Core Response: Marlon Brando's Method Madness

Looking back now, it's easy to take Marlon Brando's meteoric rise to stardom for granted, and to forget how he transformed modern conceptions of star acting. Working during the fall of the studio-contract system in the 1950s, Brando leveraged the celebrity prowess he had accrued through theatrical performances to score a series of one-picture deals, affording him unprecedented freedom to select his roles. In the three years following his silver screen debut, he played a paraplegic, a Polish factory worker, a Latin-American revolutionary, a Roman general, and a delinquent biker—a wild, zig-zagging course that soon defined his particular, chameleon-like brand of acting. Brando’s performances revolutionized American acting precisely because he didn’t seem to be "performing"—he wasn’t putting something on so much as he was being. His desire to avoid typecasting frequently led him to adopt an overly mannered, almost campy style in rebellion to conventional material and methods. Whereas previous Hollywood stars seemed to regard acting as a lucrative party trick or a pleasurable recreation, Brando's "new rebel" persona prized authenticity over ostentatiousness, primeval psychological drives over old-fashioned morals.

According to Barry King, “the self-referentiality of Method acting—the so-called personal express of realism of Brando, for example—rather than representing the triumph of the actor as impersonator can be seen as a successful adaptation of impersonation to the pressures of personification, deploying impersonation to refer back to the person of the actor, the consistent entity underlined each of his or her roles” (179). King goes on to conclude that "impersonation," which is the ability to subsume one's identity to a particular character, becomes less valued in the economies of film production than the capacity for "personification"—the ability to construct a continuing personal and authorial mark in each film role. In A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Brando's performance certainly embodies these competing forces of character acting and celebrity persona. As a result of the uncanny vitality he infused into the slouching, scratching, sweating performance, his tabloid antics, and some public ado about the much touted Method, Brando was widely branded as what he resentfully recalled “a blue-jeaned slobbermouth,” and “the Neanderthal man.”

However in seeking authenticity through film roles, Brando only cultivated an alternative type of persona: that of the sensitive rebel. His reliance on his own self-psychoanalysis to bring film characters to life defined his "presence as a unique object," and therefore relinquished more and more of his authorial autonomy to producers and directors who sought him out as his career progressed (King 181). Even Elia Kazan had selected him for the role of Stanley precisely because of his reputation. On a previous Stanley Kramer production, he had become known for a similarly real if peculiar way of working: publicity stressed that he had spent three weeks living in a veterans’ hospital among paraplegics, learning how they moved and what they felt. In addition, his rugged physicality and charismatic face, factors largely out of his control, determined his desirability as a celebrity to a large extent. Even Marlon Brando could not escape the "contradictory pressures" induced by film actors' inevitable oscillation between impersonation and personification in attempts to negotiate their on and off-screen images.