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Dec 05, 2024 By Jeremy Arblaster Web Exclusive

Few writers in American fiction inspire as much fascination as William S. Burroughs, a writer intrinsically tied to America’s Beat Generation alongside such literary greats as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The Beats’ affirmation of homosexuality lay at odds with a history of “concealment and camp, parody and irony,” and yet Burroughs cannot, in the typical sense of the word, be assigned to “any movement” as he put it: “I’ve never been gay a day in my life”.

But given his largely autobiographical work, any reading of Burroughs must address his queerness, and Luca Guadagnino sets about that immediately in his adaptation of the author’s novella Queer, originally written as a sequel to 1953’s Junkie, but not published until 1985. With the help of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (on a heater this year with Challengers and Trap), Guadagnino renders Mexico City in romantic, fuzzy colors and quaint, Wes Anderson-adjacent artificiality. Here American ex-pat and barfly Bill Lee (a purse-lipped Daniel Craig) spends his time half-cut on mezcal, tequila, and heroin in what begins as a tropical neo-noir.

Lee moves surprisingly awkwardly amongst the city’s queer subculture—a strange cocktail of self-importance and a hint of internalized homophobia. It’s no surprise then that he’s drawn to the recently arrived and temptingly aloof Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey. Allerton, a younger man with striking definition, is initially kept at arm’s length, with Lee stumbling in his overtures, unable to get a read on this handsome new enigma. The ex-serviceman’s quiet confidence is intimidating and reduces Lee to a bumbling wreck, leaving Allerton with a 1950s version of the ick, for want of a better term.

“The limitations of his desires were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar… and his eyes looked out through the invisible bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door, for the frayed collar, the loosened bar…” – The Forgotten Killer by Vince Passaro

But Lee’s reticence comes from Burroughs’ own nervousness, writing as he was at a time of heightened paranoia where the threat of the “homosexual menace” had been exacerbated by the Kinsey Reports of the late 1940s and had seeped into the Cold War-dominated political discourse. As Burroughs would later write in The Naked Lunch (1959), homosexuality was a “political crime… no society tolerated overt rejection of its basic tenets.” In this context, Queer is an examination of the state’s ability to police and surveil its populace. At least this is what Burroughs wants us to think. As per his later introduction to Queer, the writer aligned his work more closely with commentaries on control and paranoia.

Guadagnino prefers to take the novella at face value, with more interest in modernizing its central relationship. The Call Me By Your Name director sees it as the tragic result of confused, reluctant queer desire and Craig is fantastic, sweating out his desire whilst drunk or in the throes of withdrawal. But the thorny obsessive nature of Lee’s pursuit remains to a degree. After suffering humiliation, Lee threatens to buy the bar he and Allerton frequent—and to whom Allerton owes a substantial amount of money—in order to force some sort of re-engagement. It’s these colonialist leanings that Guadagnino dials in on. Whether it’s his treatment of the locals or the gun on his belt, Lee’s ugly American power is regularly on display. Lee and Allerton’s intimacy moves from mutual sexual gratification towards a power imbalance. Lee dominant; Allerton submissive. His romantic desire is impossible to disentangle from a “Cold War dream of total control”.

“The physiology of the bodies that engage in heterosexual or homosexual acts may differ, but when the language is the same, the distinction dims” – The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual Liberation by Catharine R. Stimpson

Fascinated by the promise of the yagé plant that purports to increase “telepathic sensitivity”—and may allow Lee to finally access the deepest reaches of Allerton’s psyche—he invites his lover on a South American tour, and it’s here where Guadagnino comes closest to meeting Burroughs. Blending the writer’s demons with Lee’s slide into a haze of intoxication – both romantic and literal – their search for the mind-altering drug takes them deep into the jungle, where Lee is merely an extension of the American frontiersman. This is no return to nature ala Beat godfather Walt Whitman, but rather exotic tourism in its infancy. Lee can buy his way to the hallucinogenic drug provided via rogue botanist Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville). In the middle of the jungle, the loss of civilization isn’t a loss at all. Instead, it’s a distortion. One dangerous enough that the individual becomes a stranger to themselves. Capital M Modernism.

Perhaps it’s appropriate then that Guadagnino’s film returns to where it began. After what is a relatively challenging trip into the jungle—Luca stans ready to make this film their personality may be sorely disappointed by the film’s second half—Lee comes full circle, like the snake eating its tail. He is the American tourist, able to return in apparent safety, leaving the desires and accidents of the past behind them to write anew.

Author rating: 7/10