Undefeated

While reading the end of the play, I couldn't help but thinking of a common saying in the NBA whenever a great player nears the end of his career that goes something like this: "Father time is undefeated." Chance says almost the exactly the same thing: "Time--who could beat it, who could defeat it ever?" Yet, despite the inevitability of time, there seems to be a major effort to defeat it and turn back the clocks. Aunt Nonnie seems to sum it up pretty well: "What you want to go back to is your clean, unshamed youth. And you can't." Chance yearns to live in those idealized moments when he is young and with Heavenly. But he can't.

In Sweet Bird of Youth, beauty and love are very strongly tied with with time. It is common, and inevitable, that physical beauty fades with time. What seems new, however, in the play is the notion that "you're too old for a lover." This is especially depressing following Chance's conclusion that love is everything. Chance explains:

"the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. I don't mean just ordinary pleasure or the kind you can buy, I mean great pleasure"

The notion that love fades with time is only later reinforced as Chance gives "back a feeling of youth" to "Middle-aged people" through his "love-making." To Chance, this idea is just a cog in the wheel of the clock of father time that inevitably defeats everyone; time is is an "enemy" that "gnaws away, like a rat gnaws off its own foot caught in a trap, and then, with its foot gnawed off and the rat set free, couldn't run, couldn't go, bled and died."

While father time is, in fact, undefeated, Chance gives himself something to be happy about that he overlooks. As he points out, "nothing that’s happened to me or to Heavenly since can cancel out the many long nights without sleep when we gave each other such pleasure in love as very few people can look back on in their lives” (36). As everyone succumbs to time we can either focus on turning back the clock (as Chance and Princess do), or as Chance aptly points out, we can focus on creating memories that nothing can take away, not even father time.

-Andrew T

Over-dramatic Actresses

Throughout Sweet Bird of Youth, I was reminded of the Saturday Night Live sketch about the game show, "Secret Word," with the recurring guest of the washed-up Broadway star who can't seem to let go of her previous stardom. The Broadway star, called Mindy Elise Grayson, is portrayed by Kristen Wiig.



The reason for my association was primarily caused by of the first lengthy speech Princess Kosmonopolis/Alexandra del Lago delivers. She's obsessed with her own art and own career, and diverges from her previous pattern of regular dialogue to pontificate upon her previous lifetime:

"They told me I was an artist, not just a star whose career depended on youth...There's nowhere else to retire to when you retire from an art because, believe it or not, I really was once an artist. So I retired to the moon, but the atmosphere of the moon doesn't have any oxygen in it..." (p 33).

It's very hard for me to take her character seriously, as she comes off to me nothing more than a superficial alcoholic obsessed with youth and beauty (soap opera material much?). Actually, nearly everyone in this play came off to me as superficial and selfish. But the Princess in particular struck me with her bubble-headed daze and her histrionic, compulsive behavior. She seems to me like the type of person who dwells on the Olay commercials, yearning to look 10 years younger, refusing to compromise with herself and her future.

At the end, when her picture is successful, I'm left deeply unsatisfied. Am I supposed to be happy that her picture breaks records and is successful, despite her doubts? I don't really want to be. It seems too much of a cop-out. I mean, yes I get that ultimately she will age and lose fame, especially with the last line of "the enemy, time, in us all," and that her success is only temporary, but somehow a much more depressing "no-one-wins, especially-not-the-psychotic-actress" ending would have left me a little more content. But I guess a happy ending sells better.

-Carrie

Everyone Pretends

“Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. I don’t mean just ordinary pleasure or the kind you can buy, I mean great pleasure, and nothing that’s happened to me or to Heavenly since can cancel out the many long nights without sleep when we gave each other such pleasure in love as very few people can look back on in their lives” (36).  

 

I think it’s interesting that Chance regards the biggest conflict in life—that is, love—as a performance, because performance is, at its core, powered by imagination. Imagination can be more pessimistically viewed as the vehicle for pretending and, by extension, denial. 

There’s a lot of pretending in Sweet Bird of Youth. The Princess hires Chance to pretend to love her as she pretends that her reputation as the beautiful young star can be immortalized if she hides behind her makeup and aliases wherever she goes. Chance pretends that he still has a chance with Heavenly and that their love is true when in reality, he treats her as nothing more than a sexual object. He wants to pretend that he is successful around the people of his past by using the Princess’s resources; he believes that through this pretending he can get Heavenly back. I wonder what this trend of actors play-acting in real life in the plays we have been reading could be telling us.

While most of the pretending is for less than noble purposes, there are some that seem to have been inspired by benign intentions. That being said, I don’t know what to make of Boss Finley’s final act—pun intended—for his dying wife. He bought her the diamond pendant the day she died to allow her to pretend that she wasn’t close to death, and he pretended with her. The sweet gesture soured, however, when he promptly returned the pendant the next day after she died. He also mentioned that she didn’t stop pretending until the very end, so she must have had a less painful end. So should we pretend? Does it hurt less in the end if we lie to ourselves than if we confronted the reality and the pain of such confrontation head-on?

-Ly Pham

Names or Labels?

What struck me almost immediately while reading Sweet Bird of Youth were the names of places and people in the play. It is pretty easy to discern certain meaning when Tennessee Williams’ has named his characters and the places they inhabit everything from “Heavenly” to “St. Cloud” to “Fly.” Of course the girl who is supposed to embody purity is named “Heavenly” and “Fly” is an irritating errand boy buzzing around looking for “Chance”…who took a chance by leaving St. Cloud (and his youth), and then took another by trying to return to it (St. Cloud and his youth).

I was tempted almost to roll my eyes at some of these naming choices Williams made. However, I started to think about it further and had a change of heart. I mean, what’s so bad about making the meaning you are placing on things and people apparent? Is it especially valuable to make symbols and representations hidden and obscure—so that only the meticulous readers can find them at all? By doing this, a writer is inevitably sacrificing the understanding of some, if not many.

Wholly apart from this realization, though, I found that the abstract names Williams employs added another sort of effect to the play. By giving his characters these abstract names—“Princess,” “Heavenly,” etc., he labels them; he tries to sum them up. In a way, he dehumanizes them by attempting to so simply characterize them, instead of treating them as complex individuals. We find, though, that these characterizations are as easily broken as they were imparted—“Heavenly,” for example, is not as pure as her father would like everyone to believe—serving then to show that people are more than archetypal.

"Mr. [DeMille/Williams/Wayne], I'm ready for my close up!"

Pretty soon into the play, it seemed clear to me that Williams was drawing on a number of other characters in his creation of the Princess, Alexandra del Lago. In particular, she seems similar (a little too similar for my taste) to Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard, a movie made nine years before Sweet Bird of Youth. Del Lago, like Desmond,  is an aging movie star who tries to stage a comeback and fails. She starts a romantic/sexual relationship with a man who acts as a financial parasite. And, of course, reference is made by both del Lago and Desmond to the dreaded close up. In Act One, Scene One (page 34 in my edition), Princess says, "The camera advances and you stand still and your head, your face, is caught in the frame of the picture with the light blazing on it and all your terrible history screams while you smile." Hmm... sounds familiar. Perhaps because that same nightmarish sentiment is captured in Sunset Boulevard's infamous climactic scene in which Desmond goes mad obsessing over the close-ups that will reveal her changed appearance in her comeback film. I've linked to the scene so you can decide for yourself whether Williams borrowed too heavily. I mean, Desmond even calls herself "The Princess"in reference to her role....

But putting the issue of similarity to the side, I think both the movie scene and the scene in the play approach capturing how painful it can be for women who suffer because they are valued as things to be viewed. How successful are they in expressing that idea? I'm not certain. Many viewers and readers will pity Desmond and del Lago, sure, but I'm concerned by the madness and addiction that plague both characters. For me, it seems to almost bridge into stereotypes surrounding female hysteria and instability. Additionally, I'm not sure readers and viewers outside of our class who aren't familiar with Mulvey and the theory of the (straight) male gaze will necessarily read the works as critical of social structures. I think it may be all too easy for the texts to be seen as extending pity to women who can't handle getting old or losing fame. And I'm not sure pitying female characters who are depicted as highly flawed in stereotypical ways really does much for feminist causes. But hey, maybe others read the scenes differently than I do. I'd be interested to know and hear from you guys.

by Jack Flynn

Ageism

SBoY is set in a society much like ours today where the old have no human value. Aging is a catastrophe to Chase and Princess Kosmonopolis. But why are they, and we, obsessed with youth? Even today, we are surrounded daily by age-defying products, cosmetic surgeries, and magazines with phrases such as, “Take ten years off your age!” The founding fathers of the United States powdered their wigs and wore clothes that imitated the sloping shoulders of the. Since then, the focus has shifted from wisdom and experience to appearance and image. (Says something about our priorities, doesn’t it?) The greatest compliment now is to be told you look younger than your age. How did we reach this point?

In the 1800s, a form of Protestantism focused on the importance of youth, self-improvement, and progress in order to achieve redemption for sins. Changes in the workplace from industrialization also made young workers more attractive then old for labor. Physicians in the early 1900s also spoke of aging as an “incurable disease,” and when doctors say something, we tend to believe it. Today and in SBoY, the young grace all sorts of media. They are seen as possessing sharp minds and “ideal” bodies. Aging, on the other hand, is a time when we are declining and our bodies and minds are dull and losing our capabilities. There are fewer opportunities open when youth is gone, and both Chase and Princess Kosmonopolis have an acute sense of this phenomenon.

As Bob Dylan says to his listener, "May you stay forever young." 

“Time—who could beat it, who could defeat it ever? Maybe some saints and heroes, but not Chance Wayne.”

Chance and Princess have a peculiar fixation on time, so I traced the key word time throughout the play. I came to the conclusion that time is both characters greatest enemy: “It goes tick-tick, it’s quieter than your heart-beat, but it’s slow dynamite, a gradual explosion.” Whereas Princess is anxious about the effects of time and its aging properties, Chance also worries about the effects of time on his own appearance and its ability to change people.

For Princess, the passing of time strips her of youth and beauty. Once, a celebrated actress she is now plagued by panic attacks when she is reminded of her golden days. Chance’s struggle with time stems from the opportunities he has missed. As time passes, he becomes increasingly frustrated because he is unable to reach the level of success as an actor as he had anticipated. Chance laments in Act One, “…Time does it. Hardens people. Time and the world you lived in.”  However, the passing of does not change his feelings for Heavenly. And while time exacerbates the venereal disease she is inflicted with, Heavenly remains youthful in Chance’s eyes.  

While the play takes place in the South on a seemingly uneventful Sunday, the unlikely events that take place through the course of the day create a sense of urgency in the play and the reader: “Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.”