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‘Queer’ and beyond: The screen life of William S. Burroughs
Summary
Luca Guadagnino’s film is the latest to feature an avatar of the Beat icon and iconoclast author
Luca Guadagnino understands the poetry of human bodies in motion, the raw frisson offered by both conflict and convergence. His tennis drama Challengers (2024) was a great advertisement for this quality, as is his latest, Queer (now streaming on Mubi). The film is based on the eponymous 1985 novella by the American writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997). Almost as a counterpoint to the absorbing physicality of his films, there’s a poignant moment when Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) tells his older lover, American expatriate William Lee (Daniel Craig) that he’s not queer, he’s “disembodied". This is especially moving considering everything going on in the story with Lee and by extension, Burroughs (“William Lee" was a frequent authorial stand-in). His physical dependence on heroin and morphine is so bad it’s making him shit blood. He’s desperately searching for yage, a psychedelic substance that he believes will help him ‘transcend’ the body and open hitherto untapped reservoirs of spiritual potential.
Craig’s mesmerizing performance as Lee/Burroughs reminds us of just how much we lost in the 15 years he was tethered to the flailing James Bond franchise. Is there even one moment in any of his Bond movies that rivals the eroticism of Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ playing while Lee/Burroughs does the classic movie-star walk? He’s now the fifth actor to portray Burroughs, the others being Peter Weller in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), Kiefer Sutherland in Garry Malkow’s Beat (2000), Viggo Mortensen in Walter Salles’ On the Road (2012) and Ben Foster in John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings (2013). Weller and Sutherland had lead roles in their films while Mortensen and Foster’s can be called extended cameos.
Alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs was one of the principal figures associated with the Beat movement of the 1950s and 60s. His ‘anti-novel’ Naked Lunch (1959) is considered one of the pioneering postmodern texts, the story of opioid addict William Lee who travels to the surreal ‘Interzone’ and stumbles into working for the shadowy ‘Islam Inc.’ (inspired by the author’s experiences living in the Tangier International Zone, where he witnessed the Moroccan Nationalist Movement up close). The novel featured examples of Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ technique, wherein a pre-prepared text is chopped up and rearranged to create a new entity, centering the element of chance in the literary process.
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His early works, like the autobiographical novel Junkie (1953) and the nonfiction book The Yage Letters (1963), are some of the most forthright, unsentimental depictions of addiction. In the 70s and 80s, Burroughs wrote ‘The Red Night Trilogy’, culminating in The Western Lands (1987) which united several lifelong obsessions — drugs, hallucinations, Eastern spiritual traditions, the afterlife and, of course, writer’s block. In the 80s and 90s, Burroughs also made the shift from counterculture icon to the mainstream-end-of-the-alternative, reading from Naked Lunch on Saturday Night Live in 1981, doing a Nike ad in 1994 and lending his voice to the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired video game The Dark Eye in 1995.
Out of the onscreen depictions of Burroughs/Lee, Kill Your Darlings and On the Road were mostly concerned with his engagement with the Beat writers — the leads in these films were Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) and Jack Kerouac (Sam Riley), respectively. On the Road sees Viggo Mortensen imbuing the role of Burroughs with mystique. “Old Bull Lee" (as he is called in the film and the book) was a drug-shaman, a distinctly American oracle, and to the other Beatniks, the platonic ideal of the writer-as-nomad. Ben Foster was diligent but much less effective in Kill Your Darlings, although the film itself soared thanks to an electric performance by Michael C. Hall (Dexter) as David Kammerer, a man who used the liberatory sexual ethos of the Beat Generation as cover for grooming a vulnerable teenager.
The pick of the lot, and the film most in sync with Burroughs’ literary style as well as his life, is David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991). Instead of a straight adaptation of the novel, Cronenberg intercut (‘cut up’, even) scenes from the book with scenes from Burroughs’ real life, all given the signature Cronenbergian waking-nightmare treatment. And Peter Weller, who would later get typecast as an eccentric TV villain (Star Trek: Enterprise, Fringe) was immense as Burroughs. The twitchiness, the nervous energy and the generational intellect — Weller never had to try too hard to communicate any of these traits to the audience. Rewatching the film, I was pleasantly surprised to see how it not only holds up but may actually be more relevant than ever before, especially the Kafka-on-steroids atmosphere of guilt, paranoia and cultural exasperation.
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There is a seminal event from Burroughs’ life that Naked Lunch, Beat and Queer have all depicted as their climactic scenes. In 1951, Burroughs accidentally killed his partner, 28-year-old writer Joan Vollmer, in a game of ‘William Tell’ gone wrong. The duo would often perform the stunt—Burroughs shooting a glass off Vollmer’s head—as a parlour trick at dinner parties. The incident left a lifelong impression on Burroughs and he frequently credited it as the reason he became a writer. The film Beat depicts this with the twee sentimentality of a true-crime thriller, Courtney Love playing Vollmer to Sutherland’s Burroughs. Naked Lunch actually takes two bites at the William Tell apple, with the scenes bookending the film very effectively indeed — one scene taking place in the ‘Interzone’, the other in the real world.
Here again, Queer distinguishes itself with the way Guadagnino has staged and shot this scene. Allerton, after dying, vanishes in Lee/Burroughs’s arms, who then vanishes into thin air himself. The earlier scene about Allerton feeling “disembodied" is elevated even further thanks to the magic realism of this climactic moment. We then see an aged Lee/Burroughs in bed with a still-young Allerton, amplifying the pathos without making it outright kitsch. This is neither a straightforwardly romantic story nor an outright tragedy but something considerably stranger, like Burroughs’ own work. In a 1954 letter to Jack Kerouac, Burroughs wrote, “There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve." Queer is a film that embodies this sentiment in more ways than one.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.
