Suddenly last summer : the invisible homo devoured by his inner demons.
[ Spoiler ]
Carnivorous plants, devouring desires, derailing reason and disturbing love, are the ingredients of this crypto-gay film, marking the apogee of Tennessee Williams. Although never explicitly named, the homosexuality of a character is the invisible thread of the film.
Rich widow Violet Venable, venerable woman of the bourgeoisie, snob and arrogant, is played by Katharine Hepburn. She manipulates her sister-in-law by blackmailing her, with some inheritance, to lobotomize her niece Catherine. Her goal is to silence her. Her toxic relationship with her late son Sebastien is at the heart of this drama. Violet tries to convince and pressure the young doctor Cukrowicz, played by Montgomery Clift, to achieve her goal. The young and beautiful Catherine, played by Elizabeth Taylor, holds a traumatic secret related to the death of her cousin Sebastian. But her memory is blocked. The plot unfolds in flashbacks, gradually revealing the tragic events that occurred last summer in Spain, Cabeza de Lobo (Head of wolf/Cut head). Suspense hovers over the mystery surrounding Sebastian’s death, until the final revelations.
The central character of Sebastian is invisible, first because he is dead, and also because even in memories he is faceless. Sebastien’s portrait is built by the testimonies of his relatives. He looks a little like his creator : snobby, suffering from the heart, surrounded by young men, he’s a poet, and he likes to travel around Europe, and do sex tourism. He is arrogant and manipulative. It feels like Tennessee Williams fantasized about being a rock star, by this desire to be so much loved, that he would have died devoured by his public.
It is in Sebastian’s office that the first clues to his secret reveal him, through paintings and sculptures of naked men everywhere, including the painting of Botticelli’s San Sebastian, one of the first to rejuvenate and eroticize this biblical figure.
Saint Sebastian is narrated in the Golden Legend as a Gaul man from Narbonne, who joined the Roman legion to help Christians. He was condemned to death for this and for having performed miracles, including restoring the voice of Zoe : Speech is the foundation of psychoanalytic therapy, and, the narration of the film. Saint Sebastian was executed by archers, but he did not die, he was rescued by Irene. Once recovered, he returned to quarrel with the emperors, who condemned him a second time, to be beaten to death with rods. The Renaissance painters made Saint Sebastian an erotic figure, who could express ecstasy, and he quickly became a gay icon, even a BDSM symbol.
Montgomery Clift, the gay actor and great friend of Elizabeth Taylor plays Doctor Cukrowicz. The name evokes a slightly crackbrained person, but in polish it evokes sugar, and indeed, the docteur is very sweet. Cukrowicz is a little entangled in his costume, as he is in his role as a surgeon. A kind of stiffness that marks his professional awareness about lobotomy. And the actor’s face lack of mobility marks the aftermath of his car accident on a night in 1956, when he left Elizabeth Taylor’s party. Disfigured, he could benefited from the best surgeons, thanks to her who rescued him the night of the tragedy.
In the film, Montgomery Clift saves Elizabeth Taylor. She plays a Catherine in danger. She is a prisoner of her amnesia, her mother’s cowardice, her aunt Violet’s hold.
Catherine is traumatized by the death of her cousin Sebastian, which she witnessed. His death, if told, would reveal a terrible secret. When Catherine tries to talk about it, she fails, she panics, her brain shuts down. And some people don’t wanna know the truth. Catherine’s mother is a true chatterbox, she disturbs all true communication. While the words of Violet Venable is a venom that she spreads around her. These two mothers become despicable. Catherine is a prisoner of Violet, who locked her in a sanatorium, like a carnivorous plant locked in a little greenhouse, out of fear of her mouth.
Tennessee Williams’ older sister, Rose, was a troubled child with psychotic symptoms at an early age. With two unbalanced parents, Tennessee found refuge in writing, but Rose did less well. Her development was difficult, she grew up without being able to socialize enough, her relationships with her parents became violent, even physically violent with her alcoholic father. Her mother put her in a sanatorium, probably more to shut her up than to get her treated, because Rose accused her father of sexual assault. Suddenly, Rose was lobotomized in 1943, without her brother knowing it. She will remain mentally disabled, mutilated I should say, for life. Tennessee Williams remained shocked by his mother’s decision, he began to hate her, and he suffered from his sister’s fate all his life. He made of her a part of his work.
Where he failed to save his sister, Tennessee Williams will save Catherine.
The film is an investigation for truth, and it has a double construction : in the story is built a path to the truth about the life and death of Sebastian, which is revealed to the characters in the end, but in the narration a camouflage is built around this truth to finally hide it.
Sebastian was a prisoner of his oedipal or almost incestuous mother, she speaks of them as a couple. Violet is a prisoner of the idealization she makes of her son, she builds a denial that she imposes on others. But by managing to escape his mother for once, last summer, Sebastian reproduced an unhealthy relationship with Catherine, who served as a new bait to attract men. To what purpose, it is not said, but the money involved in the story suggests prostitution. What Catherine describes as a cannibal riot, is filmed rather as a homophobic assault. Some critics have retained cannibalism, because, officially dead from a heart attack, Sebastian’s death is simply incredibly violent, as much as Violet’s reaction.
Homosexuality is so terrifying (at least for censorship), that even a cannibal metaphor seemed plausible. No, the Franco regime did not tolerate sexual intercourse between men, so eating one another was not either. Catherine’s comments about Sebastian, who had “put blondes on the menu (…) he was starving to death”, were obviously, a sexual metaphor.
Tennessee Williams had already received, among other things, two Pulitzer Awards for his previous plays, A streetcar named desire and Cat on a hot tin roof, he was in full glory when his new play Suddenly last summer was staged in New York in 1958. Columbia Pictures added Gore Vidal, another gay writer, to create the script.
If Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams did not make great mystery of their loves, Montgomery Clift lived it less well, despite a therapy begun in 1950. «The lavender scare » due to McCarthism’s witch hunt against LGBT (and communists) in public services, was also hovering over Hollywood. Montgomery Clift had been the victim of blackmail attempts and false rumors. Violet was a weel chosen name for Sebastien’s mother.
In 1943, the gay writer received a letter from her sister Rose, in which she wrote “hordes of hungry people screaming at the city gates”. This paranoid vision certainly inspired him for the murder scene. After his father’s death, Tennessee Williams began psychotherapy that included hypnosis. He read Freud and Yung, and the never forgot his mother’s words, which he put in Catherine’s mouth « cut the truth out of my brain ».
The film is therefore also a plea for a mental illness treatment with psychoanalysis, to make the unconscious speak, rather than by destructive surgery. To avenge his sister’s lobotomy, Tennessee Williams made his doctor Cukrowicz, from a brilliant brain surgeon, a man who doubts, and then renounces, for a more modern practice. The words, which serve as a support for therapy, are not destroyed by lobotomy, they will deconstruct Violet’s lie, and reconstruct the truth about Sebastian, to the point that it is Violet, who becomes crazy. Thanks to the character of the doctor there is an almost symmetrical shift in the film, whose focus passes from the venerable and powerful words of Violet, to the true words of Catherine, who proves perfectly lucid. The supposed madness and reason, swap places.
Catherine discovers other patients like Tennessee Williams must have seen her sister after the lobotomy. And for the viewers too, it is a shocking entry into mental health institution, which was evolving very slowly. It was only after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that California began legislating against lobotomy, starting in 1976.
In 1959, Gore Vidal lived with Howard Austen, and Tennessee Williams had great love story with Frank Merlo, yet, Sebastian’s character is a particularly repulsive gay person. Like mother like son. He is described as being rather evil towards others, and impelled by his vanity towards a fatal punishment, that he would have deserved. He owes his death to his way of consuming people, of using them, he became the monster his mother made.
This is probably the only negative point of the film : the homosexual who is at the center of the film is dead, invisible, and mean.
Nevertheless, the film is still a masterpiece of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’, who once again showed his talent as a director, and his ability, who he was considered an intellectual in Hollywood, to adapt major and ambitious literary works.
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– Au cœur de l’Histoire 9 mars 2011 - Europe 1
– https://lesmemorables.fr/tennessee-williams-1911-1983/
– http://evesmag.com/tennessee.htm
– https://saint-sebastien.net
#SuddenlyLastSummer #TennesseeWilliams #ClassicCinema #QueerFilmHistory #ElizabethTaylor
