On the occasion of Luca Guadagnino’s screen adaptation of William S Burroughs’ sexually charged novel, Ian Haydn Smith considers how the self-confessed ‘literary outlaw’ folded his personal experiences into the book.
No matter the genre, or whether they indulge in the tender or the visceral, Luca Guadagnino’s films revel in the tactility of physical encounters. Across a wide-ranging filmography, from the swooning romance of Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Challengers (2024) to the flesh-peeling shocks of Suspiria (2018) and Bones and All (2022), Guadagnino combines the sensual and corporeal to startling effect.
In Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of notorious Beat author William S Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical sophomore novel, penned by screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, every moment exists in the service of his characters’ – and by extension our – experience of the subterranean world. It unfolds in early 1950s Mexico City, where William Lee (Daniel Craig) has taken refuge, escaping a drugs charge north of the border in New Orleans. Life is cheap in this world, as is the entertainment, and, in a place where charm can carry as much currency as capital, sex.
No sooner have we been introduced to Lee and his ragtag bunch of dropouts, drunks, junkies and compadres (including an impressive Jason Schwartzman), his object of desire comes into view. Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) is one of the many young men who land in Mexico with money to spare, courtesy of their GI salary. The film then unfurls across two distinct parts. The first details the undulating trajectory of Lee and Allerton’s primarily physical relationship in Mexico City’s bars and unkempt lodgings, before taking off for a remote corner of the Amazon where Lee hopes to indulge in the plant yagé (the hallucinogen ayahuasca), whose qualities purportedly enhance cryptaesthesia, or ESP.
If the jungle environment feels alien, it’s not much stranger than the city streets Guadagnino conjured up on a soundstage at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. Like Jacques Audiard’s use of a studio space to create a specific vision of contemporary Mexico City for Emilia Pérez (2024), Guadagnino’s fabricated vision of the Mexican capital gives him free licence to create a place that burns yellow under the heat of the daytime sun, bleeds orange at dusk and transforms into an underworld of waifs and disconsolate strays at night.
Queer (2024)
This vision of Mexico City is markedly different from Burroughs’ account, mainly because of the sheen Guadagnino applies to every surface. Even the most dissolute ratholes exude a seductive allure. The real experience of these places was, for Burroughs, far less salubrious. Of one local haunt he noted, ‘A smell of spilt beer, overflowing toilets and sour garbage hung in the place like a thick fog… A television set which was out of order half the time and which emitted horrible, guttural squawks was the final touch of unpleasantness.’
Queer, whose title was suggested to Burroughs by fellow Beat writer Jack Kerouac, was written in the early Fifties. It emerged from the shadows of Burroughs’ first major work, Junky (1953), and is a counterpoint to that book. As he describes in his introduction, ‘In my first novel… the protagonist Lee comes across as integrated, self-contained, sure of himself and where he is going. In Queer, he is disintegrated, desperately in need of contact, completely unsure of himself and of his purpose.’ Lee is in withdrawal – albeit punctuated by the occasional lapse – and his craving manifests itself as an insatiable desire for physical rapture. For Burroughs’ publisher it was too much. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, ‘Publishing Junky was dangerous enough without teaming it with a book about homosexuality that might land them all in jail.’ As for the real Allerton, on reading the manuscript he told Burroughs, ‘Well, it’s not a bad yarn, but don’t get the idea that you’re anything in the way of a writer.’
Queer (2024)
The deeply personal nature of Queer, which like Junky was written in the style of reportage fiction – a far cry from the subsequent Cut-up and Fold-in experimental techniques he would develop for The Naked Lunch (1959) and his Nova trilogy (1961-64) – had unsettled Burroughs. He didn’t publish the book until 1985, which coincided with a period of increased interest in his writing and the release of his acclaimed Red Night trilogy (1981-87). By the time of David Cronenberg’s ambitious 1991 adaptation of The Naked Lunch, Burroughs had become something of a renaissance figure.
Surrounded by celebrities and acolytes, his world and personality was far removed from the insecure writer he had been some 30 years before, let alone the doubt-wracked, semi-autobiographical character he had created. In Queer, William Lee is a haunted figure. In real life, William Burroughs was reeling from the death of his wife, Joan Vollmer, by his own hand – the victim of an alleged game of ‘William Tell’. (This horrible act, alongside certain opinions that are unlikely to sit well with contemporary audiences, go some way to accounting for the writer’s diminished presence across the cultural landscape in recent years.) It’s an incident that is never directly mentioned in the novel, but remains present like a spectre that looms over this world. It’s alluded to in the film, albeit indirectly, but informs a certain gravity that Daniel Craig’s performance evinces as Queer progresses.
Queer (2024)
Craig was a bold choice to play Lee, although it’s not entirely new ground for the actor. Before donning the suits that showcased his ripped physique in the Bond series, he excelled as the object of Francis Bacon’s lust in Love is the Devil (1998) and Paul Newman’s emotionally troubled son in Road to Perdition (2002). In Queer, Craig not only embodies every element of Lee’s physical, emotional and spiritual being. He also successfully melds his portrayal of him with more than a nod to Burroughs’ own physicality. The linen-mix suit resembles the one the writer famously wore, along with the fedora, large-rimmed glasses and the revolver he obsessively kept close to hand.
Queer (2024)
The actor also imbues Lee with an otherworldly quality (one not so distant from the nickname ‘el hombre invisible’, which was used to describe Burroughs during his lengthy stay in Tangiers in the 1930s). Lee could be an alien attempting to be a human, so uneasily does he fit into his own skin. His hair, at best lank and greasy, clings for dear life to a skull that has seen too much drink and drugs, and too little food. The chiselled physique of 007 has been supplanted by a body that edges towards the cadaverous; what was once fit is now ill-fitting. And there’s an awkwardness in his actions. None more so than in his initial attempt to ingratiate himself with the lithe, smooth-skinned Allerton. In his novel, Burroughs renders the scene thus:
Lee tried to achieve a greeting at once friendly and casual, designed to show interest without pushing their short acquaintance. The result was ghastly… As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child’s smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless.
Craig nails this early act brilliantly, creating a character simultaneously pathetic and utterly compelling – a car crash to our disgusted but rapt rubberneckers.
Queer (2024)
Guadagnino’s command of the Mexico City chapter, followed by the wild phantasmagoria of Lee’s journey into the jungle (which features a standout performance by an unrecognisable Lesley Manville), sees him meld the abject with the sensual. Late in the film, following the consumption of yagé, or a substance like it, Lee enters into a psychedelic coupling that moves beyond the conventions of any physical act, with skin no boundary to the merging of bodies. It’s the (il)logical outcome of an intense attraction that begins with Lee’s first sight of Allerton.
In Burroughs’ book, the two are already familiar. Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who also wrote Challengers) are right to recognise the missed opportunity of not showing their first encounter. It takes place on a bustling street and highlights the filmmaker’s mastery of image and sound, with arguably the year’s most show-stopping needle drop. The track is an anachronism in this era, but the emotion isn’t. In that moment, radiant and sensual, desiring and vulnerable, Guadagnino transforms Queer from a personal missive by a troubled and troubling writer into a work that is very much his own.
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