Here we are in 2008, and the pendulum of sexual misunderstanding has swung both ways now, in a few generations. Once, homosexuality was despised. Now, increasingly, homosexuality is advocated as an enlightened preference. Propagating the human species is not a priority in what is perceived as an era of over-population. Besides, we have test tube babies today, and cloning people is probably already being practiced behind closed laboratory doors.
What has remained the same in the past 40 years, however, is that people regard sex, in whatever form it takes, as the main priority of life. The pharmacies can't keep enough Viagra on the shelves.
"Tea and Sympathy," is only 'dated' for those people who don't realize that both the play, and the film, deal with the subject of love. Love is not sex. Sex is not love. You can have love without sex. You can have sex without love.
Perhaps, in some future era of civilization, if we don't blow ourselves up first, the time will come when caring so much for another person that you are willing to sacrifice your future for him, or for her, is more than a Quixotic fantasy. Actually, this has been the cultural ideal on and off for centuries. Ancient Greece and Rome glorified sex and demeaned marriage, as our role models seem to do; and their orgy palaces fell into ruins in the dust of time. Later, in the Middle Ages, the troubadours sang of romantic, idealized love. By the 1600's, as the incredible book "Don Quixote" humorously demonstrates, chivalry was already dead, a laughing-stock, totally divorced from reality. In Victorian and Edwardian England, sexuality became schizophrenic - incredible debauchery existed side-by-side with the kind of love story personified in the lives of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on Wimpole Street.
The two World Wars of the 20th-century despoiled and degraded many lives, on a wide scale never before seen in history. The film goddesses of the Silver Screen could play a whore one week, and a nun the next. Schizophrenia continued to reign, alive-and-well.
But now, we are immersed in a pornographic dream.
From that standpoint, of course "Tea and Sympathy" is dated. Some commentators here on the film even go so far as to entirely make up scenes which never occur in the movie, right out of the whole cloth of their own fantasies. No, in the last scene Laura never unbuttons her cardigan; and Tom never fondles her breast. More proof that people claim to see things that don't exist simply because they expect to see them. Even 'eyewitnesses' to major news events often don't really know what they're talking about.
If this is a cult film for homosexuals, it is because they see what they want to see in the movie, and not what exists. Clearly, Tom Lee is smitten with Laura long before the film starts, just as his first love was a blond schoolteacher when he was only twelve. Laura's line to his roommate: "Maybe Tom is deeply in love" could only apply to Tom's feelings toward herself.
What is to be learned from Maxwell Anderson's sensitive writing, as well as from Tennessee Williams' best work, is that love is the main thing, and that we choose those whom we love because they meet our psychological and emotional needs, and many times we are not even consciously aware what those needs really are. Reynolds, for example, although he was certainly ambivalent in his sexuality, still truly wanted a good woman to be his wife, which is why he married Laura and fully loved her in his own way; but he also needed patient help right from the start, whereas Laura was slow to realize his dilemma and, being admittedly a selfish woman at times, nursed her own hurts as their relationship deteriorated, quite apart from Tom's involvement at all. Her husband ended up a broken man, not because he was a frustrated, repressed homosexual, but because he had failed the love of his life and couldn't trust himself not to do the same again with another mate.
In "Tea and Sympathy", and in reactions to the film for the past decades, we see how the norms of society can entrap all of us, at both ends of the spectrum.
What has remained the same in the past 40 years, however, is that people regard sex, in whatever form it takes, as the main priority of life. The pharmacies can't keep enough Viagra on the shelves.
"Tea and Sympathy," is only 'dated' for those people who don't realize that both the play, and the film, deal with the subject of love. Love is not sex. Sex is not love. You can have love without sex. You can have sex without love.
Perhaps, in some future era of civilization, if we don't blow ourselves up first, the time will come when caring so much for another person that you are willing to sacrifice your future for him, or for her, is more than a Quixotic fantasy. Actually, this has been the cultural ideal on and off for centuries. Ancient Greece and Rome glorified sex and demeaned marriage, as our role models seem to do; and their orgy palaces fell into ruins in the dust of time. Later, in the Middle Ages, the troubadours sang of romantic, idealized love. By the 1600's, as the incredible book "Don Quixote" humorously demonstrates, chivalry was already dead, a laughing-stock, totally divorced from reality. In Victorian and Edwardian England, sexuality became schizophrenic - incredible debauchery existed side-by-side with the kind of love story personified in the lives of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on Wimpole Street.
The two World Wars of the 20th-century despoiled and degraded many lives, on a wide scale never before seen in history. The film goddesses of the Silver Screen could play a whore one week, and a nun the next. Schizophrenia continued to reign, alive-and-well.
But now, we are immersed in a pornographic dream.
From that standpoint, of course "Tea and Sympathy" is dated. Some commentators here on the film even go so far as to entirely make up scenes which never occur in the movie, right out of the whole cloth of their own fantasies. No, in the last scene Laura never unbuttons her cardigan; and Tom never fondles her breast. More proof that people claim to see things that don't exist simply because they expect to see them. Even 'eyewitnesses' to major news events often don't really know what they're talking about.
If this is a cult film for homosexuals, it is because they see what they want to see in the movie, and not what exists. Clearly, Tom Lee is smitten with Laura long before the film starts, just as his first love was a blond schoolteacher when he was only twelve. Laura's line to his roommate: "Maybe Tom is deeply in love" could only apply to Tom's feelings toward herself.
What is to be learned from Maxwell Anderson's sensitive writing, as well as from Tennessee Williams' best work, is that love is the main thing, and that we choose those whom we love because they meet our psychological and emotional needs, and many times we are not even consciously aware what those needs really are. Reynolds, for example, although he was certainly ambivalent in his sexuality, still truly wanted a good woman to be his wife, which is why he married Laura and fully loved her in his own way; but he also needed patient help right from the start, whereas Laura was slow to realize his dilemma and, being admittedly a selfish woman at times, nursed her own hurts as their relationship deteriorated, quite apart from Tom's involvement at all. Her husband ended up a broken man, not because he was a frustrated, repressed homosexual, but because he had failed the love of his life and couldn't trust himself not to do the same again with another mate.
In "Tea and Sympathy", and in reactions to the film for the past decades, we see how the norms of society can entrap all of us, at both ends of the spectrum.