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