A Review of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer
by Oliver Harris
Literary adaptations for the silver screen have always been a hit and miss affair, with some notable triumphs and many spectacular travesties. William Burroughs’ bête noire was The Snows of Kilimanjaro,which in 1952 ruined Hemingway’s short story about death by giving it a Hollywood happy ending. Whether the Beat field is especially cursed, I don’t know, but up until now you certainly can’t say it has been blessed. Not one of the films made from the holy trinity of texts written by the holy trinity of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs can be called a great success, despite good intentions, promising creative collaborations, and flashes of inspiration. And adaptations matter, despite what Burroughs famously said about David Cronenberg‘s 1991 version of Naked Lunch (via a quotation from James M. Cain, which he misattributed to Raymond Chandler): “My novels? Why, Hollywood hasn’t done anything to them. They’re still right there, on the shelf.”
Burroughs’ hope for Naked Lunch was that readers “will judge the film as something quite apart from my novel, and that I may perhaps find some new readers thereby.” However, like many people, I can’t help seeing cinematic adaptations as “translations” of the original — and badly translated texts badly misrepresent them: if you have any French, try reading Le Festin nu; it’s awful. But Burroughs put his finger on the key questions: can you separate the two when reading one or watching the other? Does the film risk replacing the novel in the cultural imagination? Does the adaptation recruit more readers or does it mislead, confuse, or put them off altogether?
And on top of the question of fidelity — does the film do the text justice? — there’s the problem specific to Burroughs of how to avoid confusing the man with the myth. The iconic image of Burroughs was forged early on from sensationalised portraits of a mad, bad and dangerous to know man of mystery in Kerouac’s novels and, with a hostile cutting edge, in the mass media. So, it’s more than that Keifer Sutherland was hopelessly miscast as Burroughs in Gary Walkow’s dreadful Beat (2000) or that Viggo Mortensen was unconvincing as Old Bull Lee in Walter Salles’ disappointing On the Road (2012). Peter Weller’s performance as William Lee/William Burroughs in Naked Lunch is the object lesson in what happens when the iconic image takes over, summed up by the film’s opening shot — which is not of the actor but of the shadow cast by his hat, which doesn’t just fetishise the trademark fedora but stands in symbolically for the long shadow of the mythic author that has mediated the popular reception of Burroughs’ work.
Cronenberg reduced Burroughs to little more than signature visual props and a vocal mimicry that isn’t so much the dry deadpan drawl of the gentleman junky as just two-dimensionally lifeless. A frenzied, feverish text is not well represented by such a cool central performer. At least John Fleck’s Burroughs in Ed Buhr’s gem of a low-budget short, The Japanese Sandman (2008), adapted faithfully from The Yage Letters, is very funny, as is Ben Foster’s better-known imitation in John Krokidas’s entertaining Kill Your Darlings (2013), based on the real-life drama behind the Kerouac-Burroughs novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The last two instances suggest that the higher the expectation — as in the case of On the Road and Naked Lunch, and indeed Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl (2010) — the greater the let-down. Texts that are cultural landmarks as well as Beat classics create a burden of hopes that set a high bar for adaptation: minor works with more modest expectations may have more chance of making it.
Skin Game
Such thoughts ran through my head as I anxiously took my seat along with two thousand others in the Royal Festival Hall for October’s London premiere of Luca Guadagnino‘s ravishing and remarkable adaptation of Burroughs’ novella, Queer. Although utterly different in most ways, the film has two important things in common with Kill Your Darlings. Both are based, one indirectly the other directly, on source texts that became legendary while remaining long unpublished: Hippos, written in 1945, not published until 2008; Queer, written in 1952, not published until 1985. And in the case of Queer, the adaptation has itself been long-anticipated, appearing almost 15 years after the much-rumoured project to be directed by Steve Buscemi based on Oren Moverman’s script. And second, both Kill Your Darlings and Queer made very surprising casting choices that involved celebrated actors known for one high-profile part playing against type: Daniel Ratcliffe, aka Harry Potter; Daniel Craig, aka Bond, James Bond. But there the similarities end, and while I had been faintly amused to see one Daniel take on the role of Ginsberg, I was much more anxious about seeing the other Daniel take on Burroughs. That’s because, when it came to Queer, the stakes were far higher — for Burroughs, for Guadagnino, and for me. We all had skin in this game.
Queer will never come close to the literary status or cultural reach of Naked Lunch, but the publication of Burroughs’ slight, incomplete early novella was a complete game changer. In a material sense, it had marked a turning point in his career as the keystone in a six-figure publishing contract that secured the future for the 70-year-old author after decades of precarious finances. And in terms of his development as a writer in the first place, the novel transformed our understanding by providing the missing link between the tight-lipped hardboiled reportage of Junky and the radical, riotous disarray of Naked Lunch. My own critical and scholarly work turned crucially on making the case for Queer, which became the driving force for William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination in 2003 and my revised edition of the novella in 2010.
Putting Queer on the big screen represented, therefore, a unique opportunity to raise exponentially the profile of a work in which I had invested a great deal for over two decades. Ironically, that history made me the best and the worst possible viewer: desperate for it to measure up, could I watch this Queer without the other one always in mind, condemned to be the Man Who Knew Too Much to see the film on its own terms? Worse still — full disclosure — I had even more skin in the game having worked for Guadagnino as a research consultant, given feedback on a draft of Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay, and chatted with Daniel Craig about his role. Still, my investment was strictly professional, unlike the bond that united director and novelist.
Annexing Annexia
You didn’t have to be an academic to recognise that Queer was by far Burroughs’ most nakedly personal work, one that revealed an inner torment about his sexuality shockingly at odds with the ice-cold image of the man. Far from being an old minor text, this was, in Ginsberg’s blurb, “a major work. Burroughs’ heart laid bare, the origin of his writing genius, honest, embarrassing, humorously brilliant, naked — the secret of the Invisible Man.” And for Guadagnino, too, Queer is his most personal film, as he has taken every opportunity to insist, the one closest to his heart going back to his reading the novel as a teenager. There’s an emotional chemistry here between two homosexual artists that suggested an utterly different take to the collaboration that produced Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, a film that has its admirers and a few good moments — shooting bug powder as “a Kafka high”; the Mugwump typewriters — but which for me got all the important calls wrong. Not only did it replace the vibrant energy, pace, colour, and savage humour of the original with a lethargic and morose dull brown sludge, and not only did it straighten out both the novel’s narrative disarray and Burroughs’ sexual identity (“homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had,” apparently), but it threw away the novel to create a kunstlerroman. As Timothy Murphy argued, by making everything into a metaphor for Burroughs becoming a writer — or rather, a fantasy of the writer-as-secret-agent — Cronenberg sealed his Naked Lunch off from any external reality or other significance. This was one reason why it had left me cold thirty years ago, and why the early frames of Queer might have had me worried.
Setting the scene in early 1950s Mexico, Queer opens with a slow pan across various objects: a bed, a typewriter, manuscript pages of Burroughs’ novel-in-progress, guns… Centipede jewellery and a sign for “Annexia” confirm that these are all references to Naked Lunch — but Cronenberg’s film rather than Burroughs’ original. Would the Italian director follow the Canadian’s path, and film not the novel but a story about its writing? That would at least be true to the facts, since the force of my reading of Queer was that the relationship between William Lee and Eugene Allerton is based on the writing and reading of the text, whose routines Burroughs had sent as letters to his reluctant lover, Lewis Marker, in spring 1952. And of course, as everyone knew — because this was the sensational story Burroughs told on the novel’s publication in 1985 — his turn to writing was linked to the reckless, tragic shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer, that had taken place in Mexico City six months earlier. Egregiously, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch had put the shooting at the centre of his film’s fantasy. Guadagnino, it soon became apparent, would reference the shooting but, like the typewriter, it would be a brief allusion to facts on the ground, not the basis to his film’s fictional world.
The clue to a very different trajectory lies in Queer‘s soundtrack. Whereas Cronenberg’s film was scored entirely by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman’s original jazz composition, Guadagnino’s Queer goes in the opposite direction. Supplementing Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno sounds, the film features some two dozen non-period songs, starting over the credits with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies.” More anachronistic hits by New Order (“Leave Me Alone”) and Prince (“Musicology”) and many others new to me established that the film was not interested in creating a self-contained mythology or recreating an historical period drama but in making bridges from the past into the present, playfully addressing the present — and doing so in part by a catalogue of Burroughs’ enduring creative influence on other artists, from David Cronenberg to Kurt Cobain.
1950s Postcard
A tension between past and present is unavoidable given the ambiguous sexual politics at the heart of Burroughs’ novel, which made any adaptation seven decades on bold and risky. It would certainly be easy to misconstrue Burroughs’ Queer as a narrative of internalised Cold War homophobia and nothing more, missing the way Lee performs the part of the Ugly American as a critique of imperialism, holding up a dark mirror to the culture that demonised homosexuals and heroin addicts. Guadagnino could possibly have gone there, although it would have been impossible to retain the other side to Lee’s demonisation, which plays out through his many outrageously racist routines, anti-Semitic jokes, and self-loathing sex tourism humour. Instead of retaining these abject and abjecting fantasies, the film keeps only tasters and a brief exchange — when Lee refuses to pay a Mexican cabdriver the asking price — to indicate the colonialist entitlement of expatriate Americans. But if it looks as if it shies away from the novel’s difficult politics by redacting the routines that made Queer a dry run for Naked Lunch, that would be to miss the genius of the film, which is the way that Guadagnino translates a verbal performance into a visual one.
Even the few hostile reviewers have granted that the visuals of Queer are ravishingly gorgeous, observing that the cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, its Thai DoP, “makes the fantasy sequences feel vital and real and the more realistic elements feel vaguely dreamy,” as one put it, while as another noted, the uncanny effect is like being taken inside an intoxicated Technicolour 1950s postcard Mexico. This unsettling poetic quality in the filming goes together with Stefano Baisi’s design that uses paintings, soundstages, mattes and miniatures to create a dreamlike effect. I’d spotted this aesthetic already in the screenplay, which featured several diorama models (“The diorama seems now something like the sets in Synechdoche, New York,” I had noted in my annotations, presciently as it turned out). The film therefore embodied my reading of Burroughs’ novel, which saw through its apparent realism — and remember: it is unique in his oeuvre for appearing to be the realistic narrative of a relationship — as a sham. Thinly fictionalising Burroughs’ real-life experiences of 1951, his Queer tried to pass itself off as realism, but it breaks down as his narrative falls apart together with his own identity as a coherent character. Accordingly, the film is set in a Mexico of the mind, a real-world geography reshaped by Lee’s agonising inability to engage with place or connect with people except through the all-consuming, shattering fantasies of his desire.
There’s a superficial similarity therefore between Guadagnino’s decision to film the Mexico City of Queer at the Cinecittà studios in Rome and Cronenberg’s filming of Tangier on a Toronto soundstage (although that was forced on him due to the outbreak of the first Gulf War). However, the unreal city of Queer is consistent with the tormenting isolation and instability of its central protagonist, evidenced in a scene early on when, with a TV on the wall tuned to hissing static, Lee sits in a bar and turns first monochrome and then semi-transparent while the sound of other drinkers fades out. The point is clinched shortly after when (in a scene faithful to the novel) Lee takes Allerton to the cinema to see Cocteau’s film Orphée: as a phantom arm reaches out to caress the object of his desire, we watch Orpheus on the screen-within-the-screen being led through to the other side of a mirror into what Cocteau called “the Zone.” And so, while Guadagnino’s film is meticulous historically in certain respects, it wasn’t shot on location and the artifice is played up so as to display, in the director’s own words, the “private reverie of a largely unreliable narrator. What’s universal about the story is its fidelity to raw feelings and the suffering this removal from the real world causes.”
Raw Feelings
I should have known better — how could I know the novel by heart and yet miss it? — but as much as I was ravished by the stylised visuals of Queer so was I floored by Daniel Craig’s interpretation of Burroughs’ persona, William Lee. From our video conference discussions, I knew Craig saw Lee as horny in an immature, adolescent kind of way, but still I wasn’t ready to see up on the big screen a version of Burroughs as a man of physical passion, an intensely sensual, sexy man. Hot and sweaty, muscular and naked, Craig’s Lee is a painfully vulnerable prisoner of love, a victim of his own insatiable desires.
The fever dream of amour fou that takes over the opening third of Queer depends crucially on Lee’s relationship with Allerton, his reluctant lover. Reviewers seem divided between some who find it “never feels entirely believable” and others who say “their relationship is entirely believable” — an understandable division, given how hot and cold Allerton blows and how inscrutable he remains. I saw his illegibility — is he queer? Is he bicurious? Is he a capricious user? Is he indifferent to desire? Does he know what he is? — as a kind of mirror for Lee, a projection of his own inability to understand himself. But I had also always seen Allerton as essentially unworthy, a nobody — Burroughs’ novel paints him ambivalently — so that Lee’s obsessive pursuit is more obviously a fantasy in excess of the real, suffering the blinding self-delusion of love. But as played by Drew Starkey, Allerton here is not a ringer for Lee except perhaps as a romantically idealised version: whereas Craig gets more and more louche in the heat as his white linen suit gets sweatier and sweatier, Starkey remains neat and clean in his preppy clothes — pleated trousers, pressed shirts — and has the easy good looks of a male model. Like the Baked Alaska in Lee’s joke (taken verbatim from the novel), we see him as hot on the outside but cold on the inside. In contrast to Allerton, and playing off against the artifice of the unreal city, Craig’s raw sexual desire comes across as both totally authentic and masochistically tormenting. How long, as Burroughs would write in his final novel, “How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he ‘wants’?”
Sympathy for the Devil
Daniel Craig’s brave, bold, and rightly lauded performance is, of course, as far removed as imaginable from the laconic cool icon of Peter Weller’s Lee. However, the more important contrast is not between the casting choices of Cronenberg and Guadagnino but within the performances of Craig himself. Like everyone else, I had seen the casting of Craig as very “interesting” — meaning: I had no idea how it would work. It would have been hard to predict his alternation of restless energetic masculinity (shown in the decisive way he moves or slams down his endless tequila shots) and vulnerable inner torment (shown chiefly in his eyes). His Lee is both cynically funny in his delivery of key lines and pathetic in his eagerness to please, as when giving Allerton an excruciating “old-world” bow (deriving from a line in the novel that gave rise to the title “Naked Lunch” via Jack Kerouac misreading the phrase “naked lust” from the manuscript of Queer). In short, Craig is unrecognisable to anyone who knows him from the role that defined his career, as the cool, suave, entirely superficial secret service agent, 007.
Craig’s star charisma and stellar acting elicit a compassion for Lee that makes an otherwise repellent character sympathetic and in turn humanizes Burroughs. The transformation of Craig from James Bond into William Lee now struck me as very carefully calculated. It wasn’t about giving Burroughs’ alter ego the kind of masculinity with which he identified (as I might have suspected). What it was about I found evidenced in the film’s two brilliant cameo performances, by Jason Schwartzman (hilarious as one of the gay characters in the Ship Ahoy bar) and Lesley Manville (even more hilarious as Dr Kotter, the cackling Annie Oakley botanist in the jungle who leads Lee and Allerton towards taking yagé). In each case the actors are simply unrecognisable. It’s all about transformation, the revelation of hidden depths and inner potentials. And what makes this eerily appropriate is that, in giving expression to a sexual and emotional depth suppressed by the iconic image of Bond, Daniel Craig also gave expression to precisely the inner turmoil of Burroughs that was on show in his early novella but which had been hidden for decades behind his own icy cool iconic image.
Coincidentally — giving that word the significance it has in Burroughs’ world — Craig’s performance in Queer actually returned him to one of his own earliest parts, his breakthrough role in fact, when, 25 years earlier, starring alongside Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, he had played George Dyer, the disturbed lover taken up by the painter during the 1960s, in Love is the Devil (1998), John Maybury’s brutal, brilliant study of loneliness, creativity, and destructive inner demons. The twist is that, for Craig, the younger lover and older predator roles are now reversed. The connection between Bacon and Burroughs as radical queer artists and friends generates a typically Burroughsian point of intersection, one that confirms Craig’s casting is not a wildcard but his destiny, a match made in heaven. To use one icon to play another icon is one thing. To resurrect the actor’s own past as a way to annul the limitations imposed by his iconic identity, and to use that transformation to visualise a parallel transformation for the writer, exposing the queer man behind the cool junky secret-agent myth — it’s a remarkable thing.
Mysterious and Unsettling
Craig’s towering performance is sure to earn him nominations; but whether Queer as a whole wins awards may depend on how critics understand its hybrid, composite nature as a Guadagnino film. When I first learnt of the project, I anticipated as much: “If the director of Call Me By Your Name is ideally placed to do justice to the romance story of queer desire,” I wrote in a piece for the Allen Ginsberg blog, “the truly dark fantasmatic core of Queer will need the director of Suspiria” (his 2018 remake of an Italian horror movie). Mashing irreconcilable film styles and worlds together has naturally baffled reviewers, and the narrative structure doesn’t help, as Lee’s pursuit of contact through sex with Allerton in Mexico City segues into his pursuit of telepathy from taking yagé in the jungle — scenes which have no source in Burroughs’ novel and that are by turns comic and moving and viscerally psychedelic — until the film ends up in an abstract symbolic territory that channels David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. At one point, Joan makes a brief, very strange dream appearance which I didn’t understand at all, and that tempted me to ask the woman in the next seat in the auditorium for an explanation — since I had found myself sitting beside Ronia Ava, the Finnish actress who plays the part. I was held back by shyness and an acceptance of mystery as integral to the film.
Some reviewers got the point, but even those who think they don’t get it actually do when criticising Queer on the grounds that it “ultimately suffers from an identity crisis, leaving viewers puzzled by its intentions.” If you want a satisfyingly coherent, good-looking and well-made story with credible plot and character, you’re watching the wrong Guadagnino film of 2024: Challengers has been a commercial hit because it doesn’t leave inexplicable loose ends and internal contradictions, or combine beauty with horror and the poignant with the weird, or risk polarising its audience with uncertain shifts in tone and style and strange twists in structure. In 1952 Burroughs had left his novella unfinished because it was unfinishable; but then all his work lacks finish, in the double sense of polish and completeness. Seventy years later, its cinematic version adds an ending but remains open-ended, inconclusive, ongoing. What I love about Queer is therefore also what makes it a difficult film, a film that is queer in form as well as in content and name. “For the one thing that would make Queer untrue to its title,” as I put it myself in the 2010 edition of Burroughs’ novel, “would be to explain away all that makes it so mysterious and unsettling.” And that is why, enchanting and challenging in equal measure, the Queer of Luca Guadagnino does justice to the Queer of William Burroughs.