Luca Guadagnino | Queer / 2024

broken heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Justin Kuritzkes (screenplay, based on the book by William S. Burroughs), Luca Guadagnino (director) Queer / 2024

 

Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film Queer, based on the book of the same title by William S. Burroughs is not so much a coherent narrative as it is a gay picaresque where every morning its central character William Lee (the name that Burroughs himself used early in his career) moves out on yet another adventure. Or perhaps in the manner of Malcolm Lowry’s amazing novel Under the Volcano (made into a movie in 1984 by John Huston), we might describe his daily forays as a gay bar and drug trawl, except unlike the central character of Lowry’s book the British consul Geoffrey Firmin, who visits numerous different bars, in this case Lee keeps returning to the same one, Ship Ahoy or, on occasion, the Green Lantern—although his drug searches in Ecuador take him far into the Amazon rain forest. Instead of his body being tossed over a mountain cliff into a ravine below as in the Lowry work, Lee dies perhaps more suitably in a bed as an old man; but as an alcoholic junky he is probably no better off.

     But then coherent narrative, even in his early works, was never Burroughs’ surreal Beat shtick.

     Although Queer was not a cut-up, it might as well be in director Luca Guadagnino’s hands, who is more interested in presenting the images that represent Lee’s quiet (and sometimes quite boisterous) desperation. Performed brilliantly, if at times rambunctiously, by Daniel Craig, this rather autobiographical depiction of Burroughs presents him first as a seemingly blasé expatriate, who has escaped to Mexico to satisfy his cocaine and heroin habits. He sits at the center of the small gay community which includes Joe Giudry (Jason Schwartzman) and Winston Moor (Henrique Zaga), among others such as the sleazy John Dumé (Drew Droege)—the latter a true Green Lantern denizen—Lee almost holding court at Ship Ahoy as he tells outrageous stories, demonstrates his disinterest in current news, bears with Giudry’s endless woes of having the boys he picks up steal his typewriter, clothes, and  other possessions, and who himself occasionally takes one of the hunky local denizens (pop-star Omar Apollo in the scene we are presented) for a quick night of sex at the local hotel filled with human warrens on either side of a long hall painted in red.

    But this abrasive and loud-mouthed Lee is a cover for the real man, who makes it clear at one point early in his life just how much he feared the discovery of his own homosexuality back in Baltimore. Leo Gleiberman, writing in Variety, summarizes Lee’s early fears: “Lee, who wears white linen suits, a fedora and clear-framed glasses, a trusty handgun, and an appraising scowl, looks like the dandy version of a CIA spook. It’s the early 1950s, and though he drinks around the clock and is frequently a disheveled mess, in his appearance and demeanor he’s something of a straightarrow. At first, he says, he regarded his proclivities as a ‘curse.’ He shook with horror at the word ‘homosexual,’ which made him think of “the painted, simpering female impersonators,” he says. ‘Could I have been one of those subhuman things?’” He even considered suicide.

     A Baltimore drag queen, however, explains just how important it is that he go on living, being himself. And so he has, if as we gradually realize rather uncomfortably and still filled with self-hate, which is what lies behind so much of his bluff, as well as the alcohol, cocaine, and heroin (although the latter is down-played in Guadagnino’s film as compared with the original book).

    And when, quite by accident, Lee catches a glance from a young former soldier now an ex-pat new to town, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a tall lean lanky American that looks like he just stepped out of a Graham Greene novel as one of the dangerous innocents who destroy everything in their paths, it is love at first sight.

   In several of the early adventures, we see the love-hungry Lee simply attempting to determine whether Allerton, who regularly plays chess with the town’s most beautiful female, is really gay. Yet even during the games with whom some describe as his girlfriend, Allerton glances back at Lee’s fixed stares, even seeming to wink at moments as in a flirtation that sends the usually aplomb Lee bowing in homage. At the very moment he decides to approach the boy to get it all settled, he sees Allerton stop on his way out to speak to Dumé, which certainly must mean the boy is gay, but clearly slumming. But Dumé does not really know him, he insists. Allerton simply wanted a tour of the bars, particularly the Green Lantern. Dumé argues, however, that he doesn’t take people to the lowdown Green Lantern (perhaps a bit like The Green Parrot in Casablanca in relation to Rick’s Café Américain); people go there only of their accord.

    Lee’s friends describe Allerton as a cold fish, and when Lee finally does get the opportunity to talk with him, his metaphors are outrageous, as he imagines a pig only partially cooked, or with brandy poured on a live pig and set afire as he runs squealing away, only the surface actually cooked. These references to the surface beauty that cover the inner secrets of the boy’s sexuality certainly do not help lead Lee to the young man’s heart. But, quite amazingly, the boy does finally go to bed with a quite drunken Lee, the two this first time simply exchanging a quite sexy blow-job for a hand job. But later they have intense sex, and Lee is so in awe that he is set off course, particularly when immediately after the boy suddenly can find no further time for him and returns to his beautiful female chess player each afternoon.

     Lee finds solace, once more in alcohol and drugs, finally confronting the boy at a Green Lantern party when he passes out on the floor, dead drunk.  

     So far, Guadagnino has presented us with only a love story that might make a teenager blush with shame at the central figure’s slavish devotion to a man who clearly doesn’t have an open heart. But the second half of the movie moves toward the magic and supernatural elements that later Burroughs argued are at the heart of all of his writing.

    Lee, deciding to get out of town for a while and travel to South America, suggests to Allerton that he join him, even if he participates in sex just a couple of times each week. He will prove his good will, he argues, by purchasing the boy a round ticket, suggesting he can leave at any time he wants.

      Even here Allerton is a slippery fish, saying that he has business for a few days but will think it over. But amazingly, at the end of those few days, he agrees to tag along.

     This trip, however, is even more of a disaster, Lee’s drugs being more difficult to find, complicated with his contracting dysentery which leaves him so cold and ashiver that the only warmth he can find is in the boy’s sometimes not so willing arms. They have one intense morning of sex, but Allerton here also pulls away from him, finally dragging his traveling companion to a doctor who when he finds that Lee is a Junkie tears up the prescription, but finally relents, allowing him to purchase his desperately needed drugs.

     Allerton flies on to Quito alone to search out what has been his true goal in the trip, to find the doctor and researcher who is doing work on the effects of yagé, a plant that when properly rendered is said to allow telepathic communication. But the doctor explains this is not simply a drug, but an experience that needs careful guidance and help. What you discover you may not like, and the results are long lasting, not at all like any other “drug.” He refuses to be Lee’s guide, and to help him in any manner. But he does suggest that in the Amazon forest there is a female Dr. Cotter who might be willing to help him explore the yagé. He gives him a map of her jungle location.

     In real life, also, Burroughs was fascinated by the yagé, recounted in the letters between the author and Allen Ginsberg titled The Yage Letters. In the movie Guadagnino plays it as a kind of comic adventure, as Lee, now again with Allerton, hacks his way through the clearly sound-stage jungle on their way to find Cotter’s cottage. They meet up with an obviously digital snake that pops out at them like any great serpent of the Indiana Jones Franchise might, and finally meet up with the gun-toting Cotter (campily played by the wonderful Lesley Manville) seemingly channeling a grumpy, testy Walter Brennan. But what the hell, she takes a liking to the truth-telling Lee and her pet tree beast takes a liking to Allerton. She readily agrees to cook up some yagé, “which results” as Gleiberman reports, “in a hallucinatory sequence that’s pure high-wire loony-tunes filmmaking. The movie we thought we were watching comes close to stopping dead in its tracks.”

     They first vomit out their hearts before stripping off all their clothes and rolling around naked for hours during which their bodies dissolve, with Lee still unable to make his voice heard, while Allerton expresses the fact that “he’s not really queer,” at least in the same way Lee is. Yet they exchange bodies and enter in and out of one another freely, obviously having some sort of deep kinship. Whether that is positive or negative is apparently something neither of them wants fully to discover, for they pack up and plan to leave the next morning. Cotter tries to warn them, “Door’s already open, there’s no going back now. All you can do is look away. But why would you?”

      They not only would, but do as they begin once more to machete their way back out of their artificial paradise. In the midst of their journey Lee loses sight of Allerton, who in the very moment disappears from his life.

      Guadagnino’s movie does not truly ever come back to real earth, and since Burroughs’ original novel was never completed, that is perhaps justifiable.

       Two years later Lee stumbles back into Mexico City and the Ship Ahoy bar from where most its patrons have seemed to disappear. Yet Guidry, now shoeless since they have been stolen by his newest trick, reports that Allerton had returned but has now gone back to South America as a tour guide for an Army Colonel.

       Lee continues his drugs as a replacement lover, but as the reviewer for Time magazine, Barry Levitt, pontificates, feeling the necessity of explaining the ending to the reader:

   

“Then things get bizarre—or rather, even more bizarre. We’re dropped into a hotel room, the same one Lee had a hookup in at the beginning of Queer. The camera pans slowly around the room to find Lee lying alone in his white suit. He gets up, only to find things have changed. He’s now in a different room, with a spiraling carpet—a suitable metaphor for his mental state—and a dollhouse on the table, a replica of the hotel he’s in. He peers in with one eye and sees himself walking the red hallway, alone. His miniature self walks to the last room on the right, which is almost entirely empty.

 

    Dr. Cotter’s words ring particularly true here. While she was talking to Eugene [Allerton] about an open door, we don’t really see the results of his newly open mind. We do, however, see how the ayahuasca has opened Lee’s, via a series of mysterious dreams that punctuate the end of Queer. The dollhouse represents Lee’s past, a seedy encounter that happened before he first fell for Eugene. Here, Lee’s sadness manifests in a desire to revisit the past, a time before he fell for Eugene. But he doesn’t wish to erase the memory of Eugene; instead, placing himself in the dollhouse affords him the chance to try again—perhaps if he wasn’t so detestable this time around, Eugene wouldn’t declare he isn’t queer, and he’d stay with Lee.  

       He closes the door behind him and finds a snake eating itself in the shape of the infinity symbol. This is an ouroboros, a representation of the natural cycles of life, death, and rebirth. Yet this snake sheds a tear. Lee looks up and sees Eugene on a single bed, with a glass pane over his crotch area. Eugene’s centipede necklace—the same necklace worn by the man Lee seduced at the beginning of the film—has come alive and is moving. Lee looks down, and the snake is gone. Looks up, the glass is gone, and Eugene is sitting on the bed. Lee stares at him.

    While Eugene’s symbol (the centipede) is moving ahead, Lee’s (the snake) is consuming itself, doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. Eugene is able to carry on after his romance with Lee, while Lee is confined to a life of falling into the same miserable cycles of loneliness and addiction, a feeling manifested by the snake shedding a hopeless tear. Eugene can walk away from Lee—and from queerness—but Lee cannot escape who he is, nor the repressive society he lives in, and it’s bound to eat him alive. In an interview with Time, Guadagnino spoke to the movie’s symbolism, explaining that the centipede represents repression: ‘The centipede is the villain in the movie,’ he said.”

 

    I’ll stop there, although Levitt goes on for several more paragraphs. Levitt's interpretations sound at moments like desperate attempts to turn these somewhat surreal images into fully meaningful tropes, however he is not entirely wrong-headed, despite restating much of what is quite obvious to any sensitive viewer.

    The director also throws in bits and pieces of Burroughs’ real life, particularly when Allerton, sitting in the room places a shot glass on his head, leading Lee to pull out his gun and shoot, killing him. The incident is based on Burroughs’ own either murder or perhaps accidental killing of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer Adams in Mexico in 1951. Their Mexican life was miserable, Vollmer suffering from Benzedrine abuse (she had previously been in Bellevue) and Burroughs without heroin. Wikipedia describes it quite accurately supported by the other sources I’ve previously read:

 

“One night, while drinking with friends at a party above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City, a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act." There is no indication that they had performed such an action previously. Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, allegedly obliged him by putting a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.”

 

     Burroughs later changed the story to suggest that his gun was dropped and accidentally fired, and others argue that Vollmer, who had grown suicidal, was ready for death. If nothing else Burroughs was certainly frustrated at the time for being unable to return to his homosexual patterns of living. His brother came to Mexico City and bribed authorities to release the writer on bail. Burroughs returned to St. Louis, while back in Mexico he was convicted in absentia with culpable homicide.

      Back in the movie, the rooms are cleared with another blink of the giant Lee’s peeping eye, the saddened explorer taking off his hat to suddenly reveal a head of white hair. He sits down on a bed and begins to shake, reminding us somewhat of his dysentery in South America; but we recognize these are shakes of an old man on his deathbed.

      But even now, decades later, Allerton remains still in the old man’s mind, as he appears as a ghost laying down with him as in their South American days to keep him warm. His lips tremble, the hand still shaking, but with a final gasp even the shaking hand stops.

      The body is transformed through colors of blue, yellow, and purple into a kind of holy spirit now loosened from the world.

     If it is a kind of hokey ending worthy of Terence Malick or Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (works I am not fond of), so be it. I agree with the Variety reviewer that Guadagnino is really again playing out the ending of Call Me by Your Name, wherein once more love does not end happily. As that reviewer puts it, queer love does not always deliver “the salvation it promises, withers under the gaze of the real world. The film’s final shot is stunning. It shows that you after all the drugs, the warped crusades, the queerness he owned, the one thing William Burroughs could never figure out was how to heal his broken heart.”

       Queer, like it’s subject William Lee, bluffs its way through an empty plot and portentous attempts at transcendental projection to end up in its last frame with a man on his death bed, all alone—to reveal only the reality of most of humanity. And in the end, accordingly this work is more a sad comedy than a tragic drama of lost love.

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).