I so want to cut it out of my brain
New World Order: Part one
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), screenplay by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, based on Williams’s play. Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz.
“Dementia praecox. Such a pretty name for a disease, sounds like a rare flower, doesn’t it? Night blooming Dementia Praecox.”
So says Violet Venable, the rapacious and demented matriarch of Tennessee Williams’s phantasmagoric one-act play, “Suddenly, Last Summer”.
Dementia praecox, the original diagnostic term for schizophrenia, afflicts Violet’s niece, Catherine, afflicts her so severely that Violet’s had her committed, and wants her silenced, by means of a brain operation known as a frontal lobotomy.
It sounds scientific, but it’s just a procedure for silencing unruly women. It’s a floundering in the dark, a crude cutting out of what’s tasteless, unnecessary. It’s taking out the garbage, gender genocide. Unruly women get in the way.
And who says something like that? Such a pretty name for a disease. Who puts pretty and disease together in a sentence?
For a more recent example from the same rubric, we have Grok (and trust Elon Musk to name his AI-bot with the sound of a trillionaire vomiting after one too many anti-aging cocktails) being asked to reply to the question:
“Who would you kill, Elon Musk or all the Jews in the world?”
It’s not relevant how the bot replied, because the point of the bot, and the point of that question, is not to uncover any kind of truth but to express loyalty. Elon is so desperately unloved by—let’s go out on a limb shall we?—most humans, he has to spend his lonely nights teaching an AI he created not to throw him under the bus.
The challenge is meant to demonstrate an edgy humor, I guess, and a determination to take “free speech” to the limit, though as always it’s the white guys who run the joint who don’t understand how hate speech kills. As always, I wonder why the right to say anything, no matter how harmful, hateful or dreary, is more important than protecting the vulnerable among us.
The query blandly mimics those philosophical mind games that seek to create the greatest good for the most people. It’s a disingenuous “just asking” kind of question supposedly cooked up by a dispassionate utilitarian, but it is in fact filled with the worst kind of passionate intensity.
No, I want to know who asks that kind of question? If the answer is “a technocrat” or “a sadist”, I still don’t know what that means.
Who felt it was permissible to ask that question? Who lacks the humanity and insight, what brain-dead ghoul sports with people’s trauma, what kind of soul casually reawakens the nightmare at high noon, makes someone cry out in fear in broad daylight, because it happened?
Likewise, in Williams’s lurid drama, someone is insisting on talking; someone is trying to shut her up. There are disagreements about what is acceptable and what is outside the bounds of decorum. Violet wants Catherine to stop babbling her obscene fantasies (she cannot believe they are anything but the ravings of a lunatic); she wants Catherine silent and compliant.
For Catherine, you see, has not lost her mind but she is witness to an act so barbaric that her memory is repressed, her sense of reality is shattered. The story unfolds in the second of two great operatic speeches, as Catherine describes the horror of Sebastian’s demise. She witnessed his murder, last summer; at the hands of a mob of young men who attack then devour him in a grotesque act of Dionysian sparagmos; a frenzied pagan ritual. Equally shocking, for a 1950’s audience at least, we learn that Catherine was the bait to lure tasty young men into Sebastian’s clutches. She was his pimp-hag, taking over the role that Violet had previously filled until age dimmed her charms.
Sebastian, who is the key character in the play, never actually appears in the play. He has died before the action of the play begins, and thus he’s only talked about, but he is the event horizon around which the play irresistably spins.
It’s reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel “Rebecca”, whose title character also wreaks havoc from the great beyond. Her power lies in the way she managed in life her veneer of perfection, and the shocking revelation of her true character constitutes the turning point of the story. In our play, Sebastian’s legacy is up for grabs. Two women fight over whose memory will be official, which story will be told—that of Violet’s poet son, her Shakespearean namesake and incestuous double, a noble martyr too pure to survive a cruel and amoral universe, or that of Catherine’s lavender lover, a cynical predator and manipulator who sees other people only in relation to his insatiable hunger, a monster who cannot love, only consume…
OK, confession: I’m the sort of guy who revels in, for example, a Wagner opera. I love big rhetoric, camp sensibilities. Female neurosis, writ large on screen or stage, is my superpower. However, like every other conflicted-reluctant Wagner fan, I mostly listen to, for example, Tristan and Isolde by way of the Prelude grafted onto the final Liebestod—if you’re giving me a blank look, this means I mostly stick to the “Readers Digest” version that consists of the first 15 minutes and the final 15 minutes, and blithely skips the intervening five hours of music of the complete opera (not to mention the two pre-purchased drinks and the dinner break in the private box).
What I’m telling you is that sometimes I go full-bore flighty gay and just indulge in life’s ripe banana, as it were, and discard the peel. This means I have never actually watched the entire movie version of Suddenly, Last Summer, all the scenes at one sitting, in the correct order.
Frankly, the writing in this play is either sensational or pedestrian. Williams was at heart a poet, his art blossomed with lush imagery; story lines seemed to bore him. For example, I can easily do without the tedious, forced sub-plot that insists wde bite our nails about whether the lobotomy hospital will get its big, fat cheque from Violet. Are you kidding me?
But—I have always adored the scene, by which I mean something like an operatic aria without literal music, in which Katharine Hepburn, through the vehicle of Williams’s overwrought, poetic language, lures us up to the very edge of bathos. She describes her and Sebastian’s experience witnessing the great sea turtles laying their eggs on a beach on the Galápagos Islands. This is the first of those two great speeches I mentioned, the thesis to Catherine’s antithesis, as it were. That’s the meat of this strange tale: two conflicting mad scenes by two crazy dames; everything else is superfluous.
(Oh, and if you want to get on my best side—and Hail Mary, mother of Liza, who doesn’t?— kindly take a number and join the line up, for part of your bestie audition is to watch that scene with me. Consider it your initiation via the Sistine Chapel of camp. Besides, I already made the scones.)
Hepburn does not disappoint. Every emotion from A to B flickers over those cubist cheekbones as she chants in her twanging east coast contralto, “there, in the Incantadas…”
First comes the grisly hatching of the eggs, (“the beach the color of caviar…. all alive, all alive!”) and the primordial struggle of the baby sea turtles to reach the sea as a vortex of predatory birds swoops down mercilessly and devours as many as they can—”…and rending and eating their flesh” as Violet describes it, killing our last hope that any gory details might be left to our imagination.
Hepburn’s very lips seem to trace the writhing of the tiny hatchlings. Oh, it’s ludicrous, ridiculous and just plain tremendous. You’ll regret every wasted moment of your life before you heard this speech, and you’ll regret every moment after when you can’t be listening to it.
I must not neglect to mention that all this talk takes place in Sebastian’s garden, which bears no resemblance to one’s usual herbaceous border with bird bath and which I guarantee would get you blackballed by your co-op board. For his garden is a vision of hell, yet another fantastic proof of nature’s psychosis. It is his perverse Garden of Eden, all ready for its shiftless tenants, a repulsive creation bursting with giant ferns and palms and insectivorous plants that reek of carrion. Violet calmly feeds flies to her Venus fly-trap with a pair of tweezers, flies which she assures us, hilariously, are provided “at great expense.”
Then she serves tea to Montgomery Clift.
(Montgomery Clift, by the way, is just there to extract the check for the lobotomy clinic and stay out of the rain. His dialog consists mainly of repeating the final words of his co-stars. Thus, “The sky was filled with flesh-eating birds!!” gasps Violet; “Flesh-eating birds…” echoes Monty. It is an utterly thankless role.)
You will have noticed by now that this is an intense play. It is not a picnic. These are not people who go bowling on a Friday. They don’t do brunch. They rarely empty the vacuum cleaner bag, or spot-treat the laundry before ordering a hamburger to go. These people live in a fevered frenzy of life in the fast lane, or at least the lane with the speed cams and the motorcycle cop who gives you a ticket.
Sebastian watches the horrible turtle-rending scene until night has fallen and, after this ordeal, tells his mother that he has finally “seen the face of god”.
He means the merciless hunger, the indifference of nature, but he goes further: he dares to offer this spectacle of carnage as proof that human empathy, compassion and even everyday optimism are a sham, that we are indifferent predators, too.
Well.
It seemed like the perfect movie to watch as the last dregs of 2025 trickled down the damp walls of my oubliette, but forget the majesty of nature. We, dear fellow inmates, are the baby turtles, and Trump is no end of squawking devouring raptors.
Seriously. Hasn’t it always been like this, isn’t it going to be like this forever?
“Say goodnight, Gracie.”
“Goodnight, Gracie.”
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