Obsession & Love in Mexico City

A Review of Queer (2024)

Many people say that any proper newsletter gets bigshot experts to come in when something in the discourse occurs that they don’t have the standing to comment on. Since this is a proper newsletter, of course, I have done the same. I kid: one of my friends wanted to write a post that sounded like an excellent idea to me, so here it is! I hope this will be a refreshing break from my rambling and bumbling. This review’s strength is in the recontextualizing knowledge brought to the film and its themes of obsession, isolation, and desire. In a shocking turn of events for the blog, this post is even arriving with a decent claim of topicality. Nonetheless, it’s never a bad time to hear about a good movie. Without further ado, A Small Kernel’s first guest post!

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This review WILL contain spoilers for the movie Queer. That having been said, it is not really a plot twist oriented movie, so I don’t think you’ll ruining the experience by reading this.

INTRODUCTION

I’m a self-proclaimed Burroughs-head. I’ve read a lot of his books, including Queer. I’ve read his published letters. I own a record containing some of his spoken word poetry and sonic experiments. I had photos of him saved to my Google Drive. I’ve written scholarship about his experiments with and literary descriptions of the psychedelic plant yagé. I also wrote a screenplay that follows him and his lover from Mexico to Colombia in search of yagé. Basically, I have something of an obsession with him.

I’m far from unique in my Burroughsmania. The leading Burroughs scholar has written an entire book trying to understand his “fascination” with the man. If you just read Naked Lunch you might not get it, but those who get bit by the Burroughs bug can’t ever forget his best sentences or stories, or his worst moments. Burroughs’s weird fiction and his unbelievable biography alike provoke the entire range of human emotion. Even just reading his letters, one oscillates from deep pity to admiration to contempt within paragraphs, over and over. And because Burroughs the man, myth, and character is such a force, I should have been less surprised than I was when I heard about A24’s Queer. The movie, which I saw two weeks ago, is an adaptation of two Burroughs works: his early semi-autobiographical novella of the same title, and his epistolary novel The Yage Letters, coauthored with Allen Ginsberg.

But since I’m a narcissist (at least according to The Last Psychiatrist), my initial reaction upon finding out about the film Queer was, “Hey! I came up with that idea!” And I knew I had to see the movie, so I did. Now I put my Burroughs credentials and trivia to perhaps their only good use–reviewing a A24 film after everyone who wants to see it already has.

IN GENERAL

Let me pause here and give a quick, oversimplified run-down for those who have not seen the movie, or who saw it but aren’t aware of its literary and historical lineage.

William S. Burroughs was a wealthy, Harvard-educated American who met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Keuroac in New York after World War II. Burroughs knew Ginsberg because both men were homosexual and, resultantly, ran in the same circles. Fun (or not-so-fun) fact: around this time period, Burroughs and Ginsberg were embroiled in a homicide case when Ginsberg’s friend murdered Burroughs’s friend for making incessant homosexual advances on him. At this time, Burroughs was also well-connected with the criminal element in New York City. It was through those connections that he was introduced to morphine; he would be addicted to opioids for the rest of his life.

Burroughs was openly homosexual, but nevertheless married a woman named Joan Vollmer, who was also friends with Ginsberg. Joan was, by all accounts, very intelligent and a bit crazy–not unlike Burroughs! She was also not without her own substance abuse problems, although her drug of choice was benzedrine. With Joan’s child from a previous marriage, and with their new baby William Jr., the couple travelled the United States, settling in Louisiana for a while before Burroughs’s troubles with the law forced them out of the country. As the US government cracked down on drug users, the Burroughs family to Mexico City. And Mexico City is the setting of Queer (the novella and the film).

Burroughs’s Wikipedia page includes this concerning sentence: “Their life in Mexico was by all accounts an unhappy one.” I’ll go into more detail later, but suffice it to say that things began falling apart for the couple in Mexico. Joan hated Mexico, and she was not enthused about Burroughs’s homosexual escapades and growing disdain for her. Burroughs’ and Joan’s respective addictions put an additional strain on their relationship. Burroughs became obsessed with a young American man named Adelbert Lewis Marker. Then, Joan died (more on that later), the children were spirited back up to the States by relatives, and Burroughs remained in Mexico City. Meanwhile, Burroughs’s fixation and reliance on the aloof Marker only got worse.

It is about this period of his life that Queer was written. Burroughs fictionalizes himself as “William Lee,” an awkward, generally disliked, pretentious middle-aged expat homosexual. Marker becomes Eugene Allerton, a young American hayseed who has come to Mexico City to live fast and cheap. Allerton is beautiful, uncaring, and allegedly heterosexual. He sleeps with Lee and suffers his presence (for the money and booze, perhaps), but doesn’t always seem to like him.

In a weird coincidence, the film Queer (2024) covers the exact period of Burroughs’s life that I have written the most about. In fact, as the movie progressed, I was delightedly surprised to realize this thoughtfully made and beautiful film was a much, much better version of a screenplay I’d written! As someone who tried to adapt Queer and The Yage Letters, I can attest to the difficulty. Burroughs is incredibly charismatic in his writing, but when you write about him, it’s hard to portray anything but a selfish, dysfunctional asshole drug addict whose sole redeeming quality is that he occasionally says something witty. And the story almost feels too edgy, too overloaded with hot topics to be real. He’s gay–and he’s addicted to heroin? And he’s an alcoholic? He pays for casual sex, believes wholeheartedly in the occult, escapes the law multiple times, and seeks out a mythical psychedelic for its telepathic powers. It would be a great story if it wasn’t so depressing.

But this movie pulled it off. Burroughs here (played excellently by Daniel Craig, and called by Burroughs’s nome-de-plume Lee) is awkward, charming, annoying, pathetic, and ultimately quite likeable, despite everything that’s wrong with him. The film itself is a treat for the eyes. The creators wisely opted for color, sunlight, and stunning settings in a story that could easily be bogged down by a murky gray theme and surroundings that reflect only abject poverty. The film is rewardingly attentive to detail; for instance, Burroughs’s apartment is filled with books, and he wears his signature suit and hat. Most admirably of all, this movie captured the best part of the novella Queer–the cringe-worthy longing that Lee suffers for Allerton. In the novella Queer, people around Lee find him appalling or silly, Allerton says unkind things about his older lover, and Lee himself feels a debilitating embarrassment. But hopeless adoration drives Lee to keep pursuing Allerton, which means venturing his imperfect and shameful self into a feigned confidence that morphs into the true devil-may-care attitude of a modern Decadent. Lee woos Allerton with funny stories (which Burroughs called routines), money, alcohol, drugs, and food. Eventually, Lee convinces Allerton to take a trip with him to Colombia to find yagé.

I think it was a great decision to stretch the film beyond its namesake and into The Yage Letters. (And I’m not just saying that because that’s what I did when I wrote my version of the script.) The Yage Letters feels like a natural extension of Queer, and it features incredibly fun settings and shenanigans, plus some amazing descriptions of yagé trips. The film Queer makes additions and alterations to its source material that, as a whole, work very well. My personal favorite was the film’s take on Doctor Cotter, who in the movie is a creepy American woman gone native in the Amazon. Queer also contains nods to the best of Burroughs’s oeuvre and style, like the dream sequences and centipede motif that feel ripped from the pages of Naked Lunch. While I found the ghost-Lee moments (when a phantom, semi-transparent arm reaches out to caress Allerton, for instance) a bit cheesy, it was on the right side of movie-sentiment for me. It helps that those scenes seem to be a thoughtful and subtle reference to Burroughs’s “El Hombre Invisible.” Burroughs’s books are full of people’s flesh and spirit getting consumed by alien parasites, or old homosexuals lurching through South American streets unseen. In Burroughs’s work, junkies suffering withdrawal and unrequited lovers alike fade into nothingness. Burroughs even claims the local boys called him the Invisible Man, although I find that a bit too poetic to be true. Point being–there is a veritable wealth of Burroughsian Easter eggs in this film for every Burroughs fan.

And for those who don’t know or care about Burroughs? This movie apparently still has appeal, according to the companion I went with. I worried that without my enviable Burroughs background, she’d think the movie was Lynch-derivative, overly obscure, or just plain confusing. But she loved it. Or she said she did, at least.

THE LENGTH

I think movies should be ninety minutes long, so I’m a little biased. But I think my main complaint with this movie is that it is TOO LONG. I can sympathize with how this happened. Firstly, there is enough material from Burroughs’s life and books to make multiple seasons of a television show. Secondly, this film was obviously made by someone who loves Burroughs. When you love something, you could talk about it forever without noticing your audience’s eyelids drooping. (And I have done that exact thing about Burroughs.) I think this film could’ve used a final pass from a well-intentioned executive or editor, maybe someone who also loves Burroughs but can take the requisite step back to say, Hey, how do we get this thing down from nearly two and a half hours? Because it did not need to be two and a half hours.

If I were this hypothetical editor, I would start by cutting the Epilogue. While there were sections of the Epilogue I enjoyed, and while I won’t complain about getting extra content with my movie ticket, as a whole the Epilogue did not add anything to the film. In fact, it diminished from what would have otherwise been a well-crafted and complete story. And by the point you’re watching the Epilogue you’re pretty exhausted by the events of the film already. We don’t need to be explicitly told that Lee and Allerton have lost touch; the final scene in the jungle establishes that both poetically and concisely. We don’t need to see Lee and Joe small-talk more. We definitely don’t need that confusing dream sequence where Allerton gets shot (more on that later). And the, overly slow final scene where an old Lee slowly dies in a modern American city is not only unnecessary, it is cheesy and lame. If this had been written for a class, the screenwriting professor would tell the student, “Don’t show your character dying of old age multiple decades after the main events of the film.”

Epilogue aside, the film’s pacing was mostly excellent. Scenes lingered where necessary to let us get the whole uncomfortable tension of the moment, like when Lee takes a man back to a hotel with him and the hotel employee silently unlocks the rented room and leaves a single, flat, sad-looking towel for them. Scenes ended, often with artful abruptness, when we’d gleaned what mattered from them. Conversations had a natural flow. Foreshadowing and short but sweet travel scenes eased the transition from Mexico City to the jungle.

ALLERTON AND LEE

I already alluded to this, but my favorite part of Queer is the longing. Unrequited love from afar, a la Dante and Petrach, is so passe. A modern unrequited love story can and should involve sex with the object of one’s affections, if you ask me. And Queer (both the novella and the film) is a modern unrequited love story. Although Burroughs/Lee has seemingly gotten what he wanted, i.e. to sleep with Allerton, we realize quickly that what Lee actually wants is something deeper, something he can’t have because of who Allerton is. And it is through his lopsided relationship with Allerton that Lee becomes most sympathetic. I loved Lee’s awkward passes at Allerton early in the movie, like when a tequila-drunk Lee does an elaborate mock-curtsey, to Allerton’s bemusement. I loved that Lee warns his friend Joe not to take male lovers back to his apartment, only to later bring Allerton to his.

As suits the source material extraordinarily well, this film is ultimately a love story. Allerton and Lee’s relationship feels intimate, but no one is surprised that, eventually, Allerton leaves. The movie did a good job telegraphing Allerton’s dubious sexual identity. He wants to go to gay bars, he finds Lee charming and seems to enjoy sex with him; but Allerton is not of Lee’s world, has not been in the gay community, and finds Lee’s attention at times suffocating. You get the sense Allerton just wishes Lee would play it cooler sometimes. I’m especially glad the film included the simultaneously embarrassing and heart-wrenching moment where Lee bargains with Allerton: Come to South America with me, and you’ll only have to have sex with me twice a week.

The capstone is the telepathy scene toward the end of the film. After finding the mythic psychedelic plant yagé, which Lee claims will enable telepathy, Lee and Allerton take it. Once the men have overcome the initial nausea and horror, they fall into a long trip. This is done in a manner that is remarkably unique considering how overdone psychedelic experiences are as a film trope. But more importantly, the trip reaches to the heart of Lee and Allerton’s relationship to each other. The two men communicate telepathically. They look at each other, cling to each other with love and need. And then their bodies combine into one monstrous, multi-faced, bony lump of flesh. They move within and without each other, at the same time two and one. It’s a creative and excellent visual depiction of telepathy. It’s also very Burroughsian in form and function: Naked Lunch features many creatures that absorb people and each other in a semi-sexual manner. And finally, it reveals what exactly Lee wants from Allerton. We already sort of know, or feel we know, what this desire is–it’s a desire for unconditional love, for understanding, for constant being-together. But the telepathic body-melting is a literalization of a need that can never be satisfactorily explained by mere psychology, and maybe can never be fulfilled, at least not permanently.

The movie could’ve gone for a very different version of Allerton and Lee’s relationship–a version where Allerton’s feelings for Lee are purely platonic at best, the older man manipulates and persuades the younger into sex acts that Allerton does not necessarily enjoy, and Allerton’s laziness, need for money, and substance use problems are the primary reasons he remains with Lee. The movie knows this reading is possible (Lee offers to pay Allerton not to go to work at one point), and I don’t think it’s an unfair way to interpret the novella Queer. But I’m very grateful the movie did not go that route. This story works better as a surprisingly lighthearted and loving encounter between two men who do want each other, who do make a weird sense together, but who are incompatible and flawed. The movie starts by making you want Lee to be happy. He’s lonely, and we all know what it’s like to be lonely. He’s got a crush, and we all know what that’s like, too. I think a more cynical version of this story would collapse under its own depressing weight. But because it is a romance, the many facets of this story coalesce into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The love story is a fantastic way to link together everything else–the addiction narrative, the travel narrative, the gay period piece, the psychoanalytically-meaningful dreams and trip sequences. Had the creators chosen to center some other aspect of the source material, my bet is that the movie would be a good bit jumpier and far less emotionally affecting.

WHERE IS JOAN?

What follows is not a spoiler in the sense that it is not about the movie itself, but rather about the material that the movie left out. That having been said, it’s possible the biographical information I’m going to reveal about Burroughs will make a viewing of Queer less enjoyable, or at least Claudia said it post facto diminished the movie in her eyes. Proceed at your own risk.

I said earlier that Joan dies while she and Burroughs are in Mexico City. All we know for certain is that Burroughs killed her, and it also seems very likely the killing was an accident, although this is disputed by some. The most well-documented chain of events is that Burroughs, one night while all involved were very drunk, decided he and Joan should do a “William Tell” stunt. Joan balanced a glass on her head, Burroughs (a great marksman ordinarily) took out a gun and aimed at the glass. But he shot Joan’s head instead, and she died. Burroughs would spend very little time in jail, seemingly thanks to a combination of bribery and getting the hell out of Mexico City at the right time.

The story of Joan’s death (and much of what leads up to it) is tragic. Burroughs did not write about the death directly, but credited it with sparking his increased writing output and willingness to experiment with the form and function of prose. To state the obvious, this story does not make Burroughs sympathetic at all. Although the shooting seems to have been an accident, it was preventable. It doesn’t help that some accounts of the shooting include Burroughs’s lover Marker (remember, this is who Allerton is based on). I’ve seen it said Burroughs came up with the William Tell stunt to impress Marker, although I’m not sure this is true. Regardless, given that it was already unpleasant to be a woman of the Beat Generation, and given Joan’s wasted potential and ruined life, this anecdote is chilling to even the most fervent Burroughs fans. It has an unsettling symmetry with the too-common stories of men killing their wives or girlfriends for any reason and no reason at all. Even if we credit Burroughs’s account of the thing as accidental (and I do), his actions after the fact, while plausibly explicable as unspeakable grief, can also come off as heartless: Joan’s absence from his writing, his burying her in an unmarked grave and then failing to pay the gravesite fees, his throwing out her belongings, leaving their son with no pictures of her. It also sinks the entire Allerton love story into a muck. If Burroughs was capable of this tenderness, why didn’t he exhibit it toward Joan?

You probably understand why the film Queer did not involve Joan. It’s worth mentioning that neither of the novellas the film is based upon mention Joan, either. (I believe there is a throwaway line in the novella Queer about Lee’s wife being “gone,” as in out of town.) Adding this story element may well have bogged down the pace and required cutting or abbreviating other plotlines. The biggest issue is tone. Queer isn’t exactly My Little Pony, but including Joan’s death would have changed the mood significantly, and I find it plausible that change would have been for the worse.

But I was disappointed Joan didn’t appear in the film–at least not explicitly. Burroughs-heads like myself will note that the film scatters breadcrumbs related to the killing everywhere. When Lee gets horrendously drunk and follows Allerton to a party, Mary is firing a toy gun at a friend who balances a glass on his head. A character begins to say, “Speaking of murder,” and Lee frenetically cuts him off. When Lee goes to see a botanist to ask about yagé, the botanist asks why Lee wants to attain telepathy, before knowingly saying, “You want to communicate with your wife.” Lee’s response is, again, an unusually frantic, “No!” A dream sequence in the center of the movie contains the two most obvious allusions to those who are in-the-know. First, Lee sees a man sharpening a blade. According to Burroughs, the day he killed Joan, he got a knife sharpened in order to give it to Marker. This detail was what convinced me they would include Joan in the film. It’s so specific and unhappy. Burroughs/Lee dreaming of it suggests he feels remorse about prioritizing Allerton over Joan, or at least can recognize that he did it. In the same dream sequence, a naked woman, who resembles Joan and has a hypodermic needle stuck in her arm, laughs at the camera and calls Lee queer as he attempts to have sex with her. “I’m not queer,” Lee responds in the dream. “I’m disembodied.” But it’s Joan who’s been disembodied from the movie, leaving only traces of her death everywhere. Even worse, Burroughs had disembodied her from his life. Some close to the couple, such as Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, allege such a closeness and love between Burroughs and Joan that one can imagine them once communicating telepathically, or seeking to. But by the time Marker/Allerton came around, before Joan had even died, Burroughs could only see her as other.

The movie’s lack of Joan could be forgiven as an understandable stylistic choice if not for the Epilogue. In the Epilogue, Lee dreams of walking into a room and seeing Allerton. Allerton silently and seriously puts a glass on his head, and Lee shoots and kills him. I recall actively shaking my head at this point in the movie. Obviously the creators wanted that incredible moment in the film, but couldn’t decide where to put it. And, obviously, they knew about Joan and her death, but couldn’t find the space or inspiration to write her into the screenplay as a woman. Instead, they wrote her in as a collection of dreams, symbols, and oblique references. I don’t think they needed to include Joan, and I liked the subtle references in the movie (although they arguably disadvantage an audience member less familiar with Burroughs’s life). But if you’re going to include the William Tell disaster, I think it’s ill-advised to put Allerton in Joan’s place. The tragedy of Joan’s death for those of us who didn’t know her–or at least for me–hinges on the fact that she and Burroughs had such a fractured relationship; it hinges on her womanhood, wifehood, and unhappy motherhood; it hinges on her comparable brilliantness to Burroughs; and for me, most of all, it hinges on her absence from Burroughs’s writing except as, again, a series of symbols and a lurking sense of doom. Allerton got to be in Queer. He got the book. And, by the by, he got the film, too. But Joan didn’t, and doesn’t. Allerton and Joan were not in comparable positions simply because Burroughs loved both of them, and swapping one for the other is a strange choice indeed.

CONCLUSION

In the main, I deeply enjoyed Queer. There’s a lot in the film for a Burroughs reader, and also a lot for anyone who likes weird movies about gay men. Haters and losers will attack the film because it is “problematic” and “about two white gay men, who cares,” and “we shouldn’t be idolizing Burroughs anyways.” They can stay home and watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Cocomelon. There are actual issues with the film, but as a whole, it is productively and uniquely ambitious, aesthetically compelling, magical, and weirdly uplifting.

I want to return to that book I mentioned when I began this review, the Oliver Harris monograph which claims to uncover the “secret of fascination” with Burroughs. I have only read parts of Harris’s book, but I was amused and oddly validated when I found it. I had also been asking myself this question: Why did I like reading Burroughs’s works, and more importantly, why did I enjoy reading about Burroughs’s life? He was “objectively” a bad guy. Lots of people will gleefully tell you that, not that it takes a genius to figure out. His writing is at times unreadable, as even his biggest proponents will attest. Naked Lunch, his masterpiece, is the sort of book you will praise up, down, and across, while also refusing to lend it to your friends for fear they “wouldn’t understand.”

Probably Burroughs encapsulates a certain trend, a preference for the outlaw artist whose life is interesting in and of itself. He’s like a kind of Oscar Wilde, provocatively dedicated to art and the dramatic. I never had an Oscar Wilde obsession, but lots of people have. I think despite the massive differences in their work, there is a similar allure drawing people to both men. You get two avenues of exploration–their literature and their lives. The mode of reading biography is, of course, totally different than the mode of reading a fiction book. But the two inquiries tie together in a wonderful manner. Knowing more about Burroughs’s life, which involves reading early autobiograph-y fiction like Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters, makes his fiction so much more interesting–and vice versa.

I’m not surprised a movie about Burroughs incorporates his novels’ magical realism, his stylistic flair, or his themes. As I said above, it even adopted the nervous, barely-contained secretiveness about Joan’s death. Anything that wants to show Burroughs’s life is going to have to reflect parts of his books. (“Parts,” because for instance the science fiction elements are missing from this film. This is both disappointing and entirely understandable–there is only so much you can fold in.) Burroughs’s life and his artistry complement each other, and that is not true for every author.

In a way reflective of Burroughs’s eclectic body of work, this movie employs an ambitious and often-successful mixture of symbolic Lynchian dream sequences, gritty realism, gay melodrama, and dry romantic comedy, tied together with Nirvana and New Order. It’s odd, and deeply enjoyable at the same time, to go from a scene of Lee cooking and shooting heroin, to a scene of him on a dinner date with Allerton, where Lee tells Allerton an uninteresting story and Allerton enthusiastically eats a chicken kebab. It’s excellent to see Lee’s guarded mind skinned raw for us in dreams and through drugs. Burroughs doesn’t always tell what is strictly the truth in his more autobiographical works, and this movie doesn’t adhere to fact or fiction. But that oscillation, the space between, captures the fascination of Burroughs. His life and writing come together to create a story that is greater than the sum of its parts, greater than anything he himself could have created alone, sad and funny and gripping and personal, and never, ever boring.