Tennessee Williams at the Mill of Rubes: THE FUGITIVE KIND

If a bunch of method-trained NYC actors crashed their bus in the middle of nowhere Louisiana and tried to pass as locals so as to not get lynched, the result might look a lot like The Fugitive Kind (1959). Marlon Brando--radiant, and way too good for it all--plays a Christlike (coded queer) guitar-slinging drifter who winds up in a romance with older Italian shop owner Anna Magnani. Together they face a hardened mob of drunken good-old-boy characters whose raging fires are fueled by Anna's bitter, sweaty invalid husband (Victor Jory, practically stealing the movie) spewing vitriol from his upper berth. It's the kind of vehicle the gay drunk genius Tennessee Williams cranked out by the dozen for his muse/avatar, Anna Magnani, plopping her down in the midst of his usual rentboy deep south fantasias, there to emote and assume postures and be as out of place as a weeping marble Madonna statue in the middle of a rowdy redneck saloon.

Running a general store in this Nowheresville town, scarred by memories of racist mob violence against her late father (for daring serve drinks to colored people at his wine bar), Magnani stays married to racist invalid Jory, who's all dying and sweaty, and strung out on morphine upstairs, for vague reasons (some long term plan of Elektra-style vengeance gone dormant?). Into all this strained soap and free-floating malice walks wandering troubadour Brando, his snakeskin jacket a symbol of his individuality and his handling of his mama guitar as awkward as a lavender honeymoon. He could have hot mess Joanne Woodward (top), who's never seemed sexier, or more alive, or wilder, more intoxicating, rampaging around town in a cute raincoat with wild platinum blonde hair (we're so used to seeing it pulled back with unflattering bangs, that her sudden sex appeal makes her seem like some whole other being), but Brando prefers glum middle-aged Magnani, thus hinting that his character is not entirely straight. He wants a mother, not a lover. And while he claims to be free, he's so closeted/closed-off that his snakeskin may as well be a straight-jacket. Get it?

It's that kind of poetic/layered stiltedness that keeps Kind from being an A-shelf Williams, something perhaps partially explained by its having spent two decades buried deep in his desk drawer (where it was called Battle of Angels), before he finally exhumed and reconfigured it into something called Orpheus Descending. What a title! What else is Orpheus gonna do? Now, Orpheus Just Standing There - that's more like it. The Fugitive Kind isn't much better, but at least there's a poetic semi-poetic second way to read it. And audiences were looking for second ways to read things back in the late-50s.

It's easy to forget, now it's all fallen into disreputability with many snotty academic circles, but Kind's era saw a kind of post-war suburban renaissance: White middle class America was almost legit intellectual while still being sexual, thanks to Freud and the Kinsey Report. The success of Williams' plays, his bridge game buzzword popularity, was bound up in that 'knowingness', the secret insider cool that came from that. A whole generation, home from the war, had picked up all sorts of European liberalism (that 'continental mind') leaving their parents' small town moral hypocrisy, moving wholesale into the post-war 'suburban dream of martini lunches and modernist art wherein there was just enough dirty business to make deciphering all the psychological underpinnings worth the effort.  Years of sanitized white Christian picket fence heteronormative blandness had made even a veiled mention of homosexuality, rape, or abortion in some otherwise pedestrian romance would send the cocktail class flocking, darling, if for no other reason than being able to say they saw it at the next Jaycees bridge game. Condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency was like a Pulitzer stamp. 

That said, Willians clearly run out of things to say by the time he dug his old Battle of Angels-cum-Orpheus out of that desk drawer. Man, I know the feeling. Who among us hasn't gone thumbing through old work for inspiration when we've fallen into weary writer's blockage? Still, he should have left the Battle be. He'd already cherrypicked the best ideas out of it for other plays, anyway.

Furthermore, director Sydney Lumet's shadowy noir style seems way too sober and judgmental for the Dirty South. Lumet could be great with small casts where--no matter how messed-up the characters were (as with his masterful Long Day's Journey into Night, Klute, or Dog Day Afternoon)-judgement didn't enter into it. But it's too easy to cast stones in the backwards county where Fugitive unfolds, to make characters grotesque without any real cause other than to  Brando's Christ-y glow even more godlike by contrast. Elia Kazan had a rootsy respect for the uneducated thug but Lumet's lynch mob is just raw undiluted evil, set up for us to throw rocks at, with no awareness of the vicious self-perpetuating irony such throwing engenders.

Most glaring of all the problems though, to my mind, is Brando. He's the prettiest, but he's also the most uncomfortable-looking miscast drifter/troubadour since Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar (1954), with which Fugitive would make an apt, if excruciating, lavender double bill. Both concern guitar slinging trouble magnets who shack up with middle-aged super-butch saloon/store owners and wind up in the crosshairs of  rabble-roused townsfolk who burn said saloon/store to the ground. Oh my god, it's the same damned movie!

Both films prove that stock outlaw guitar heroes need to be played by less awesome actors than Brando or Hayden to not seem forced. That's what Elvis was for. Real musicians are always a little spacey because they're so attuned to the melodic spectrum; their personalities are incomplete without their instruments. For big A-list personas, a guitar is just ab awkward accessory, hanging limply on them like a rotting albatross two sizes too small.

But Hayden knows one thing Brando doesn't: if you can't hide your complexity, just try to fade into the landscape as much as possible and let the women do all the raving. Try to not try to act at all. An even "bigger" actor than Hayden, Brando makes a bad casting choice worse by trying too hard to seem easygoing and Christlike. Each monologue is practically hung on the wall of the Whitney like an American folk masterwork and I don't mean that as a compliment.

The dialogue wouldn't be bad for a normal writer, but we've already seen this collection of archetypes and deep south incidents before, in better Williams adaptations and better Williams dialogue: Woodward's bleached nymph straining at her shackles was already brilliantly essayed by Carroll Baker in Kazan's Baby Doll and Sue Lyon in Night of Iguana; Anna Magnani had already done the depressed middle-aged Italian widow in The Rose Tattoo; Ava Gardner stole (and likely improved on) the role written for her in Iguana; the dying redneck patriarch shivering in the junky morphine prescription heat was done to a turn with breadth and sympathy by Burl Ives in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Jory and Woodward add their own spin, making them the reasons to watch this, but they still have to contend with Williams' muddled motivations. Jory and his cronies have suspicions about our guitar-wearing Brando's orientation but if they think he's gay, then their jealousy makes no sense. The idea of the virile straight male outsider downstairs at the general store, while the impotent fumer is straight-up Malden in Baby Doll or Anthony Franciosa in The Long Hot Summer (by Faulkner but similar) but the homophobic persecution angle is straight up Suddenly's Sebastian, Cat's Skipper, and Blanche's Streetcar husband prior to their suicides and/or devouring. But you can't have it both ways, unless you're just ticking off the checklist of Tennessee tropes. Even in the dirty south they probably knew enough to realize a gay bestie was a great way to keep the flies off, so to speak.

Another main problem in Fugitive, aside from its similarity to these Williams' classics, is that we can't quite believe an Adonis like Brando would be bothering to hang around these stifling swampy Louisiana backwaters in the first place. The beginning indicates he was busted hustling and is trying to go 'straight,' in some other podunk town, but an actor of Brando's caliber has no business being a mere hustler. His teeth are too perfect, his demeanor too polished. He's out of jail, why not split for NYC or SF and hustle there? New York City is the place where / they say hey babe! Yes sir, a gorgeous boy like him could make a fortune or at least find a nice sugar daddy with a comfy duplex, rather than putting up with a vicious mob just so he can get with this frumpy broad Magnani when he could be sailing the drunken Main with vivacious Woodward. 

Either way, the gay subtext is the only way any of it makes sense. The vicious hatred the town rubes have for anyone wild or serpentinely jacketed seems a beard for homophobia. Brando's 'crimes' here aren't otherwise great enough to stir the wrath of the town in quite such a vicious, heated way. Meanwhile, a handful of saints are strewn about for contrast, like Maureen Stapleton as a local painter, who Brando monologues in hushed cobra monotones until she sways before him like a hypnotized chicken. Surely such a talker could hypnotize hateful rubes into liking him if he wanted to. It's clear Brando's outlaw prefers a firehose crucifixion to any kind of real warts-and-all acceptance. Hell, all he had to do was buy them a round at the bar and the rednecks would likely accept him. Jesus would have, if he had the bread. 

What Brando's 'fugitive kind' doesn't grasp is that the beautiful people only trudge through the Dirty South for a reason. Otherwise they move, like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, from small town to big city - that's their natural drift, that's where all roads lead. Paul Newman understood that in Sweet Bird of Youth --his cocky rentboy is shanghaiing a drunken Hollywood patroness and her Cadillac to the outer bayou rings so he can rescue his hometown sweetheart from her cliche'd Kingfish-y mayor father --and it works because-- though Newman is in some ways even prettier than Brando--Newman the actor knows the way to seem a realistic local boy is to taint his beauty with cocky, needy cluelessness. When an already-perfect demigod puffs out his chest and struts to impress, he suddenly seems faintly ridiculous, and that's why Newman's performance works where Brando's fails. In refusing to betray the insecure little boy behind his character's bravado, Marlon never quite 'gives' us anything. He's so wise to his own bullshit he barely says an untrue word, which means he barely says anything, just orates a series of trite poetic monologues of the sort Williams realized early on were best kept in a file drawer.  
  
Streetcar, for another example, Brando's big Tennessee victory, was subtler by actually being more histrionic --that's the paradox Fugitive director Sydney Lumet doesn't seem to understand, and maybe wouldn't until Klute eight years later: No one should ever be all the way 'beautiful' and making a Williams play hum involves letting an actor become so much themselves that the seams of their persona break and the hideous lonely hunger of their hidden core comes busting out like taxidermy sawdust. 

Another master of getting sawdust out of his actor's taxidermy persona masks? John Huston, as in his Williams adaptation, Night of the Iguana. 

A director able to understand the Williams sawdust mill principle but not how to successfully harness it? Joseph Loesy in Boom! (1968, left). Here Taylor and Burton merely dump sawdust tonnage upon the stage as if it's a suitable shortcut to brilliance. But of course that doesn't work either. The pain has to be real, the sawdust awkward, faux-accidental, the stitches in the mask newly ripped, to grab us. We can sense the difference between drunkenly inspired and just sloppy. But the drunk cannot. That is the tragedy of humankind. 

And while sometimes his plays need a villain-- ala Karl Malden in Baby Doll, who, like the racists of Fugitive, digs on torching Italian-owned business; or Jack Carson's shrill grating harpy wife in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; or seething Ms. Fellowes in Iguana--when Williams is at his best there's no one-note villains or hicks or closets at all. In Streetcar everyone is sympathetic, even the brute Stanley. A pagan god crossed with "a ape", its he who is the put-upon party after all. He pays the bills and we can understand how he'd be sick to death of Blanche and her joneser high-hattin' and liquor-mooching after a few hours, let almone several months. I'd be fed up after a week. That he puts up with it when he's clearly no milquetoast is to his credit; not that it excuses any rapey climax, but on some level it at least rationalizes it.

When Williams is done right, his monologues are ranted or recited the way we natter on to people we subconsciously know aren't really listening to us. When Williams is done wrong, as he is in Fugitive Kind, monologues go on and on, slow and measured, while the onscreen listener stands at rapt (i.e. vaguely bored but respectful) attention, like at a poetry reading when they're trying to impress the bourgeois date. 

All that said, it's still fascinating as a film, just for its T-Williams laundry list affect. Brando is gorgeous and at least when he does sing and play it's actually his voice and guitar doing it (hearing Brando cautiously sticking to a few lightly brushed chords and singing in a half-whispered croon works only because you wonder if he really doesn't know how to play and it's just no one's told him because he's so gorgeous). And Woodward lights up the screen as the wild drunk nymphomaniac... when she's around, but for whole stretches of the film she's MIA and we're left with this half-baked, zombie-like mama-fixation romance between Magnani and Brando.  

Oh well, even if the tepid chemistry-free 'torridity' is just not convincing and whole stretches are formulaic, if you're a Williams, Brando, or Lumet fan (and you should be all three), you need to see this movie, even if for no other reason than to unlock the joys and motivations of Williams' other, better adaptations. Somehow seeing a genius faltering backwards into amateurish pretension makes his great work all the more noble. There's a great fountain of truth and enthusiastic idealism one can drink from when indulging amateurishness: the amateur's inability to dilute his poetry's potency in the minutiae of realism is like watching a clumsy magician give his tricks away, i.e. fun on a whole other level than intended.  The poetry is still fresh and raw, so you can feel the rush the author felt while writing it, his swooning in drunken euphoria over a late night typewriter. Such a euphoria can help us all find the courage to become alcoholic titans, to write into existence the scalpels that will tear open future actor's masks so they might sprinkle the sawdust of the soul upon silver screens yet to be... even if for no good reason.

Mendacity A-Go-Go: Liz vs. the Little Monsters

 

I'll never forgive Richard Brooks for the Gaspar Noe-ish ending of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977, my review here), but his unflinching eye comes in handy when dealing with  the mythic component of Tennessee Williams, and his dispassionate objectification of Paul Newman's unnerving sexuality and Roman statue profile has a unique fetishistic kick perfectly in line with Williams' rough trade tendencies. In CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and in the undervalued SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962), Brooks finds in Newman the gay eye candy grand prize of Williams' hard drinking man-children, then lets genius character actors bounce off the bronze.

But the big early scene in ROOF of Maggie chattering away and Brick just drinking and laying around, muttering passive-aggressive things like "Do they, Maggie?" infuriates me, every time, and keeps me from loving the film like I love NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Newman seems neither drunk nor closeted, and Taylor seems too poised and mannered to be really in heat. By comparison, dig up the old Showtime production with Jessica Lange (above) and Tommy Lee Jones! I haven't seen it since it premiered on cable in the 80s--but I watched it a peck of times back then: a young, pre-celebrity Lange is damn hot in the negligee dress, and Jones mixes it up with Lang and Rip Torn's Big Daddy with a cagey weariness that Newman lacks in Brooks' version.

I know it's sacrilege but Liz and Paul seem to lack connective chemistry; it's strange to me that the long Brick-Maggie bedroom scene is the most famous and recognized part of ROOF (not so strange perhaps considering how hot Liz looks straining at the seams of her white negligee) yet easily the weakest. Maybe I'm off the mark but for me this isn't a boozy romantic drama with closet undertones as much as tale of masculine redemption: Newman and Burl Ives slay me every time in the heavy showdown in the troll king basement that comes towards the end, and the real scene-stealer is Jack Carson who--when he finally lets some tears show in his voice, some realness instead of this 'boomer' good son-facade--levies such a gentle shock to the film it sheds its whole other skin. Carson seems so honestly frail in this one moment, warts and all, that the rest of the film fades around him suddenly in a mendaciously artificial overacting haze.

Fault it as you may for the now family therapy 101 moments of dialogue and symbolism (the crutch and alcohol, stairs, the ice cream, the unending shrillness of Boomer's one-note wife), but it's the kind of film that holds your hand and invites you to peer--without maudlin weepiness--deep into the harrowing void of mortality the way few films have done before or since. And if you have a dad with cancer who you all call 'Big Daddy' who has a bit of a Welles or Ives gravitas then you will, like me, be devastated down in that basement. The upstairs may be artificial and stifling, burdened with half-assed southern accents and shrill bombast, but down in that basement cobwebs and Cooks' Tour souvenirs, we're privy to something truly titanic: the bloody, pugnacious, tenacious process by which father and son help each other shed their stifling masks and genuinely connect. The sudden coherence of Brick, as if he went through ten years of therapy on his way down the stairs, may not be realistic, but Newman has never been realistic, he'd too godlike for that. It works. Why bother with realism down in the troll king basement? No women are there with their brassy monotone drawls, nor screeching kids. 

Thanks to an ingenious piece of art direction which magically takes cobwebs and antiques and weaves a dense stalactite-bedecked underworld for them to stagger in, what could be just a cliche'd rendition of Charles Foster Kane's big ole statue depository becomes truly mythic in all six senses of the word, with Burl Ives as a kind of pot-bellied troll king and Newman down there with a hypodermic torch to beseech some magic exchange. There's moments for Burl and Paul to each smash stuff in a clutching heart attack way as their illusions of immortality and glory are dashed on the altar of passing time, irrelevance, the horror of all existence, and then are redeemed, sweaty and wrecked, by the icky area they fear and recoil from the most --genuine feeling and human love.  And you know that, in the drug-hip universe of Williams, a hypodermic full of morphine resting on a crate isn't just a symbol; it's something to drool over. Even if neither dad nor son ever finally shoots it, the drugs do their magic.
Drugs don't help you escape from reality in a Williams effort, they help you confront it head on.

Wait, which reality are we talking about? Not the 9-5 family values no-neck monster reality--it helps turn down the volume on that--but the 'holy shit here comes the scythe' mortal coil shuffle reality. In Williams' plays, its the whole mindless reproductive Christian-patriarchal family dynamic that's an escape from the inescapable gravity of death. And if you don't make amends and whatever else you have to do to prepare of it, and do it now, you're fucked. 

And incessant off-key renditions of "Dixie" are not amends. 

I've had those breakthroughs before with my own big daddy, maybe you have too -- the late night boozy moments of truth when you can look at him and suddenly see--instead of a paragon or symbol of authority--a frail, aging human like yourself, not a reflection of you, but a version of the same creature you are --ever trying to escape his lack of future by ignoring his foggy present. And if alcoholism runs in your veins you can bond quite well until the hungover morning when you scarcely remember the progress you made --but hey, you made it. Deep down, behind the veil of mist, you know it happened.  Like many of Williams' plays, it seems made for me, made for a brooding drunk writer by a brooding drunk writer - with booze as the thing that both gives you the brio to stare into that void, and at the same time shorten the distance to the bottom, where the teeth are, in the base of the Sebastian's Venus fly trap garden. Click!

I wonder if the whole first half is intentionally shrill for just this purpose, meant to wear you down with the constant songs sung by the no-neck monsters to welcome Big Daddy home. We identify totally with Brick hiding out in the bedroom, as Taylor's Maggie rants on and on in her flat, mannered drawl. And we identify with Big Daddy when he rejects the ugly brood of Gooper for Maggie's hip convertible, and his irritation with the non-stop dinner songs which his wife makes such a show of enjoying. There's also no accident that the ROOF is in the title, as the different levels of the family estate are packed with meaning, from the elevation of the bedroom and its deceptive luxury (Big Daddy wants a son but momma "hates locks on doors") to the lowest ebb of the basement and the killing floor living room and the convertible quicksand driveway. And when the children go off to bed, and the drama starts in earnest, we above all note the the quietude like a weight removed from our shoulders when their no-neck noise caterwauling ceases at last. It's that 'click' Brick was waiting for. And now we realize we too were waiting for it.

The rejection of messy children is one of the few things I connect with in the Apollonian, as per Camille Paglia, vs. the chthonic. Gayness has been one-note in the media since Williams' day, and thanks to PC indoctrination, homosexuals are now depicted as just the opposite of the fey aesthetes they were in the 1950s; now they're just saintly victims longing to become legally-wed adoptive parents. Either/or but on no level are homosexuals allowed to be properly ambiguous: mercurial, both good and bad, like everything else on this fucked-up planet. A negative portrayal will get you a sack full of angry letters; a positive portrayal a snoozing audience and bizarre Christian right wing protests. Can you win? Williams, even back here in the 50s, wins easily, by giving us complexity.

Few artists today bother to try, to plumb the depths that Camille Paglia writes about in her Sexual Personae, to explore gayness as the rejection of the feminine body, the denial of procreation and all the messy morasses and fairy bower quicksand pits that slow time to a crawl. For me and a very few others, the whole media portrayal in things like TV's American Family and The L Word are deeply offensive because they are a betrayal of all that was good and pure about the Williams' aesthetic. Now everyone's a breeder, queer eye or no, and kids are saints by default, suffocated in round-the-clock hyper-monitoring even as their parents aren't home (they have to work overtime to afford nannies and after-pre-school sewing lessons).

In that sense, it's illuminating that Brick--who may or may not have fooled around with his late pal Skipper-- is the only one to ask "why!?" in relation to Big Daddy's edict to reproduce. He has a point and it's a harrowing one: why bother to procreate just so some idiotic legacy of wealth and possessions can go on? Where's the meaning?

As someone who reacts with  mute horror to the surplus of children in my Park Slope neighborhood, I relate to Brick's question; and as someone who, because he has no kids, I get to stare into the terrifying mortal mirror without the worry being channeled into anxiety about providing for the kids after I'm gone; and as an alcoholic writer aware of the repulsion aspect of sexuality on a visceral level,  I relate to Liz's scheming to keep the no-neck monsters off that nice piece of land. Like her I want to drown them in ice cream, choke them on their own stupid toy guns..

Looking at the film in relation to Williams' other works we see a running theme of the grabby, uncouth, poor relations who breed willy nilly and are a pox upon the land. Against this grain, this unceasing flow of children into the future, stand a few 'whole' souls, beautiful people, like Maggie and Brick, Blanche Dubois, Mrs. Stone, Violet Venable, Rev. T.L. Shannon, and a boozy actress named Alexandra Del Lago.
 

God bless this old era,when Tennessee Williams was as hot onscreen and stage as pocket edition Freud was in the bookstores. A time when cigarettes, the Kinsey Report, whiskey highballs, and contract bridge made a nation more alive to the truth and ambivalent about the blind procreative drive.  Maybe one day we will once again have another Tennessee Williams to steer us into some actual dialogue with our own tragic genetic imperatives, to embrace the terrifying gaze of the Apollonian eye instead of just aping the most banal of suburban values. Until then, mendacity will remain so common as to be unnoticed, and sexual risk takers will die, whether by AIDS, psychopathic hustlers, or terminal big daddy cancer. Won't someone not think of the children, just for a couple hours, and smoke a goddamned cigarette, or stoke that morphine shot Big Daddy doesn't seem to want, so we can talk like high adults?

A Voluptuous Crucifixion: My Long Day's Journey into NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)

There's movies about drunks made by sober folks for sober folks (i.e. Days of Wine and Roses) and then there's movies about drunks made by drunks for drunks, such as NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. It's directed by John "drunk in Mexico" Huston, written by Tennessee "alcoholic beachboy junky" Williams, and stars Richard "King Drunkus" Burton. Whether snoring through high-steppin' crap like EXORCIST 2: THE HERETIC or THE MEDUSA TOUCH, chewing scenery indiscriminately between woozy waves of hungover nausea in DR. FAUSTUS and BOOM! or--in very rare moments of clarity--brilliantly acting, Burton was always one drink ahead of his slur, a surfer sliding and grinning wild-eyed and mirthlessly down the tube as lightweights collapse in his wake. If he didn't always land gracefully, we could blame the floor or the script, not the man, usually.

But he had his weaknesses. He had appetites. And he fed his appetites. And when a great writer knew him and too knew appetites, of the sorts condemned by moral matrons blind to their own butch yearnings, then a mighty force was in the works. Only a great shaper of drunken, mighty forces like these could harness such a booming noise into a manly tune, only a towering friend to the drunken titan, like John Huston could craft from this crazy madness something truly mythic and even transcendent in scope. The result of this great meeting of three minds, NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, has been called indulgent male narcissist male gazing by bitch-ass punks and people who never knew the awful terror of depression, loneliness and fear that coalesce when a day of youthful waggery, public adoration, groupies, endless free drinks, and velvet ropes parting before you like an admiring red-faced sea suddenly gives way to hostile, indifferent nights, alone - shivering, unemployed, fired, bested devastation - paying full price for even a plain diet coke as you clutch your sweat-stained AA pamphlets like the last rope out of the jaws of the long swim crashing surf Medusa. 

I don't like to regale you with tales of my own grandiose drunkenness (hah!) when writing about my favorite drunkard films, except in ways that illuminate the impossibility of being objective about a film when it hits close to home. So let me tell you a story that mirrors Rev. Shannon's own, a story that takes me back twenty years - to good old summer 1990.

I'd graduated college in Syracuse in '89, where I'd been played bass in a very popular (on the college scene) acid rock cover band, I quit them on good terms thinking my stardom would illuminate wherever I next alighted. I moved to Seattle with my hot girlfriend; I did the Noel in a Hendrix Experience cover band until the Hendrix guy got arrested and I wouldn't co-sign his bond and put up my car as collateral, whatever. No one came to see us anyway, except our progressively less-impressed girlfriends. Being just 22, bloated and wild-eyed with progressing alcoholism, and naive as all hell, I was genuinely surprised how hard it was translating my Syracuse local rock god glory to a town that, as anyone who's tried to move there knows, is very insular, and depressing. I became a hopeless drunk with few friends (all from California). I hung out at the Blue Moon tavern a lot, trying to score weed while various people tried to pick up my hot girlfriend and I let them (actually, as anyone in that situation knows, there's not much you can really do about it without coming off swinish) on the off chance they had weed. At home I read Hate and Eightball comics and listened to records of old blues and/or old radio shows while guzzling whiskey highballs and eating peanut butter on crackers; I watched endless WC Fields and Jack Hill movies (fell in love with Spider Baby for the first time), and drank more and more while the endless rains fell on our U-district one bedroom apartment's flat-top roof. A great way to sink into a cold depression, and loving every sick minute of it, at least in hindsight.

My too-hot girlfriend became disenchanted. She had too many good offers from affluent non-screwed up hippie bros. We broke up while shrooming at the aquarium, the sadness of a tank of black fish polluted her viaducts with melancholy. I left her there in our apartment and hit the road for home, shrooming all the way across the country via route 90. I hit Syracuse along the way, right in time for the hardcore psychedelic revels that mark the end of the semester every spring (or did), especially on Earth Day, at which used to be held an annual block party on the huge strip of lawn between the roads on fraternity row. Crashing with myriad yet-to-graduate friends and bandmates, I was out of the band but still invited onstage to jam and do funnels. I may have been nothing but a cut-rate Noel Redding imitator in Seattle, but in Syracuse I was still a lizard king-ish icon. Free at last, girls literally standing in line to welcome me back after the show as I sat there on my bass amp throne, each forcing each other out of the way, clamoring for my ear; my head full of cocky entitlement and psilocybin (a great combination), it was the happiest two weeks of my life. Unfortunately, looking back, I overdid it. I became a notorious slut, figuring out the best plan to deal with two housemates on Victoria Pl. both hitting on me was to sleep with them on successive nights, thus earning both their lifelong ire. They weren't even my only lovers during that two week stretch. I also got so high and drunk I actually accelerated out of my depression for the first time since 1987.

But May ended, the last of the straggling students left, and finally, the last person I knew still dawdling had left for home. I had nowhere else to crash, so--. still glowing from two weeks of validation, sex, drugs, rock and roll--I finally drove home--fanfare trumpets in my Lou Reed and Stones-soaked ears--to New Jersey and the Kuersten family tract. I was three grand in debt and a week late. I walked in expecting to just say hey and make a drink. 

My mom was there, furious, waiting. 

She started right in lecturing and a man had been waiting there, in the kitchen, to give me a urine test for life insurance. She hadn't even told me. This being the time of "Just say no," when you could go to jail for decades just having a joint in your car, I knew what would happen if I complied. So I went from living the "lush life" as king of the world to making hurried, vague excuses why I couldn't give a urine sample to my mom. Enduring her scathing silences and near-tears looks, the beige walls and the hostile yet disinterested depressive silence of that empty-but-for-disappointed-parent's house hit me like a tidal wave. I had no friends in town, nowhere to go, no one even to call.

That night I lay in my crappy little twin bed in my old room, as miserable as I'd ever been. I finally missed my hot Seattle girlfriend; it ached. I missed the girls I'd rebounded with in Syracuse - though by then they were all mad at me as they'd found out about each other. I was reaping the shit I'd been sowing for six years, all at once. My pillow wet with tears, I was too young (23) to understand the anguish of validation withdrawal, going from a life of constant drunk, stoned, tripping, collective love, to one of silently hostile maternal indifference and crushing solitude. I felt the full weight or all the great shit I'd thrown away in the name of what I called at the time "the sacrifice of love for love's sake," of walking away from the band and the girl while the memories were still sublime - not riding it into the ground. That sense of sacrifice made it all so sweet at the time. But now.... there was only  pain.

Men weren't allowed to cry back then. We were supposed to man up, tie our ties and take temp agency typing tests every day until we died or got a real job. Man, that Seattle girl was so hot, bro. Shit. Now that I wasn't rebounding right and left, I really missed her. The things I disliked about her faded into trifles while her beauty glowed every more painfully from the 3,000 mile vantage point  and I was yet too young to understand why that was. Now I'd be unable to smoke pot for at least a week (when the urine taker returned), needing to wash my system out with daily jugs of water and refraining from all "dry goods" in a state of uneasy paranoia. There was no recourse, no outlet for my longing.

I was so sad that night, I couldn't sleep. I'd never been too sad to sleep before. I never had a pillow soaked with literal hot tears before. Never. It was hell and it went on forever, hour after hour as I lay there until I could finally hear the snores of both my parents in the next room.... like an 'all clear' alarm.

I crept downstairs to see if I could perhaps find solace in TV and the parental liquor cabinet.

My ginger touch in removing dad's booze ever-so-quietly from the shelf was still in effect. I could negotiate the creaky stairs in pitch blackness without making so much as a creak. I could make myself a large "heroic" tumbler of rum with a dash of pineapple juice without rattling a single ice cube. Thus armed, I began the torturous cycle through cable channels that was two AM TV in the pre-internet early 1990s, and all so quietly no creature would stir around me.

Suddenly out of the fog of paid programming whom should appear? Richard Burton, in color on TNT (Ted Turner was colorizing everything it could get its hands on), fending off Sue Lyon's irresistible advances down in Mexico and basically giving voice to all my miserable woe right there on the spot and the rum hit me like a warm hug right as I saw Burton's magnificent drunk face and recognized the girl as the same hottie from "Lolita."

I was going to be all right... the warm flush of rum hit me as I realized the whole movie was about what I was going through, the kind of night that's tough to get through, but saved by frank and honest discussions of, for some reason, Hannah Jelke's bizarre sexual experience in a gondola. Deborah Kerr's performance is, I realized only later now that I'm older (and many years sober, thanks to AA and the grace of etc.), the other major source of power in this movie, as her own descriptions of getting through long nights ("any light looks good after being so long in a dark tunnel that you thought was never ending") rattling any emotionally vulnerable soul to tears of catharsis.

In short, Night of the Iguana "makes it easier to get through nights that are hard for us to get through," Miss Hannah Jelkes says of her poppy seed tea. Watching it that night, after my hours of tear-stained despair, I realized a part of me was enjoying being at the end of my rope "on a green carpet hilltop instead of Golgotha, the Place of the Skulls," i..e. my parent's tract home in Bridgewater, NJ, bathed in the forgiving glow of rum and orange juice. "Isn't that a comfortable, almost voluptuous crucifixion, Mr. Shannon?"

I rushed to tape it, missed about the first 45 minutes, realized it was playing again the following night so I could tape the whole thing. Thank you, God! Thank you, rum! There was still some left! And Richard Burton, his thick black eyeliner-lined eyes wild with hungover desperation so palpable I knew I was not alone in ways I wouldn't know until AA ten years later. Thank you, John Huston! Thank you, you old savior and lonesome Tennessee Williams! They all 'got it'  And of course, thank you, Sue Lyon and all the other irresistible, cool, unique or awful women that Burton deals with in the film: thank you, tangle of closeted lesbian cock-blockers, nymphs, sexually active widows and middle-aged virgin quick-sketch artists with your tins of opium poppy seed tea.

I'd avoided the film prior to this moment because of childhood resentments against the misleading use of "Iguana" in the title. What monster-loving child expecting giant iguana attacks wants to see an "alcoholic priest dealing with various women in Mexico" (as per Lennie). Other people don't like this film for other reasons than its lack of rampaging giant iguanas. They see Reverend Lawrence T. Shannon as too passive, letting himself by fought over, pursued and pushed this way and that by various ladies, including Lolita's butch guardian, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall). To these critics he's little more than a rag doll, flopping in one pair of jaws after another, barely able to choose or fight back, unwilling to sober up and escape. They said he was pathetic with self-pity, trying to swim out to his death the minute he doesn't get his own way. They were right, but can I suggest that if you hate him because of that, well, maybe you wish some girls would fight over you while you laid back in a similar rag doll fashion?

Take it from me, and Burton, Huston and Williams - you're better off wishing for it than getting it, because as Liz Phair would sing a few years later, if you do get it "and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you." And worse, as hollow a pleasure as it is, you get addicted to it pretty fast, and then, the minute it stops, the agony of not having it kicks in, like opiate withdrawal (which if you don't like this movie, it's clear you never experienced). You see the results of this 'admiration withdrawal' all the time in Hollywood, the aging starlets turning themselves into duck-like gargoyles to vainly try and get their 'fix' back. In short, it's the male version of Charlene's 1982 hit "I've Never Been to Me" - no faint praise.

But before you find the solace of 12-Step Groups (or death) you--in desperation--grab at any straw with all the desperation of a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. When a ride shows up you nearly always say yes, wherever it's going. And that's never good because they want you for reasons not your own. The only way out of one dysfunctional lover's claws is when some other chick bothers to scoop you up and steal you away for another. Whatever the new temptation is, you take it. The alternative is an ever-tightening noose of co-dependence as your last temptation slowly ages into a death trap, or what AA calls "taking a hostage" or worse, dying alone - over and over, through every minute of every night. Eventually all the girls you messed around with behind each other's back are going to get together and compare notes. Girls might get branded slutty in high school but they're always absolved (it's the men's fault), but men get branded later by secret female cabals and it's forever. They never look at you the same way again.

You know the score, dear reader, everyone has had their May 1990, that shining moment when more than one person is fighting to take you home to their place and you just soak it all up and let them fight it out, and then, in the end, you can only go home with one of them. You can't decide which to pick, and anyway, the party is in full swing, so you stay, drink more, and then around dawn, you realize you are alone, your options are expired; the person you've been talking to for the last hour is long since asleep. You laugh at your own absurdity but even that doesn't help allay the sense of isolation and anguish. You wake up the next evening and it's already dark and its sadder than if nothing ever happened because something did... and you blew it. And hearing dear Hannah sat "Drink was never your problem, Mr. Shannon" is quite a comfort, as is the withered old poet lost in a grapple with his verse which will only ever be heard by whomever happens to be around when it's finished, but he doesn't care. As long as it's good. Now in the age of the internet we can all imagine all our work read and treasured by anonymous strangers, as opposed to existing only in a few Kinko copies, read only at open mikes by yourself, literary journal editorial offices by rejection slip-mailing interns, or no one, and all chance for notice dying as soon as your parents moved and threw all your old boxes away. Where could you find the strength to be a writer in that hellish environment of complete isolation and Father Mackenzie writing his sermons that no one will hear / with no betrayal of despair?

You could be one day as lucky as the old gentlemen - it doesn't matter who hears it, as long as it's finished, and as long as it's good. Since in the end we're just looking for a reason to keep writing, some assurance we're not speaking only to ourselves (not even noticed enough to be forgotten), or that it doesn't matter even if we are, there's a goal now. Get so good that when someone does read your work in the future, it cracks their mind apart. Like yours is right now! Bro! 

"endurance is something blue devils respect"

There are critics who also dismiss Iguana as being talky and grandiose, but you have to understand the mindset: if you're a talky, grandiose drunk grappling with the realization that you've already had your glory days, that you're like Sebastian Venable if he was smart enough to take a cab out of that godforsaken beachside bar in Cabeza de Lobo and so survivied, aging to become the oldest 'working' poet, still galavanting around with a female 'procurer'; and if you keep photos of ex-girlfriends in secret drawers, to pore over longingly in between your serial monogamous string of relationships, and if you reread your illegible notebooks of slurred poetry and tear-stained letters from the only girls you ever loved, all while vainly drinking your way out of a pre-internet suburbia NJ hell, then Night of the Iguana is your movie.

Few things are more boring than a sane artist. And of course, academia and the bourgeois are flooded with them. Not to rationalize, but in my opinion if you're an 'artist' and not down there in the sludgy flooded basement of your inner mansion, digging for monsters and jellyfish and risking being dragged under by monsters from the Id, then where are ya? In the living room having tea? A spot o' tea, guvna? Then you're not an artist - you're a 'craftsman' and/or a tenure track hack.

Just try to lead one of these sane artists down the stairs and see how they fight to get back up, screaming in litigious terror.

Then there are the ones with completely clean basements, they have nothing left to dig for and so their writing moves from "fiction" or "non-fiction" into "spirituality" or "Self-help."

All of which is preface to saying Night of the Iguana comes from a messy basement, a star, director and writer all with messy basements that they are deep down in the muck of, pulling up all sorts of deep archetypal mythic relics, as ancient as Cronus' broken rusty chains. It's there in the shy, ashamed way Shannon can't even drink in front of the ladies, he has to take a bottle of the cart and sheepishly slink off to his room like Popeye ashamed to let Olive see how shaky he is with the spinach can opener. I've also endured the hissing vibes in the eyes of women my own age as I walk down the street with hot babes half theirs... I've been victim of rumors, and shakes, and blue devils. I've been saved, as well, by beautiful angels who fed me when my hands shook to much to lift a fork. Hannah Jelkes calls these moments examples of "broken barriers between people." It's when you're so vulnerable and sensitive you see the beauty and kindness of those women who stick around and comfort you as truly angelic --glowing and absolving. You have no wall to hide behind and they are drawn to that nakedness of soul like a holy flame. "What is important," notes Hannah, "is that one is never alone." Yeah, booze, man, and Central, NJ, and being a barely published young writer in the age before internet, with intense social anxiety.  She gets it.

"Did someone call for a recitation?"

Yet, in getting it, she can undo it. Her love for a humble man turns him cocky, and then needy when she's not into him anymore (due to his cockiness) - thus hard-won self-knowledge seems to be swallowed up by women, who leave the man having to start all over again shedding his post-cocky neediness. Similarly, recognition and fame makes mundane formalist status quo keepers out of once visionary artists. Like a woman's love for a humble man, the public's love for writers and artists turns them cocky, then needy when their cockiness (as seen in the infamous 'sophomore effort' curse) shifts to neediness  Rather than prizing process all else, famous artists fall prey to to the addictive (naturally this process applies to all addictions) craving of attention. While self-aggrandizing is a necessary thing for some artists to overcome blocks, eventually old Ego chokes all the pipes and the bullshit starts to rise, coprophiliac sycophants may gather like hyenas in some mad night club nature show; the first line you cross is free but the costs rise until suddenly the limelight isn't over your head anymore, it's below your feet and all you're left with is a stamp on the back of your hand, now slowly washing away in the early morning rain like Roy Batty's tears. When you wake, mom wants a urine sample, and there's Bim maybe, letting your mom know a bed has opened up in the Bellevue alcoholic's ward.

A summary of Iguana's own plot is a great example of the has-beenophobic male as well: right at the beginning Lawrence T. Shannon is derided by his pinch-faced congregation,  for "praying" with one of his more attractive young (female) parishioners. We never see this girl but when we next find Shannon, he's acting as a Mexican tour guide, showing old church ladies around, trying to stay awake or semi-sober as best he can in the heat. Complicating matters is Charlotte (Sue Lyon) a wanton nymph under the care of Ms. Fellowes, a lady so misandric she could go toe-to-toe with Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar.

"oh, courage..."

Charlotte is madly in love with Shannon, promising him a job at her father's church and completely deluded and swept away in a girlish infatuation tide generated by boredom on the one hand, and the girlish sense of safety created by his being a 'born and bred' clergyman on the other. For his part, Shannon's conscience is so strict about messing around with an underage girl that he has no choice but to drink said conscience clean into oblivion. The line is sanity, honey, and he crosses it. Fellowes catches them one too many times in a clinch and threatens to have him fired from Blake's Tours. Shannon strands the tour bus near his old drinking grounds, tries to keep Fellowes' call to Corpus Christi, TX, from happening, way off in a suite of bungalows up in the hills above the beach, run by yet another female (played lustily by Ava Gardner) with an eye for defrocked Welsh priests. Brother, the heat is on! Literally as the hill is super steep and the sun hot enough to fry the minds and shaky lower intestines of some of the older ladies in the congregation.

Shit, man... and to see it all in color the first time was really nice. The TNT folks did a fine job. You could practically smell the coco de oro in the air (especially with what I was drinking at the time, 50/50 rum and orange juice). I managed to tape the entirety of a second showing and to see it a dozen times or more before finally seeing the b&w original. And now it just doesn't feel like the same movie. Still, now I'm sober so the tales of Hannah's few sexual experiences --one in the Nantucket movie theater, the hand job or whatever it was ("he was arrested, for molesting a minor / I told the police it was a Garbo picture.") and Shannon's mix of hostility during his panic attack and flashes of compassion and wisdom --has all lost a little of the magic I felt deep in my rapturous veins watching it on that colorized TNT print back in 1990.

And it's easy to see why Williams wanted his go-to muse, Anna Magnani to play Maxine (like she did on Broadway). He wrote the role expressly for her, and--as she showed in her other William's-written vehicles The Rose Tattoo (1955) and The Fugitive Kind (1960)--Magnini's slightly-dowdy sexually super-needy persona might be manna for gay boys (Brando in Kind) and grinning idiots (ala Lancaster in Tattoo), but is terrifying for any straight men who's grown up and moved out of his parent's house. Magnani' brash 'to the rafters' powerhouse dowdiness is terrifying, while Gardner's beauty is apparent no matter how down she dresses. It's fine by me, of course, that Gardner is in Magnani's role. I feel suffocated by even a few minutes of her in The Rose Tattoo and that a gorgeous man like Brando would choose her over Joanne Woodward at her sexiest in Kind is, frankly, as unconscionable as the idea that shacking up with Gardner would in anyway be a consolation prize instead of sexless Deborah Kerr (while it it was Magnani, it would make sense. No offense to that actress meant, of course. But Gardner is a raspy doll that any man would love to shack up with on a hilltop overlooking the sea, the cradle of life (and death, for brave poets to sail off into), no matter how much make-up she lost and weight she added and hair she mussed. On the other hand, shacking up with Magnani is daunting. She's legit larger than life and it's only with her in mind the part makes sense. She's the kind of woman a man needs to drink into focus, otherwise she's a blur of resonant movement. That's sometimes the best feature about forces of wild nature like her (i.e. my favorite adage (that I made up for my folklore final), "there's no such thing as ugly women, only sober men"). And Nadine's has a fully stocked bar (if Shannon doesn't drink up all the profits), so why he wouldn't be leaning that way from the get-go is the one false note. 

Since Gardner plays her though, it's hard to imagine why he seems to think twice about it. She's a lifeline tossed to Shannon the way this movie was a lifeline tossed to me in my hour of woe. I took it, as did he. Drunks may be a lot of things, but they're no fools, and they're in no position to refuse hospitality, be it Nadine's rum cocoas or Ted Turner's colorized cradle of life. Save us once, in our hour of woe, and we're loyal to you forever. Even now my relationship to this film is strong, unbreakable I quote it so often in this blog I don't even notice it anymore. Amen.

Sparagmos a-Go-Go: SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959)

Them that think their Salvia trip was like being slowly rendered apart by wild animals or ravenous cannibal percussionists clearly never saw the face of God on the Encantadas during the sea turtle hatchings when the sky is black with carnivorous birds. Sure, the bad trip equivalent, when your whole soul becomes the beach and the world rips you to shreds with its transient blood bag banality, may be close, and may take just as long, but it's not the same. You only feel it until you can drink enough whiskey to dull the world's blades back to velvet cudgels. 

"Say something funny" says Katherine Hepburn, playing Violet Venable, one of the most coolly dangerous of all Tennessee Williams' predatory mothers. "Make me stop wanting to cry."

She's talking with a young psychiatric surgeon, Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) mourning the death of her (gay aesthete poet) son Sebastian in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1958). Drinking her dailly daiquiri to undo the cringe of seeing her poor relations (Mercedes McCambridge and Gary Raymond)

pick through her late aesthete son's clothes like late-to-the-party no-neck seagulls, honking shrilly while nosing through his empty turtle shell for remaining scraps. God already took his soul, the beggar boys took his flesh and now Violet wants Cukrowicz to scrape the memory of his last moments from the brain of the scene's one witness, voluptuous Catherine Holly (Liz Taylor). Now the poor relations are her to grab the remaining cuff links and shirts. 

Though we never see a photo or painting of him (how can we picture anyone but Hurd Hatfield from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) or Helmut Berger circa 1969's The Damned?), Sebastian's spirit, his memory, hangs over the film like the angel of sexy death (that poses behind Katherine in that memorable final shot of Dr. Cukrowicz's first visit to Sebastian's weird prehistoric garden). Violet wants his poetry preserved but his homosexual promiscuity excised from the mind of its main witness, Katherine. Hence, she's locked up in a convent until the doctor can lobotomize the 'truth' out of her. 

For you see, Violet knows the kind of existential horror her son was into. The highlight of the film is Hepburn's monologue detailing her unforgettable summer with Sebastian the previous year, at Encantada island in the Galapagos, wherein we learn Sebastian saw the face of God in a beach full of baby turtle-devouring birds --an all too real annual event that traumatized many of us who first saw it as kids on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom back in the 70s and--like me--never forgot, trembling in the sudden unveiling of some evil undercurrent, some sadistic devouring other, aspect of existence.At least Violet Venable, Sebastian's mom and the caretaker of his poems, his life story--for his life was his poems and his poems were his life, doctor--is hip to that cosmic Lovecraftian truth, as evinced by the prehistoric garden they walk through, replete with an Angel of Death statue. - One of my favorite scenes in all movies. 

She's not well, or she'd know how creepy it must be to others to hear her boasting about her tight nigh-incestuous relationship with her late son. Yet determined to hide his gayness. 

Of course, PSYCHO was still two years away --there wasn't a template for recognizing when a mom's apron strings are choking her child in his 22 year-old cradle--at least one wasn't allowed to be visible in film unless based on esteemed literature (the big loophole to censorship was the bourgeois reverence for classic novels). With Sebastian gone, her need to dominate and invade moves over to Katherine, her screaming hysterical niece, she must be drilled dumb, so the fantasy poet can remain intact.

Despite all that, I love her. Violet may be monstrous, but she knows the queasy dread that draws sensitive poets to the rocks, that push me-pull you lure of the abyss. She draws short of sparagmos cannibalism, but otherwise is down to stare into the void. In that way she and her niece become poets, perhaps made so by osmosis, by connection to Sebastian. These two women provide nearly every monologue in the movie; they even sound similar--the syntax, the rhythm. We can only presume--having never heard him speak--that they are somehow imitating Sebastian's style, the way the absence of someone we love or admire causes us to adapt some of their traits, our unconscious attempt to fill the void they left. 

Through Sebastian, these two ladies have felt the caustic touch of god, the endless ever-amplifying agonies of drug (or sex addiction) withdrawal, the sense of disaster ever-looming, only a lack of funds or availability away. The horrible pain of being ripped apart by wild animals stretched infinitely. Withdrawal is the check for the meal so large and expensive we don't dare finish it. We linger at the bar, the needle, the bathhouse, hoping that blank page will somehow write itself.

But sooner or later we run out of salve for our cigarette-burnt hand and we've no choice left but to twist and hyperventilate in our bed (or on the street or park bench) for hours on end. Every minute of consciousness stretches out like a long strip of beach slowly being rent to shreds, every last twisting living reptile cell devoured and clawed; our whole being just a sacrifice to some pagan bloodthirsty god.

Tennessee Williams knows the feeling. You can tell in the way he blurs that sadomasochistic line between fear and desire, between the psyche and its surroundings. Williams' demons precede the debauched white-faced, black leather-clad monsters of HELLRAISER by thirty years. The rape in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, the shattering final shot of ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE, the (if the censors hadn't changed it to a broken nose in the film version) castration of Paul Newman at the end of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, the sexy price of another drink at the end of CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (changed in the film version for a happy ending with Brick finally straightening out and loving Liz Taylor the movie), they're all concessions to the realistic level that come with an intense price tag.

 Sometimes they constitute crimes but in Williams' world there's no such thing as a bad sensation Sebastian wasn't the type to complain to the management, as Katherine explains during the climactic, drugged, hypnotized recollection of his final hours. With peaks of crucifixion-level agony at the climactic end of the spectrum and drunken 'snap!' stillness on the other--what else is true heaven but hell escaped from at a suitable velocity, like a rocket that needs pillars of fire scorching the ground to rise past the clouds? The only truly bad sensation in Williams' work is the despair that comes from the numbness of isolation and drifting; the fear of winding down to the speed of a boat becalmed, when not even the gulls want to peck at you. It's that despair Williams truly fears, a fear that makes the violent attentions of cannibal rent boys a luxury by contrast.

And even then, there's one thing worse even than isolation: being locked in with the no-neck monsters, trapped in 'the Drum' and its insane gibberers, or the smug naysaying nuns who refuse to let their patients so much as scream in despair or finish one cigarette. They're all of a piece with the banalities and shrill over-acting of Katherine's white trash mom and her dumb-as-shit cufflink-scavenging goober of a brother, George. How Sebastian ever put up with any of them long enough to pull Katherine from their grubby mitts into his rarefied realm is anyone's guess. "Aren't they awful?!" Violet comments to Cukrowicz  after they finally leave Sebastian's studio (where we see a male black nude and are left to draw our own conclusions).

Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz from Williams' original one-act play, brilliantly adapted with Gore Vidal, Suddenly Last Summer is the kind of thing that would freak people out even today, unless it was shot by George Romero or Dario Argento and all the cannibalism was actually shown, hence giving it a drive-in / grindhouse context. Then, somehow, it would be okay. The bourgeois snobs would know to stay away and it would all be laughable or cathartic.  As it is, the film's artsy pedigree ensures that even the most squeamish of bourgeoisie have to see--or rather hear-- it all the way through, forced--almost like Katharine Hepburn's insane matriarch--to accept the vicious incestuous, homosexual, Dionysian cannibal truth. They must hear that which cannot be shown. A mix of metonym and metaphor (hands, legs, instruments, birds), Katherine's recollection plays like a Hitchcock or Bergman dream sequence during a long therapy session more than a traumatic reality or more to the point, it shows there is no difference.

The terrible fate of Sebastian mirrors several mythic archetypal sacrificial moments from classic Greek literature (namely Euripides' Bacchae) involving crows, youths, blood sacrifice, implied homosexuality, and ritualistic initiation and of course, maenad rending - the 'ultimate' sensation (as Frank notes right before the Cenobites spring the hooks). Violet tries to make the "real" event in Williams' story seem a dead myth, a torture-porn fiction invented by a hysterical nymphomaniac suffering from "dementia precox" (which Dr. Cukrowicz assures her is a meaningless phrase) rather than a living truth. Just because it hides so damned archaically deep in the collective subconscious--doesn't mean it didn't happen. In a way it's the blueprint for paranoid conspiracy theories to come - are the dark secrets of aliens and secret societies so horrible we can't admit they're real, so make up paranoia--a meaningless phrase by which we deny dark truths? Why are alien abductions almost exactly like sleep paralysis? Which one is the illusion, or are both real, or some deeper truth than either/or?) 

We know the truth here because we know someone has read the coroner's report, but that doesn't change the poetic abstraction - as if shocking violence opens up a direct mainline between modern life and Greek myth. In flashbacks of hypnotized washed-out poetry, our senses are blasted open by Liz Taylor gradually releasing her gorgeous black hair out from under a tacky bathing cap, her voluptuous body squirming in the surf in a revealing white one piece bathing suit and inciting us into a horny cannibal frenzy (that image below was the selling point of the film).

What a flashback! The young bucks of the town that clamor against the private beach fence as they ogle her --creating a freakish, unnatural class divide / mirror / screen dichotomy - as if these boys could be the audience around us in the theater, or rather we become them, joining the slavering nameless throng climbing over each other to get a better view. And what a view! Me --YOW!  A thousand horny hands rip the screen to shreds and devour it, hoping to capture some of the hot light upon it. But the image still just hangs there, now on the wall behind the screen, and in the haze of sweat and blood rising up from the front of the trashed cinema. Pan! Pan! Not just bread but the god of satyriasis (a condition Williams self-diagnosed). 

But this is a talking cure movie and, as I say, the main horrors are spoken of--not seen, nor is the above image, we never see her hair flowing so freely (she has her neutering bathing cap on in the movie)  First, Violet describes the spectacle of turtle hatching day to Monty Clift's venerable shrink in the prehistoric garden. She's already a goddess (descending from her elevator chariot), made so by erudite wit and money so is--in a sense--under permanent hypnosis. If she had a hidden unconscious she'd perhaps be less eager to point out the totality of her incestuous bond with her son. Second, under hypnosis, Liz Taylor describes Sebastian's last hours to Clift at the film's climax. This Violet would rather not hear; it's as if her remove from the beach at the Encantadas, the safety of the ship, the fact it was turtles and not her own young, made it just an enthralling and weird story. But when it's your own flesh and blood being rended and gobbled up, she cannot--in a sense--look away from it OR see it. 

Monty's job as analyst then becomes acting as witness to these two women discussing the horrors of the unvarnished extreme end of the real, the obscene existential mouth which devours itself via a tongue of a million frenzied lashing conqueror worms; a churning, massive, oceanic ouroboros at the base pit of existence. Both Catherine and Violet wind up lambs in a kind of dual sacrificial ceremony, performing the horror of watching and relating a sacrifice for a (presumably 'civilized') audience. The band-aid is off and the audience forced to look, not at the scenes of carnage too grisly to show in 1959, but into the horrified eyes of someone who has looked (which is profound without being sickening). The natural reaction is horror of the type one may have when turning over a large rock and finding a whole ecosystem of squirming worms, centipedes, and snakes living below it, but then Clift doesn't let us recoil before taking each insect out in turn, and naming it, putting it to sleep under ether; and freeing us of our disgust. It's real Freudian return of the repressed abject menstruation shit. He's paying the tab, redressing the sins of our hear-no-feminine-napkin-application-procedure evil forefathers. The patriarchal rep of a new kind of medicine (Clift) hears the truth (sparagmos) of the hysterical symptom (Violet's denial / impending lobotomy) and thus the scene itself--sex--is cured as well as Katherine, as well as the nation under Kinsey. No wonder 1950s America loved Freud! He gave both genders an out: he mediated the mounting bedroom cold war by just keeping everybody talking. A war can't be waged if both sides admit they're afraid to fight. Their must be something more productive they can do with their excess energy.

Williams' own real life sexual interests followed the Greek ideal, aiding no doubt in his profound grasp of Greek tragedy and its ability to explain the cosmos in terms of Apollonian beach boys. Sebastian's unseen ghost hovers over the action like Poe's Lenore or the dominating spirit of REBECCA. Never seen, he's outside of space and time, at once something of a past and future century. He's anywhere but here. Even the title carries a time-travel vibe, like Phillip K. Dick's sci fi book NOW WAIT TIL LAST YEAR and indicates the exact kind of transcendence of space and time.

The whole structure of "Big Chill" kind of dramas, where the action centers around someone recently or long-since dead and therefore unseen is a big thing with Williams: Blanche natters incessantly about her long-dead lover who couldn't get it up cuz he was queer and thus shot himself in STREETCAR; Anna Magnani worships the memory of her late stud husband in THE ROSE TATTOO; Fred's dead at the start of NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and who could forget old Skipper in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF? But none of them can hold a candle to the evil and eloquently damned Sebastian, who for total dominance over the living is as spectral as a Poe heroine, or Rebecca de Winter or the first half of LAURA.

Suddenly REPULSION

His mother, Violet, then is both Sebastian's symbolic killer and the force that kept him from harm on all the other vacations, and the force that keeps his name on everyone's lips... even in death. She's like a vampire protecting her prey from other hustlers. When Sebastian dies because it's because Violet's not around to save him and he forgot all the things he never learned while being under her wing when other boys were negotiating narrow streets on foot, and otherwise avoiding the painful fate of the cannibal crockpot.

Perhaps because of their own outsider statuses via homosexuality and alcoholism, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal could both really stare wide-eyed into the hellish morass that represents the ultimate end-game of rich jet set debauchery, the "okay let's take off the kid gloves" kind of thing involved in the real rough leather trade and all the other stuff Camille Paglia writes about. Here's an excerpt of Paglia talking about the greatness of Tennessee Williams in that regard:

If we are ever to see a revival of artistry, young film-makers must study and absorb the great movie past. To build on the small, weak, one-dimensional films of the 1980s and '90s is a dead end. The same thing with writing: if young people simply draw on the shallow, cynical, jargon-clotted postmodernism of the 1980s and '90s, they'll produce nothing that will last.

This is why I exalt Tennessee Williams as a supreme role model: he was openly gay (daring at the time) but never ghettoized himself. He lived in the real world and thought and felt in passionate, universal terms — which is why he created titanic characters who have had worldwide impact and who are still stunningly alive.

(Bright Lights Film Journal, #54, 2006)

Liz Taylor--a titanic, stunningly alive character with worldwide impact herself--seems to have been a kind of protean cine-muse to Williams, and one much more magnetic than Magnani, and much more opinionated and loud about it than most of the screen goddesses in her league. Totally unafraid to get in there and shake it in all senses of the word, from root to crown chakra (with a long pause at the hips), Liz's characters clash with patriarchy and then withdraw to fight again, like Sung Tzu says to do in ART OF WAR! Take GIANT, for example, where she maneuvers around the end zones at her newfound homeland Texas' narrow-minded patriarchal ways, and everyone of the old guard just has to put up with it. None of their usual patronizing crap works, even when she's way out of line they can't rope her in. She lets them win a hand or two, but never stops wearing them down, until they surrender like aggressive dogs to Cesar Milan in the Dog Whisperer. Like said dogs, these Texans realize they love her for her ability to be assertive without being aggressive, and she becomes the social mother conscience for all of Rich Oil Texas. She creates a new respect and admiration for the voice of dissent. It's okay to walk away having lost a fight with Liz Taylor. She'll let you win the next one.

SUMMER's Catherine isn't allowed to know this kind of power. When she parades around in negligees or bathing suits, it's both a mythic Venus on the half-shell moment and a scream for help; she wants you to see how desperately out of place she feels, but you can only notice how perfectly in place every part of her actually is. She needs a Rock Hudson around who she can bounce off of and claw at and know he'll stick around regardless. She needs a man to see the limitless compassion and love behind all the compulsive attention-seeking. Monty Clift fits this role beautifully, paralyzed face or no. One of my favorite moments is when she kisses him impulsively during their therapy and he neither rejects nor accepts to go any further, or back for that matter, saying "why not? It was a friendly kiss." He lets it affect him only mildly, but later when she grabs him and they kiss we never quite see how he responds. So many similar scenes in films blow this opportunity to dissolve phony social dualities between authority figure and lover, social order/propriety and chthonic carnal desire, the desire of the higher self and the desire of the man, as if any response other than rejection is considered amoral. Catherine's 'nymphomania' could be unknowingly encouraged to devolve into degeneracy by the nuns strictly-enforced codes of shame and negative reinforcement coupled to fast profits ala BUTTERFIELD 8, so when Monty responds in this way the chain is short-circuited and she's free. Who wouldn't go crazy if they took away your smoking privileges?

Any subliminal resemblance between Violet's hat and a Venus flytrap upper palate is purely intentional

Yes, this film makes you proud to be a smoker. It's cigarettes ultimately that bond Catherine with Monty's doctor and drive the mean nun from the room. And like cigarettes, it only gets better with repeat viewings, wherein you smoke along with the action, addicted and decaying... until all the cigarettes are taken out digitally and replaced with delicious chocolate candies!

A unique film, SUMMER's only competition in whatever genre it invented is Bergman's PERSONA (1966), which similarly deconstructs the nature of truth vs. recollection, image vs. verbal description, and the way image becomes truth via personally recounted testimonies of unfettered lust under blazing afternoon suns. Stories told verbally (but not seen) of unchained desire prove more arousing and dangerous than mere soft core footage shot through gauze, as it turns out, unless you're on acid maybe, but even on acid you just like it for the rhythmic breathing and colors; the image is inherently obscene to you by then anyway, it seems always about to overflow, eventually ripping open the screen. But whereas PERSONA delves into abstract meditation and whereas something like the DEAD trilogy shows the horror of the animal and vegetable decay but skips the post-modern ripped screen artsiness, SUMMER trumps all by showing the rip AND the screen and then showing Liz Taylor describe it under a heat lamp.

The result is as devastating and cathartic as a dozen art and/or horror films combined. A new image every viewing comes to mind, with echoes of Matt Shepherd and all the horrifying gay hate crimes on the one hand, and the meta refraction of Liz's real life bosom friendship with the homosexual Clift and his crippling car accident during the shooting of RAINTREE COUNTY, the year before, one that took this beautiful god of a man and left him looking far older, partially paralyzed, with Liz right there every step of the way, procuring and protecting. SUDDENLY finds the connecting ground between the horrors of old Greco-Roman myth and the reality around them, the more outre it gets the more real, the more specific the more meta, the more universal, its clear-eyed unflinching grasp for the truth is so pure-- even if it takes a little demerol to get there--it goes beyond truth, or myth, or even art, to become a reflection of all the loving joy to be found once the horrors of God's cruelty are finally grasped in full, and accepted. Color then is thine.