Brick's Recursive Crutch in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Brick’s crutch in Richard Brooks’s 1958 film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a metaphor, a touchstone device that provides a vantage point on the character Brick’s constitution. The crutch has multiple associations such as impotence and spiritual dissolution; the crutch not only represents difference (external and internal), but is linked metonymically in the film to both liquor and Skipper. It is interesting to note the multiple definitions of disabled that the crutch symbolically and literally describes and implies. The crutch also pokes at the erasure of Brick’s possible homosexuality in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Studios Inc. film version of Tennessee Williams’s classic play.