Adapting the Unadaptable: Luca Guadagnino’s Take on William S. Burroughs’ “Queer”
Many have long believed that certain works of art are “unadaptable,” meaning the qualities that made them unique would not translate well (or at all) in another medium. But now that we live in a world where art, especially cinema, is constantly mining other existing properties to adapt, it seems like such a hurdle isn’t as daunting anymore. The works of Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs used to be considered unadaptable in this way. Anyone who’s cracked open a Burroughs novel can see why — his prose is a nearly impenetrable stream of consciousness, pitched somewhere between poetry and encryption, and even if he was more of a forthright writer, his books tackle some fairly taboo topics.
Filmmaker David Cronenberg was the first to crack the Burroughs code with his audacious big-screen adaptation of Naked Lunch in 1991, a movie that found a back door into Burroughs’ alternative reality of “Interzone” through some of his real-life encounters. Now, 33 years after Naked Lunch, director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes have mustered up the chutzpah for a new Burroughs adaptation, bringing his 1985 unfinished (put published) novella Queer to the screen.
Luca Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes, who together brought Challengers to screens earlier this year, are helped in large part by both Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and Burroughs’ life. Unlike the sprawling Naked Lunch, Queer the novel is a semi-autobiographical story of a man having a somewhat unrequited love affair in 1950s Mexico City. This relatively simpler premise allows Guadagnino and Kuritzkes to give their movie adaptation a much more manageable structure and identity. However, this is no mere translation of the book; Guadagnino’s film is a heady, sometimes hilarious, frequently horny, yet ultimately haunting amalgam of the novel and Burroughs’ own life, telling an aching tale of star-crossed lovers doomed to never quite fully connect.
Daniel Craig & Drew Starkey in ‘Queer’
Courtesy of A24
Exploring the Unconventional: A Dive into “Queer”
Split into three chapters and an epilogue, Queer follows William Lee (played by the great Daniel Craig), an American expatriate living in Mexico City sometime in the 1950s. Through some set dressing and dialogue, it’s assumed that Lee was once an author. He might still be, were it not for clearly preferring his dalliances in Mexico as part of a homosexual subculture, filling his days with bloviating about life with friends like Joe (Jason Schwartzman) and his nights with random hook-ups. When Lee spots Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey of Outer Banks fame), a discharged American Navy serviceman, on one fateful night, he becomes infatuated, following the man from place to place in hopes of sussing out his sexuality.
Eventually, the two men come together, though not in a fashion that’s as permanent or committed as Lee would hope. Thus, the lovesick older man concocts an impromptu trip to South America with Eugene, which involves their quest for a plant used in ayahuasca that, according to some dubious research by Lee, could give a person telepathy when ingested. Given the story’s central age gap romance between an older gentleman and a younger man, much will be made about its relationship to Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, and indeed, Queer contains a good portion of that film’s swooning, idyllic bittersweetness.
In fact, much of Queer involves Lee constantly attempting to peer into Eugene’s soul, trying to figure out if there’s genuine affection beneath his ambiguous demeanor or if their dalliance is merely a lustful experiment for him. Call Me by Your Name’s sexuality is quite frank, but Queer pushes things even further, including a particular visual element during one sex scene that anyone who is or has been with a man will identify with. In a way, the movie slightly feels like a rejoinder to critics of Guadagnino and Kuritzkes’ Challengers, which was taken to task for being not as sexually explicit as some hoped.
