For my family, the Passarellos, Hortons, and Turkelsvibrant voices all.
Down in the Holler
HERE WE HAVE A FILM STILL OF BRANDO at his most filmable: garments rent and wet, hands cradling his temples, and the name of a star on his wide, taut lips. A half-dressed mass of wet sinew and moxie could keep any scene in the cultural memory, but Stella! would never be Stella! without Brandos gloriously ugly noise.
Most speech teachers will tell you the best way to tax your instrument is either to flatten the sound hole made by your lips, jaw, and throat or to finish your words in the rear of the mouth, rather than at the lips and front teeth. Throughout his movie career, Brando, the forebear of Mumblecore, rolled his voice toward his molars, where it slumped over his epiglottis like a delinquent schoolboy at the back of the bus. Stella! is no exception. That clenched neck squashes his airway, and his downturned mouth and retracted tongue reduce resonance. The bared teeth add grit and rape tone. If this voice had come from an inanimate instrumenta trombone, sayit would be one whose bell and slide had been run over by a streetcar.
This is not to say, however, that the Stella! could ever be improved upon, especially with something as Apollonian as voice training. Brando would add no further art to the moment by relaxing his throat and mouth into a broad and yawning Stah-lah. In fact, an operatic Stella! might have made the sound forgettable, assuring it would never escape the world of the script. Brandos warped vocal channelpaired with a lung power as beefy as his young physiqueshakes the boundaries of the context in which it is uttered, and takes it outside of the scene. This Stella! that we all remember is mighty, and it is mighty because it just hurts.
We hurt as he winces through the pained Hey and the bitten first vowel of her name. When he opens to that oft-mimicked, strained aaaaugh, something gravelly and hoarse is hefted from within him, but cant quite make it out of his mouth, and that halted timbre hurts us, too. This transmutable hurt is what moves the line of dialogue to raw soundwhat makes us hear the haggard notes of Brandos Stella! as a scream.
But what part of the scream moves us to keep referencing it? No other movie screams showed up a half-century later, in the mouths of Seinfelds Elaine Benes and The Simpsons Ned Flanders. Though Brando yelled in Julius Caesar and The Wild One, those films sounds werent the grand finale of Dueling Brandos, a Saturday Night Live skit that pitted Peter Boyle and John Belushi against each other, swapping Stella!s to the theme from Deliverance. And no other line of stage dialogue has been lauded in the style of the Stella Shout Out, a twenty-six-year New Orleans tradition that invites contestants to try their best Stella! in Jackson Square.
But who wouldnt want to parrot a scream like Stella!? Its easy to learn, its fun to scream, and it even gets a laugh, because screams like these hold special powers. Stella! is a screaming memea unit of vocal culture built to replicate and to travel. I submit that Stella! or any other scream with legs and momentum employs a three-ingredient recipe:
It is physically impressive.
It sounds out of place.
It is somehow clownish.
It impresses us to watch the loose folds of Brandos T-shirt shake with his deep air. Such heavy sounds are periscopes from within the body, so much so that we the listeners consider this upheaval of lungs, organs, and muscles a corporeal gift. It also carries an impressively fearless and acrobatic physical artistry. Like watching a ballerina or an Olympic sprinter, this is a thrill we can take personally, because we are made of the same raw materials. Hearing Brando push his voicean application nearly all of us are born withsuggests that inside us might be a Stella! that shakes the alleyways, especially because he uses that unprofessional throat shape to deliver the line. In doing so, he makes that much feeling look both cleansing and possible.
It sounds out of place because he is in the Faubourg Marigny at midnight, and, as Miz Eunice tells Stanley at the top of the scene, his kind of noise will force the law to haul you in and turn the fire hose on you, like they did the last time. Whats more, live man-screams were not common in early 1950s feature films. It was rare to see any A-list actor this loud, this up-close, and this unafraid to look shamefully desperate in a movie. Though we might now reward actors who immerse themselves so deeply in the muck of feeling, back then, it was not a part of filmmaking to watch them relinquish control to the camera. And this out-of-place-ness makes the scream doubly memorable.
And Stella! is clownish because the last syllable is a vomited, metallic duckwalk of a sound, more tenor than baritone, screamed by a man notorious for monkeying around with his voice (the cotton balls in The Godfather, the eerie drone of Kurtz, the show tunes in Guys and Dolls). Its clownish because only total clowns yell outside a girls window and expect results. Its clownish because Brando played Stanley Kowalski as a goofy brute, perhaps to up the contrast between the characters resting self and his violent tendencies. And finally, its clownish because, as cute as their intentions might be, clowns are also fucking terrifying.
But we must not forget that Stella! is also memorable because it works. Despite Stanleys rotten behavior in the scene before it, despite the weird and embarrassing sound that comes from his mouth, the camera cuts to a woman hearing his voice and then moving. She puts a zombie hand on the door and follows the sound down the wrought iron staircase, moving until she can find the body that screamed her name. Stellas palms sliding over that thorax that just trembled with sound; Stellas fingers caressing the wounded throat. Stellas calm and silent mouth sucking the fumes of the scream from the screamer.
Brandos Stella! says Im here, or heal me, or perhaps I will die if you do not come to me, and come Stella does. Perhaps we love Stella! because it is proof that the voice can move things in the outside world. That, in the bodys arsenal, the voice can exist not as a genteel language delivery service, but as a means of control. Stella! proves that you might have wounded someone you love, you might have woken the neighbors, you might have pushed your voice until it sounds cartoonish and alien, but this scream of yours, if it comes from deep enough inside you, it is your best bet.
Perhaps this is the fourth tenet of my recipe for the screaming meme: at all costs, it must have the power to manipulate.
