Near the middle of William S. Burroughs’ novel Queer, American expats Lee and Allerton see Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus at a Mexico City cinema. As they huddle in the dark, Burroughs writes that “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.” As Lee imagines himself inhabiting—even becoming—his companion’s body, Allerton fidgets, perhaps leaning away, and Lee finds himself sharply dislocated: awkward, strange, and thrown out of the intimacy for which he pines.

This scene, which lasts no more than a paragraph, may very well be the atom at the centre of director Luca Guadagnino’s new adaptation of Queer. Lee (Daniel Craig) is full of gestures offered and then retracted, whether a floppy, undignified bow to initiate courtship, or his reaching to pour Allerton (Drew Starkey) another brandy at the same moment the young man withdraws the glass for another sip. Their out-of-sync gestures betray bodies that are most often on two parallel tracks, converging only to lurch apart again. 

In the theatre, we see Lee’s febrile hunger for amalgamation. While the pair (not yet lovers) gaze at the screen, Orpheus, played by Jean Marais, is given gloves that will allow him to “go through glass like water.” Lee gazes at Allerton and imagines touching his cheek, his hands superimposed over the frame like gossamer; on the screen before them, another trick of film editing allows Orpheus to walk through a mirror. As we see these two bodies dissolving, passing through flesh and glass, the laws of what is real and manifest are upended by the transformations of cinema.

Here is perhaps where Guadagnino’s Queer is at its best—when it visually telegraphs the desire for absolute oneness, while showing this can be nothing more than an illusion. Queer’s surreal, dreamy aesthetics open the film to an ambiguity uncontained even by its plot, embodying the gaps between who someone is and who we can only imagine or want them to be. Just as we witness in the brief clip of Orpheus, cinema enables impossible acts of contact and touch through editing and various optical maneuvers, the leakage of fantasy into the domain of the visible, and the playing out of Guadagnino’s favourite subject: desire.

But with his latest film this desire is not so much for the other, but for the elimination of their otherness, for a fusion of selves always beyond reach. As William Lee, Craig is a thinly-veiled (nay, naked) cipher for Burroughs himself, who in his introduction to Queer described the character as a vehicle for exorcizing a slew of his very real demons: heroin addiction, his killing of his wife Joan, shame about his sexuality. (William Lee is also the pseudonym under which Burroughs published his first novel, Junky, in 1953.) Queer is set in 1940s Mexico City, where Burroughs was living to avoid jail time in the U.S., and it serves as a zone for multiple kinds of escapism, including the hope of slipping away from himself and into the body, lungs, and mind of Eugene Allerton, the blushing young veteran with whom he locks eyes one night near an expat bar. 

Allerton, however, is not so open, often putting up walls that Lee cannot climb, eventually wriggling out of the older man’s grasp altogether. Allerton says that he does not want to sacrifice his independence—he fears losing himself, whereas Lee fears being himself. As Guadagnino told an interviewer, “It’s that they cannot find the possibility of contact lasting more than the moment in which it lasts. They are out of sync, and that’s the tragedy of their love story. And that’s their doom because they will always try to find the moment of synchronicity.”

Unlike in the novel, Allerton proves more responsive to Lee’s initial sexual advances; rather than pliantly going along with them, Starkey plays Allerton as a somewhat outwardly amorous and reciprocating lover. This shift in the story, however slight it might seem, had the effect of undermining what was for me one of the central readings of the novel—Allerton as a transitional object for Lee as he recovers from his heroin addiction, an object of brief obsession or substitute craving from which he can never get “enough,” rather than the recipient of genuine, sustained love. The film seems anxious at times to pin down some of the slipperiness of their relationship, with Lee explicitly asking Allerton post-coitus whether he “enjoy[s] it sometimes? The whole deal?” to which Allerton, smiling, replies “oh yes” twice. In the novel this sort of affirmation is never granted, and Lee never goes so far as to ask, as if speaking about their bond out loud might cause it to shatter. Perhaps this reframing of their relationship in a more sentimental register, as straightforward tragic-romance, makes the film more legible to a broader audience, though it comes at the expense of the ambiguity so essential to the novel. As Burroughs never completed Queer—it was published decades after he had abandoned the manuscript in the 1950s—Guadagnino even takes the liberty of imagining a future for Lee in which he still thinks of Allerton as an old and dying man.

To whatever degree Allerton reciprocates at least some of the attraction, Lee wants more—he wants “communication without speaking, on the level of intuition.” In other words, he wants Allerton to join him in taking yage, or ayahuasca, which he has read in a magazine article can help cultivate telepathic abilities. The final third of the film follows Lee and Allerton to Ecuador, where they track down a rogue American doctor squatting in the jungle; their eventual psychedelic trip is told through a choreographed modern dance and a furious river of Burroughsian imagery, extending what was on the page into a sequence that fully indulges the surreal. As they dance by the fire, flesh is no longer a boundary and the lines between the two men quite literally become blurred. “I’m not queer,” says Allerton, “I’m disembodied.”

To his credit then, Guadagnino does make room for ambiguity in the visual language of the film. He has referred to Queer as taking place in “a Mexico City that exists in the mind of the character,” shooting the film almost entirely on soundstages at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. The cityscape seen outside the window of Lee’s apartment is clearly artificial—too drenched in sunset, too quiet and neat. Establishing shots of the environment are likewise uninterested in concealing that they are made up of miniatures or models, rather than real buildings. The unreal leaks into the real; what should be substantial is no more than style, playthings to be arranged just so.

Some critics have complained that the film is stylish to the point of excess. Ira Silverberg, a close friend of Burroughs who also did PR for the writer and helped arrange his funeral, has written that the film is constructed “in the modality of fashion—having a ‘look’”, down to the costumes by J.W. Anderson, or even the charge that Starkey is simply too beautiful to play the saturnine Allerton. I found that the film’s lustre, however, contributed to the idea of it as fantasy, bending reality into the shape of a futile and unconsummated longing. 

This aesthetic tension between what is latent and manifest might subvert a reading of the film as a straightforward tragic romance. At first, Lee always sees Allerton through something else: they initially catch each other’s attention from opposite sides of a crowd betting on a cockfight, and later Allerton is shot through door frames or at the furthest end of a café or bar. Yet even when Lee gets Allerton to himself in Ecuador, their schism is redoubled: here, Allerton is so drenched in sun as to become insubstantial, the light coming right through the diaphanous fabric of his shirt as if he will evaporate at the touch. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom sharply contrasts shadows and light, drawing from mid-century photographs by the gay photographer George Platt Lynes. In the camera’s gaze, Starkey and co-star Omar Apollo (playing a local sex worker picked up by Lee) look like models from these images, and perhaps this is how Lee sees them: over-idealized, without flaw, cultivated and posed for his pleasure rather than marred by the inconvenience of being an independent, inaccessible consciousness. If you look too closely, it all collapses; try as they might, distance is the only workable vantage for Lee and Allerton, because it allows imagination to thrive.

But Lee’s desire for perfect harmony and control belies the fact that pleasure tends to bubble up where he least expects it to, as surprise or idiosyncrasy rather than something he can know in advance. Up close, Guadagnino pays homage to textures and their strangeness, letting the camera linger on Apollo’s mesh tank top and a tattoo on his ass, or the alluring centipede necklace at his throat. When Lee and Allerton first sleep together, Lee lavishes attention on the place where Allerton’s rib is permanently broken. A chink in his armour, perhaps—an opening to the heart that he and Lee will later imagine to vomit up during their yage trip.

These moments throw Lee off his axis, disturbing all of the ways in which he has tried to steel himself against the unknown, particularly against the feelings of guilt that the film itself is cagey about (Guadagnino visually references Burroughs’ real-life murder of his wife at least twice, but doesn’t give sufficient context for it to educate the uninitiated viewer; I’m still not sure what these allusions are meant to convey). If Lee’s sense of order is buttressed by the artificiality of Mexico City, the jungle in Ecuador is all too real and wild, deflating what authority Lee has tried to conjure up in front of Allerton. Dr. Codder, the reclusive yage expert, is likewise recast as a woman (Lesley Manville) who has mastered this unforgiving terrain where Lee cannot. Perhaps we can read the feminization of Codder, who raises snakes and is even more gun-toting than Lee, as a provocation of castration anxiety: while Burroughs and Guadagnino represent mid-century Mexico City as a place where American drug users and gay men could live outside of the law and be aloof about their financial and social privileges, the jungle is instead a zone of untamed sexuality—coded as feminine, Indigenous, and Other—that is less of a playground and more of a Pandora’s Box. 

It is no wonder then that this is the setting for Allerton’s escape act, where after a night of closeness with Lee, he unceremoniously disappears into the bush. This is also where my interpretation might split hairs with the filmmaker’s intentions: Guadagnino seems to be arguing that Lee’s desire to know Allerton (to the point of wanting to be him) stutters because of Allerton’s aversion to knowing himself—that is, to admitting he is not straight. And yet what I find most queer about the story is not just the fact of two men having sex, but perhaps the admission that unfulfillment is a part of how we relate. Where a trad view of sex is that it has to arise after a particular period of courtship, be sanctioned by the courts and clergy in marriage, produce children and eternal, monogamous, acquisitive love, maybe what is queer about Queer (itself long unfinished!) is its admission of longing, loss, and disconnection as parts of love and sexuality and not simply signs of its failure. Thinkers from the ‘antisocial’ school of queer theory, such as Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, might go a step further and argue that sex is not generative or redemptive: it is a rejoinder to the pleasures and possibilities of powerlessness, rather than a utopian horizon of harmonious, liberal belonging and self-completion. It upends the ego, rather than satisfying it. 

More than what Guadagnino has decided is Allerton’s closetedness, the greater problem might be Lee’s misguided, appropriative mode of attachment, where his desire is to drink up his lover, to secure him more than to be with him in all of his switchbacks and opacities. In bringing Queer from the page to the screen, cinema offers a vehicle for imagining the things that Lee or Allerton cannot say, but can only imagine or guess at. While Guadagnino suggests that these communicative gaps are what keep intimacy at bay, perhaps they are better understood as doors to knowing one another differently, for loosening the sense that to love is to capture. 

When Lee says he wants to “talk to [Allerton], without speaking,” perhaps we can take this as not just a plea for the telepathic unification of yage, but for a bond that would allow the unspoken or unknown not to be so saturated with anxiety. Perhaps one can live with the gaps between them, rather than assuming the necessity of total overlap; perhaps both characters’ obsessive, albeit different, modes of self-protection belie anxiety not about knowing, but about the unknown. Unlike Orpheus, they cannot reach through walls and mirrors to penetrate what is beyond them—this is just a trick of the screen, a beautiful dream.