Queer

The buzzy advent of the so-beautifully filmed Queer movie by Luca Guadagnino has revived my own adventure with Burroughs's soul-baring autobiography. Originally an aside to fill my evenings while wrassling the funding for the Bisso/Wold sword-and-sandal-and-ridiculously-epic Sub Pontio Pilato, it has become one of my favorites, and the favorite of a number of people around me, to the point of changing their lives, e.g. my long-time artistic partner Jim Cave, who came out, found a boyfriend, got married, and has lived one hopes a truer life. 

There is this lovely ambiguous interview with me about the opera, which now reading back seems to be from a more-articulate time in my life, so pause this blog, read it now and then come back. 

I loved watching the film, I keep thinking about it: its stagey aspects, CGI set extensions, the light, psychedelic scenes with the Yage, the filling out of the life beyond.  But when I was watching it, I was in a constant double-exposure with the opera. Like the opera, many of the dialogs in the screenplay are verbatim from the book, which is at it should be - Burroughs's language is the thing - and may have been required by the estate, as they did for me. But that meant that every line spoken on screen was at the same time playing its musical version in my head. 

For example, this scene, where "As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless." I've linked to the 2001 production of it, and below is the scene from the movie and to the 2010 version, Daniel Craig/Joe Wicht as Lee. 

And the scene where "Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau's Orpheus. In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes."  The film was able to visually represent the protoplasm, whereas in the opera, the narrative conceit of the book continued.  In film, one is  told to show not say, but narration has always been cool to me, and that Lee observes himself in the third person up until the bright ending is also. 

The movie, like the opera, is a love story, a love and lust both reciprocated and unrequited, painful, wrenching.  But the routines - some of my favorite parts in the book, e.g. the General von Klutch episode and that over Chess Game with their baldfaced racism and sexual predation - are lessened in the movie.

And what to do about the ending, which in the book simply evaporates, "the end of the road" as he wrote later in the introduction. The movie in a dream follows Lee to the end, the skip tracer forever searching for the object of his idealized affection. 

 

An Allegory of Now

When I first read She Who Is Alive, it seemed to be just the kind of craziness I love, in this case a wonderful insane neo-fascist world filled with the heady precognitions of those who purport to have the truth, and where those truths might actually be the truth. Such joy I felt contemplating such a ridiculous world, where up is down and sideways is the other sideways. Sure, I mean, we've always had believed-in craziness of many types - religions oft being my favorite source, one I could cuddle with at night whilst the children slept - and we've had, in the previous centuries, the upside-downiness of the Stalins and the Vatican and, well, now that I think of it, it actually happens an awful lot. And it now seems that it's back in fashion, like hair wraps and bellbottom jeans. And the kowtows have begun, the politicians polishing their rubber stamps lest they end up a person of interest or audit.  

So do we still laugh, like our buddy Daniil Kharms, who laughed while starving to death and force-psychiatrized, or do we scramble into our false bottom coal sheds, hoping to not be found by the side-looking radar pointed down at us by balloon and aircraft and (dare I say it?) some future generation linked-starlike space objects?  For now, I push this film along, knowing that it may be used against me, although luckily so far off their aforementioned radar that it seems unlikely I will be lined up against the wall.  But, if it happens that this happens, I will boldly smoke that last cigarette, refuse the blindfold, and at the last moment call on them to shoot straight, blow them a kiss, and strike off to meet our makers.