William Burroughs wrote Queer in 1952, directly after his first novel, Junkie, and less than a year after he had shot dead his wife, Joan Vollmer. The novel continues straight on from Junkie, telling the story of Burroughs’ alter ego, William Lee, an addict and writer living in Mexico City, infatuated with a young American ex-serviceman, Allerton, who proves elusive, possibly not gay at all.
Queer was salvaged from the archive and first published in 1985. In his introduction, Burroughs said his motivations for writing it were no longer clear. “Why should I wish to chronicle so carefully these extremely painful and unpleasant and lacerating memories?”
Luca Guadagnino first read Queer as a teenager. He says now he has realised he has been “thinking of William Burroughs, looking for William Burroughs and paraphrasing William Burroughs” all his life.
So here’s Queer, scripted, like Challengers, by Justin Kuritzkes, starring Daniel Craig. Craig is excellent as Lee, an isolated, alcoholic, mannered writer, stylishly dressed in linen suits, a pistol on his belt, cruising the gay bars of Mexico City for pick-ups. Guadagnino disdains the idea that casting a gay man would have been in some way more authentic – and also notes that very few stars can “reclaim the power of going above the icons they play”, as Craig, despite being still imposingly, inappropriately, muscular, does so well here.
Lee first spots Allerton (Drew Starkey), slender, cutely dressed, reserved, in the street, watching a cockfight – and Allerton notices him, too. Over the following days, Lee encounters him repeatedly without finding out much about him. “Is he queer? You could ask,” another barfly tells him, but Lee rejects the idea.
Then, over dinner, in a big speech taken directly from the novel, Lee explains his “proclivities” to Allerton. On realising he was homosexual, he nearly killed himself. “Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster.” But a wise old queen taught him to bear his burden proudly. This routine works. They go back to his place and have hot sex, a much more explicit scene than any in Call Me by Your Name.
Yet in the following days, Allerton remains offhand, unavailable. In desperation, Lee persuades him to go with him to Ecuador, in search of a drug, “yagé” (ayahuasca), that he believes enables telepathy and mind control. The relationship at this point is abjectly transactional, Lee paying for Allerton’s trip in return for Allerton being “nice” to him twice a week, contractually.
In the novel, the pair never get the drug, the story peters out. In the film, deep in the jungle, they meet a mad old Colonel Kurtz-like botanist who has gone native (Lesley Manville, as never seen before) and take it together, resulting in a protracted scene of hallucination in which they dance, naked and sweating, their bodies melding and entering each other in ultimate consummation, via double exposure. Like most trips and dreams, it’s unconvincing to watch.
Guadagnino, whose stock-in-trade is love-rapture, didn’t want to make a story about unrequited love. Yet that is precisely the bitter subject of Queer the novel. Guadagnino contends that the film reveals the connection between Lee and Allerton as mutual and eternal: not unequal, just out of sync in timing. Stylish as the film may be, with its artificial sets and anachronistic soundtrack featuring Prince and New Order, that romantic project fails. The casting of so heterosexual an icon as Craig is at least successfully perverse.
What would it be truly to connect anyway? Nightbitch, adapted from the 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder, presents Amy Adams as a stay-at-home mother of a sweet two-year-old, so worn down that she finds release only in running wild as a dog, literally, in the small hours. Hubby (Scoot McNairy) is useless at childcare and they separate. But all ends well when Mother returns to her career as an artist. Hubby begs forgiveness at the vernissage. “I’m just in awe, I’m in f***ing awe of you. I should have told you not to give this up. I f***ed up and I’m sorry. You’re so weird and I love you.” He is rewarded with a kiss. Prospective fathers might like to memorise this speech, so universally applicable, in advance.
It would serve the hero very well in the romcom out on New Year’s Day, We Live in Time, in which a wholly familiar story (unlikely couple love-struck, bliss blighted by illness) is made a little strange by non-linear delivery and terrific performances by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. They connect, you might almost believe.
“Nightbitch” is in cinemas now, “Queer” on 13 December, “We Live in Time” on 1 January 2025
[See also: Conclave: this papal power struggle is high entertainment]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024