Last Updated on November 27, 2024 by Stephinie Heitman
Queer is a 2024 Romance Movie Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by William S. Burroughs, and Justin Kuritzkes. The film stars Daniel Craig, Daan de Wit, and Jason Schwartzman released on November 27, 2024.
In the novel Queer by William S. Burroughs, Lee’s obsession is Allerton, and to win him over, he takes him to see Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. “In the dark theatre”, Lee’s body, for example, reaches in an amoeboid protoplasmic way towards Allerton’s and strains to enter his body, to breathe with his lungs, see through his eyes, to feel for his guts and genitals.
For this, in framing the unfolding of Burroughs’ work, Luca Guadagnino — who confessed, in interviews, being a devoted reader of the author since his teenage years — puts us in that theater. On the screen within the screen, the poet Orpheus dons a pair of rubber gloves and steps through a mirror that ripples like mercury: a portal to the underworld. In the foreground, Lee’s spirit gets out of his body and moves towards Allerton in an impressive ghostly form.
Daniel Craig as the fictional representation of William Lee in Burroughs comedy inhabits the character with real humor and fragility. No, not the grim and mechanical reprisal of the character as delivered by performing insect in Naked Lunch by the same director.
Marooned in Mexico City with a white linen suit, a pistol, and a stash of heroin, he spends his days and nights ricocheting from bar to bar, gossiping with fellow queer expatriates (including a wonderfully camp Jason Schwartzman) and cruising attractive young men. One night when Lee is out walking the streets aimlessly, he meets the handsome and cold Eugene Allerton played by Drew Starkey and it makes Lee even more clingy toward him.
What ensues is an account of desire that grows and engulfs. First, there’s sex, sex that—for anyone who remembers the whining of James Ivory about the reserved lust in Call Me by Your Name —is as gratuitous as it is unromantic; Guadagnino’s camera oscillates between a sex scene and an off-screen windows view. But Lee and Allerton are blatantly incompatible beyond physical attraction, even at the level of the acting: Starkey is serious and sincere in his body language and mannerisms, on the other hand, Craig seems to be performing, theatrical in his rendition of Lee’s sexual desire as a physical torture much like the junk sickness ailment he occasionally suffers from. There is something pathetic and tragic in the very nature of Lee’s phantom hands which stretch out for Allerton and only succeed in pulling him further away.
Queer was written in the early 1980s, but Burroughs was not yet 40; by the time of the book’s publication, he was over 70 years old. Well, I don’t think it is a mere coincidence that Craig’s present age lies midway between the two extremes. The genius of his portrayal lies in how it bridges two Burroughs: the menacing junkie-provocateur of his early texts and the contemplative, melancholy figure immortalized in Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary, Burroughs: The Movie. Like Cronenberg, Guadagnino understands that Burroughs’ overtly intimate and confessional writing does not simply call for a biopic but a creative one at that.
One cannot overlook the fact that Queer was written only a few months after Burroughs fatally shot his wife Joan Vollmer in what the author claims to have been a drunken attempt at recreating a scene from William Tell. Burroughs would later, in the afterword to the published version of Queer, recycle this incident as the trigger for his artistic awakening — an unfortunate piece of mythmaking that Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch doesn’t uncover as effectively. In all these cases, references to Vollmer’s death seem forced and incongruent with the themes that are central to the show.
The actual reality here is not very thick and these historical elements only make it thinner. Staged in Rome’s Cinecittà studios with apparent minimal location shooting, Queer’s Mexico is a dream space where memory and fantasy are indistinguishable from reality. When the colored lighting comes out, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography inevitably resembles the oneiric queer imaginary of Fassbinder’s Querelle, though the references generally skew more painterly: Rather than featuring bustling streets and diverse social life, Hopper’s lonely urban landscapes are grafted onto De Chirico’s metaphysical landscapes complete with phallic chimneys.
It is when Lee tries to talk to Allerton while the latter is drunk and practically on the verge of committing suicide: “I want to talk to you,” his words are, “without speaking.” Thus, into the jungle and into the hovel of the shotgun-toting Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville, who would be completely unphased if you told her she was the great-aunt of the ’80s New Wave duo, the Thompson Twins) they go, in pursuit of the hallucinogenic plant known as yage or ayahuasca and its purported ability to bestow telepathy.
Here, Guadagnino and his screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes seemingly depart the novella, even if what they’re doing is visualizing Burroughs’ text from the earlier cinema scene: the artistic desire to get inside another person’s skin, to suspend the separation between the inner and outer worlds of the self and its others. Or as Burroughs’ Lee says to Allerton in the book, “Wouldn’t it be bootful if we should just run together into one great big blob.” In Guadagnino’s version, with the aid of some gorgeously uncanny effects, this is exactly what happens, in a sequence pitched somewhere between ritual dance and cosmic sex: Lee and Allerton become the same.
The straight world might take this as a rehearsal metaphor for reproduction; what if queerness is the proposition of the opposite, an impossible pledge to the actual physical merging of self and other? This being the case, it is still quite rare to speak out loud the obvious revelation that queers mess up desire to and desire for. But it is remarkable that even if Burroughs based his comprehension on a somewhat reductive concept of gender dichotomy, he knew.
In this way, through Guadagnino, the intellect more fully comprehends Burroughs that desire is a desire to control. The images in this scene are reminiscent of the flashy Liquefactionists in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch which suggests that everyone should merge “by protoplasmic absorption” into one person. It should be of no surprise, therefore, that fleshy fusion must be penned in at hallucination, an experiment. But how moving to imagine, however momentarily, the nightmarish proposal at the end of Cronenberg’s The Fly as something tender, even transcendent.
Ayahuasca will not give Lee a door, Dr. Hernández (Andrés Duprat) explains, but a reflection. But must the transcendent, be it in the form of drugs or sex — or art cinema — be limited to psychological? As Cocteau has said, a mirror may indeed be a door after all. Guadagnino’s cinema of desire is an oscillation between looking and being looked at and a space between mediation and life. How often are we able to distinguish between the two?
Queer 2024 Parents Guide Age Rating
Queeris Rated R by the Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, strong drug content, language, and brief violence.
Sex and Nudity: ‘Immodest and constant revelations of prostitution, including situations involving couples and intimate strangers.’ Sexual activity is depicted, both inside and outside of the bedroom, and characters are often depicted as being naked.
Violence and Gore: The shooting that is referred to in the flashback is based on a real-life event. Some aspects of the movie are violent or emotionally charged, such as a scene with a character who points a shotgun at people and suicidal thoughts.
Profanity: There are extremely provocative and blatant sexual expressions employed throughout the episode.
Alcohol, Drugs, and Smoking: Heavy drug use, specifically heroin, is depicted. Foremost, the intake of alcohol pervades the culture and frequently results in reckless actions or choices. Ayahuasca use is illustrated in a ceremonial setting involving hallucinating effects.
