Film review #3: Queer

Thorpe-Tracey's reservations

To recognise a landmark moment in the Beat arts, Rock and the Beat Generation has commissioned two reviews of the new Luca Guadagnino film version of Burroughs’ novella Queer. Here, indie musician and former Morning Star culture columnist C.J. THORPE-TRACEY delivers some lingering doubts regarding the latest cinematic realisation of a Beat text. Elsewhere, DAVID S. WILLS, Beatdom editor and counterculture essayist, casts a largely approving eye over a production in which Daniel Craig stars…

Queer, dir. Luca Guadagnino (2024)

By C.J. Thorpe-Tracey

For ‘Beat literate' cinema goers, I suspect that digging into Luca Guadagnino’s new romantic period drama Queer, adapted by Justin Kuritzkes from William Burroughs’ unfinished novella, is an entirely different experience to that of the wider public and film critics when they consume the same movie. I reckon that the deeper one is engaged with Beat literature, Beat history, the less satisfying one will find the film, despite its qualities. And vice versa.

Queer is undoubtedly the highest profile Burroughs movie adaptation since David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch in 1991 (which was, essentially, a commercial flop, despite intriguing many critics of the day). Indeed, with its former Bond superstar leading man, its major mainstream release and its awards season press tour, perhaps Queer is the ‘biggest’ film adapted from any Beat work to date.

And with that, for all its off-kilter-ness and mid-twentieth century counterculture positioning, Queer is in fact a deeply conventional thing: it is a vehicle for its star.Daniel Craig is nominated for a Golden Globe, a Critics’ Choice and a Screen Actors’ Guild Award for his portrayal of William Lee, though he’s just been snubbed by the BAFTAs.

Prior to this new Queer, one couldn’t have easily imagined a William Burroughs text ending up as the topic of light-hearted banter between a-list celebrities on Graham Norton’s sofa, as part of British late evening prime-time telly.

Craig does carry the film and creates a compelling, complex character out of Lee. Meanwhile, in essence, despite sticking fairly closely to Burroughs’ plot points, Queer is not very ‘Beat’ at all. Set in a stylised 1950s Mexico City, director Guadagnino's vivid, heady interpretation of the text makes a darkly romantic, atmospheric, highly palatable costume piece out of Burroughs’ excoriating tendril-ish self-haunting.

Guadagnino has explained in interview that he was inspired by Powell and Pressburger. And his Queer does achieve something of their blurriness. British critic Mark Kermode describes it as having a ‘fever dream’ quality. At the same time, its best moments are like the sharp-eyed midfielder who finds space between the formal lines for beautiful long passes. That’s in nuanced performances and unreal settings, not storytelling.

Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes – now his key screenwriting collaborator – broke through earlier last year with Challengers, an audacious, evolving, erotic (ménage à trois) drama set in the world of professional tennis, which starred Zendaya and Josh O’Connor. A recurring criticism of that film, despite its overall success, is that it lacks true heart or depth. One might add, Kuritzkes isn’t even the best writer in his own house: he’s the partner of Celine Song, who created the extraordinary Past Lives and made a star of Greta Lee.

Anyway, these two creatives arrive at Bill Burroughs, not out of any especially subterranean countercultural connectivity themselves, but as fêted figures in twenty-first century Hollywood’s rising new generation.

By contrast, even as recently as the early 2010s, the last time a film version of Queer was seriously planned, it was going to be a more street level grimy affair – slated to be directed by Beat-affiliated indie flick journeyman Steve Buscemi. That didn’t emerge. So now, here is where we arrive at, as a culture. For both better and worse.

All the background flurry is reflected in what Guadagnino has done to Burroughs’ claustrophobic (at the time) sexually insurrectionist tale of overwhelming desire. There is a stylish artifice and a pacing that emphasise (and yet in some ways bely) the supposed raw, suppressed desperation of the lead character.

I realise – after too much time wasted attempting to do it – that unpacking character, plot and tonal differences and similarities of film and book, making direct comparisons, in order to try to highlight how Guadagnino’s Queer dances parallel — or not so parallel – to Burroughs’ own Queer, is in fact a red herring.

When Burroughs wrote Queer’s manuscript (years before it was eventually published) we lived in a world where its entire premise, and text on every page, would’ve been regarded as profoundly obscene by the establishment. More broadly, Beat literature defined itself and constructed its own universe via that extreme a sense of ‘outsider’ positioning.

But those kinds of ‘outsider’ are no more. Burroughs’ own notion of Queer as a companion to – in continuity with – Junkie, and his description of the semi-autobiographical character ‘Lee’ as how the ‘Lee’ of Junkie might’ve come off, when he’s clean of drugs, is now moot. Because today, neither drug taking, nor gay sex, are remotely transgressive in the urban cultures of the global north.

Yes, there is currently an ugly, potent, socially conservative backlash mushrooming, yet still, the incredible shifts in societal norms over the past 40 years – arguably steeper over the past decade – has eradicated almost all sense of ‘edge’ from this book’s (still fascinating) structure and narrative.

Over that same time period, the very word ‘queer’ has travelled from being deathly insult with bona fide threat (and deep outsiderness) attached to it, to having been joyfully, fiercely reclaimed by a now far more visible global community of LGBTQ+ people.

That’s not in any way to underplay the regular fear and challenges queer folks still face, or the continuing worldwide danger to those freedoms. But specifically, within the popular arts and entertainment, within the ‘culture’ (against which the ‘counterculture’ creatively railed through the twentieth century) now far more open-minded scenes of a reset normalcy now appear in mainstream, high budget film and television drama all the time.

And notions of sexuality and gender have – thank god – broadened and are being understood to the point where older, relatively privileged, white, male gayness such as that on display in Queer, can feel positively outdated.

Which is to say, we’ve travelled so far that an elderly man’s obsession with a beautiful, much younger man can be in no way perceived as ‘countercultural’. It’s specifically mainstream itself, even a bit old fashioned. So much traumatised male whiteness.

The Beat writers having built a whole world on mutual rejection, with that power of gritty realism underlying their books and poems’ context and authenticity, that world – that counter-culture – isn’t just no longer sustained, it is entirely gone, for most people reading or watching.

Brutality and outsiderness look utterly different. Technology dehumanised and re-interfaced us all, both at once, so that the banality of real-world drudgery took on new costume and meaning. And arguably it has been a later, different ‘counterculture’, the libertarianism of the computer coders who revolutionised everything in the online era, that forced that change and now rule our cultural world.

Meanwhile, if we’re looking for something that moulds a personal heartbreak and loneliness narrative into a thoughtful meditation on queer theory and the psychological processes of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, we could save ourselves the running time of Queer by just listening to Chappell Roan’s ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ – which does an equally powerful, vivid job in four minutes of pop music.

Plus, I have to say, that one of the most rewarding – and universally praised – aspects of this film has no connection to the book at all. That is, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ original score.

In the end, my best solution to getting the most out of the film Queer is to actively disconnect it from the entire Beat oeuvre, before settling down. The less one thinks of Burroughs, the more one can enjoy this offbeat horny Daniel Craig movie.

See also: ‘Film review #2: Queer’, January 24th, 2025; ‘Queer thinking: Harris’ movie takes’, January 16th, 2025

Editor’s note: You can read more of C.J. Thorpe-Tracey’s work at The Double Chorus and The Border Crossing