When I was much younger, I fell a little bit in love with Marlon Brando. Not the reedy, rounded Brando of The Godfather, but the young blunt Brando of A Streetcar Named Desire, and the nasal, quick-talking gangster in the pinstripe suit of Guys and Dolls. Oh, and Terry, let’s not forget Terry Malloy.
I have still not seen him play Johnny in The Wild One, but I don’t need to see the post-production photos to know I had a crush on a rebel.
I had a lot of trouble when I was a teenager trying to figure out what kind of man I wanted. Remember that this is pre-queer, pre-kink awareness, that I was still just a weird kid with weird friends and weird thoughts. And I loved Brando then. But now I wonder if I didn’t want to fuck him, so much as I wanted to be him. I watched Guys and Dolls again a few days ago and realized that he’s the only character I relate to. He’s also the only character with true agency and sexual power in the film, swinging as it does in its candy-colored 1940s New York. Go figure.
This crush was a strange one, because while I liked the man, and I liked the idea of the rebel, I didn’t see a space for me in his counterparts, in Stella or Sarah with their nice neat clothes. So I sort of gave up on him, and on the idea of falling for a rebel.
The undertone we can pick up in retrospect, of course, was that Brando’s image, and therefore my image of a rebel was a dominant man. I hadn’t learned yet how to sort the strength it takes to embrace countercultures from the overtly sexual nature of said strength. So I turned away from rebel crushes, though I do still have a soft spot in my heart for Brando.
I moved on to white knights.
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You know, I felt the same way about Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (which is one of the few plays aside from Shakespeare I enjoy reading). I related to Stanley, but never to Stella or Blanche. I rather disliked the two of them.
How about “Mutiny on the Bounty”? Swoon!
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