White Woods and Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen Rewrites A Streetcar Named Desire

Most of Woody Allen's allusions to Tennessee Williams in his films and writings have been to A Streetcar Named Desire.1 So it is not surprising that Streetcar (1947) is written all over Allen's recent film, Blue Jasmine (2013). Allen goes beyond adopting and adapting plot lines and characters from Williams's play. He has so deeply assimilated the earlier work that motifs and lines of dialogue, often transferred to different characters or situations, become the imaginative counters with which he constructs his own screenplay. The film's reviewers almost invariably commented on the parallels with Streetcar, many noting, too, that Cate Blanchett, who plays the title character, Jasmine, had also successfully played Blanche Dubois in Liv Ullmann's 2009 production of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.2 But for all the similarities in character types and plot structure and for all the allusions to specific lines in Streetcar, the themes of Blue Jasmine are very different from those of Williams's play because the story that Allen tells also channels the fall of Bernie Madoff and his wife, Ruth. In this essay I will review the similarities between Blue Jasmine and A Streetcar Named Desire, explore the implications of the allusions and the changes Allen makes, and suggest how the post-World War II play works in the postMadoff film.Blanchett's Jasmine (as the character Jeanette has renamed herself) most obviously reiterates Blanche. She introduces herself to one of her suitors as Jasmine French, explaining that she is named for "night-blooming jasmine," just as Blanche explains to Mitch that "Blanche Dubois" is French for "white woods" (299).3 Like Blanche, Jasmine prefers illusion to reality. Blanche tells Mitch, "I don't want realism. I want magic! ... I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth" (385). Jasmine similarly tells her sister that she did not lie to her latest suitor but rather "dressed up a few facts" and "omitted a few unpleasant details." After all, she says, speaking in contemporary parlance, "People reinvent themselves, don't they?" By the end of the play ana film neither Blanche nor Jasmine can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. In an interview, Blanchett said that in preparing for her role she thought about characters such as Blanche Dubois, "people who have fallen from grace," but she also studied the Madoff story and took particular note of once wealthy women, like Ruth Madoff, who lost everything in the recession.4 This blending of Blanche and a woman like Ruth Madoff (at least as she is popularly conceived)5 gives Jasmine a harder fashionable edge than Williams's Blanche possesses but also_renders Allen's and Blanchett's portrait of a self-centered society woman fallen on hard times more sympathetic than we might expect.At the beginning of Allen's film Jasmine comes to stay with her sister, Ginger (played by Sally Hawkins), in San Francisco (instead of New Orleans). We learn about Jasmine's past through a series of flashbacks triggered to contrast with or explain incidents in the present. For example, the cluttered, gauchely decorated apartment that is home to Ginger and her two noisy little boys clearly distresses Jasmine, much as Stella's more ramshackle two-room apartment shocks Blanche, and she mentally compares it with her own spacious and elegant former home. The flashbacks are a filmic equivalent for Williams's gradual exposition of Blanche's story recounted by Stanley, Stella, and Blanche herself! Since many of the flashbacks represent what Jasmine is remembering when she detaches herself from the present (talking to herself, staring into space), they also correspond to Williams's expressionist use of visual and aural effects-the glaring light of the passing train, the music of the Varsouviana-to convey Blanche's consciousness, her memory of the night her young husband shot himself. The night that Jasmine remembers is when she met her husband; the song "Blue Moon" was playing. …