I first met Marlon Brando in my 12th grade English class, when our teacher screened The Island of Dr. Moreau one afternoon for the whole grade. It was disastrous, the kind of movie meant to be screened solely for horny high school students more interested in the opportunity to turn off the lights than watch a film.  

So, it’s not surprising that my relationship with Marlon got off to a rocky start. We didn’t meet again until college, when my housemate threw a Godfather marathon and somewhere around the same time, I watched A Streetcar Named Desire in film class. It’s hard to resist the combination of the two when viewed in close proximity: Brando’s iconic performances defined masculine sex and power for generations. If my high school English teacher had chosen carefully, he’d have had a much more attentive audience.

Brando passed away on Thursday at the age of 80. He leaves behind a legacy that separates screen acting from before Brando and after Brando, forever changing American cinema.

Like most American icons, we use Brando as malleable subject material, with infinite capacity to contain our myths and metaphors. David Thomson’s editorial in The New York Times today posits Brando as an ever-changing symbol of America’s identity confusion. It’s a tempting analogy — as Thomson writes:

At the end, he was huge, stranded, nearly alone, his life littered by the needs (or the appearance) of more and more children, and by what was reported as near penury.

Brando’s film career as simile for the ascent and plateau of the American empire isn’t a seamless fit, but it seems particularly timely as we celebrate our country’s heady birth and debate its current position (particularly if you too have seen The Island of Dr. Moreau, one of Brando’s later films). As Thomson suggests, we want our country to fulfill its potential and capitalize on its early triumphs.  Even when we celebrate our nation’s diversity of opinion and voice, we sometimes wish it would stop being so argumentative and divisive, and start acting heroic.

llouison