In the intimate, shaggy sphere of Providence’s classic Avon Cinema, a row of college students sit in their winter parkas. They are taking ample time before the lights go down to talk; munching popcorn and biting off the heads of twizzlers with gloved hands. The heat in the cinema has turned off, and everyone’s breath can be traced in exulting, foggy puffs. Each person a small factory, emitting tiny smokestacks in the walled-up night.
Avon Cinema, an independently owned theater, has yet to succumb to the luxurious edification of movie theaters nationally – which is probable cause for their heating issue. Although, sitting in the straight-backed chairs of our humble past feels fitting when you’re there to watch Queer, a film by Luca Guadagnino of William Burroughs’ namesake novel.
Written in 1952 but not published until 1985, the novel is the semi-autobiographical story of William Lee, an expatriate in Mexico City who yearns delicately, violently, for the adoration of Eugene Allerton. It is not a solely romantic venture that spurs Lee, it is the nagging pursuit of desire itself; a desire to write and a desire for freedom that manifests in a drink-fueled binge of dissolution. On the fringe of Queer exists the sinister allusion to a dissemination of reality, a terrifying existence of sludge, centipedes, and perpetual doom; a waterstamp of Burrough’s oeuvre that became trademark after the magnificent madness of his second novel, Naked Lunch (1959).
In Burroughs’ own introduction he concludes (with the prose of someone who is realizing, in real-time, the thing that’s been haunting him his whole life) that the book was motivated by his own accidental shooting of his wife, Joan, in 1951. This event relinquishes an “appalling conclusion” for Burroughs: “I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death… So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have no choice except to write my way out.”
In Queer we see Burroughs attempting this digging, this pendulum of suffering that appears in Lee’s Junk (opium) withdrawal, his loneliness as he grapples with catacombs of lusts. A search for truth in the eyes and caresses of young men, of anyone; a tapping into something that was not yet named.
During the writing of Queer, Jack Kerouac went to stay with Burroughs in Mexico. A quote by Kerouac in the 2010 introduction to Queer, written by Oliver Harris, describes his entry into Burrough’s strange Mexican bungalow. “[Burroughs] looked like a mad genius in littered rooms… He was writing. He looked wild, but his eyes innocent and blue and beautiful.” Eyes of frozen lake being melted by sun; sun of ideas, words, curtains being lifted and shuttered, Kafkaesque hallucinations of depravity… writing that does not spare the world.
This is what we expect to see in Luca Guadagnino’s film adaptation. We get bits of this, but there is the perpetual feeling that something is missing. Lee’s character, played by Daniel Craig, captures Lee’s swagger as he saunters between bars looking for Allerton, downing shots of tequila, then immediately deadpanning for another one. Although if you weren’t familiar with Burroughs, the average viewer would gain nothing from his character but the veneer of him as a predatory, alcoholic, old man.
Moments are “cringy,” such as when Lee is abandoned by Allerton, propelling Lee to go on a binge that results in absolute hallucinatory disintegration. He appears at a party to try and reconcile with Allerton, drunkenly begging him to touch him, soothe him, on which Allerton and another guest look in horror. There are moments of intimacy between the two men, propelled by a pathos unfamiliar in Burroughs writing; a place only familiar in commercialized romance that is suffused with cued music and soft lighting. This particular scene prompted some of the younger audience-goers to react with revulsion (because of the characters’ age-gap), but also with a sigh of relief at their inevitable coupling.
The novel Queer does not read like a romance novel, a lens Guadagnino plays with. Burroughs writes viscerally, strangely, and without rules; as though he is an animal. In the novel, when Lee and Allerton are at the theater, Burroughs writes “In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals.” An amoeboid protoplasmic projection… blind worm hunger. Guadagnino does not aim to capture the full weight of Burroughs in this film because it is not easily digestible.
Maybe it is better this way. Maybe it is better to have diluted Burroughs than no Burroughs at all. There are moments when you do see the real Burroughs come through, like when Lee is sitting across from Dr. Cotter in the jungle asking about the drug Ayahuasca. Here, at this wooden table, intimately captured by Guadagnino’s predisposition for mood lighting, even Allterton looks with amazement upon Lee’s change in character. We drop the one-dimensional appearance of Lee as a pining man desperate for Allerton’s young heat, and we see him for what he is; a smart man who uses the world and its vices as a tool for exploration.
Guadagnino does well with Burroughs’ dreamscapes, but even these have a kitschy air that exclude the true bizarreness of Burroughs ( I might be suffering a predisposition to David Cronenberg’s 1991 film adaptation of Naked Lunch). If anything, this film is a training-wheeled introduction to Burroughs. Those who watch Guadagnino’s Queer without knowing who Burroughs is, leave feeling intrigued, a twinge dissatisfied, then he has done his job. For only we guide people into the door of the unknown; it is up to them to jump in. Or as Donald Webster Cory writes in his book The Homosexual in America, ‘“is it, perhaps, in the baffling character of the unknown that there can be found the origin and significance of the word queer?” •
