{"id":794,"date":"2012-11-10T20:57:18","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T20:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/?p=794"},"modified":"2015-05-02T20:59:18","modified_gmt":"2015-05-02T20:59:18","slug":"the-invisible-b-in-lgbt-discourse-a-reading-of-brick-pollitt-in-cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/the-invisible-b-in-lgbt-discourse-a-reading-of-brick-pollitt-in-cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof\/","title":{"rendered":"The Invisible \u2018B\u2019 in LGBT Discourse: A Reading of Brick Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Robert Brooks\u2019 1958 cinematic adaptation of Tennessee Williams\u2019 Pulitzer Prize winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof<\/em>, tells the story of a feline Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) whose sexual advances are unfailingly thwarted by her alcoholic and apathetic husband Brick Pollitt (Paul Newman), who is still suffering from the suicidal death of his bosom friend Skipper. The action occurs on the occasion of the 65th birthday celebrations of \u2018Big Daddy\u2019 Pollitt (Burl Ives) \u2014 who unknown to himself and his wife Ida, is suffering from a terminal disease \u2014 when the greater Pollitt family including Brick\u2019s brother Gooper and sister-in-law Mae, gather and quarrel over the imminent granting of the sizeable Pollitt inheritance.<\/p>\n

My primary focus in this piece is the character of Brick Pollitt and his relationships to Maggie and Skipper. Queer readings of this character have sought to establish Brick as an unresolved gay person who is unwillingly to accept his homosexual feelings for his male best friend and uses his marriage to masquerade as a heterosexual man. Here, my intent is to unravel how far the narrative of the film provides us with possibilities of destabilizing easy monosexual readings of characters\u2019 sexualities. Thus, intimately connected to this examination is the analysis of the narrative technique deployed in the film.<\/p>\n

The film begins with a visibly drunk Brick setting up hurdles in a high-school athletic field at 3 a.m. in the morning, preparing to jump over them to the sound of cheers which only he can hear. Characters imagining absent voices is an oft-repeated dramatic technique which Tennessee Williams employs to instate the troubled subjectivities of his principal characters. In A Street Car Named Desire<\/em>, Blance du Bois (essayed by Vivien Leigh in the film) is frequently tormented by her auditory hallucination of the trumpet music which was playing when she had last danced with her homosexual husband. The point of these scenes is that they indicate a traumatic past in the characters\u2019 lives. Furthermore, since very little ever \u2018happens\u2019 in this film at the level of active events, such narrative signposts draws attention to the inner drama in the characters\u2019 hidden lives.<\/p>\n

\"\"From this opening scene we move to the sequence in which Gooper\u2019s eldest daughter throws ice-cream at Maggie\u2019s feet. This whole sequence swiftly frames the peripheral characters \u2013 Gooper as hen-pecked husband and Mae as the domineering avaricious wife. We follow Maggie upstairs. She declares her intense dislike of Gooper and Mae and informs her husband Brick that his father is dying and that his brother is plotting to cut him off his share of the family inheritance. What strikes us instantly about Brick is the fact that he is an alcoholic and his strange apathy to all that his wife is saying. Soon enough Maggie reacts, \u201cThere are some things in this world you\u2019ve just got to face.\u201d That this statement is proleptic is something that emerges only in hindsight but within 5 minutes of screen time, the immediate context of the film has been laid out for the audience.<\/p>\n

Maggie fixing her stocking and Brick\u2019s strange indifference to such displays instantly locates their relationship in a troubled zone. Here, the low camera angle framing Brick\u2019s apathetic expression and only Maggie\u2019s legs cannot simplistically be seen as the male tendency to fetishize the fragmented female to avert castration complex; rather it is a skilful cinematic technique which serves to convey the sexual distance that exists in their relationship. It is also noteworthy that this whole sequence serves to intensely eroticise the Maggie-Brick relationship, from Maggie\u2019s perspective. Maggie\u2019s repetitive references to Brick\u2019s irresistible body, her sexual advances and the pain that his refusal engenders are important departures from the philosophical tradition which de-sexualizes love, particularly love harboured by women, as simple \u2018caring\u2019 and \u2018respect\u2019.<\/p>\n

What further complicates this relationship is the insinuation that Brick harbours a latent homosexuality. Up to this point, we get no indication of this. Rather, and this is important for the point that I wish to make about Brick, it is his prowess as a heterosexual lover that is looked on with nostalgic recalling. In what Maggie perceives to be a moment of sexual tension between the two, she reminds Brick that he was \u201cso excited to be in love with me\u201d, \u201cyou were such a wonderful lover.\u201d These observations of Maggie provide testimony to Brick\u2019s heterosexuality. These and further narrative signposts which I will identify, inhibit an easy reading of Brick as a closeted homosexual. Rather, it may be more profitable to explore the possibility of bisexuality in Brick\u2019s character, a sexual identity that is frequently overlooked in both gay and heteronormative discourses, with their stern insistence on monosexual allegiance.[1]<\/p>\n

Robert Scholes has pointed out that \u201cA fiction is presented to us in the form of a narration which guides<\/em> (my italics) us as our own active narrativity seeks to complete the process that will achieve the story.\u201d [2] He also says, \u201cOur primary effort in attending to a narrative is to construct a logical<\/em> (my italics) order of events.\u201d[3] Scholes\u2019s words underscore the importance of a convincing logic informing our subjective readings of a text rather than a capricious randomness that celebrates multiplicity simply for its own sake. Can we then wrest meaning from a text by focussing only on some aspects of the narrative and neglecting others?<\/p>\n

Using this theoretical premise, I would argue that Brick\u2019s visibly anxious turning away from Maggie\u2019s sexual advances (remember his disquiet when she starts shutting the doors and windows in their room) disputes a reading that sees him being sexually indifferent to his wife. Nor can it be simply read as the homosexual man\u2019s anxiety about heterosexual performance, which has already been disproved by Maggie\u2019s avowed approval of Brick\u2019s sexual prowess. Furthermore, after Maggie passionately hugs Brick, telling him that she can no longer accept his refusal to make love to her, and he restrains her appeal, Brick proceeds to lock himself in the bathroom and passionately hugs Maggie\u2019s dressing gown with a deeply felt tenderness and hurt. On hearing Maggie trying to appease his mother, he tries to fling away her gown in disgust, only to find out that it has stuck to his finger. These narrative clues encourage a reading of Brick\u2019s eroticized affection for Maggie as being an inalienable aspect of his being, the effort to depersonalize which results in the deepest agony. Moreover, when Maggie, taking opportunity of the doctor\u2019s presence, drops Brick Big Daddy\u2019s birthday card for him to sign, Brick registers an expression that seems amused at her little \u2018feminine\u2019 machinations.<\/p>\n

The emotional intensity between the two picks up a little later when Brick starts reacting with violent anxiety the moment Maggie mentions Skipper. This is not the first mention of this off-screen character; it will be remembered that the doctor had mentioned that Brick and Skipper were part of a football team. Even as Maggie exhorts him, \u201cWhy won\u2019t you face the truth\u201d, Brick anxious response is \u201cI don\u2019t want to hear about it\u201d. Talk of Skipper is thus a grim reminder of Brick\u2019s relationship with him, the contours of which are still very unclear. What is evident is that Brick is extremely anxious to annihilate any discussion about his past with Skipper. In violent defence he screams out, \u201cSkipper and I had a friendship; why won\u2019t you let that be\u201d, and instantly places the three in a triadic relationship. It emerges that whatever the nature of the relationship between the men, it was inimical to Maggie\u2019s interests. Importantly, Brick misses in his attempt to hit Maggie, falls and hurts his broken ankle, in what can only be seen as a narrative punishment for concealing the truth about himself. The narrative will thus not endorse mendacity.<\/p>\n

The first overt indication of a possible homosexual relationship between Brick and Skipper emerges in Brick\u2019s confrontation with Big Daddy. As his father alleges that he started drinking after Skipper\u2019s death, Brick puts up a somewhat disproportionately excited defence: \u201cWhat are you trying to say\u201d and then, \u201cyou are trying to pull it through the gutter\u201d. Although Big Daddy does not overtly allege it, Brick starts an aggressive defence against the charge of homosexuality. It is here that the homosocial crosses over into the homoerotic. The narrative punishment that we have seen earlier repeats itself. As Brick denies sexual relations with Skipper and tries to strike his father, he misses his step, falls and hurts himself again. The sarcastic ring of Big Daddy\u2019s \u201cHow did Maggie take this great, true<\/em> (italics mine) friendship\u201d further crystallises Brick\u2019s homoerotic relationship with his male friend.<\/p>\n

At this juncture, two things need to be underscored. Research done on the sociology of sports illustrates that when boys start playing competitive sports they are not simply learning a game but simultaneously entering a highly hierarchically organized institution.[4] Brick Pollitt, with his conventional gorgeous looks and prowess at a \u2018manly\u2019 sport like football, would unquestionably occupy one of the highest positions of that masculinity scale. Insinuations of homosexuality in Brick thus unsettle the reassuring American fantasy of the macho, aggressive, drinking, heterosexually promiscuous male athlete. Secondly, as Andre Bazin points out [5], an important difference between theatre and cinema is that while the spectator of a play is in an oppositional relation with the central character, in cinema the relation is one of identification. This throws up interesting possibilities for Cat. At one level, heterosexual men in the audience are probably uncomfortable with Maggie\u2019s desire for Brick\u2019s body but on another, they are inclined to identify with Brick whose possibly bisexual identity problematizes the complacency of their own heterosexual identities.<\/p>\n

Brick\u2019s open altercation with Maggie reveals interesting aspects of both Brick\u2019s and Skipper\u2019s sexual identities. She alleges that Skipper did not want them married because that would mean less time for themselves. This further corroborates the homoerotic nature of the two men\u2019s relation. More interestingly, she says that when she went up to Skipper\u2019s room, he was more than willingly to make love to her. To Bricks rejoinder \u201che was drunk\u201d she replies \u201cso are you most of the time; I don\u2019t seem to make out so well with you.\u201d This complicates not just the reading of Brick as a closeted gay person but also Skipper\u2019s sexual identity. His willingness to make love to Maggie challenges a reading which configures him as solely homosexual. Additionally, it emerges that Brick\u2019s refusal to make love to his wife had stemmed from his belief that she had slept with his best friend. One wonders if this would have troubled Brick so much if he had been gay. Surely a gay man married to a woman would not need to wait for his wife to sleep with his gay lover to stop making love to her. Evidently then, Brick\u2019s sexual identity is more complex, one which is struggling to accommodate his erotic relationships with both Maggie and Skipper.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Maggie sleeping with Skipper is a betrayal at two levels. One, it is his wife cheating on him with his best friend; at another, it is his gay lover cheating on him with his wife. In this sense, Maggie and Skipper emerge as projections of his bisexual inclination, wherein Skipper\u2019s death is a symbolic death of his homosexuality, a denial of an essential part of his sexual identity. The self-flagellation that Brick inflicts on himself after Skipper\u2019s death is his masochistic way of dealing with the guilt of denying an aspect of his sexuality. As Maggie confesses that nothing happened between herself and Skipper, this guilt alleviates and in the final scene he is able to kiss her in a defining moment of a newly negotiated subjectivity.<\/p>\n

Keeping in mind the severe emotional disconnect that Brick has always felt with Big Daddy, it is his friend Skipper whom he idealised as an invincible, dependable hero. Thus it is Skipper who comes to occupy the position of the real father. However, give that the symbolic father is such a rigid cultural order, Skipper is able to occupy this only briefly as Brick soon realises the lack that reasserts itself in Skipper. It may be said that Brick does not really need Maggie to declare that Skipper was tough only on the outside and \u201cpure jelly\u201d within. That the phallus is fraud is certain to have emerged in Brick\u2019s own interaction with Skipper. Consequently, Brick takes on the burden of defending the real father\u2019s failure to be ideal, (he forms a professional football team with Skipper so that the latter does not ever fail, which he does when Brick is unable to play in one game) and assumes the responsibility of the lack of jouissance so that the authority of the ideal father can remain. Brick\u2019s hanging up on Skipper hearing he has made love to Maggie, is Brick\u2019s failure to defend the ideal of Skipper. This results in a neurotic guilt which finds symptomatic expression in his alcoholism.<\/p>\n

Brick\u2019s addiction to alcohol however works in a more complex way. In psychoanalytic terms, the suspicion (because it is only in the end that Maggie speaks about it) that Maggie has slept with Skipper takes Brick\u2019s sense of lack to a traumatic point because he realizes that Maggie\u2019s attention is directed not at himself but possibly at Skipper who occupies for Brick the position of real father. His addiction to alcohol is thus a metaphorical substitution of the child\u2019s fort-da game, the death drive to master the trauma felt by the absence of the mother. Alcoholism thus becomes a form of jouissance that Brick uses to take refuge from reality. Since jouissance is also about enjoyment of suffering, it preserves the neurotic structure of compulsive alcoholism. Till the end, he does not know precisely whom Maggie wants. It is this perplexity that restrains him from making love to her. The moment Maggie reveals that she did not desire Skipper for himself but rather wanted to keep him away from Brick, the enigma is answered and he is able to make love to her again.<\/p>\n

It is easy to read the final kiss in the film as reproducing the classic Hollywood ending in a reproduction of the cultural order of heteronormativity. However, I would like to attempt an alternative reading. The final kiss is obviously a heterosexual one but it is perhaps important to trace the trajectories that have led to such a kiss. The film began with Brick\u2019s long-standing guilt. As the narrative progressed, driven particularly by Big Daddy, it emerged (at least to Brick himself) that this guilt is in-part, the guilt of his homosexual desires projected in Skipper. We remember that as Brick attempts to drive away in the rain, his car gets stuck in the mud and he can no longer run away from the desires that he has tried to repress. As he grapples with these desires, his defence mechanism collapses. The emotional crutches that he had hitherto depended on are no longer needed. In a symbolic delineation of this emergent subjectivity, the physical crutch that Brick had leaned on breaks into two. Hence, the final kiss, heterosexual though it certainly is, is possible only after Brick has begun to come to terms with his same-sex desires, an aspect of his sexuality he had hitherto tried to repress.<\/p>\n

While in terms of narrative form and structure, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof<\/em> is cast in the mould of a classic Hollywood film, it has important points of departure, particularly in the way in which the central male character has been portrayed, in that it allows us to make a bisexual reading in the text. This is important because it empowers us to rescue the \u2018B\u2019 in LGBT discourse, something that is often rendered invisible by the demand of exclusive sexual allegiance to either sex. This is to my mind, an important addition to the whole project of queering popular cinema. It is to Cat on Hot Tin Roof\u2019s credit that it allows for such a possibility, in spite of its historical location in a society intolerant of non-heterosexualities.<\/p>\n

NOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/strong> Bisexuals are often shunned both by gay and heterosexual people. Gay people frequently see bisexuals as either wanting to enjoy \u2018the best of both worlds\u2019 and avoid making a political commitment to the queer cause, or as closeted homosexuals. For heterosexuals, a bisexual person is no different from a gay person. See Angelides, Steven. 2001. A History of Bisexuality<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/strong> Scoles, Robert. 1992. \u2018Narration and Narrativity in Film\u2019 in Mast, Gerald et. al. (Eds.) Film Theory and Criticism. Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/strong> Ibid.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[4]<\/strong> Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities<\/em>. Polity Press: Cambridge.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/strong> Bazin, Andre. 1992. \u2018Theatre and Cinema\u2019 in Mast, Gerald et. al. (Eds.) Film Theory and Criticism. Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

REFERENCES<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scoles, Robert. 1992. \u2018Narration and Narrativity in Film\u2019 in Mast, Gerald et. al. (Eds.) Film Theory and Criticism<\/em>. Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities<\/em>. Polity Press: Cambridge.<\/p>\n

Bazin, Andre. 1992. \u2018Theatre and Cinema\u2019 in Mast, Gerald et. al. (Eds.) Film Theory and Criticism<\/em>. Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Angelides, Steven. 2001. A History of Bisexuality<\/em>. The University of Chicago Press: London.<\/p>\n

(All pictures used in this article are courtesy the Internet)<\/em><\/span> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While in terms of narrative form and structure, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is cast in the mould of a classic Hollywood film, it has important points of departure, particularly in the way in which the central male character has been portrayed, in that it allows us to make a bisexual reading in the text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":645,"featured_media":1620,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[421,16],"tags":[836,897],"class_list":["post-794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-film-reviews","category-volume-8","tag-cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof","tag-cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof-1958"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/645"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}