QUEER Is About Desires That Are Too Real and Not Real Enough

Wanting gets in your head.

“I’m not queer. I’m disembodied.”

That’s an enigmatic assertion repeated in two different dream sequences in Luca Guadagninos’ adaptation of William Burroughs’ novel Queer. The contrast between queerness and embodiment seems in part to be aspirational; desire is painful and humiliating, and it would be better, perhaps, to escape the body altogether than to deal with its ugly demands. At the same time, though, disembodiment seems aspirational in the sense that it attains a queerness beyond queerness—a fusing of selves, which, in its pain and humiliation, is love, dream, and art.

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The film is set in 1950s Mexico, where American expat, addict and Burroughs analog William Lee (Daniel Craig) has settled to avoid the homophobia and narcotics laws of the US. In the course of his compulsive cruising, he falls in love/lust with a young American GI named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Allerton appears to be ambivalent about sex with men in general and with Lee in particular, but the two do sleep together, leading Lee to become even more obsessed. He invites Allerton to travel with him to Ecuador in search of a drug, yagé, which is supposed to confer telepathic powers

Lee finds the drug, but the trip, and the trip, like the film, do not have a lot in the way of narrative closure. Instead, the movie circles helplessly around Lee’s obsessive desires and needs, for Allerton and for narcotics. Debasement and satiation alternate and merge as Guadagninos’ camera frames each rebuff, each drunken misstep, and each sordid encounter with a still, cold, formal beauty that makes the abjection feel hyper-real—and then, in numerous hallucinatory sequences, leaves reality behind altogether.

The reason for Lee’s interest in telepathy is never explicitly stated, but he seems to hope it will overcome his sense of loneliness and isolation. And taking yagé does give him and Allerton a shared vision of melding; they vomit out their own hearts and then merge into a single rippling erotic skin. They are in love; they are together.

But then Allerton returns to his default setting and runs away from the bond, leaving Lee to wander out of cohesive narrative altogether. The last image in the film is an extended shot of an aged Lee on a bed, perhaps dying, perhaps imagining Allerton holding him.

The hallucination that Allerton is and is not there is not exactly a hallucination. We’re watching a movie, after all, in which the people on screen are simultaneously present and absent—or, to put it another way, they are queerly disembodied. Their desires implicate us; you sympathize with and hope for Lee’s happiness and fulfillment via the magical telepathy of film. But their desires are also nonexistent and noncorporal; they are images of desire, rather than desire itself.

Desire itself is also an image, though. Lee wants an Allerton who isn’t there, as Allerton, along with his desires, seem to vanish, like the image of Allerton himself fading out in the hallucinatory sequence at the end.

Laura Mulvey argues in her famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that male viewers identify with male protagonists; the images become onscreen surrogates for fantasies of mastery and desire. This experience is supposed to model heterosexual empowerment. But in Queer, male/male aspiration and desire is elusive and transitory; the bodies on screen are not there, and cannot provide fulfillment.

To some degree, Queer frames queer identity as a tragedy, picking up on homophobic tropes about gay degradation and loneliness. But in putting viewers in/not in the head and bodies of queer men, it makes queer men into a representation of a gap that cannot be bridged for anyone, by drugs, or sex, or movies. Desire and fulfillment, bodies and disembodiment, are queer things, out of which Queer makes a strange, sad film about hopelessness and hope, writhing together under a single skin.