Brando and Elvis


Brando died today. He was larger than life, a transcendent spirit, like Elvis. It's axiomatic that things always contain their opposites. What was beautiful about these men was their spiritual power. It was a bird that we could watch fly at the edge of space, counterbalanced by a fat man in the bathtub with the blues .

There was something exciting about the existence of Marlon Brando when it was caught on film. It was like catching a picture of a UFO. "There. That's a real actor." Nobody else could dominate the screen the way he could, because they were too much like actors. He wasn't like an actor; he was a natural. He was a container who could open any window he chose, because nothing human was unwelcome in him.

In both Brando and Elvis there was a deep well of nature, and their thoughts and voices grew from it as innocently as trees growing out of the ground.

It was at the edge of space, where the spirit believes it can shoot on through the atmosphere of earth and transcend the body, where they both became lost in a lonely orbit. There is a Native American drawing that shows a fish and a bird locked in struggle. The bird has the fish by the tail and is trying to carry it up out of the water. The fish has the bird by the tail and is trying to pull it down into the water.

This is to show the nature of the relationship between spirit and matter.

In, "The Fugitive Kind, " by Tennessee Williams, Brando played a New Orleans musician stranded in a small Louisiana town, where he begins an affair with the woman who gives him a job as a store clerk.

Brando was paid a million dollars to do the play (originally entitled, "Orpheus Descending") on film. It got really bad reviews, and was considered very inferior to "Streetcar Named Desire."

But it certainly has an underlying cult following. When Nicolas Cage, in, "Wild At Heart, " proclaimed his snakeskin jacket the symbol of his individuality, and then morphed into Elvis Presley, David Lynch was combining Elvis with Brando's Xavier, to create the archetypal man whose god is Nature, and who stands against the poisonous pedagogy around him.

One of the most significant symbols of the movie is the husband, who is brutal and racist, dying in the upstairs room. He is the rotten cancerous American man who has put himself in the "upper room," separated from his Orpheus.

His wife is seduced by Brando, not because of anything Xavier does deliberately, but because it is the Nature energy he brings, that is missing in "the man upstairs," and cannot be denied. It's just the way he walks and talks. In one scene he describes a tiny bird, which has large, diaphanous wings, so that it is invisible to predators in the sky. And it never, in its whole life, touches the earth, until it dies and falls to the ground. That is the perfect symbol of the Puer. The lines were written by Tennessee Williams , but it was Brando, with his uncanny sense of timing, and his deliberate, unhurried movements that hypnotized the camera, who breathed life into them.

The unlived life is always there. In a generation of men who were too afraid of censure to allow Orpheus to be reflected in their nature, Elvis and Brando radiated an earthy sexuality.


Each man portrayed the rebel, the outsider, standing up against a deadly conventionality. And they touched in others the spark of immortality of the Spirit, even if it was only remembered for a moment, and then lost in the swamp of duty.

Brando was the greatest actor of his generation and perhaps the only one who really didn't think of acting as much of a profession. He claimed to be doing it only for the money. Being bought and sold seems to deal a serious blow to that youthful spirit. In Elvis, the string of bad movies and crass commercialization of his talent certainly was poisonous to his soul, and to his body.



Brando lived to be 80, but inside the only "fish" large enough to hold the bird with the diaphanous wings in check, and not be lifted away to early death.


He lived out his old age inside a very fat man, and his pain was visible. He once said that people don't understand that for every impression they take in, an artist might take in fifty. He was trying to explain what is different about people like him.

They are described as being sensitives because they are dealing with fifty times the emotional and somatic information.

Now there are no impressions, and the body, like a great vault that has been forced opened, is dead, the spirit gone missing from it. There have been sightings, though, in the memories of those of us who knew how good he really was.

Posted: Fri - July 2, 2004 at 05:25 PM