Revised and Visualized: How Luca Guadagnino Transformed “Queer”

Watching director Luca Guadagnino’s recent film adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel Queer raised some difficult questions for me about what you might call the ethics of adaptation. Particularly, how necessary is it, when adapting an artistic work into a different medium, for the adaptor to maintain a consistency with the original’s tone, style, subject matter or purpose? Is the original an unmalleable object that cannot and should not be forced into a different shape, or is it merely fodder for the adaptor’s creative freedom? Surely, the answers, if there are any definite answers, will change depending on the work that’s being adapted. Few would care if some forgotten 1980s beach read was transformed by an artful director into a profound statement about gender roles; on the other hand, if The Sound and the Fury was adapted into a family-friendly sitcom, knowledgeable people would likely feel the adaptors were doing something wrong. But what does “wrong” mean when the subject is making art (even bad or commercialized art)? If the status of the original is an important factor in figuring this out, an individual audience member’s familiarity with the original is certainly another. In fact, let me propose a formula: the more an adaptation deviates from its source material, the less an audience member with an affinity for that source material will be able to judge the adaption on its own terms. I’ll call this I’m-sure-very-original formula “Guadagnino’s Law,” because watching his Queer so soon after reading Burroughs’ novel, I was distracted by two constant impressions: first, that Guadagnino was twisting the source material in ways that felt as wrong as a sitcom based on The Sound and the Fury, and second, that I couldn’t say what I would feel about the film – undeniably effective in many ways – were I totally unfamiliar with the novel or Burroughs. 

To be clear, I’m not anything close to a Burroughs expert, and “affinity” is not the word I would choose to describe my feelings about a man who, along with being an important writer of the beat generation, was a killer and a pedophile. I’ve read Naked Lunch and Queer, seen the Cronenberg Naked Lunch a few times, and have a general sense of Burroughs’ biography and his influence as a writer. That’s the extent of my Burroughs knowledge, but it’s enough to find Guadagnino’s liberties pretty extreme. Until the film’s concluding scenes, these liberties are mostly thematic and tonal; the movie actually hews closer than most adaptations to the plot and dialogue of the book. In both versions, the narrative finds Lee, a fictionalized version of Burroughs (acted by Daniel Craig in the film), coasting around Mexico City in the early 1950s, drinking too much with other American expatriates, desperately and often unsuccessfully trying to hook up with just about every man he comes across. The novel was written in the 1950s but published in the 1980s; the narration is third person but in an introduction for the 1980s publication Burroughs is transparent that the novel is essentially autobiography. The introduction provides a lot of other invaluable context to the novel, including that it was written during a period of time when Burroughs was off heroin and dealing with a reenergized libido, and that the despairing tone of the writing is largely due to his having just (accidentally, he claims) shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer. The major dramatic tension in both novel and film draws from Lee’s romantic pursuit of the sometimes amenable but always remote Gene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Guadagnino and his writer Justin Kuritzkes’ take on this relationship is a lot different than Burroughs’, but indicative of the movie’s overall shift in tone from the book. 

I think a lot of the difference between the novel and the movie can be boiled down to the evolution of the word “queer.” Today, “queer” is used lovingly to describe anyone within the LGBTQ+ umbrella; the word has been scrubbed so clean of taboo that even entirely straight people don’t get in trouble for using it. In the 1950s, however, “queer” was still one of the go-to slurs popularly used in attempt to degrade homosexuals. Burroughs using the word to describe himself and his peers was an act of “owning” the word as a defense against hatred, yes, but in Burroughs’ voice it also comes with an undertone of self-hatred and internalized homophobia. See this quotation from the novel Queer, spoken by the protagonist Lee:

“I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands – the lymph glands that is, of course – when that baneful word seared my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? […] I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation.” 

The self-disgust described so palpably here would have been evoked to 1950s readers simply by Burroughs’ use of the word “queer,” but not so for younger audiences in 2024 for whom the word evokes friendship, community and pride. If the 1950s meaning of “queer” defines the tone of the novel, the 2024 meaning defines that of the film. When Guadagnino’s Lee and his friends chummily throw the word around, there is hardly any sense of the era’s pervading culture of homophobia, or its impact on a group of outcasts who would describe themselves with a slur. Rather than taking their tonal cues from the above quotation, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes seemed intent to take them from something Lee says later in the same monologue:

“It was a wise old queen – Bobo, we called her – who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. […] No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.” 

In fact, neither quotation can be taken at face value; both are part of an extended, rambling performance undertaken by Lee as a desperate attempt to hold Allerton’s attention. In his introduction, Burroughs referred to these performances as Lee’s “routines” and had this to say about them:

“While the addict is indifferent to the impression he creates in others, during withdrawal he may feel the compulsive need for an audience, and this is clearly what Lee seeks in Allerton: an audience, the acknowledgement of his performance, which of course is a mask, to cover a shocking disintegration. So he invents a frantic attention-getting format which he calls the Routine: shocking, funny, riveting.”

Therefore, if Lee’s expression of self-disgust in my first quotation is not entirely sincere, neither is the more hopeful quote; the function of the scene as written is to show Lee’s compulsive need to use Allerton as a psychological defense against the destructive effects of his addiction. The scene makes it almost verbatim into the movie, but crucially reinterpreted. The disgust is put forward by Craig utterly ironically but the paean to love is sincere. While Burroughs’ writing makes it clear that Lee’s need for Allerton has more to do with his broken state of mind than a genuine love connection, Guadagnino treats Queer as a love story. This is how Guadagnino and Kuritzkes retain so much of the detail of the novel while casting the whole story in a totally different light.

The literary Burroughs doesn’t exactly fit snugly into the role of romantic hero. For anyone with what he called a “middle class morality” – if you object to paying pubescent Mexican boys for sex, this is you – spending a lot of time with the man on the page is not easy. What makes the experience both tolerable and valuable is Burroughs’ honesty about his degradation. This is the purpose of the book, really: to impart the humanity underlying one of the seamier corners of existence. To that end, the reader never gets the impression that Burroughs is deluded about who he is, and he never asks for the reader’s sympathy. None of this can be said about the character played by Daniel Craig in Queer. Craig’s Lee is not an unhinged, mentally-ill, pedophilic, wife-killing drug addict* on the path toward “shocking disintegration;” he is a mostly likable guy whose worst sin is often that he needs love so bad that he can be a little desperate. Starkey’s Allerton is willing to give sex, but not love, and Guadagnino strongly suggests that if Allerton were to just open up a little and give Lee the love he needs, Lee would be fine. A stark difference from the book, but fitting with Guadagnino’s conception of Queer as a story about mid-twentieth century homosexuals struggling to find the courage to love each other.

Guadagnino’s romantic take on Lee is emphasized by the casting of Craig, who, in case you forgot, happens to be famous for playing a character named James Bond. That shouldn’t be held against Craig, whose performance is excellent and moving, but this is not a film ala Monster where a gorgeous movie star disappears into a wholly unattractive character. Guadagnino directs Craig as a movie star: his speeches are charismatic and funny, his lows are full of pathos, and when he strips down for the sex scenes he still has James Bond’s physique. Lee generates a lot of sympathy that he might not were he played by, say, Caleb Landry Jones, an actor more age-and-visually-appropriate for a 1950s Burroughs. I haven’t seen Kill Your Darlings, where Ben Foster plays Burroughs, but I would bet serious money that Guadagnino’s Queer is the first time in history Burroughs has been depicted as sexy. 

Yet I return to the question that started this piece, that is, to put it economically: So what? Why should Guadagnino be obligated to treat this film as an accurate representation of William S. Burroughs? After all, the novel is a fictionalized version of Burroughs’ years in Mexico. Can’t we see Queer out of the context of Burroughs’ life story? In theory all of this is permissible, but then Guadagnino encourages the audience not to see Lee and Burroughs as separate entities. For one thing, Craig’s suits and hats and the flattened delivery of his lines recall both the real man and Peter Weller’s performance as Lee in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. More significantly, at the film’s conclusion Guadagnino and Kuritzkes move the narrative completely beyond the novel to address the killing of Vollmer. 

It’s in the climactic scenes that the movie stops being an almost word-for-word (if not tonal) depiction of the novel and transforms into something wholly invented by Guadagnino and Kuritzkes. The last third or so of the book finds Lee and Allerton on a journey through South America in failed search for ayahuasca (or “yage”), which Lee has heard can give the user telepathic abilities. They reach a dead end in Puyo, Ecuador, staying in a ramshackle hut belonging to an American doctor studying the local natives’ arrow poison. The doctor, Cotter, won’t help them find ayahuasca. More painful for Lee, the journey has not brought him any closer to Allerton. The novel abruptly ends. As Burroughs’ puts it in his introduction:

“The manuscript trails off in Puyo, End of the Road town… The search for Yage has failed. […] Lee has reached the end of his line, an end implicit in the beginning. He is left with the impact of unbridgeable distances, the defeat and weariness of a long, painful journey made for nothing”

Obviously, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes were faced with a difficult challenge: how to end a story that has no ending. The inconclusive downer of the novel did not really suit their more romantic take on the story, and even if it did, that type of ending is hard to pull off cinematically. They had multiple choices for how to end their film, and the answer they picked was apparently “all of the above.” Kuritzkes was not able to resist the temptation to choose an alternate ending where the characters do find ayahuasca, do experience an extended psychedelic trip and do achieve some form of telepathy. It’s easy to understand why he took it in that direction, the “drug trip scene” being a tried and true cinematic excuse for visualizing a story’s subtext. In both novel and film, so much of Lee and Allerton’s relationship is unspoken that there’s some logic to bringing it all to the surface as a series of visual metaphors, to show what the characters don’t say.

In many ways, the drug trip scene is an effective piece of filmmaking. After Dr. Cotter – played by Lesley Manville in a gender swap that feels inevitable given the book’s lack of female characters – acts out a probably-very-inaccurate-and-possibly-offensive native ritual, Lee and Allerton find themselves vomiting up their hearts as painfully as it would be for them to expel their emotions verbally. Next, a dance performance in which CGI is used to literally join Craig and Starkey’s bodies, where for a fleeting moment Lee and Allerton gain the intimacy Lee so desperately craves. Finally, telepathy is achieved: Lee and Allerton read each other’s thoughts by a campfire. “I’m not queer,” Allerton thinks. Ah, the key to understanding Allerton’s coldness is implied (or told): he cannot fully accept his orientation, therefore he cannot accept the love of another man. Through these moments, Kuritzkes manages to give Allerton a psychological basis that he doesn’t have in the book, where he remains a mystery to the end. As a demonstration of Kuritzkes’ resourcefulness as a writer, the sequence is impressive. Nevertheless, I felt I simply could not judge this section fairly, given its answers and emotional closure were not just a deviation from but rather directly opposite to Burroughs’ text.

At this point, the movie is far from over. The South American trip ends with some of the abruptness of the novel, and the movie enters darker territory with an epilogue set two years later in Mexico City. The novel also ends with an epilogue in the same setting, but the movie’s epilogue has less in common with the novel’s than it does with the cinematic oeuvre of David Lynch. Lee spends most of this sequence wandering around creepily empty, dreamlike spaces and having inscrutable encounters with scenes from his past. He finds Allerton sitting on a bed; Allerton places a beer glass on his head as a target, Lee takes aim with a pistol but misses, shooting Allerton in the head – exactly the way the real Burroughs killed his wife, Joan Vollmer. Vollmer is otherwise not referenced in Guadagnino's Queer, but Guadagnino clearly wants the viewer to think about her. But since this Queer is so different from Burroughs’, what exactly is this scene doing here? I can’t say, but there are some options. A charitable answer is that Guadagnino and Kuritzkes wanted to recast everything until the epilogue in a different light by telling us that this Lee, like Burroughs, did kill his wife, and this is the true reason for Lee’s issues and his inability to successfully connect with Allerton. That’s possible, but so is the uncharitable answer that Guadagnino and Kuritzkes were afraid they’d get in some trouble if they didn’t pay some reference, even oblique, to the fact that their romantic hero is based on a murderer (or at the very least, since we’re being charitable, a man guilty of taking someone’s life through gross recklessness). Both reasons, and others I’m sure, could have motivated the reference to Vollmer, but it’s interesting that the killing made it into the film but Burroughs’ pedophilia did not. Pedophilia is clearly too much of a buzz kill for a moving story of unrequited queer love, but wife killing? Well, that’s easier to swallow.

Guadagnino wanted to have his cake and eat it too: adapt Queer into a cinematic love story that would go over well with modern audiences, but also capture something of the real Burroughs and his life. In practice, that’s a bit like making a romantic comedy about Jerry Lee Lewis. Or a sitcom based on The Sound and the Fury. I have to think Guadagnino and Kuritzkes, who are both obviously very brilliant and must have spent years engaged with this material, would have been conscious of the contradictory nature of their pursuit, and made some intentional choices to dilute and obscure the sides of Burroughs that would hinder a romance with popular appeal. Cleaning up Burroughs to make him palatable in 2024, but then stamping his name all over the film, if it’s not ethically wrong in some Platonic sense, is at least not honest. And since honesty was one of Burroughs’ greatest values as a writer, the cinematic Queer feels doubly unfaithful.

By now I’m sure I’ve aptly demonstrated my original point, that I cannot judge this movie fairly because I’m too familiar with the source material. This doesn’t mean I am telling you not to see it. It is a strange, memorable experience. Almost every scene and line of dialogue from Burroughs’ very slight novel is painstakingly recreated as if the book had swarms of expectant fans like a Harry Potter or Hunger Games. A scene where a doctor refuses to prescribe Lee opiates lasts longer onscreen than it would take to actually read on the page, for instance. Guadagnino’s visual and aural style have their own idiosyncrasies that keep the movie from ever being boring. Shot in Rome, Guadagnino uses transparently fake-looking CGI backgrounds to create a nostalgic Mexico City. The soundtrack is full of anachronistic songs with counter-intuitive effects; an extended shot where Lee miserably shoots up to New Order’s Leave Me Alone is particularly moving. Craig’s performance is flawless and boldly vulnerable. It’s an entertaining movie, I’m just not sure it has a lot to do with William S. Burroughs.

*- To be fair, Lee/Burroughs’ heroin use is depicted in the film, but is not put forward as a major part of the story or character, at least in my estimation.