Enys Men

Director Mark Jenkin

ENYS MEN               B+                                                                                                            Great Britain  (96 mi)  2022  d: Mark Jenkin

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare.  Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it.  The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.                                                                  —Joan Didion from The Paris Review, 1978

A metaphysical horror flick with Nicolas Roeg sensibilities, including the intrusion of the natural world in Walkabout (1971) and the recurring red coat image from Don't Look Now (1973), yet also in the editing, with its free-associative cross-cutting in time and space, where the bleak remoteness recalls Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937), with a minimalist yet repeating narrative that resembles the carefully choreographed, almost mathematically precise shooting scheme of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), yet also delves into ghostly realms.  This is one of the better efforts of using the COVID lockdown as a metaphor, shot during the pandemic, where isolation is a recurrent theme as we follow an anonymous middle-aged woman known only as a wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine, the director’s partner), the sole resident living alone on an island off the Cornish coast, instead spending her time hiking around the island in her hiking boots, studying and collecting data on a rare flower growing on the cliffs, making scientific entries into a daily journal, where at least initially not much changes as we see her making a cup of tea while listening to the scratchy sounds of a shortwave radio broadcast and/or a two-way radio.  The grind of the routine is all that matters, with the director establishing a rhythm and unpretentious avant-garde aesthetic where not much happens, providing no clear answers by the end, with very little human interaction, as it’s all about capturing the minute details of daily living in such an isolated existence, an exploration of time, memory, nature, and grief, expressed with a sense of dread and foreboding, where it’s not really horror per se, but a cinematic aesthetic.  Like the Dogma tradition, The 10 Rules of "Dogme 95", The Danish Film Movement, on Christmas Day 2012 Jenkin typed out his Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 film manifesto, checkthis.com/sldg13, consisting of 13 rules promoting his own film aesthetic, “to be realised with a minimum of fuss.”  Rules, of course, that are later meant to be broken!  In something of a one-man project, the film is written, directed, shot, and edited, with a post synchronized sound design and ambient musical score written by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, shot on 16mm using highly saturated color on aged film stock, using an outdated, wind-up Bolex camera that allows only 27 seconds per shot, where the authentic look of the film includes recurring dirt scratches and light flare-ups around the grainy edges of the frame, yet there’s an intoxicating style to the repetitious visual design of the film that is not like anything you typically see, featuring a prominent and almost playful use of a zoom lens, feeling more like an immersive viewer experience.  Jenkin’s earlier film BAIT (2019), winner of the Outstanding Debut while nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year at the British Bafta Film Awards in 2020 that ultimately became the most successful Cornish film ever made, had a silent film era look and was also shot in a picturesque Cornish fishing village, part of England’s rugged southwestern tip where the coast is lined with towering cliffs overlooking the Celtic Sea.  Though language is sparse, occasionally heard over the radio or in carefully chosen songs, the emphasis is much like Colm Bairéad’s use of Gaelic in The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) (2022), as there is an intentional choice to infuse the film with a thematic song written in an unsubtitled Cornish Celtic language, where a hidden history and culture are resurrected in spirit, actually reviving a Cornwall heritage that once thrived, but has now fallen on hard times, becoming part of the heart and soul of the film.      

Very much focused upon texture, where the medium of film itself becomes woven into the director’s experimental artistic aesthetic, Jenkin’s film premiered in Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where the title (pronounced ‘Ennis Main’) is Cornish for “Stone Island,” taking place on a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and crumbling stone ruins, where her overgrown stone home appears to be the only surviving structure.  Her sense of isolation is magnified immensely by the surrounding quiet, providing a sense of timelessness, where the first spoken word comes about fifteen minutes into a film that features only a dozen or so lines of dialogue spoken throughout the whole experience.  From the journal entries we can tell this is set in 1973, where the film is built around the woman’s same schedule as she gets up in the morning, hikes around the island, looks at the flowers, takes the soil temperature, sees birds flying out over the open sea, drops a rock down an old mining shaft listening for the sound, and observes any changes of note before cranking up the generator to provide electricity in the old cottage where she is living, typically writing “no changes” in her journal, where the endless repetitive cycle resembles the onset of cabin fever in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), as once things start to change, her mental outlook slowly deteriorates, with the director developing a strange fascination for filming backwards.  A younger girl (Flo Crowe) begins to appear in the house with her, a ghostly presence that also appears standing on the roof, but she also speaks to her in a motherly manner, though she may be a younger version of herself that simply appears to her, as if she’s seeing things in her imagination that spring from her own personal memories.  Viewers don’t know how long she’s been alone on this island, or how long she’s staying, as she’s running out of supplies, but apparently is expecting to be replenished by a supply boat, as she’s connected to the outside world by a CB radio, often ignoring the voices heard.  Ambiguous to the core, not really part of any pre-existing genre (though the director drew heavily from British horror films of the 70’s, occasionally resorting to schlock horror techniques), one of the first signs that her world is falling apart is an image of the boatman (Edward Rowe), who suddenly appears on this island, and may be her husband, but disappears just as quickly, like a repressed memory, seeing just a brief flash of the man’s face.  Equally stunning is the appearance of local schoolchildren dancing and singing folk songs outside her cottage, resembling a May Day ceremony, remnants of a vanished community, singing a specially commissioned Kernewek Kemmyn song Kan Me - YouTube (4:09) written and performed again over the end credits by Gwenno, a Welsh singer raised by a Welsh activist mother and a Cornish poet father, who has become something of a one-woman Celtic revival.  This song recurs several times throughout the film, providing an atmospheric refrain, where the haunting nature echoes a theme of internal pain and loss, adding yet another layer of texture, as the line between what’s real and what’s imagined becomes more blurred, taking a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing her, along with viewers, to question the nature of what is real and what is a developing nightmare.

The cawing sounds of seagulls and gannets comprise much of the film’s sound design and visual palette, as these birds were here long before the presence of humans, living in complete harmony with nature, seen dive bombing into the sea for fish, developing a miraculous instinct for survival even in the most remote places.  The camera seems as much interested in the island itself as the woman, perhaps merging into a single consciousness, continually alternating between long takes and sudden cuts that keep viewers off balance.  In an ironic twist, the woman can be seen reading Robert Allen and Edward Goldsmith’s A Blueprint for Survival each night before bed, one of the earliest warnings of climate change in 1972, a telling sign of her own fragile state of mind, offering precious insight into the tenuous state of her well-being and shifting equilibrium, as if her own survival is at stake.  There is a nautical theme of shipwrecks, with a memorial plaque on the island for seafarers lost at sea attempting to save a supply boat in 1897, as emergency warning sounds can be heard over the radio as if it was happening in the present, where she appears to get lost in a time warp, Enys Men | Exclusive Clip | Opens Friday - YouTube (1:15), diving ever deeper into the darkest corners of the unknown, Clip: Enys Men (NEON) - YouTube  (1:18).  She also hears inexplicable sounds in the middle of the night, like water dripping, or pounding sounds underneath the earth, where she moves to explore the origin only to discover the dirty faces of tin miners illuminated by candlelight in a dripping-wet cave, men who may have lost their lives there many years ago, while an elderly preacher (John Woodvine, Mary’s father, ninety-one years old at the time) delivers apocalyptic warnings of lost faith, heard singing a healing hymn, Let the Lower Lights Be Burning - YouTube (2:46), all adding to the spectral figures connected to the island’s history who make themselves known, remnants of a time long passed, mysteriously merging together the past, present, and future.  An ancient stone monolith that has been there all along (the Boswens Menhir, standing more than eight feet tall, Boswens Menhir – ancient history, mystery and modern ...), a memorial to those lost but not forgotten, suddenly changes positions on the familiar landscape, moving closer to the home, while the flowers have also disappeared, alerting viewers that something drastic is happening, perhaps losing all sense of self, 'Enys Men' Clip - Haunting Artifact a Catalyst to ... - YouTube (1:34).  Mysterious sounds are the connecting tissue of this unsettling film, taking us into unexplored realms, like the eerie electronic musical score, the rustling wind, or the waves ceaselessly pounding the craggy rocks along the shoreline, creating a symphony of sounds that mirror her alarming deterioration, where her journal entries warn us of significant changes, as reality starts to break down, suddenly contaminated by the surrounding world, where each passing day sends her deeper into her own darkness, plunging us into the world of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968).  Jenkin grew up near the Merry Maidens Stone Circle, a collection of standing stones that have remained in a jagged circle since the Bronze Age, so his personalized familiarity with the history and cultural memory of the region has led to a twisted and discomforting portrait of human isolation, exaggerating the fear and paranoia associated with loneliness, creating an ominous reminder of how easily things are forgotten, where something truly terrifying can end up taking the place of everything we thought was familiar.  

Understanding Mark Jenkin's Cornish Folk Horror YouTube (17:12)

Suddenly, Last Summer

 

Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Montgomery Cliff on the set

 Mankiewicz with Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor

Playwright Tennessee Williams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER                 B+                                                                               USA  (114 mi)  1959  d: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Don’t you understand?  I was procuring for him!                                                                  —Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor)

A decaying relic from a Gothic age of Southern delirium is summoned from the demented imagination of a Tennessee Williams one-act play, re-imagined by screenwriter Gore Vidal, and shot by heralded director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, coming on the heels of the success of what is arguably Williams’ best-known play, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1958), where this film’s overt treatment of homosexuality, insanity, incest, lobotomy, and even cannibalism challenged the limits of the Hays Production Code Era (1934 – 1962) and pretty much blew it to smithereens, opening the door for a mostly uncensored decade of the 60’s which exuded unlimited freedoms. But this may be one of the defining examples of how writers and film directors attempted to skirt the heavy hands of the censors, where everything is spoken in code and sexual ambiguity, and certain taboo subjects could never be openly discussed.  Tennessee Williams, of course, is the granddaddy of exploring outlawed territory, yet surprisingly film adaptations of his plays were extremely popular in the late 50’s and early 60’s, bringing out the top-tiered performers in the lead roles, grabbing all the headlines, furthering their careers, while Williams sat in the background watching these films dance around unnamed problems and literally expunge the heart of his material, calling to mind a memorable line from Big Daddy (Burl Ives) in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, where he bellows “Something’s missing here!”  And indeed, the subject of homosexuality was simply carved out of the film, where an entire generation of film goers never knew what they were missing unless they looked behind the scenes, where Brick’s friendship with Skipper, an old football buddy who drank himself to death, was more than it appears, as their gay relationship is the central premise for Williams writing the play, with the playwright often disowning any connection to the watered down versions that eventually graced the screen.  And, in fact, he hated this film version, where Gore Vidal entirely reworked the original material, particularly incensed that references to cannibalism were meant metaphorically and not literally.  It’s a baffling production filled with behind-the-scenes rancor, the first film Elizabeth Taylor chose to do after her contract with MGM expired, producing an A-list of gay icons, from Tennessee Williams to Gore Vidal, yet also screen legends Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift.  Hepburn, in particular, was furious at the favorable treatment of Elizabeth Taylor, but was especially appalled by the demeaning treatment of Montgomery Clift on the set from both Mankiewicz and producer Sam Spiegel, allegedly spitting at Mankiewicz after her filming was complete.  Mankiewicz was so troubled by Clift’s performance that he tried to get him fired, as Clift, still reeling from the effects of a serious car accident from which he never recovered (relying upon pain pills and alcohol), was unable to shoot lengthy scenes, but his friendship with Taylor prevented that from happening.  What remains is a campy, over-the-top rendition that may be more Gore Vidal than Tennessee Williams, but this is what would fly under the radar in the oppressive, post-McCarthyism atmosphere of the times, feeling more like a time capsule into a forgotten age of Hollywood.  Yet this reflects a time when homosexuality, like communism, was viewed as a threat to national security and the American “way of life,” as gay men and women became routine victims of police violence and harassment, described as sex perverts, perpetrators of sex crimes and treated as transgressors, leading to FBI manhunts hunting down homosexuals and lesbians that mainly ended up in imprisonment, their names appearing in the newspapers the next day, with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover placing Williams under a watch list while keeping an extensive file on him.  Williams’ excessive drug and alcohol use may have been an attempt to blot out that harshly oppressive reality, all in an attempt to keep it from consuming him.  In this scenario, homosexuals were victims of an age of unenlightenment, viewed as the personification of evil, yet those that perpetrated this wicked misconception were the real national threat, driven by hypocrisy and moral superiority, sadistically offering their religious-like wrath in condemnation, blatantly exhibiting signs of homophobia, where extreme prejudice defined the times.  This film is a window into that era, where what’s unspoken speaks volumes, even in an excessively wordy film like this.  What’s immediately apparent is just how effortlessly the Katherine Hepburn character at the end of this film slides so easily into her next role, Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962), slipping into a morphine-induced trance of forgetfulness, lost in her drug-laden dreams of the past, which on many levels is extraordinary, yet has to be one of the most traumatically depressive works on film, the impact of which is simply unforgettable. 

Echoing the play, which takes place at a single location and features just two monologues, the film is told through a series of very long scenes, culminating with a prolonged Elizabeth Taylor monologue that borders on the surreal, given a nightmarish, horror-filled dream sequence tone, drawing parallels with Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968) made a decade later.  At the center of this film are the obsessional ravings of Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn), an obscenely wealthy matriarch from New Orleans whose wealth has survived the Depression in 1937, embellished to ludicrous extremes, channeling Norma Desmond from SUNSET BLVD. (1950), the patron saint of drama queens, making her grand entrance in a garish elevator throne that descends from the heavens, bringing her back down to earth, speaking nonstop even before she’s seen. Setting the story in a Victorian Gothic mansion in New Orleans’ Garden District, where there are foreshadowing statues of black boy servants and a life-sized angel of death, yet she speaks with reverence about her recently departed son Sebastian who she has immortalized in death to near godlike status, constructing an Edenesque “Dawn of Creation” gardens on the premise of her home in honor of his life, having died of an apparent heart attack last summer under mysterious circumstances.  The only one who knows the truth about what happened is her niece Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor), who accompanied Sebastian on a summer excursion through Europe, yet remains traumatized and under psychiatric confinement since witnessing her cousin’s violent death.  Enter a prominent young surgeon, Dr. John Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift), who is seen at the outset performing an experimental lobotomy, a radically invasive brain procedure meant to eliminate aggressive tendencies, often leaving patients in a near vegetative state, rendered harmless, but having no will of their own, having lost all distinct signs of their personality.  Violet gets wind of this unique talent and immediately sets out to take advantage, offering the underfunded state facility one million dollars in exchange for the doctor performing a lobotomy on Catherine.  In another reflection of the times, Catherine was raped after the big Mardi Gras ball by a married man offering her a drive home, with the man suffering no consequences, while she was labeled hysterical in her response, one of the psychiatric terms that led to her confinement.  Her abuse is a metaphor for the crimes committed by the institutions and the police, oppressing women, under threat of being labeled hysteric, while nationally tracking down homosexuals and threatening them with imprisonment.  In a society that implements irrational laws of morality, crimes are committed by respectable men, doctors, lawyers, teachers, policemen, and family members.  The entire film is structured around the invisible presence of Sebastian, a metaphor for the forbidden subject of homosexuality, (the image of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows or tethered to a tree has been strongly identified in the last century as a homoerotic male gay icon, Saint Sebastian as a gay icon | Art UK), but is not necessarily about homosexuality, more about truth and lies, and how we use and manipulate people for our own ends, covering up our real intentions with lies and deceit, yet suppressed homosexual symbols, themes, and metaphors are more prominently displayed here than anything coming before, literally breaking down doors, a major reversal from just a year before.   Most shocking was the homosexual link to both pedophilia and cannibalism on the forbidden Spanish beaches of Cabeza de Lobo, where oppressive heat blurs all reality, providing a horrifying presence, causing outrage at the time of its release, calling the film disgusting, repulsive, and morally obscene.  According to Gore Vidal, the publicity generated from a scathingly negative review from Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, describing with salacious detail a work obsessed with rape, incest, homosexuality, and cannibalism, sent audiences to theaters in droves.  Even seen 60-years later, this film packs quite a punch, but is hysterically overcooked by both Hepburn and Taylor, both of whom were nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actress, but lost to Simone Signoret in ROOM AT THE TOP (1959).  It’s that Elizabeth Taylor monologue, however (she collapsed in uncontrollable tears on the set afterwards), that fills in for the Sebastian poem which was never written, blisteringly caustic and unsettling, yet morbidly creepy, where one can’t help but be moved by the elegance of the descriptive poetic lyricism leading to an incantation of hallucinatory images shot in bleached-out white superimposed over her face that lay the groundwork for the long, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies of damaged and tortured souls featured in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) or Robert Altman’s Fool for Love (1985), which are utterly enthralling, tour de force examples of unparalleled moments in cinema, eloquently shot in black and white, with skeletal signs of death everywhere, a provocative scene that’s sure to cause controversy even today, canonized further by a pop song from the Motels that appropriates the title, The Motels - Suddenly Last Summer - YouTube (3:59).

For Tennessee Williams, who first came to New Orleans in 1938, “I found the kind of freedom I had always needed.  And the shock of it – against the puritanism of my nature – has given me a subject, a theme, which I have never ceased exploiting.” (Tennessee Williams' Early Days in New Orleans - Stop 3 of 7 ...)  The city represented an exotic and erotic fantasy world that Williams exploited in contrast to stark realism, which is exactly what Williams discovered when writing this play, where homoerotic desire represented an unleashed sexual freedom.  Using both his mother in prior summer trips and Catherine as bait to procure available men, as they were able to attract boys without risk of exposure, they facilitated Sebastian’s gay liaisons, having his pick, as if they were “items on a menu.”  It’s clear Sebastian was smothered by an affection from his mother in an incestual-like relationship, as it was impossible for her to see any flaws in her son, viewing him as perfection itself, speaking of him endlessly even after death in present terms, as if he’s still with her, describing him as a poet who lived the rest of the months to prepare for an epic poem he wrote every summer.  Preferring to remain anonymous and unpublished, his work is pure, untouched, and without criticism.  His insatiable appetite for abusing young boys, however, is clearly a one-sided exchange, emerging each afternoon from the bathhouses, having had his fill of dark-skinned boys, he has his eye on Nordic blonds next, believing people exist purely for his own gratification, where his dehumanizing treatment of his subjects has a colonialist feel about it, as if they somehow belong to him, which is why the payback in the end is so viciously and cruelly disturbing, as they refuse to allow him to get away with that contemptuous attitude of superiority.  This scene recalls one of Euripides’ greatest tragedies from the 5th century BC, The Bacchae, which references similar barbarism with implied homosexuality, while also mirrored by an earlier voyage to Herman Melville’s Encantadas of the Galápagos, described as Las Islas Encantadas, seeing something Melville hadn’t described, where powerless, recently hatched baby turtles desperately scramble for the safety of the ocean, but are mercilessly attacked and gobbled up by a darkened sky of gathering carnivorous birds, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, then tearing them open and eating their flesh.  It is this uncompromising view of the hostile forces of nature that completely changed and transformed Sebastian, turning into a narcissist and taking what he wanted at will, living a hedonistic life of pleasure, displaying the life of depravity exhibited by the super wealthy.  Cannibalism is used as a highly graphic metaphor for the social anxiety surrounding homosexuality, exaggerating the sexual exchange to the extreme, exactly as Melville did in his 1854 novella, using his imagination to conjure up the wildest suggestions of men being with other men during lengthy voyages at sea.  Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness exploration of the primitive unknown, this jungle motif allows homosexual desire free reign, given extraordinary latitude in this work, where the drama is achieved through the power of suggestion, as we never meet Sebastian, all but invisible, yet his lifestyle drives the action, where the macabre wickedness of his death is the traumatic trigger, sending Catherine into an asylum and Violet with an expressed desire to prevent her from defiling the memory of her son, eliminating all signs of debauchery from Sebastian, as she has purified his remains, turning him into a glorified saint.  Yet it’s a story, according to Catherine, that must be told and no one wants to hear.  Violet’s true desire is to expunge that memory from Catherine in the form of a lobotomy, “You’ve got to cut this hideous story out of her brain,” believing she has the money and power to do it, and nearly does, with Catherine’s own family willing to sacrifice her for a hefty price, leaving only Dr. Cukrowicz to sort out the truth, conveniently using the magical and mythical qualities of a truth serum, the mainstay of spy thrillers for decades.  Though the film can be humorously campy and hyper-melodramatic, filled with grotesque exaggeration and tragic excess, yet it’s also indisputably among the most scathingly accurate portrayals of a supremely detrimental criminal misdiagnosis when it comes to the disastrous effects of societal homophobia, a cautionary tale of authoritarian overreach, and in some ways an autobiographical exorcism, perfectly capturing the horrific consequences and extreme detriment of this cruelly misguided morality purge.     

One should examine the personal life of Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest playwrights of modern American history, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for two plays, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), so he enjoyed popular and critical success early on in his career.  But he had his fair share of failure as well, undergoing psychoanalysis in 1957, the same year this play was released, while also paying frequent visits to his sister Rose who had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic (Dementia praecox) and was subjected to a lobotomy in 1943 with the permission of their mother Edwina, effectively silencing her after accusing her father of rape, an event that traumatized Williams, who was away at school at the time, never forgiving his mother afterwards, haunted by Rose’s memories, writing about her extensively, becoming a recurrent motif in his writings, perhaps best exemplified by the physically crippled and emotionally fragile Laura in The Glass Menagerie in 1944, but also the insecure ravings of Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, an aging Southern belle who eventually becomes institutionalized, and perhaps again projected as Catherine in this film, more openly rebellious and nonconformist, yet viewed as untreatable during her psychiatric institutionalization.  Many of Williams’ plays rely upon psychoanalysis, where the institution itself becomes part of the overall authoritative oppression that crushes the will of its patients, with homosexuality viewed as a sexual perversity and a crime when many of his plays were written, officially described by the mental health profession as a mental illness, categorized as a sociopathic personality disorder and systematically treated as such, purging homosexual desire from the system, much like a lobotomy excises part of the brain.  It’s a Kafkaesque absurdity that was part of everyday gay life during the puritanical conservatism of the 1950’s.  Openly homosexual, much scholarly attention has been paid to analyzing his plays from a gay perspective, yet this play seems to combine all these elements into cinematic language, where Williams’ poetic use of language mirrors the deep connections to the subconscious of the characters, revealing major character flaws in both Violet Venable and her son Sebastian, greedy and selfish reflections of a capitalist society, neither of whom feels any guilt or remorse for their behavior, where Violet devotes obsessive maternal affection to her gay son who can barely write one poem per year, and cannot travel alone, apparently, despite being around forty, while being unable to separate his own identity from his mother.  Early on, Violet describes their relationship as a couple, going places and seen everywhere together, with suggestions they are supposed to be together.  Routinely traveling together for his entire life, Violet suffered a minor stroke and was unable to travel, opening up the doors to his cousin Catherine, yet he wrote no poem that summer, with Violet claiming he couldn’t write without her, as they were a symbiotic pair, viewed as inseparable.  Strangely, Violet repeatedly accuses Catherine of being the murderer of her son, refusing to allow anyone to speak to her, keeping her confined in a mental asylum, using a host of elaborately fabricated story constructions to keep her there.  One of the unsung aspects of the film is Elizabeth Taylor herself, where it’s difficult not to sexualize the glamor of her look, given the sensuality of her appearance and the flattering way she is photographed, an erotic object of the camera, viewed as an irresistible object of desire, inexplicably kissing the doctor on occasion, constantly accentuating her figure, as if that was intentionally at the forefront of the director’s mind, and Sebastian’s as well.  Violet continues to live under illusions of grandeur concerning her son, growing more perfect each passing day, until no one would be allowed to criticize him at all, while the overcontrolling mother refuses to allow her son to have his own sexual identity, contending he was chaste and had no sexuality at all (the ultimate castration complex), that “he was looking for a clearer image of God.”  Sebastian failed in his search for God, or perfection, discovering instead the morbid secret of the Encantadas, symbolized by images of decapitation, a version of truth his mother refused to allow to exist, while also evading the truth about her son’s death, passing the blame onto others.  Yet in her zeal to keep the reputation of her son unsullied, she may have been the driving force behind his death, renouncing his sexual drive altogether, contending it doesn’t exist, describing him only in saintly perfection, which no man can live up to.  In the shocking break from the womb, finally detached from the umbilical cord connecting him to his mother, he is free to express his own desires as they are, unbridled and liberated, a true representation of his own truth, yet he experiences a psychotic crisis, a meltdown of the worst order, defying rationality and belief, thinking he is somehow above the rest, like a supreme deity, finally brought down to size by the clamoring hordes.