The character:	Stanley Kowalski
The actor:	Marlon Brando
The movie:	A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

I try not to degrade things that I am not deeply familiar with. Pavement, for example. I cannot stand Pavement, I do not understand the hype about Pavement, and my experience with them has convinced me that they are poseurs representing the worst of Gen X stereotypes. But I do not make a point of pontificating on this matter, because I don’t pretend to know that much about music.

I have a Pavement-style issue with “naturalism” in theater, and by proxy, in the movies as well. In theater, it seems basically impossible for anything to seem natural. You’re in a theater. No matter how hard they try, no matter how avant-garde the thinking or engaging the design, nothing can convince you that you are not in a theater. Movies have much the same problem, but there is an advantage in the pictures. Casting allows you to move towards a more natural, or at least less stylized, position. It’s an overdone example, but it’s overdone for a reason; Pather Panchali allows us to feel that we have stepped across the bounds of the movie and into something resembling life. For professional/non-child actors, there are even fewer examples to pull from. Off the dome, I’d reach for Barbara Loden in Wanda, and after that I don’t have a great set of answers. Peter Falk in A Woman Under the Influence? Hayley Squires in I, Daniel Blake?

Naturalism in film acting is a euphemism for two things, as far as I can tell. One of those things is the portrayal of working-class people or poorer. See the above examples. “Naturalist” is one of those things that the overwhelmingly bourgeois critical firmament talks about when they’re trying to emphasize how real and scary it seems for people to live blue-collar lives, or impoverished lives, or scarce lives. They may as well call it “Hobbesian” for what they really mean. (I’m looking squarely at Sean Baker here, whose understanding that sex workers exist has been confused for “empathy” or, even worse, “humanism.”) The other thing that naturalism means is there’s a lot of yelling. Naturalism is when people yell and scream and make lots of noise at one another. It helps if they talk over each other, too, but the most important thing is volume. By this definition, we may include the bourgeois or even the upper-classes: Rachel Getting Married, Marriage Story, and other no-account domestic dramas.

Maybe this is all very cynical, or maybe this is one of those misreadings that people make because the word itself has been used wrongly. Maybe “naturalist” is “nonplussed” or “enormity” for the arts crowd. By the definition that we basically agree on, Brando’s performance in Streetcar is the gold standard for naturalism. Run-down apartment and shabby clothes, drinking cheap beer and playing poker with his similarly working-class friends? Check. A sense that this is how the other half lives, that these base emotions can only really be expressed by an underclass that doesn’t have the breeding to keep it in? Check. Yelling? I mean, lol.

I’m still waiting for the interpretation of Stanley that makes the STELLA scene make real sense, something that does more than Kim Hunter slinking down the steps or Brando sinking his face into her clothes. The sex, presumably, is just sinfully good in Streetcar, but it’s hard not to wonder if the sex is especially good for Stella because she hasn’t had that many partners more than it’s because of Stanley’s cocksmanship. Brando cannot definitively answer that question, and so we are left with rationalizations for what keeps Stella with Stanley in the first part of the film. So the rationalizations abound, and the naturalism resonates, and what’s left is a series of stark indictments. The law, Stanley’s precious Napoleonic Code, will never touch him. His friends will never leave him. Even Stella is trapped. With the impunity of a Viking raiding some convent, and with much the same track record, Stanley is bound to persist in all of his viciousness.