Queer Explained for Cinephiles | The Giant Stares Into the Motel Room

If you want to understand Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that much of the story boils down to a simple theme: connection. And that explains essentially 95% of the movie. The bad news is that the surreal epilogue takes some huge swings that are a lot more nuanced and less straightforward. Let’s break it down. 

Queer explained

What is Queer about? Themes and symbolism

William Lee has two things going on. He’s profoundly lonely and an addict. The film’s first hour focuses explicitly on the loneliness. Initially, Lee prowls for company. Obsessively. You can imagine a life filled with throw away, superficial encounters. Until he finds Eugene. Then he fixates. In the second hour, Luca makes Lee’s drug addiction a focal point. In hindsight, viewers should realize that Lee has treated Eugene like a drug. And that their relationship has been, for Lee, a kind of opioid. He gets high from it, goes through withdrawals, etc. 

Lee’s interest in telepathy is really just a byproduct of his longing to connect. To know someone intimately rather than superficially, to understand what they’re thinking and feeling (as opposed to trusting what they’re saying). The ayahuasca trip is the culmination of this. Lee and Eugene don’t just touch, they go beneath the skin, into the flesh, and meld. It’s a truly connected, immersive, intimate experience. Everything Lee had wanted. 

My interpretation of the end is that Lee’s time with Eugene changed him for the better. That’s essentially what’s conveyed by all the final surreal moments. It’s symbolic for Lee moving past his addiction and being in a healthier place. I’ll explain that in more detail below. 

Interpreting Queer’s ending

Yearning, Ghostly Moments, Disconnect, Ayahuasca

When we first meet William Lee, he’s desperate to connect with anyone. That’s what the opening scene is all about—Lee is on the hunt for someone to sleep with; he’s an addict looking for a quick fix. But he longs for something deeper. When we first hear about his interest in telepathy, it seems silly. But it’s a manifestation of his supreme loneliness, so actually quite a hopeless romantic character trait. This yearning also explains the ghostly moments where an ethereal arm lifts from Lee’s own and reaches out to Eugene. 

Over the course of the film, Lee grows closer to Eugene. They form a superficial friendship. Then have superficial physical intimacy. That deepens when they become travel companions. Eugene shows genuine care, like when he throws a leg over Lee’s own cold leg. That builds to actual intercourse between the two. As close as they become, there’s still a barrier between them, which is most clear when Lee, the morning after the intercourse, tries to re-engage with Eugene. Surely, after such a breakthrough, he thinks, it must be okay? But Eugene pushes him away. Hard. The two still haven’t figured each other out. 

The ayahuasca trip is the last bastion of connection for the two. They transcend their individuality and become one. It’s an intimacy way beyond anything the two had previously experienced. And is everything Lee had hoped for. But also the antithesis to Eugene. He’s not a forthcoming person. He values his independence. So sharing something so personal and intense with Lee actually turns Eugene off. Which is why he’s ready to leave. That’s when Queer takes an even harder turn to the surreal. 

Epilogue

Initially, I wondered if the entire epilogue was part of the ayahuasca trip and Lee would wake up back in the jungle. Except you wouldn’t put in formal, non-diegetic chapter cards that say “Epilogue” and “2 years later” if it’s all part of Lee’s hallucination. So how do we explain the jump to outer space? Lee’s appearance from the jungle and back on the shore? Or him being a giant outside the hotel. And what happens with the infinity snake and the “William Tell” moment?

We can glean some information from the novella the movie is based on. The author, William S. Burroughs, wrote a lengthy, detailed introduction to the story. Near the end, he mentions he has had “A lifelong preoccupation with Control and Virus.” This is hinted at earlier, as Burroughs describes writing his novel Junky and how “the motivation for that was comparatively simple: to put down in the most accurate and simple terms my experiences as an addict.” If Junky was about the Virus, then “Queer” is about Control. How does a junky find their footing? Burroughs: “As soon as something is written, it loses the power of surprise, just as a virus loses its advantage when a weakened virus has created alerted antibodies. So I achieved some immunity from further perilous ventures along these lines by writing my experience down.” 

So we know Burroughs was self-reflective and about his own journey from addiction to some degree of sobriety. 

The epilogue of the novella mirrors the film. Lee and Allerton leave Cotter’s and suddenly Lee is on his own, in Panama. Months go by, maybe even years, and he finally returns to Mexico City. He sees familiar faces and an old friend tells him Eugene had, just like in the movie, taken an army colonel down to South America, as a guide. The novella ends with Lee’s dream of Allerton. Very different details. Lee’s a “skip tracer”, essentially a bounty hunter, a finder of someone who “skipped” payment. This dream version of Lee confronts the wayward Allerton and tells him he’ll have to pay up. But then seemingly has a change of heart. As he leaves, he says, “Oh, uh, about your, uh, account. I’ll be around soon. That is, within the next few….We’ll come to some kind of an agreement.” 

Literature is a lot less straightforward than film. Especially Burroughs, who was one of those mid-20th century Beat writers who hit people in the head with postmodernism. But that final dream amounts to a role reversal. Lee is the one who, finally, has power over Eugene. And is the one setting the terms. And we know Eugene, Gene, Allerton, is symbolic for a drug. The virus. Which means that final dream is about control. 

The movie makes different choices but arrives at the same conclusion. After the ayahuasca trip, Lee achieved his goal—genuine connection. And having that frees him. He transcends, transforms. That’s why the camera suddenly flies into the stars. And why Lee, when he suddenly “falls” onto a beach, somewhere else, has a different energy. A calm he had previously lacked, a health that had been beyond him. This ease and confidence is what he carries back to Mexico City. And it’s why the film takes us full circle back to the hotel room. At the beginning, that very hotel room was where Lee had a hookup with some other lonely, damaged person. But now he’s okay being in that room alone. He’s not desperate for someone else. 

And the dream is essentially him having that out of body realization. He looks into the model of the hotel, sees himself go into that very room in the model, and watches that confrontation with Eugene. Killing Gene symbolizes killing the need for Gene. The desire for him. The addiction. It’s the death of the virus and the gaining of control. The snake swallowing its own tail is the classic metaphor for infinity, which gives this confrontation a timeless quality. But, also, snakes are venomous, so it connects to the idea of drugs as poison, as Allerton as a poison. The centipede is also part of that. It was the pendant on the necklace of that initial lover, a man as sad and lonely as Lee. That Eugene now has it on further positions the dream figure as the embodiment of all of Lee’s negative characteristics that he’s finally ready to purge. 

In short

All of that amounts to Queer being about Willima Lee’s character journey from needing to connect with others to feeling connected to himself. From addiction to control. As confusing and Lynchian as the ending is, the technique that almost always puts such choices into perspective is just contrasting who the character is at the end to who they were at the beginning. The change between the two almost always gives you the information you need. 

William Tell

One last thing to note is that Eugene placing the glass on his head is a reference to the real life of William S. Burroughs. It doesn’t happen in the novella. This is a quote from an actual newspaper article written in 1951 about the event: 

Mrs Joan Vollmer Burroughs, 27, formerly of Loudonville, was shot and killed by her husband Thursday night during a drinking party in a Mexico City apartment. The husband, William Seward Burroughs, 37, a descendant of the adding machine family, first told police after the shooting he had tried to shoot a glass of gin off his wife’s head, but the bullet struck her in the forehead…. After consulting a lawyer, police said, Burroughs revised his story and told them his wife was wounded fatally when he accidentally dropped the pistol. The official police report said Burroughs had taken the pistol from a bag and was demonstrating with it. It added that “Burroughs thought she was joking” when he wife fell to the floor from her chair after the gun fired….

Police said the “William Tell story” of the shooting was related after the former Albany woman died at the hospital. He is said to have told authorities of wanting to display his marksmanship with a newly bought pistol. The story was that he placed a glass of gin on his wife’s head, fired and missed—the bullet striking her in the forehead. 

Burroughs, in the intro to “Queer”, said: When I started to write this companion text to “Queer”, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer’s block like straitjacket: “I glance at the manuscript of ‘Queer’ and feel I simply can’t read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by which one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded. —Painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge.” The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951…. The event towards which Lee feels himself inexorably driven is the death of his wife by own hand, the knowledge of possession, a dead hand waiting to slip over his life a glove. So a smog of menace and evil rises from the pages, an evil that Lee, knowing and yet not knowing, tries to escape with frantic flights of fantasy: his routines, which set one’s teeth on edge because of the ugly menace just behind or to one side of them, a presence palpable as a haze.

So, to Burroughs, “Queer” wasn’t a confession of guilt so much as an acceptance of fault. Luca acknowledges the specter of Joan Vollmer in the work by changing the final dream to incorporate the glass-on-the-head moment between Lee and Eugene. 

Cast

• William Lee – Daniel Craig
• Eugene Allerton – Drew Starkey
• Joe Guidry – Jason Schwartzman
• Dr. Cotter – Lesley Manville
• Tom Weston – Ariel Schulman
• Jim Cochran – David Lowery
• Mary – Andra Ursuta
• Based on – The novella “Queer” by William S. Burroughs
• Written by – Justin Kuritzkes
• Directed by – Luca Guadagnino

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This is a living analysis. So if there are more things you want explained or discussed, leave a comment below!

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