A Film Canon

Suddenly, Last Summer generalises Cat On A Hot Tin Roof's paedophobia to a vision of life bounded by the "hot, ravenous mouths" of childbirth and death, both controlled by a cruel, perverse, libidinal Father, and only (temporarily) repressible through a supreme act of aesthetic detachment; that is, the homosexuality that results in protagonist Sebastian Venable's death, and matriarch Violet Venable's (Katherine Hepburn) subsequent institutionalisation of niece, cousin and only witness Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor), at the hands of Dr. Cucrowicz (Montgomery Clift). This defensive aestheticism may explain the hyperbolic staginess of the adaptation, whose extreme insularity - the conclusion is little more than an extended exposition, while every statement exudes the epigrammatic ambition of Sebastian's poetic 'gestations' - segues into exactly the abject, amniotic constriction it seeks to preclude, while Violet's attempts to contain and lobotomise Simon's ghost simply clarifies the extent to which that ghost resulted from such a failed lobotomy, producing a more nuanced objection to emergent "psychosurgery" than the characters' endless discursions and observations. The result is Williams' most eloquent failure to contain trauma within theatrical language; or, inversely, the most direct - if not the most nuanced - connection between his inevitable return of the repressed and cinematic language; an uneasy disparity between the awareness and representation of transgression.