Queer is a story of lost love that hangs very much on a truly excellent performance from Daniel Craig, who, despite his obvious physical differences from the protagonist, manages to not so much act Burroughs as channel him. Horny, moody, needy, and vulnerable—this is the kind of pathos which has not been on display since Craig’s debut appearance as the alcoholic, homeless, and street-crazy Geordie Peacock in BBC TV’s 1996 Our Friends In The North, or as Francis Bacon’s doomed muse and lover, George Dyer, in 1998’s Love Is The Devil. It is a breathtaking showcase of just what he is capable of as an actor.
Most Burroughs-informed readers of Beatdom will already know the basic back-story: Queer is the novella that Burroughs wrote as a kind of half-hearted sequel to his debut autobiographical novel, Junkie, in Mexico City in the early 1950s while he was awaiting trial for the killing-by-accident of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer. It was deemed unpublishable at the time, and by all accounts Burroughs wasn’t very satisfied with it, so it remained unpublished until the mid-1980s. Then it was dusted off as part of some multi-volume publishing deal and given an up-to-date, possibly somewhat revisionist preface, which is most (in)famous for introducing the mission statement:
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to the realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. The death… brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.
Be that as it may, Luca Guadagnino’s film version—made 40 years after the book’s late publication and by an award-winning, openly gay director at the height of his mainstream success—is released into a world with different values and taboos. Don’t get me wrong, my young partner and I loved it, and found the whole experience of watching the film immersive, moving, celebratory, and vindicating.
Queer is divided into broadly two sections. The first is set in an almost dreamlike Mexico City (filmed on sets at Rome’s legendary Cinecittà) where the obvious Burroughs stand-in, “William Lee,” lives in a spartan hotel room, furnished with little more than half-empty bottles, drug paraphernalia, guns, overflowing ashtrays, and—oh yes—a typewriter. His life is a round of the same louche dive bars as his fellow American expats, notably “Joe” (Jason Schwartzman, effortlessly stealing every scene he is in), a bearded proto-beatnik poet with a weakness for rough trade who steal his possessions along with his heart. He also has a ready line in self-deprecating humour: when a hook-up goes wrong, a disgruntled lover graffitis “El puto Americano” [=roughly “The queer American”] on his door, Joe leaves it there, deadpanning “Well it pays to advertise.”
Guadagnino shows, authentically and convincingly, that this is a life based on an easy and sleazy eroticism of the streets. Lee spends much of his time walking from bar to bar, or—with a pick-up—from a dive bar to a cheap hotel. There’s a great tracking-shot sequence early on, when he walks from his hotel to his local gay bar, and passes a cockfight on the street (no heavy signifiers here), during which his eyes alight for the first time upon Allerton, soon to be his love-and-lust object. The soundtrack’s accompanying use of the Nirvana song “Come As You Are” never made it sound more starkly sexual and predatory.
Soon Lee is infatuated with the much younger Allerton [based on Burroughs’s real-life fixation on Adelbert Lewis Marker, an ex-sailor slumming it in Mexico City after WWII]: a preppy, clean-cut young American who is all the things Lee is not, and perhaps wishes that he was, and wishes he could connect with. Hats off to Drew Starkey for his sterling turn as Eugene Allerton. He manages to hold his own on screen, and for all the cool detachment and disinterest he is called upon to display, he conveys a genuine, if ambiguous, chemistry with Craig’s heartworn, hurting and grasping Lee. As Lee puts it in a dream-sequence, which will then be echoed back to him by Allerton in two meaningful exchanges later in the film, “I’m not queer, I’m disembodied.”
Later, when he is alone in his seedy room, a quite self-consciously willful relapse into heroin while Allerton is away is soundtracked acutely by New Order’s “Leave Me Alone.” Lee cooks up a shot and administers it with starkly clinical detachment, all the while staring unblinkingly—already unfeeling, in anticipation of the drug?—into middle distance. There has been much criticism of the film’s anachronistic use of such music, but for myself and my young partner, the “emotional borrowing” of such familiar contemporary music, including Prince and Sinead O’Connor’s masterfully understated cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” as well as the moving, effective score by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, added to the accessibility of what could have very easily seemed too much another time and place, making it more relatable.
When Lee and Allerton do finally hook up after a night of relentless drinking, despite the sweaty, fevered passion, it is still as ambiguous as it seems inevitable. And yet the sex scenes do manage to be as authentic as they are unflinching—grimy, gritty, furtive, fluid—with both actors communicating a believable drunken, horny joy. Later, after another bout of what certainly looked like mutually enjoyable sex, a bashful Lee asks Allerton, awkwardly, “Do you not mind this terribly?” The grudging acceptance—and, later, also a moment of surprising tenderness when Allerton comforts Lee in the midst of opiate withdrawals—will be the better-than-nothing, less-is-more core of almost connection upon which Guadagnino’s Queer as hymn-to-gay-desire is founded.
Soon after, Lee invites Allerton to accompany him on a trip to South America [all expenses paid, “just be nice to Papa once-or-twice a week”]. This is because Lee has read of the hallucinogenic yagé, or ayahuasca, as it has now become so much better known. Apparently the Russians had been experimenting with it because it is said to induce telepathy, and they think it might be a tool for mind-control. Clearly Lee has issues connecting with others, and also wants to know just what Allerton really thinks and feels about him. Later, in a dreamlike party scene, a very drunken Lee confesses to his beau, “I want to talk to you… without speaking!” before passing out.
The “second act” of Queer seems to be the part that left audiences confused or disappointed, and it is certainly the greatest departure from the work-as-published. But then, Queer-as-a-novel was a somewhat unfinished text. Personally, I think Guadagnino should be applauded for the bold step he has taken in marrying Life and Art. In an inverse mirroring of David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch, Queer resolves its various loose ends by leaving the realm of biography for fiction. The latter part of the film takes as its basis the follow-up to Queer, the so-called “epistolary novel” The Yagé Letters, based on the letters between Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs when the latter was travelling South America, looking for what he described as “maybe the Final Fix.” His main hope for some kind of connection was the so-called “father of ethnobotany,” Richard Evans Schultes, to whom he was hoping to appeal as a fellow Harvard-man. Guadagnino’s film instead provides us with a star-turn from the completely unrecognisable Leslie Manville, who swaps her usual top-drawer, cool-as-a-cucumber and cut-crystal delivery for the toothless, seriously gone-native, and obviously drug-addled “Doctor Cotter,” who by turns pulls a shotgun on our boys and then cooks them up the Special Brew they’re looking for. The vivid yagé sequence sees Lee and Allerton literally vomit up their hearts, before melding together in an extraordinarily choreographed sequence of psychic and physical merging that will lead, the morning after, to Wise Crone Cotter remarking:
Door’s already open. Can’t close it now. All you can do is look away. But why would you?
The film ends with a kind of post-yagé dream sequence, in which the now-aged Lee—Craig again looking uncannily like the older William Burroughs—revisits perhaps the two defining tragedies of his younger life: the Shooting of The Beloved and The One That Got Away. In a sequence surprisingly suggestive of the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the old and, by implication, dying William Lee is made ready for whatever comes next…
And that, perhaps, is the Final Fix awaiting all of us.
