Queer Is the Year's Most Divisive Movie. That's How You Know It Works

You’ve gotta hand it to Luca Guadagnino. The director picked up an impressive amount of critical and commercial love for the gay indie romance Call Me by Your Name in 2017, and has worked tirelessly to both recoup and challenge that adoration ever since. He confused everyone by remaking the horror classic Suspiria as a brainy, disjointed tale about the Holocaust with Fassbinderian touches in 2018, then seemed to curry pop favor by reteaming with Timothée Chalamet for Bones and All in 2022, but that movie put everyone off. Then, earlier this year, his bi-curious tennis drama Challengers struck the zeitgeist and became his biggest box-office hit.

Now comes the other swing of the pop pendulum with Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella about an American heroin addict cruising 1950s Mexico City. Between the dejected aimlessness of its first half and the note of body-horror phantasmagoria on which it ends, it’s guaranteed to sift out the fake Guad-heads from the real once again. I greatly enjoyed it, even as it initially upended my expectations of the director’s typical softness, the Guadagnino touch—relaxed opulence via gorgeously appointed interiors, shabby-chic exteriors, menswear that looks the way menswear is always supposed to look but rarely does.

On the surface, Queer has all of those things, but its thematic darkness and hallucinatory narrative descent make it far from the most Guadagninoesque Guadagnino, as I expected it to be. Still, it does the most to stretch his aesthetic over a purposely sleazy narrative and foregrounds the obsession with surfaces found throughout his oeuvre. I was unsurprised to see gay acquaintances divided in their opinions: the edgier ones felt it gentrified Burroughs’ nastiness and hid it behind custom JW Anderson; the, uh, aesthetes loved its pacing and responded viscerally to two surreal scenes near the end, a narcotics-fueled dream ballet between Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey and a psychedelic gun-toting nightmare, both of which visualize the idea that each man kills the thing he loves. Others had no idea what to do with its disjointedness and detested it outright. The least surprising thing, and god bless all involved, was the snobbery brought out by the whole ordeal—everyone staking their claim on how it did or didn’t portray queerness, desire, and Burroughs. (The title sort of begs for it.) Everyone’s right, of course, but the middle ground that emerged for me is what I think will ensure its place in the pantheon of gay cinema.

The editor Ira Silverberg, who actually knew Burroughs, wrote on Instagram that the film is “made for bougie fags who want to go slumming”; the notion of gentrification is interesting in this context, and not only because Burroughs, who was born into a wealthy St. Louis family and received monthly allowances long after college, was doing a variation of that during his time in Mexico City – even if “slumming” for him was a lifelong project; “to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses,” as demon twink Arthur Rimbaud once wrote. Guadagnino loves the finer things, yes. He might even be called a dandy. But the dandy has been as essential a part of the hustler in terms of representing and advancing gay culture, and Queer applies the former’s aesthetic to the latter’s story. A backstreet marriage as old as time, it works. And Guadagnino, a third-culture kid, born in Italy, who grew up in Ethiopia, has a keen eye for displacement. (I found it poignant that, really aside from an early appearance by Omar Apollo, most Mexican characters have their dialogue distorted into a muted variation of Charlie Brown’s teacher—Craig’s character, Lee, is hyperfocused on his own lusty hunt.)

The writer and musician Brontez Purnell, whose sexed-up musings perhaps make him the Genet of our era, had similar issues. But, while he told me that while the muscley Daniel Craig is hard to believe as a junkie, he was ultimately seduced by the film. “It was stunning,” he said, “but, with this team, what else would it be? I just wish this had been made by Americans because Americans know how to make something ugly and beautiful. These people only know how to make things beautifully beautiful, and it’s not that type of story.”

In an eye-opening piece for Vulture, Silverberg writes that Guadagnino told him he views the core of Queer as being about connection, about love. I don’t really see it that way but, as always, there’s the tension between what the filmmaker wants, or thinks he’s doing, and what is ultimately achieved. Guadagnino, whose swoony gaze coyly, and somewhat infamously, shied away from on-screen sex in his adaptation of André Aciman’s “Call Me By Your Name” (a novel which culminates with a man lovingly helping his companion take a shit), can talk about love all he wants and the film could still read as something else. The director told Little White Lies that, in Queer, “it felt like [Burroughs] was making love to the desire for a confession that he had inside himself,” which seems to get closer to the heart of the matter, and what ultimately comes across onscreen.

But no: Guadagnino’s Lee is not particularly abject. A scene of him shooting up is (compellingly, I thought) portrayed more as a paralleling of the whole to-do of cooking and strapping up with the fastidiousness of a foppish American than as a grimy, warts-and-all portrayal of rock bottom. There’s no Trainspotting-style take on the junkie lifestyle to contextualize Lee’s behavior, which might make it appear as if this man is maneuvering through his addictions exceptionally and without resistance. In many ways, he is. But Guadagnino’s Lee is similar to Guadagnino’s Elio (from Call Me by Your Name). The novel’s Elio is a teen whose own obsession is as much an all-consuming fetish object for him as the man with whom he’s obsessed; the film’s is more single-minded (a flattening, for lack of a better word) which works in cinema. Likewise, the onscreen Lee is more preoccupied on winning a visual tug-o-war with the young man in front of him than in following his own dark mental path. All that is upended when the two do ayahuasca in the jungle—a kaleidoscopic visual feast of a sequence, in which the two men briefly become one before coming completely undone—and Lee is shown devastatingly alone.

In speaking of the marriage between filthy and foppish, we evoke John Waters, the long heralded “Pope of Trash” who, incidentally, ranked Queer as his second favorite film of the year, writing in Vulture that, “if today’s homos were this radical, I’d be a much happier queer myself.” He, too, though, took issue with Craig’s look.

The whole thing reminds me of the saga which Querelle, Rainer W. Fassbinder’s take on the Jean Genet novel “Querelle of Brest,” has undergone through the years. Genet having prefigured Burroughs’ own sense of filthy, memoirish street tales by a few years, that 1982 film was an utter, and utterly fascinating, disaster: a highly stylized personal statement bloated with pretentious Classical quotes about desire and shot on an obvious studio set which can only be described as a Tom of Finland play area at Disney World. Queer borrows that controlled artifice; its characters inhabit a hypersexualized world of constant cruising where everyone is either a target, an aid to acquiring that target, or an obstacle. Guadagnino’s film doesn’t have a burly barkeep viscously inserting himself into its hero over a pool table, but it does have Craig’s protagonist greedily inhaling Omar Apollo’s cock, visible immediately prior, in an early scene. Both attempt the impossible in trying to elevate what they view as diamonds in the rough, Guadagnino inserting biographical elements from Burroughs’ life in its surreal finale as a way to round out his vision, picking up on the artistic license granted by the fact its source was unfinished, where Fassbinder deployed outside meditations and original music based on an Oscar Wilde poem to pad the pulpiness of Genet’s book.

Reading Vincent Canby’s original review of the Fassbinder in The New York Times, the parallels to critiques of Queer are uncanny. Like Purnell, Silverberg, and Waters with Queer, he takes issue with the lead’s looks, calling out Brad Davis’ “clean-cut American college boy” look as incongruous to the hero imagined by Genet, who, like Burroughs, found “salvation in the utter degradation by which he denies the real world to create a world of his own.” Canby, too, notes what he views as Fassbinder’s shortcomings in being equipped to portray Genet’s abjection. “For all of his loudly proclaimed anarchist views,” he writes, "[Fassbinder] was always a true product of the bourgeoisie, a dutiful son to a fond mother,” (The German director did, after all, commission Andy Warhol to create its now-iconic, tangentially related poster art, and his greatest ambition was always to recreate the Technicolor Hollywood melodramas of the ‘50s). And yet Fassbinder’s film is today upheld as a landmark of horny gay cinema, and has inspired several fashion collections. Controversy about its aesthetic values, or how to portray them, continue: there was a micro, but heated, online debate over the slick artwork which Astra Zero designed for its Criterion Collection cover. Yet its hyperreal 3D-ness, evoking ads for sites like IMVU you’d see flashing next to online porn, is a more honest homage to the quick-and-easy pulp horniness of its original release than the Warhol. But then Warhol’s line-based print directly evokes Jean Cocteau’s illustrations in Genet’s book, so the circle jerk continues.

There’s a triangulation between Guadagnino, Burroughs, and Fassbinder that takes place in the viewer’s mind while watching Queer. Not for nothing does Guadagnino feature a scene where his characters go to a cinema to watch Cocteau’s Orpheus, itself a queer updating of that ancient tale of blind obsession. He’s a director in thrall to beauty who, in this latest picture, confronts that compulsion head-on by casting a former 007 as a character who, by the end of the film, would lose what little he had to begin with. But I don’t write this to congratulate Craig for “going there,” or whatever (for one thing, he’d “gone there” long before Bond, playing the painter Francis Bacon’s destructive rough trade in 1998’s Love is the Devil), or Guadagnino for dealing with nastier material. Though I disagree with their film being centered on love and connection, I’m glad Guadagnino grasped onto that as he set out to tackle Burroughs’ novel. The writer employed that down-and-out grunginess, in life and in art, to convey his mentality, and Queer, the film, is better for not clutching onto aesthetics in order to present a perfect adaptation. In its weird, reflective and ouroboric way, one gay man’s attempt at catching up to another becomes brilliant in its very flaws. It’s not a bad trade.