Marlon Brando tells in his autobiography that, one night, he and his partner at the time woke up to find a completely naked woman standing in front of their bed. As expected, she had a hard time convincing her companion that she didn’t know the unclothed woman. Brando was born in April 1924, the same year that teenagers Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy, Bobby Franks, in the United States. It was a time when the white press liked to feed rumors of white women being raped by blacks, who were described in dehumanizing terms.
Marlon’s mother was an alcoholic. On more than one occasion the actor recalled the feeling of abandonment that his illness caused him. His father didn’t help much either. Without major financial problems, he was more of an absence than a presence in the house, and while he was there, he took it upon himself to make fun of his son for her manners. Marlon’s sister remembered a family in which forgiveness did not exist.
Knowing that past may help illuminate Brando’s performance. Also his attitude on and off stage, and his alpha male pose. He acted with his whole being, like a good disciple of the method. He didn’t leave anything out. He did it in such a way that he became one of the great actors of the 20th century. Immense in works such as On the Pier (Rat’s Nest) or A Streetcar Named Desire, he had a reputation, with good reason, for being a headache for directors and producers.
They say that in Apocalypse Now he did everything possible to get Coppola mad. She showed up at the location where he was filming with a few extra kilos, to play a character that was originally supposed to be athletic. In the middle of filming he shaved his head, to the despair of the director, who had not foreseen this in his script. Marlon Brando insisted on not learning his lines and continually improvising. Coppola ended up putting a microphone in his ear to whisper the words while he performed. To hide the artifact, the director instructed the illuminists to surround Brando’s character, Colonel Kurtz, with shadows.
The result of so much nonsense was a terrifying Colonel Walter Kurtz, casting shadows, barely talkative, almost minimalist for another actor, but not for Marlon. Brando was simply an acting animal who dominated his craft in such a way that everything became Art, with a capital letter.
Both in fiction and in life, Brando represented the anti-intellectual capable of leaving a mark on the thoughts of more than one generation; that character that makes you think that maybe the great thinker does not exist.
Maybe we are wrong to wait, at all times, for someone to guide us and, there is simply no map for the great rebellion; that Western nostalgia that condemns us to be eternal infants longing for a tutor to tell us what to do. The great rebellion is carried out without a road map written in advance, telling us, at every moment, what to do and how to do it. There is no roadmap in any action. There is no roadmap in any action. In no science there is a road map. What there is is a method, which seems the same, but it is not. What we can most aspire to is to involve our entire being in what we do, without leaving anything out. And while we are at it, let’s not stop petting that cat of the desired reality, of which we do not know if he will give us approval, in the form of purring.
