Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is in Canada all week covering the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. And as usual, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Many wish they could be like William S. Burroughs – a true blue counterculture icon if there ever were one, the one Beat who didn’t turn into a sad shell of himself or became a walking punchline, a man who made it into his 80s without sacrificing an iota of his cool or edge – but few would ever actually want to be him. Sure, you might want to write like him, or have a life as exciting as his, or have that elder statesman status that had poets like Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain looking up to you as you pose, dapperly dressed among the punks and freaks, for sure-to-be exhibited photographs. But behind those eyes, the ones featured so prominently in the video for U2’s “Last Night on Earth,” held something other than the outlaw/raconteur that mythology styled him as. What he was, ultimately, was a human who wasn’t comfortable in his own skin. Throw whatever mitigating detail gleaned from his life you’d like to in there — his wealth, his sexuality, his addictions — all were ultimately in service of an appetite that nothing could ever satisfy. He was fundamentally an alien (only a properly alienated mind could write something like Naked Lunch, after all) walking among us, praying that he might be perceived and loved. This forms the backbone of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, a deeply empathetic yet clear-eyed adaptation of Burroughs’ novel, which sees the author’s “dark spirit” transformed from phantasm to what it was: a white bedsheet with two eyeholes cut out of it.
Queer was published in the ‘80s, but it was composed decades earlier as a follow-up to Junky, another semi-autobiographical novel that earned a spot on the pulp fiction racks and later on in head shops. There’s a heady salaciousness to his writing at that time, as the work’s almost free of the disregard for convention that would define his later work, or at least the drugs provide a contextual reason for its flights of rhetorical fancy: The shock value of the subject material was substance enough for his readers at the time. Paired once again with Challengers scribe and potion-seller Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino approaches the story much like Burroughs did in fictionalizing his life.
In the author’s imagination, William Burroughs became William “Bill” Lee (Daniel Craig), an American ex-pat haunting Mexico City’s bars searching for… something. When we first meet him, he’s trying to find it in the face of a young Jewish boy, his slicked-back hair and swarthy demeanor exuding a sweaty desperation. He then tries to find it in his friends, knowing, at the very least, that he’s not as craven as Joe (a fat-suited and hilarious Jason Schwartzman), who keeps letting his paramours steal his things — typewriters, boots, socks — but who always seems to have company. He tried to find it in junk before the bust that caused him to flee Louisiana for the Border. He tries to find it in the company of a sex worker, whom he picks up in a cantina and who makes him feel even emptier when he leaves their hotel room with an understated “adios.”
But then, walking in slow-motion down the street, past a brothel towards a cockfight, Lee finds it. Soundtracked to “Come as You Are,” Krist Novoselic’s rolling bass line captures the heady, sexy vibe of the moment he first lays eyes on Eugene (Drew Starkey), his polo shirt fitting snugly over his pecs, a seductive swagger hiding behind his horn-rimmed glasses, a casual yet knowing smirk on his face. Lee’s infatuated — he’s found that thing he’s been missing! — but then comes the matter of meeting and getting to know him. Gene remains obscure to him, even as they consummate their relationship. Sure, he tells Bill things about his time in the service and gladly drinks his bitter brandy before heading to bed with him, but he also plays chess with the lone woman among the gay men at Bill’s favorite bar and seems to poke at his insecurities. A jealous heart plus a weak man equals a recipe for disaster, and he starts using again right after he fully embarrasses himself at a party, the mescal-soaked patrons playing games of William Tell with dart guns and glasses. He begs Gene to journey through South America with him and offers to pay him, not informing his beau that he’ll have to nurse him through withdrawal or that they’ll journey deep into the jungle to try and find a drug that the CIA thinks can allow people to read minds. He wants to know if Gene loves him.
What Guadagnino and, by extension, Craig see in Bill is his ceaseless yearning and his queerness. I don’t mean the latter in the sense that he’s a gay man — I mean that he’s perpetually odd and uncomfortable in any scenario, regardless if he’s sweating out a joke in between rum and cokes or trying to write or falling over himself to impress Gene. It’s a soulful, deep, ugly, and beautiful performance by Craig, one so ruthlessly human that it’s my pick for the definitive screen version of Burroughs and the best work Craig’s done in his entire non-Tuxedoed career on screen. Everyone else did impressions, but Craig makes this god human. He doesn’t walk on water with cane and hat in hand and a Rolex on his wrist — he’s drowning in his desire, floundering for even the slightest bit of connection. Everything that isn’t related to his character but is a part of his mythology is rendered emotionlessly.
For instance, a scene where Bill cooks up some heroin, freshly off of a broken heart, is filmed in a single static shot, rendered dispassionately and unromantically. When he finds a vein and shoots up, Guadagnino doesn’t go for the Aaronofsky-style extremes; instead, he’s just himself, albeit a little slower: whatever warmth or comfort he feels doesn’t follow him to the screen. The only change is New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” getting cued on the soundtrack. His hallucinations of love are perpetually doubted by the dissonance of the fabulous Reznor/Ross score — the twirling violins undercut by the heavy droning that follows, the stillness of Guadagnino’s inserts reducing the heady physicality of Bill’s otherworldly desire to just another still detail in the pageant of Mexico City life. When he finally does reach that transformative experience, it doesn’t give him the release or fulfillment he imagines it will, but he receives another: A psychedelic horror show of colliding bodies, a burlesque of his and Gene’s union, but presented at its most honest.
I don’t mean to give the impression that Guadagnino intended this as a takedown of Burroughs (though it’ll be interesting to see what happens when the CMBYN TikTok teens learn about him). Queer is full of small tributes to him and his interests. Sci-fi books litter the tables, his influence on culture is acknowledged through the anachronistic soundtrack, and Craig always manages to evoke at least some of that trademark cool at some point. It manages to tread a very interesting line between other translations of his work to the screen — everyone from Cronenberg to Coppola gets a shout-out. Yet it refuses to settle for hagiography: Queer views Burroughs as he viewed himself, but with the benefit of distance and hindsight, and presents to us a theory: his alienation was the source of his magnetism and lust for experience but also his most repellant feature. His humanity made him ugly — we could stand him weird and withered, but not pathetic, eschewing the details that didn’t fit the view or, like the murder of Joan Vollmer, turning them into quirky features for punks to mythologize and for English professors to use to try and hook college freshmen. Her death casts a pallor over the film, as much as it did the novel, which was written in the aftermath while he was waiting for trial.
Behold, then, the man: An intelligence governed by lust, a hungry heart in need of sustenance. The body may be gone, but the yearning remains, captured in this masterpiece, evoked through Craig’s soulful performance, soundtracked by some of the best Prince needledrops you’ll hear since the Purple One passed on. Queer is yet another feather in Guadagnino’s cap and perhaps the more impressive of the two scripts Kuritzkes has written over the course of his short career as a screenwriter. There may be no filmmaker better at presenting the beauty and horror of longing working in cinema today, and he’s only getting better when paired with a writer and cast of this caliber. But, even more importantly, it may be the Burroughs film that Burroughs himself would have paid to see. Perhaps he’d have seen someone like himself on screen, a little different but close enough, and feel that someone, somewhere, might have gotten it right.