Melissa Anderson
In his latest film, Luca Guadagnino presents a sanitized adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel.
Daniel Craig as William Lee in Queer. Courtesy A24. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis.
Queer, directed by Luca Guadagnino,
opens November 27, 2024
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Written in 1952 but not published until 1985, William S. Burroughs’s second novel, Queer, stands out for its idiosyncrasies, even in a consistently perverse oeuvre. (As the Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris notes in his introduction to the 2010 reissue, “any one of [his books] might be called Queer.”) It was composed in Mexico City, where Burroughs; his second wife, Joan Vollmer; her daughter; and their son had been living since 1949—the relocation spurred by his fleeing likely detention in Louisiana for possession of drugs and unregistered firearms. He began writing it six months after he shot and killed his spouse while drunkenly attempting a William Tell–style feat that went horribly wrong. Like Junky, its predecessor, also written in Mexico, Queer concerns a protagonist named William Lee, a clear stand-in for the author, whose own experiences heavily inform the narrative: the former by Burroughs’s heroin and morphine addiction, the latter by his largely one-sided infatuation with Lewis Marker (fictionalized as Eugene Allerton), a twenty-one-year-old American student at Mexico City College.
Certainly in ’52, and even in ’85, the title of Burroughs’s book, detailing not only Lee’s masochistic pursuit of Allerton but also the demimonde of expat homosexuals, would have had a scabrous charge, deploying what was once one of the most pejorative terms for same-sex lovers. Queer lives up to its name in a more general sense, too, ending abruptly; it was “abandoned incomplete . . . a secret [Burroughs] left buried for three decades,” as Harris writes. The great crime of Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of this equally repellent and mesmerizing volume is to soften its barbed edges, infusing mutual tenderness between Lee and Allerton where so little exists in the source and insisting on a conclusion—interventions that mirror that way that “queer” has evolved from being a stinging insult directed at those with specific sexual proclivities and practices to a neutral, anodyne umbrella descriptor.
Queer’s misjudgments are all the more disappointing considering that the film—the second of two by Guadagnino released this year—follows the fizzy tennis-à-trois comedy of manners, Challengers, an exemplar of American pop cinema and the best movie the director has made so far in a very patchy filmography. (Justin Kuritzkes is the screenwriter for both.) Guadagnino’s weaker films tend to be his interpretations of works he first encountered and loved ardently as an adolescent, dreaming of putting his own stamp on them. For instance, the origins for his disastrous 2018 remake of Suspiria (Dario Argento’s riotously fun giallo paragon from 1977), which he lards with leaden subplots invoking the Holocaust and the Red Army Faction, can be traced back to the days when the filmmaker, born in 1971, would aspirationally write “Suspiria by Luca Guadagnino” in his teenage notebooks. Guadagnino also first encountered Burroughs’s novel during his Palermo youth; by twenty-one, he had written a draft of a page-to-screen transfer. His Suspiria suffers from addition of historical trauma; his Queer from subtraction of unpleasant particularities and untidy denouements.
Drew Starkey as Eugene Allerton (center foreground) and Daniel Craig as William Lee (center background, in black shirt) in Queer. Courtesy A24. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis.
Guadagnino’s Queer adheres to the book’s time and locations—1950 in Mexico City and, later, Panama and Ecuador—but affixes not especially enlivening flourishes. Since the film was shot almost entirely at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, Ciudad de México is here presented as a mock metropolis, a dusty toy-town distinguished only by its number of bars. While mid-century fashion is replicated fastidiously, anachronistic soundtrack choices ostentatiously blur eras, as when Lee (Daniel Craig) strolls in slow motion from one dive to the next, his promenade scored to Nirvana’s “Come as You Are.” (Kurt Cobain’s idolization of Burroughs makes the choice of this 1992 track slightly less irritating than the inclusion of numbers by Prince and New Order.) It is during this paseo that Lee, who has stopped to watch a cockfight, first sees Allerton (Drew Starkey), who knowingly returns the older man’s lustful gaze, punctuating it with a wry smirk.
Daniel Craig as William Lee and Drew Starkey as Eugene Allerton in Queer. Courtesy A24. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis.
That charged encounter departs significantly from the original. In Burroughs’s novel, there is no savage avian sparring to heighten their meeting in the street; Lee simply recognizes Allerton among a group of Americans. Additionally, there is no shared coup de cruising: “[Lee] nodded to Allerton and smiled. Allerton nodded, as if surprised, and did not smile,” Burroughs writes. The queasy pull of the book is rooted in the ways that Burroughs unsparingly lays out his surrogate’s desperate desire for Allerton, who, though he agrees to have sex and to travel with Lee, is mostly indifferent to him. As Burroughs bleakly puts it, “Lee knew he could not find what he wanted with Allerton. The court of fact had rejected his petition. But Lee could not give up. . . . Like a saint or a wanted criminal, with nothing to lose, Lee had stepped beyond the claims of his nagging, cautious, aging, frightened flesh.” (One of Lee’s more pathetic ploys to keep his beloved’s attention is to launch into a “routine”: logorrheic, often appalling monologues on topics such as “Corn Hole Gus’s Used-Slave Lot”; unsurprisingly, these inflammatory bits do not make it into the film.)
The disconnect between the source and its screen reworking grows ever wider. Of the first time the men have sex, Burroughs notes, “Allerton responded without hostility or disgust, but in his eyes Lee saw a curious detachment, the impersonal calm of any animal or child.” In Guadagnino’s version, the two hungrily kiss, Allerton ravenous to reciprocate after Lee makes him cum. Although the film does retain the character with whom Allerton most torments Lee—the flame-haired Mary (Andra Ursuța), the young man’s chess partner and perhaps something more—her presence never complicates Guadagnino’s sanguine portrayal of mutual GGG whenever these guys are in the sack together.
Daniel Craig as William Lee and Drew Starkey as Eugene Allerton in Queer. Courtesy A24. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis.
Burroughs’s book ends with Lee and Allerton in the jungles of Ecuador, a trek instigated by the former’s hopes of sampling the rare psychedelic yagé, with the help of a botanist there who specializes in the consciousness-expanding vine. The scientist stalls; Lee, frustrated, announces that he and Allerton are leaving; the novel suddenly stops. Guadagnino, however, cannot let this intriguing irresolution stand. (Before Queer’s 1985 publication, Burroughs appended to this non-ending an eerie epilogue, which the filmmaker demystifies and ruins further by adding his own corny coda.) Not only do Lee and Allerton imbibe the mind-altering substance, but their hallucinogenic trip is depicted as a CGI-enhanced Bauschian tanztheater, their bodies merging into one. This vision of wholeness, of unity, is greatly at odds with how Burroughs recounts the jungle adventure, in which Allerton’s most frequent command to Lee is, “Oh, go away.”
That corrosive order has no place in a movie determined to uphold one of the more aggravating banalities of our age: love is love. With its shots of dongs and jizz-rimmed lips, Guadagnino’s film is unquestionably more explicit than Burroughs’s novel. But paradoxically, in its persistent downplaying of Lee’s abject misery, his constant humiliation, the movie is much safer, more sanitized than its source—the queerer of the queer.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.