Suddenly, Last Summer · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the turtles. Violet Venable, serene as a queen receiving tribute, tells the doctor about the Encantadas — the black volcanic beach where the sea turtles hatch and scramble for the water while the sky fills with birds that drop, flip them onto their backs, and eat them alive from underneath. She narrates it as her son Sebastian's vision of the face of God. She means it as beauty. The whole film is folded into that one story, and once you hear it you can read everything else through it: this is a world in which the polite surface is a thin lid over pure appetite, and the question of the plot — what happened suddenly, last summer — has only ever had one answer. Something got eaten.

Deleuze has a name for the world under the lid. Beneath the ordinary cinema of goals and obstacles, of people who size up a situation and act, he finds a darker register he calls the impulse-image, the cinema of naturalism. Here characters are not agents but appetites. What drives them is not a plan but a drive — hunger, predation, degradation — and the elegant social setting (Deleuze's derived-milieu) turns out to be the mask of a savage originary-world that keeps breaking through. You rarely get this concept literalized as cleanly as Mankiewicz gives it to you. Sebastian's garden is a conservatory of carnivorous plants, a Venus flytrap fed live flies by hand, a primordial jungle grown inside a New Orleans mansion. It is the originary world made into furniture. And the law of that world is the law of the impulse-image: the line-of-slope, the irreversible skid toward exhaustion and death. Sebastian uses his beautiful cousin as bait, then his mother, then is finally torn apart and consumed by the starving boys he had been consuming. Cannibalism is not the film's shock twist so much as its logic completed. The mouth is the film's fetish — the part-object where the whole compulsion concentrates — and everyone in it is either eating or being eaten.

The house tells the same story in a quieter key. Deleuze would call the Venable mansion a case of crystal-decomposition: an enclosed, aristocratic, ornamental world that is rotting from inside. Hildyard lights Hepburn for monumental, brittle glamour; she descends into her garden in a private elevator like a goddess lowered into her grove. It is gorgeous and it is decaying, and the gorgeousness is the decay. Money is the preservative. The plot's engine is that two parties have reasons to keep Catherine from speaking — Violet to protect the myth of her saintly poet son, Catherine's own mother to keep the inheritance — and the price of silence is a lobotomy. An ordered world buying its own continuation by cutting out a girl's memory: the crystal eating itself to stay shining.

Sebastian himself never appears. His face is withheld for the entire film, an absence the living circle and fight over. This is the investigation-by-testimony structure that Mankiewicz had been refining for a decade and that the film inherits openly from Citizen Kane — a missing center reconstructed only through the accounts of others — and from his own All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives, where character is built from long articulate speech and nested, narrated flashback rather than from action. Violet is the forger in Deleuze's sense, le faussaire: she does not report Sebastian, she fabricates him, forging the legend of the chaste artist to overwrite what he was. For most of its length the film hovers near what Deleuze calls the powers of the false — two incompatible versions of a dead man, each told as true. But here is where the film stops short of the modern cinema and shows its 1959 address: it does not leave the versions undecidable. A truth serum is administered, and the image is made to confess. The Code-era contract holds. What the camera finally shows is true. The false is raised only to be exorcised.

And how does it show it? This is the film's real invention. The climactic flashback is not dramatized in the clean style of the rest. It erupts as bleached, overexposed, fragmentary flash-images, repeated and broken, that do not actually depict the horror so much as flinch from it. The terror lives in Taylor's voice, not in the picture. The image has gone what Deleuze calls a lectosign — a readable image, one that has lost its self-evidence and has to be deciphered, completed by the soundtrack rather than understood on sight. Sound and image split apart and carry different loads: the voice does the telling, the image only stammers. That audiovisual disjunction is precisely how the film smuggled cannibalism and coded homosexuality past a censorship regime that could ban what was shown but could not quite ban what was merely said over a glare of white light.

That is the significance worth keeping. The Williams cycle — Streetcar, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie — had been driving toward the forced speaking of a suppressed, usually queer, truth around an absent man. Suddenly, Last Summer takes that machine and makes the recovery of repressed memory the literal mechanism of its climax, then discovers that the way to put the unspeakable on screen is not to film it but to fracture the image and let language carry the wound. Watch it again and watch the mouths. Watch what consumes what, and who gets to do the talking.