I couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to pass the weekend I vacated my house so that my estranged wife could remove all of her (and most of my) possessions than to take mushrooms and see Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Queer. Never mind that the movie all but omits the impetus behind William S. Burroughs’s so potent, so alienated homoeroticism. That is, he killed his wife in William Tell fashion—allegedly an accident—in 1951, two years before the publication of his first novel, of which Queer was the sequel. A mythology as well-suited to his degenerate, mysterious, and slithering prick-filled career as my trip.
I will credit the filmmaker with shrewd pace and color blocking. And the subtle nods to that murder, arriving in the form of poignant dreams. Likewise, Daniel Craig gave a worthy performance. I like this telepathy-hungry Burroughs all hardy and ripped—it makes his maintenance of a lifelong dope habit more believable than the reality, though perhaps less than Peter Weller in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.
The reality? William S. Burroughs was an entitled WASP, who studied at Harvard and didn’t serve a lick of jail time thanks to his wealthy St. Louis family’s connections. His drug use sustainable namely due to that legacy, and whenever things got dicey, he blithely shrugged the fix off. He got classed with the Beats because they admired his temperament. Fairly, the author wasn’t beholden to any league. A man among boys, he was lucky enough he didn’t have to be.
And where does that leave us? With one of the most daring, inventive approaches in literary history. By all accounts, the man was monstrous. So the least he could do was haunt, provoke, and cut up. Like the cat inside, he stalked creation intuitively. He understood the universe, and its mystical kernel. “From the viewpoint of magic,” he explained to Jimmy Page in 1975, “no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.” This tells us everything we need to know.
-David Fishkind