for her fragility and understood that her sensitive nature made it impossible for her to live in the world she was actually in.  Instead, she created a world of illusions, a world more suited to her longings and delicacy, but doing so made self-destruction and collapse inevitable.  Other students despised her for being weak, for being unable to fact the truth of her life, for being coy, a liar, and manipulative.

The short paragraph I've written hardly covers the entirety of Blanche DuBois' complexity or her tragedy.

She is, however, along with Mary Tyrone, Laura Wingfield, Amanda Wingfield, and Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf a character who carries the weight of illusion and whose habits of wishing things could be otherwise turn into habits of lying and even of cruelty.

Without giving away the story, I'll just say that this is the part of American life Woody Allen explores in Blue Jasmine.  He brings these classic tales of the American drama into the 21st century.  The spiritual and emotional problems are much the same:  lies and illusions mixed with longings and false dreams tear both individuals and families apart. 

My friend Bridgit Lacy wrote not long ago about the cumulative nature of aging.  She wrote: 

In some respects, we age in a linear fashion. We go from one year to 53 years in a pretty straight-forward manner. But we bring everything along with us, like post-it notes that describe who we are. Every mean conversation, every joyous occasion, every broken bone and forgotten promise, it all comes along for the ride.

This is exactly what the playwrights I've mentioned portrayed in their great characters gone mad, whether it's Willy Loman or the women I've already alluded to.

I brought these "post-it notes" of my intense experience studying and teaching American plays to my viewing of Blue Jasmine.  I had not idea when I sat down to watch it that the gripping performance of Cate Blanchett and Woody Allen's devastating script would call all these plays that live in me back to life again.

My primary experience with this movie was the movie itself.  If ever one were looking for searing confirmation that Bridgit Lacy got it right, that we are, as we age, all that we have been, then the movie to see is Blue Jasmine.  I found it an emotionally taxing movie.  In made me nervous. It unsettled me.  It struck me dumb.  It immobilized me. It elevated my already high regard for the fiercely sublime acting of Cate Blanchett.

I found it profoundly truthful, in a way that has lived cumulatively in me for over thirty years, thanks to the heritage I'm most familiar with of our nation's theater from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.