About
Community
Bad Ideas
Drugs
Ego
Artistic Endeavors
But Can You Dance to It?
Cult of the Dead Cow
Literary Genius
Making Money
No Laughing Matter
On-Line 'Zines
Science Fiction
Self-Improvement
Erotica
Fringe
Society
Technology
register | bbs | search | rss | faq | about
meet up | add to del.icio.us | digg it

Essay: Suddenly Last Summer

by Sol463

Suddenly Last Summer is a heavy-handed tale of how life is a tragedy that consumes us all. If you were to rearrange the letters in Sebastian and then completely discard them and put in new letters they would spell out Tennessee Williams. There is barely a moment in this movie that you can’t feel the presence of Tennessee Williams.

Mrs. Venable taps Dr. Cukorwicz for his expertise in a new experimental surgery called lobotomy. Mrs. Venable played by Katherine Hepburn, wishes for the doctor to apply his trade to her niece, Catherine, played by Elizabeth Taylor. After witnessing the sudden death of her cousin Sebastian, Mrs. Venable’s son, Catherine seems to have went and gone a little loopy. For this favor, Mrs. Venable is willing to donate a considerable sum to the hospital, something that the facilities are in great need of. Unfortunately for Mrs. Venable, Cukorwicz is an honorable man and insists on giving Catherine an actual examination, before he dulls the knife. Through his assessment we see that not all is as it might seem and that only within Catherine’s pretty little head can the truth be found. When the truth is finally revealed in the final climatic scene, Hepburn’s character, not to be upstaged, cuts a piece out of the crazy pie herself, as she slips into her own delusional fancy, “…Suddenly Last Summer, written quickly, in something of a confused trance of guilt and remorse, was the most creative result of his psychoanalysis.” Says Spoda a critic, we discover that Sebastian self-destructed under the weight of his own carnal desires. I imagine that this is much the end Williams feared for himself.

Sebastian is dead. This is one fact that we are confronted with at the beginning of this movie and then throughout the movie we get to see the kind of man Sebastian was. Sebastian was a man of particular tastes, but more to the point, he appears to be quite the pedophile. It seems that Sebastian used the pretty females in his life to attract young boys like Winnie the Pooh to honey. Once that is accomplished it is then implied he had improper relations with the young boys. This is the big secret Mrs. Venable wishes to hide and the same one that made young Catherine’s fragile impressionable self go bonkers. You have to take the philosophy everyone is a slight off from going crazy, in stride because for Williams that wasn’t far off. “Tennessee was absolutely terrified of this play,” said Anne Meacham an actress who had played the dramatic representation of his sister, Rose. Rose Williams, his sister, who after a wee bit of a psychotic break was institutionalized and then eventually lobotomized. He lived the majority of his life believing in the possibility that he, like her, might just snap like a dry twig. Crack!

The movie was originally a play and that is very much apparent when you view this movie. There are several scenes that were acted well over the top. I am looking at you Mrs. Hepburn, you too Taylor. The entire movie is over the top, this might fly with the theatre crowd but for those who crave gratuitous violence, less than subtle sex scenes and loud explosions to keep their attention, watching this movie can be grueling. We have an eccentric old woman who is willing to lobotomize a young woman to protect the truth about her son and her true relationship to him. A young woman that writes in her journal in the third person, and this is before she takes her bullet train to looneyville. The list goes on. The lives of the characters are so far from reality that I am left unable to relate to any one or take what is suppose to be the more poignant scenes seriously.

Oh, the horror, of the realistic interpretation of a metaphor. Sebastian is consumed by his own demons in effect, but the director felt it necessary to treat us to its realistic interpretation. You could not go in any degree greater in opposition to the spirit of a scene. We are shown the images of Sebastian’s death, but the scene is fraught with peril from the get go by the sheer ridiculousness of a man being mobbed by little children as he attempts to flee them. We are shown no face on Sebastian and this takes away from our ability to ingratiate ourselves to the figure and that is all it is, a white suit fleeing children. The clips distract us from what the true focus of the scene should be, Catherine revealing the truth, freeing herself from under the weight she had been carrying. The actual events should have been left to the audience’s imagination.

Suddenly Last Summer is something that is extremely personal to Williams and the fateful onscreen product is a flawed adaptation of a greater work. Williams himself was displeased with the final product, so much so, that he walked out of a private screening given by the producer. The nature of the material is metaphorical, something which, Gore Vidal and the director seem unaware of.

 
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.

 

totse.com certificate signatures
 
 
About | Advertise | Bad Ideas | Community | Contact Us | Copyright Policy | Drugs | Ego | Erotica
FAQ | Fringe | Link to totse.com | Search | Society | Submissions | Technology
Hot Topics
Neutral English Accent
ah le francais...
Most amount of languages someone can learn
what language do you like to hear?
On a certain annoyance of speaking English..
GPP is bad grammar
Les Verbes Rares Francais! Aidez-moi!
Words that piss you Off
 
Sponsored Links
 
Ads presented by the
AdBrite Ad Network

 

TSHIRT HELL T-SHIRTS