In William S. Burroughs’ novella Queer, Lee takes Allerton, the object of his all-consuming desire, to see Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. “In the dark theater,” Burroughs writes, “Lee could feel his body pull toward Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals.” In his adaptation of Burroughs’ work, Luca Guadagnino — by his own admission a devotee of the author since adolescence — places us in that same theater. On the screen within the screen, the poet Orpheus dons a pair of rubber gloves and steps through a mirror that ripples like mercury: a portal to the underworld. In the foreground, Lee’s spirit leaves his body, reaching out towards Allerton in ghostly superimposition.
William Lee, Burroughs’ fictional alter ego, is played by Daniel Craig, with real humor and vulnerability. This isn’t the deadpan version of the character seen in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch — Craig’s Lee is a talker and a charmer, albeit one prone to bruising when his routines fall flat. Holed up in Mexico City with a white linen suit, a pistol, and a supply of heroin, he spends his days and nights pinballing between bars, where he gossips with other assorted queer expats (including a hilarious Jason Schwartzman) and hits on attractive younger men. It’s during an aimless nighttime wander that Lee first locks eyes with the beautiful Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), whose disarming aloofness only deepens Lee’s neediness.
What follows is a portrait of desire that swells and swallows. First, there’s sex, sex that reads like a belated response to James Ivory’s complaints about the coyness of Call Me by Your Name; here, Guadagnino’s camera repeatedly drifts off to a polite window view, only to cut back to a sex scene as explicit as you’ll find with major actors. But Lee and Allerton are blatantly incompatible beyond physical attraction, even at the level of the acting: Starkey is reserved and naturalistic, while Craig gives a self-consciously theatrical performance, channeling Lee’s lust as corporeal torment, just as painful as the junk sickness he periodically undergoes. There’s something pathetic and moving about Lee’s phantom hands, forever reaching out and only succeeding in pushing Allerton further away.
Burroughs was not yet 40 when he wrote Queer; by the time it was published in the mid-1980s, he had passed 70. It doesn’t seem like it’s a coincidence that Craig’s present age falls exactly in between. The genius of his portrayal lies in how it bridges two Burroughs: the infamous junkie-provocateur depicted in his early writings, and the pensive, doleful elder statesman captured in Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary Burroughs: The Movie. Like Cronenberg, Guadagnino intuits that Burroughs’ intensely personal writing demands creative biopic as much as adaptation.
It’s impossible to ignore, then, the fact that Queer was written just months after Burroughs shot and killed his spouse Joan Vollmer, supposedly while drunkenly attempting a William Tell-style feat gone wrong. Burroughs would later, in the afterword to the published version of Queer, frame this incident as a catalyst for his artistic emergence — a troubling bit of self-mythologizing that Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch interrogates more successfully. Here, allusions to Vollmer’s death feel awkwardly grafted onto a story that has its own, more immediate, concerns.
The reality here is thin enough without these historical intrusions. Shot on Rome’s Cinecittà backlots, and making extensive use of miniatures, Queer’s Mexico collapses memory and fantasy into a kind of waking dream. When the colored lighting comes out, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography inevitably resembles the oneiric queer imaginary of Fassbinder’s Querelle, though the references generally skew more painterly: Hopper’s lonely urban spaces merge unexpectedly with De Chirico’s metaphysical dreamscapes, complete with phallic chimneys.
“I want to talk to you,” Lee tells Allerton, drunk and desperate, “without speaking.” So, into the jungle and into the shack of the shotgun-wielding Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville, all crusted over and literally unrecognizable) they go, in search of the hallucinogenic plant yage, or ayahuasca, and its supposed power to grant telepathy. Here, Guadagnino and his screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes seemingly depart the novella, even if what they’re actually doing is visualizing Burroughs’ text from the earlier cinema scene: the desire to crawl inside someone else’s skin, for the boundaries between bodies to melt away. Or, as Burroughs’ Lee puts it to Allerton in the book, “Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat big blob.” In Guadagnino’s version, with the aid of some gorgeously uncanny effects, this is exactly what happens, in a sequence pitched somewhere between ritual dance and cosmic sex: Lee and Allerton begin to merge into one.
The straight world might say this is something like a rehearsal metaphor for reproduction; what if queerness is the suggestion of the opposite, an impossible commitment to the literal reconciliation of self and other? It’s still relatively taboo to discuss the obvious fact that queer desire jumbles up desire for and desire to be. Burroughs understood that, even if he predicated his understanding on a blinkered gender essentialism. Guadagnino understands of Burroughs that the desire to control underlies all desire. (The images in this scene recall the fashy Liquefactionists in Naked Lunch, who propose that everyone merge “by protoplasmic absorption” into one person.) No surprise, then, that fleshy fusion must be contained to hallucination, an experiment. But how moving to imagine, however momentarily, the nightmarish proposal at the end of Cronenberg’s The Fly as something tender, even transcendent.
Ayahuasca will not provide Lee with a portal, Dr. Hernández (Andrés Duprat) warns, only a mirror. But must the transcendent, be it in the form of drugs or sex — or art, cinema — be contained to the psychological? A mirror, Cocteau teaches us, might be a portal after all. Guadagnino’s cinema of desire blurs reflection and passage, trapping us between glimpses of ourselves and the pull of something beyond. How often do we mistake one for the other?
DIRECTOR: Luca Guadagnino; CAST: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: November 27; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 15 min.
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