I wrote this piece for a publication which basically just went underwater, so I thought I’d share it here.
Some years ago, I was traveling south through Laos when I arrived in the town of Vang Vieng. VV is the place you might draw up if tasked with imagining a backpacker haunt: a riverside town with mountains in the distance and more hostels than homes, a zone where foreigners come to drink and drug and do it all for very, very cheap. It’s also one of the more disgusting places I have ever visited. My first hostel had bedbugs, and my second had experienced some kind of drug scare, a bag of marshmallows soaked in something noxious that had made a good number of the visitors so sick the bathrooms never stopped smelling like vomit. Before my 2016 visit, a number of people had fallen from the riverside bars, and broken their necks; last month, six backpackers died after drink moonshine made from methanol. I got out as soon as there was a bus to take me.
Before I left, I spoke with an older man, a semi-permanent tourist who lamented what the place had been like before the government had started to crack down. Everything that repulsed me—the filth, the drunkenness, the risk—seemed to him like a fond memory of something which had been truly free-wheeling, a place of indulgence without real cost or consequence. This licentiousness, this self-abstention from the ‘respectable’ concerns of the ‘real’ world, draws many to precisely this kind of travel, where one can lounge all day in a set of environments shoddily constructed for one’s own enjoyment, and the realities of the actual communities which staff and support this lifestyle are kept lightly out of reach.
This is a life of great and insufficient freedom, and it is precisely this existence which Luca Guadagnino depicts in his adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella Queer. When the film starts, William Lee (Daniel Craig) is cruising across Mexico City, searching desperately for a lover. He hits on a US serviceman, two sneering twenty-somethings, even moaning to his old friend Joe (Jason Schwartzman), before picking up a hustler in a dark bar. Lee is an abject figure, a beautiful man worn down by his expat years, full of chosen poverty and heroin addiction. He wants to connect, but even among the city’s gay expats, he can’t quite get there. In the film’s signature image, Lee’s yearning takes visual form, a spectral body which reaches out, ghostlike, to touch what the flesh-and-blood man cannot.
This is a struggle of years—a longing which seems, finally, to make contact, when Lee comes across Eugene (Drew Starkey) on the street. Youthful, virile, and, most importantly, in control of both body and mind Eugene is everything Lee was once, a form of identification which allows the addict to leap precipitously from desire to devotion, an uncontrolled outpouring of affection which the younger man both accepts and rejects, playing with his suitor’s attention like a cat batting away at a mouse.
The film is structured as a series of increasingly desperate consummations, separated by increasingly longer periods of frustration. Lee lavishes attention on Eugene, but once they’ve finally slept together, the young man is off, possibly sleeping with a woman, possibly other men, only returning to his suitor once the other offers to pay for their travel together, and promises that they won’t have to have sex very often—a desperate move, on Lee’s part, retaining his beloved, but at the price of his own spiritual immiseration.
It is implied that Lee, like Burroughs, comes from a well-off American family, and has moved out of the US in search of a community where his lifestyle might be tolerated, or at least afforded. Like the more famous Naked Lunch, it transforms a foreign city (CDMX, Tangier) into a stage on which the Burroughs stand-in acts out his desires and debasements. Queer’s speaking roles are almost entirely foreign, whether the other gay expats or the American scientist, played by Leslie Manville, who he seeks out for a cure to his alienation, and Lee only interacts with the locals to pay for drinks or sex, a form of exchange more commercial than cultural. He’s moved abroad, but is still locked inside himself.
Guadagnino is hardly a controlled image-maker, and the early going is filled with rapid cutting that often threatens to undermine the ecology of any given interaction. But he is not an indifferent one, and as Queer goes on, the stagey-ness becomes ever more intentional, deploying artifice as a means of invoking Lee’s isolated existence. His is a distinctly cinematic brand of abasement, An American in Roma. It reminded me of the flimsiness of the tourist traps in Vang Vieng, colorful buildings just strong enough to serve their foreign clientele at scale. It’s apt that the film reveals itself in a scene set in a movie palace, when the camera pushes past Lee and Eugene to reveal that they’ve been sitting in front of the scale model of a theater, where a fake audience watches a very real movie projected on the miniature screen. The unreality of their relationship might as well be from a movie—and for us, it is.
Unfortunately, this unreality is not enough for Lee; he needs the real thing, a love reciprocated among lovers, not the abjection of loving someone who, for a time, permits you to love them. This drives him onward, southward, into the jungles of the Amazon, in search of a plant whose consumption, he’s heard, allow for telepathic communication. In the Burroughs, they find this drug, ayahuasca, but don’t use it; Guadagnino actually goes all the way, presenting the two lovers melting into and merging with one another in a hallucinatory ballet of connection and transformation. The experience changes the both of them, yet it is not, cannot be, enough.
Queer ends on with a vision of nearly cosmic dissatisfaction, an existential searching without end. For all his traveling, his reaching outward into the world, his rare moments of true contact, Lee’s is a desire without a destination, a quest which can never be satisfied. Having known something approaching love, he cannot accept its substitute. This leaves him with the journey.