The Relative Coolness of Marlon Brando

Ellen Hinshaw

ENG 106

Prof. Alsup

Mar. 21, 2016

The Relative Coolness of Marlon Brando

        The most well-known facts about Marlon Brando are of course that he was an actor, a bad boy, and just generally odd.  These, however, are extremely topical.  Why was he an actor?  What made him a bad boy?  Was he odd, or did he just develop his own style and ways of thinking?  The man had an interesting life start to finish, contributing non-stop to his image, because of course the first thing anyone thinks when they hear the name Marlon Brando is, “oh, he was cool.”

        Brando began acting as a child, not on a stage or in front of a camera, but for his alcoholic mother.  He was born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska and living most his early life in Libertyville, Illinois.  With a traveling salesman, abusive, and alcoholic father and two older sisters who flew to New York to pursue acting and art, only Brando was left to care for her ("BIOGRAPHY: Marlon Brando Lifetime").  This lack of a ponies and playtime childhood no doubt threw Brando into the first stages of cool.  Cool has responsibilities; he had to work and care all through his early life.  However, this does not mean he sat in the shadows and did all he was told; Brando was expelled from Libertyville High School after riding his motorcycle through the hallways, and was later also expelled form a military academy for excessive insubordination.  Rebellion is a huge part of cool, and this act thrust him into the rest of his life (Pountain, 2000)  .  Brando then did what all the cool do, he got out and moved to the city.  Following his sisters to New York, he studied at the Actors’ Guild under Stella Adler.  He started down this career path because in his early life, acting was all that he enjoyed, not to mention his father disapproved and it gave him a chance to explore himself.

        Acting is central to self mastery, which, according to Nietzsche, is central to developing into an ubermensch.  Brando’s preferred style of acting was even more about control of the self and mind: method acting.  He drew from his childhood and experience, even recalling his father’s violence; “If I have a scene to play and I have to be angry, I can remember my father hitting me” (Sheridan).    Beginning in the mid-40’s, his acting career took off from the start in his Broadway debut in I Remember Mama.  In 1951, Brando’s second film forever secured his name in Hollywood: A Streetcar Named Desire.  Nominated for Best Actor, Brando was praised for how realistically he portrayed the role.  No one had ever acted with such raw emotion.  

In his childhood it seems he was so unwanted that he looked for an identity that could be acceptable.  He became the epitome of what actors strived to achieve on-screen.  In this time period, the middle of the twentieth century, there was this thirst for rebellion.  People were throwing off tradition in every aspect of life, and Brando provided this cultural revolution with a face.  Los Angeles magazine described him as “rock n roll before anyone knew what rock n roll was.”  Brando inspired later bad boys like Elvis and James Dean.  They attempted to mimic his style.  Sure the type existed on the streets of New York or in the maw of Chicago, but Brando, in today’s terms, went viral.  He became an actor, not because of the money or because of the fame, it was literally the only thing he felt he could do.  

Brando was also interested in a sort of self-discovery.  He read books upon books on the human mind, effects of childhood experience, philosophy, psychology, religion, so on and so forth, studying philosophers such as Nietzsche and Freud (Bosworth, 2001). He often discussed, in adolescence, with his mother whether he should become an actor or minister, though he never quite understood religion.  Brando was disgusted by his father who raised and punished Brando and his sisters based on ideals of the Bible, but who would also beat them, drink, and have affairs. Brando’s only real connection to religion was his constant awe and respect for nature.