Programme Notes: Queer

‘A centipede can be seen as a test upon which Love, like St. Francis used to make, would shatter.’ – William S. Burroughs’ final diary entry, 30 July 1997, from Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs

Halfway through Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 masterpiece Call Me By Your Name, there’s a seconds-long shot of the sun languidly washing over the exterior wall of a house. It seems captured by chance, and perfectly represents the film’s central transformation – the way that love illuminates a life, gradually permeating and transforming what is already there. Guadagnino’s new adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s Queer presents a more troubled kind of illumination; as the protagonist Lee, rendered pathetic with heavy longing, stands in shadow so dark he is almost non-existent, while Allerton – the young object of his every desire – lounges pin-sharp in a luminous slice of light on the bed. It’s clear from the outset that, unlike previous Guadagnino films, Queer isn’t about a connection, but a projection – and the potentially life-long reverberations of directing love into a self-made black hole.

William S. Burroughs wrote Queer in the mid 1950s as a partial sequel to his notorious novella Junky, following his alter-ego protagonist Lee as he replaces heroin dependency with a new addiction – to a young man named Allerton who he meets among the expat scene in Mexico City. In Guadagnino’s film – a long-time passion project smartly adapted by his Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes – Lee is played by Daniel Craig, whose lurches between loucheness and itchy desperation grow more intense as he ramps up his obsession with Allerton, played with enigmatic grace by Drew Starkey. The first two thirds of the film see Lee trail Allerton through bars, hotel rooms and post-closing time streets, imagining a great kinship when in reality he is barely tolerated by Allerton, who denies he feels attracted to men at all. In the final act, Allerton accepts a paid arrangement from Lee, and the two head to the Ecuadorian jungle in search of yage, a drug which is rumoured to induce telepathic abilities.

In both its protagonist’s mindset and its stylistic choices, Queer is heavy with the slippage of fantasy. This is unusual for Guadagnino: even when he’s dealing with supernatural themes – in his 2018 remake of Suspiria, or 2022’s underrated Bones and All – Guadagnino firmly situates his films in reality with lived-in locations, period-specific detailing and tightly observed gestures. They are full of the dirt-under-the-fingernails of life; believable as the real situations of real people, even if those people happen to be dancing witches or vampiric cannibals.

There are self-consciously strange moments in Queer, in interstitial images of ouroboros and centipedes to represent Lee and Allerton respectively, and of the pair locked in imagined ritual – and especially in its final third, which reflects Burroughs’ switch to a more surreal style in the source novel. But the fantasy of Queer is also ingrained in its presentation of Lee’s everyday world, appropriately for a man who lives inside a love story based only on his own projection. He walks around sets not houses; Jonathan Anderson’s costumes are costumes, not clothes; Mexico City is actually a town in Ecuador or Italy. In this heightened, hyperreal world, Lee takes a boy back to a perfectly red-lit hotel room with a neon sign framed like a comic book panel in the window. In a movie theatre, an apparition of his arm reaches over to embrace the man next to him. The object of his affection walks in slow motion when they lock eyes, and the sound of the real world fades away, overtaken by the sound of his imagination — represented by the plaintive horns of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s typically affecting soundtrack.

The layers of projection and subjectivity on screen are mirrored in the roots of the film, in its layers of adaptation and transformation. Craig’s casting and performance are in conversation with his early role as Francis Bacon’s lover George Dyer in Love is the Devil, another film which mixes biography and surreality, in which he himself plays the younger object of obsession. Burroughs’ novella is itself an adaptation of his own life, and the years he spent in exile in Mexico, obsessed with a young man who would go on to inspire the character of Allerton. In the film’s opening credits, Burroughs’ manuscript is shown folded into paper houses – a refuge made from a story, or a prison of one’s own making. When talking about his motivations to seek out the drug yage in Ecuador, Lee says he wants to communicate with Allerton using telepathy, but he doesn’t want that at all: he wants to play out both sides of the conversation in his head, forever – where it’s safe, but where nothing real can grow.

The existential trap that Lee exists within is also reflected in Sinead O’Connor’s version of ‘All Apologies’, which plays over the credits, and subtly twists the angst of the original into the quieter kind of resignation that Lee sinks into at the end of the film. It is the end of his life, many years after his Ecuadorian trip with Allerton, when his body was finally subsumed into that of his (imagined, hired) lover. Allerton is gone, has left town, but he returns to Lee in something of a fever dream, and Lee ceremoniously kills him – in a scenario referencing Burroughs’ real-life killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer.

It seems that in his final moments, Lee has freed himself of the life-long weight of obsession. But he can’t. He lays with Allerton, holding him in an endless loop of a moment from years ago, amplifying an accidental touch to the position of sacred union. We might question the reality of everything in Queer, but each brief moment of physical touch between Lee and Allerton is charged with as much meaning and palpable longing as we are used to from Guadagnino – which makes it all the more tragic that they are the source of such endless pain and denial.

The film’s final moments are soundtracked by the song ‘Vaster than Empires’, sung by legendary Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso and written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The lyrics are adapted from Burroughs’ final diary entry, dated two days before his death. In response to a friend referring to him as the saddest man in the world, Burroughs responds, 'How can a man who sees and feels be other than sad.' No question mark, just a statement of truth. But at the end of his life, Burroughs seems to choose the same familiar balm as Lee to counteract this sadness: 'Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.'

Claire Biddles 

Film, music and arts writer 

9 December 2024