Marlon Brando in American Melancholy: A Character Analysis

Overview

In American Melancholy, Joyce Carol Oates does not create a fictional character named Marlon Brando. Instead, she addresses the real actor directly in the lyric poem “To Marlon Brando in Hell” (Chapter 17). The poem accuses Brando of suffocating his beauty in fat, mocking the adoration of his audience, and throwing away his greatness like trash. It also recalls the speaker’s adolescent fixation on him, beginning when she sneaked out at age fifteen to watch The Wild One. The poem oscillates between harsh judgment and a strange intimacy, confessing at the end that the speaker would join Brando in Hell. This analysis examines the figure of Brando as constructed by the poem: his motivations, his tragic arc, his relationships, and how he embodies the collection’s themes of memory, decay, and artistic witness.

Plot Role and Context

The poem is not a narrative but a direct address. Brando’s “role” in the book is as the subject of this single, intense poem. The speaker lists a series of accusations, each beginning with “Because,” building a case against him. The plot of the poem is the speaker’s own journey: from a fifteen‑year‑old girl lying to her parents to see The Wild One in a Buffalo theater, to an adult woman reflecting on Brando’s career and personal failures. The poem functions as a kind of dark eulogy, placing Brando in an imagined Hell where he continues to dance (the tango) in mockery of his own grief. For additional context on how the collection treats artistic response, see the art as witness and response theme page.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

The poem ascribes several motivations to Brando, though these are the speaker’s interpretations, not biographical facts. Key traits include:

• Self‑loathing: The poem states “you loathed yourself, and made of yourself a loathsome person.” This self‑disgust is presented as the engine of his self‑destruction.
• Carelessness: His love is described as “debris tossed from a speeding vehicle.” He fathers eleven children he scarcely knows, including three with his housekeeper.
• Prankishness: The speaker calls him a “prankster” who always goes too far, sowing “death like semen.”
• Desire for anonymity: In an interview with Edward R. Murrow, Brando speaks of losing his “anonymity,” and the poem notes how quickly he tried to be “normal.”
• Despair masked by performance: In the scene from Last Tango in Paris, Brando dances the tango with drunken grace, then lowers his trousers and bares his buttocks “in the exhilaration of contempt.”

The poem uses these actions—the weight gain, the failed fatherhood, the on‑screen breakdowns—to argue that Brando deliberately sabotaged his own talent.

Chronological Arc

The poem traces Brando’s life in a fragmented, non‑linear way, but a clear arc emerges:

1. Youth and Breakthrough (1953–55): The speaker recalls seeing Brando in The Wild One (1953) and On the Waterfront (1954). At twenty‑three, he “derailed” A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. The 1955 Murrow interview shows a still‑hopeful actor playing bongo drums; the poem says “at this moment it was not (yet) too late.”
2. Middle Career and Self‑Sabotage: He directed the “film debacle” One‑Eyed Jacks and made a series of “stupid films.” He gained enormous weight, and the poem says “by late middle age you’d lived too long.”
3. Late Roles and Family Tragedy: He played Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, described as “bloated American madness.” The poem recounts his son Christian shooting his daughter Cheyenne’s fiancé to death, Christian’s imprisonment and early death, and Cheyenne’s suicide at twenty‑five.
4. Death: Brando died at eighty, but the poem insists “when you died, we understood that you had died long before.” His body had been “a great tree suffocated in its own rings, beginning to rot from within.”

This arc connects to the collection’s broader preoccupation with mortality and physical decay.

Relationships

The poem highlights several relationships that define Brando’s failures:

• With his mother: A portrait of his alcoholic mother sits on the mantel in his rented house. The poem implies she “failed to love you enough.”
• With his children: He is an “absent father” to eleven children. The tragedy of Christian and Cheyenne is presented as the direct consequence of his negligence.
• With his audience: He made “mockery” of their adoration. Yet the speaker herself admits a lifelong fixation, confessing she would join him in Hell.
• With lovers: He loved both men and women, “except not enough.” His sexuality is called “futile” as a bulwark against death.

The poem’s speaker also has a relationship with Brando—one of adolescent obsession that curdles into adult judgment, but remains intimate.

Key Decisions and Consequences

The poem singles out several decisions and their consequences:

The overarching consequence is that Brando “squandered” himself. The poem’s refrain is that he “threw away greatness like trash.”

Theme and Symbol Connections

Memory and Forgetting: The speaker’s adolescent memory of The Wild One remains a touchstone. She recalls details of the bus ride, the theater, the smell of popcorn and cigarette smoke. Brando himself becomes a figure of lost promise. This connects to the memory and forgetting theme.

Violence and Complicity: Brando is called the “predator male, without remorse” and the “consummate rapist” in Streetcar. The poem implicates both the actor and the audience who applauded him. See violence and complicity.

Mortality and Physical Decay: The poem obsesses over Brando’s fat: “you died encased in fat,” the wheelchair from The Men is “suffocated in the fat of the bloated Kurtz.” His body rots from within like a tree.

Art as Witness and Response: Oates’s poem itself is an act of witness. It does not offer forgiveness (“Where there has been such love, there can be no forgiveness”) but it refuses to look away. The poem is a direct response to a life lived in public.

Apocalypso: The poem titled “Apocalypso” in the collection describes something thrilling in cataclysm and the collapse of empires. Brando’s story mirrors that collapse: the empire of his fame, his beauty, his talent all come to an end.

For more on the collection’s exploration of endings, see the ending explained page.

Book‑Specific Questions and Answers

1. What does the poem accuse Marlon Brando of doing with his beauty?
   It accuses him of suffocating his beauty in fat and making a mockery of the adoration he received from audiences.

2. Why does the speaker recall sneaking out at age fifteen?
   To see The Wild One at a downtown Buffalo cinema. The memory represents the start of her lifelong fixation on Brando, and it becomes a symbol of adolescent recklessness and desire.

3. How does the poem connect Brando’s weight gain to his acting roles?
   It says the “wheelchair paraplegic of The Men was made to suffocate in the fat of the bloated Kurtz,” suggesting that his physical decay contaminated even his early, serious performances.

4. What does the phrase “at this moment it was not (yet) too late” refer to?
   It describes the 1955 Murrow interview when Brando played bongo drums with a “goofy happiness.” The poem implies that before his weight gain and family tragedies, there was still a chance for him to fulfill his potential.

5. How does the poem end, and what does that ending suggest about the speaker’s relationship with Brando?
   The speaker says “we would join you in Hell, if you would have us.” It suggests an unresolved blend of condemnation and longing—she cannot forgive him, yet she cannot abandon him either.

For further context on the poem’s role within the collection, see the questions and answers page.