The Last Moments of ‘Queer’ Tell a Murderous True Story About William S. Burroughs’ Haunted, Tragic Life
Editor’s Note: The following story contains major spoilers for the movie “Queer,” now in theaters.
“Queer,” a new Luca Guadagnino romance so wounding and hypnotic in only the way he can do, ends the way it begins: with William Lee (Daniel Craig) alone again after another fascinating, devastating love affair.
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After picking him up in Mexico City, expat, self-loathing, sweating decadent Lee entreats the lithe and elusive former Navyman Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) to join him in the Ecuadorian jungles on the hunt for the ultimate trip — and the source of yagé, better known as the psychotropic beverage ayahuasca. Once deranged, off-the-grid healer Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville) sets them up with the tea, Lee and Allerton go on a strange mind-bend of an inward journey, fusing their bodies in a hallucinatory dance until they’re spent.
Lee believes the drug may be the only way to reach his out-of-sync lover, without speaking, but the revelations are worse: Allerton ultimately leaves him alone in the jungle, and they never meet again. It’s an ending that deviates from and expands upon author William S. Burroughs’ source material, but one that sticks close to the Beat author’s actual biography.
In the movie, Allerton abandons Lee much the same way Lewis Marker — the real man whom Burroughs fell in love with and who inspired the character of Allerton in his 1985-published novella “Queer” — did the writer.
Back in Mexico City in the movie’s last trippy coda that brings to mind cosmic traveler David Bowman (Keir Dullea) staring down his aging future self at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Lee disappears into the corners of his mind in yet another hallucination montage, vanishing down a motel hallway. The sequence lands on a quintessentially Burroughs image of Allerton, here a dream figment, with a glass balancing on his head. Lee fires his gun, sees the glass fall and roll across the floor, only to realize he’s shot Allerton in the forehead.
He runs over, kisses him, the body disappears, and Lee leaves a now-empty room, only to fade out suddenly much older, collapsed on a motel bed after hearing Allerton say his name one more time. The swan-song symbolism of this final moment of a love unrealized, as outlandishly dreamy as it may seem, actually draws on William S. Burroughs’ own story, and how he unintentionally murdered his common-law wife, the writer Joan Vollmer, in 1951. That incident ultimately compelled Burroughs to write the novella “Queer” about his time as an expat in Mexico City in the first place. (By the time his debut “Junkie” came out in 1953, Burroughs had already written “Queer” as the sequel while awaiting trial for Vollmer’s death.)
The drinking game that ended in Vollmer’s morbidly slapstick death dates back to a figure of Swiss folklore known as William Tell, a sly marksman who per legend shot an apple off the head of a Habsburg duke’s son.
Burroughs and Vollmer, who he’d been trying and failing to divorce, were at “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” levels of mutual spousal imbibing one night in Mexico City in September 1951 at the apartment he kept for her and their son — separate from his own pied-à-terre for liaisons with men. The night unraveled into a drunken game of William Tell, with Vollmer daring her husband to shoot a whiskey glass off the top of her head. He missed the target, and his bullet killed her, with Burroughs later saying he could barely remember the events of yet another bender. After a short sentence on criminal negligence charges, he fled back to the United States, still finding time to jaunt to Ecuador with Lewis Marker in between, as Luca Guadagnino explains.
Guadagnino, who spoke to IndieWire at the A24 offices across a console table surrounded by walls of books, tells the story of Burroughs and Vollmer better than any recap could. The filmmaker, after all, fell in love with the book at age 17 while living in Palermo, and he’d wanted to adapt it ever since.
“In reality, William Burroughs, who was at the time living in Mexico City with the wife … was madly in love with this guy called Lewis Marker, with who he was sometimes having sex but was also the lover of the wife,” Guadagnino said. “One night, the wife was mocking him and making jokes about his homosexuality. They were fighting somehow, jokingly because it was a drunken moment, and she said, ‘Show me that you’re a man.’ He put a glass on her head, and she invited him — he collected guns — to fire at the glass. He did that in front of Lewis Marker.”
Guadagnino, noting that Marker was present for Vollmer’s death, said, “Then, she falls on the ground, and [Burroughs] starts to laugh. Lewis Marker goes to the body and sees she has a hole in her forehead, and she’s dead. [Burroughs] goes to jail for one week and bribes the authorities of Mexico City at the time and gets out of it and goes into this trip with Lewis Marker in South America. In the book he published in 1985 that is unfinished, he adds a foreword in which he describes life in Mexico City and tells the reader that by having killed his wife this way, he had liberated the writer in him. That if he did not kill his wife, he would not have become a writer.”
“I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never become a writer but for Joan’s death…the death brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out,” the foreword reads.
How much of that true story factored into a dream-logic movie that is itself an adaptation of a fictional novel — despite its highly autobiographical elements, with Lee also being a collector of guns and an alcoholic like Burroughs — foregrounded a looming cloud of questions for the director and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes.
“We did not want ‘Queer’ to be an adaptation of a novel that, in a way, became a period drama and biopic about Burroughs. We wanted it to be an adaptation of the book, so we could not include the wife,” Guadagnino said. “You could not make the story of William Lee the actual story of William Burroughs. But you could think why he had to put this description of the murder of the wife as a foreword of the book. And we could remind ourselves of the great adage by Oscar Wilde that says, ‘Each man kills the things he loves.'”
That bleak old chestnut, as self-professed film historian Luca Guadagnino helpfully reminds, was infused by another self-destructive artist, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, into his final movie, “Querelle.” The line appears as a song sung in refrain by Jeanne Moreau, playing the madame of a brothel for sailors, in that 1982 film also about gay men’s self-steered tendency toward destruction and degradation — released in that case amid the surge of AIDS, and just three years before “Queer” was published.
If each man kills the thing he loves, then Guadagnino and Kuritzkes had to bring Burroughs killing Vollmer into a finale where Lee has imagined killing Allerton: “He [Burroughs] kills the wife. Each man kills the things he loves. He loves Allerton. She asks willfully to fire. He [Allerton] asks him [Lee] willfully to fire in a dream.” And it’s in a dream this film ends.
Screenwriter Kuritzkes, whom Guadagnino approached to adapt “Queer” while they were filming their sexy, splashy tennis menage-à-trois “Challengers” in 2022, also weighed over how much of Burroughs’ unfinished thoughts and real circumstances he needed to fill in. Especially given that “Queer,” the book, ends just before Lee and Allerton take ayahuasca.
“It was a question throughout the writing of the screenplay and conversations with Luca about how much we wanted to stick to the main text of ‘Queer’ the novella and how much we needed to bring in other information about Burroughs and his work in order to get the complete picture of [Lee],” Kuritzkes said. “It’s an unfinished novel, and it’s very hard to say where the text ends and where Burroughs’ life begins a lot of the time. When it comes to things like the shooting of his wife, he’s written about how that was an event that kind of haunted the writing of ‘Queer’ and haunted his whole career as a writer. Without that event, ‘Queer’ doesn’t exist.”
According to Kuritzkes, “There’s this moment in the book where they get to the jungle, and they get to Dr. Cotter’s hut, and they think they’re going to get the ayahuasca, and then all of a sudden that possibility is closed down. It was like the book opened a door and then quickly closed it. Something Luca and I were talking about really early on in the process was, well, what if we opened that door and went through and saw what was on the other side? How would that change the trajectory of the story? What would these characters do with that experience? How would that change how they see each other and how they see themselves? Even as I was writing the earlier parts of the script, which are more or less faithful to the book, I knew that I was going to go there.”
But like Guadagnino, Kuritzkes did not want “Queer” to end up as a biopic about Burroughs, whose work has been explored in films like David Cronenberg’s 1991 “Naked Lunch” and Howard Brookner’s definitive 1983 documentary “Burroughs.” The filmmakers worked closely with a researcher (Ben Panzeca) to get down to the smallest details of Burroughs’ life “and that world and milieu, even down to the level of … what kind of gin he drank, what kind of cigarettes he smoked, what his clothes were made of. All of that stuff is so significant when it comes to the character that he had invented.”
As for the murder of Joan Vollmer, “We had to find a way to bring that in while at the same time being very clear that we were making a movie about a fictional character Lee and not a real existing man, William S. Burroughs,” Kuritzkes said. “I wasn’t interested in writing the William S. Burroughs story. I was interested in writing ‘Queer.’ The person I had to be faithful to was the character rather than the author. But that doesn’t mean there’s not some instability in the barrier between those two people.”
“Queer” is now in theaters from A24. Read IndieWire’s full interview with Luca Guadagnino about the film here.
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