Like William S. Burroughs’s opinion of Queer, Anthony Burgess did not like to think about writing A Clockwork Orange.
Short works loosely inspired by violent crimes perpetrated against their wives, they turned both men into unwilling experts on the topic of their texts — all due to a misunderstanding born of a changed ending and a film adaptation by an auteur directing his ninth feature.
It’s not the least of what could be called seemingly random parallels between the two authors (never minding the parts both played in inspiring David Bowie). But as Luca Guadagnino’s Daniel Craig-led adaptation of the 1985 novella is launching in theatres, the exact same description could soon be applied to Queer. Given that fact, it’s not exactly unfair to compare their trajectories.
On the surface, it would make sense to interpret Queer as a sort of urtext for the LGBTQ+ love stories that have followed. The title aside, Burroughs’s story set to screen has all the plot points and visuals of a Brokeback Mountain, Love, Simon or even The Last of Us‘s Nick Offerman episode: a tragic love story about gay men deeply in love.
For that reading, look no further than the synopsis. William Lee, an aging American waiting out the U.S.’s statue of limitations on a drug charge in Mexico City, breaks out of an unending series of meaningless hookups upon spying Eugene Allerton.
The younger man floats in and out of the local queer scene with confounding, confusing aloofness. Lee is immediately infatuated. He spends his days trying to woo a man whose sexuality he is never sure of, while battling the various addictions he uses to mask a deep pit of loneliness.
Soon, Lee invites Allerton on an impromptu trip south. Down in Ecuador, there is a reclusive botanist, one who may be able to help him acquire the mystical drug yagé (ayahuasca) and therefore a window into his ultimate goal — an experience with telepathy.
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It is a goal requisitely symbolic of intimacy for a story so seemingly of the genre. And to be fair Guadagnino’s film follows almost slavishly to the experimental, stream-of-consciousness novella (up until the previously mentioned ending, that is).
There are the copious sex scenes, dripping with bodily fluids. There is the lesson of self-acceptance taught to Lee by a “wise old queen,” that it was his duty to “conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.” There is the esoteric art-house symbolism of phantom wailing babies, crying ouroboros snakes biting their own tails. And, of course, even a naked ballet dream sequence to cap it all off.
Paired with Craig’s impressive head-long dive into the character of Lee (a desperately sad, desperately smiling man quite nearly starving for affection), Drew Starkey’s adequate if impenetrable performance as Allerton and Jason Schwartzman’s brilliantly burly, effeminate friend Joe Guidry, it’s enough to stamp Queer as another entry in the canon.
But Queer as a sort of bittersweet gay romance would be about as backward from its intention as A Clockwork Orange‘s transformation into a tome on the inevitability of violence. The issue for both films is their original intention is nearly impossible to see clearly without knowledge of the source material.
Written in 1951 at the beginning of his career but only published just over a decade before his death, Queer was Burroughs’s attempt to rid himself of the most painful autobiographical inclinations that may otherwise seep into his works.
A beatnik provocateur who could be described as an early example of a troll, his works never shied away from the political — or, as in the novel The Wild Boys‘ depiction of an adolescent, apocalyptic gay sex cult, the graphic.
But it was in Queer that he dealt directly with his own life, as a young man who was either expelled, or left of his own volition from the Los Alamos Ranch School (the same school shown in Oppenheimer that the physicist would acquire and destroy for the Manhattan Project) after being caught using drugs and writing explicit notes about a disinterested male classmate.
Along with traumatic treatments intended to erase his homosexuality — and the failed attempt of winning back a lover by giving him a piece of his pinky that he detached with poultry shears — his background led to a warped view of romance. His work would remain generally icy in terms of sentimentality, built out of a past minefield of bad memories he described in the companion text to Queer as “a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape.”
But even as the book mirrors his own trip to Mexico City, his own legal troubles stateside and an obsession with telepathy and mind control that spanned back to an essay he published at 15, there is a hidden autobiographical element.
In a dramatic ending scene (alongside a subtle, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment among background actors at a party) we see a sort of William Tell shooting-an-apple-off-the-forehead moment. A shot glass is placed on a character’s head, while another takes aim with a pistol. Though it’s never directly addressed, it is a scene drawn directly from Burroughs’s own life, when he shot his wife in the head at a party performing the same stunt, killing her. He began writing the novella roughly six months later, giving Lee the same unspoken backstory.
Altered sentiments
It is one of many elements given even less explanation in the movie than the book. There is also the psychedelic imagery of centipedes: in the novella, a metaphor for the grotesque inhumanity one may take on after pursuing pleasure over all else. There is the reason why he and Allerton never quite get on: Lee, “junk sick” from opioids, does not want sex or even love, not really. As Allerton realizes: “Lee valued him as an audience.”
Guadagnino has to stretch to bring Burroughs’s story to the screen and to modern audiences. Along with lopping off Lee’s more racist observations of Mexican culture and his sexual fantasies about the local preteens, his Lee is more sympathetic.
While Guadagnino’s Lee is given a satisfying — if unfulfilling — discovery in the jungle, Burroughs’s original ending has Lee end in failure. There is no ayahuasca, no revelation and no introspection.
Like the loped-off original final chapter of A Clockwork Orange, which showed its main character saved from violent impulses by the guiding forces of society, the adjusted ending alters Queer‘s point. Modern queer love films — from Young Hearts, Heartstone and Heartstopper, to Close and Monster — are cranked out now with a message built around self-acceptance: After a battle fought around inner turmoil, these characters find acceptance in a wider-society ready to welcome them.
For better or worse, the dour, pessimistic look at living in the margins that Burroughs’s Queer explored sets it in a different group. It is closer to Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask or Fritz Peters’s Finistere — stories so disinterested in the joy and possibilities of love, they use doomed attempts at intimacy as a sort of fatalistic commentary. They documented lives, but did not see much hope.
Guadagnino’s Queer is in no way a happy fable, and its heartbreaking epilogue does tack closer to Burroughs’s original tone. But you have to wonder: If Burroughs were alive like Burgess to see this adaptation, would he worry you’d miss the point?
