William S. Burroughs is a familiar figure in the countercultural Beat movement, along with his friends Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He is also one of the greatest and most influential American writers of the postwar era.
His reputation is largely based on his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, in which he first used “cut-up technique,” randomly chopping up pages of text and reassembling them, willy-nilly. The result is deranged, hallucinogenic, obscure, explicitly homoerotic, and mesmerizing, and Burroughs was prosecuted for obscenity when it was first published in 1959. It’s also as difficult to comprehend as the stream-of-consciousness sections of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
More than anything, however, Naked Lunch is outrageously humorous in a cryptic hardboiled sort of way, much like Burroughs himself. A Harvard alum and the scion of a wealthy St. Louis family, Burroughs was openly homosexual or, as he would say, “queer,” and not in the movement-positive way that the word is used today. He was also a heroin addict for most of his adult life.
Drugs and “deviant” sex were both illegal for much of Burroughs’s life, and that fueled his creativity: being outside the law made him paranoid and radical and filled with guilt — as did the tragically negligent shooting death of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, during a William Tell–style drunk stunt in Mexico. It led him to write his early autobiographical novel Junkie and a follow-up, Queer, in the 1950s, though Queer was not published until the 1980s.
Naked Lunch was made (impossibly) into a film by David Cronenberg in 1991. It’s funny and creepy and small potatoes compared to the novel. And now, director Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, Call Me by Your Name, Challengers) has adapted the much more straightforward Queer, which is playing in theaters. It stars former James Bond portrayer Daniel Craig as a Burroughs-like figure, William Lee, who pursues a handsome young World War II veteran, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), among the queer expats trolling about in Mexico.
Guadagnino’s filmmaking is far more romantic than Burroughs’s prose. In the movie, Craig doesn’t speak in Burroughs’s Midwestern twang or assume his deadpan facade. The storytelling is magical and expressionist, using color, production design, and hallucinations to evoke yearning and madness in subtle and extraordinarily beautiful ways. There is little of Naked Lunch’s in-your-face attitude and outrageousness in Guadagnino’s playbook. Instead, Queer is a poetic fever dream of a movie, following Lee and Allerton as they flirt and have an affair, then travel to the jungles of Ecuador to take a psychedelic drug called yagé.
The performances of the two leads and many of the supporting characters are riveting, sometimes opaque, and often heart-wrenching. In Guadagnino’s hands, Justin Kuritzkes’s script does a remarkable thing: it makes Burroughs’s story cinematic in a truly relatable way. The film is more or less faithful to the book, but it’s really about Burroughs himself from another artist’s point of view — a genuine and valid interpretation. It may actually lead to an embrace of Burroughs by the contemporary queer community, which has often treated him distantly, like a weird goth cousin.
Like Guadagnino, filmmaker Sean Baker is drawn to the stories of sexual outliers. He made a splash with his trans hooker neo-screwball comedy Tangerine in 2015, and after The Florida Project and Red Rocket, he’s back with a new film, Anora, that’s currently in theaters and streaming.
The titular heroine of Anora is an “exotic dancer” in New York City who escorts on the side. Because she understands Russian (from her grandmother, a Soviet immigrant), she’s assigned in the Manhattan strip joint where she works to give a thong-and-heels lap dance to Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch with a mansion in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn. The two hit it off.
Ani (as Anora has nicknamed herself) is pouty and tough with a daredevil sense of opportunity. Vanya (as Anora has nicknamed Ivan) is a sweet, spoiled, hyperactive perpetual teenager, desperate to stay in the U.S. and party 24/7. Impulsively, they run off to Las Vegas and get married, and as in many an old-fashioned Hollywood farce, that’s when the trouble really starts.
Vanya’s family wants the marriage annulled, and a trio of Armenian and Russian thugs are marshalled to make it happen. The young couple resist, and they are clever and slippery. And the movie, despite all of Sean Baker’s art-cinema hallmarks, is hugely entertaining.
Baker is always attracted to exotic enclaves in urban America, and Brighton Beach, with its population of immigrant Soviet Jews on the ocean in Coney Island, provides him with a wintry nouveau riche fun ride. The side trip to Vegas is the cherry on top. He’s also attracted to the uncanny mix of innocence and venality that is the sex and porn industry, and Ani offers him an eye-catching window into that world and its mentality.
Baker has an almost documentary approach to filmmaking, with a camera that “catches” the action and nonprofessional actors: it’s a neorealist way of making a story feel authentic. (Tangerine was famously shot on an adapted iPhone.) He also elicits revelatory performances from his casts. Mikey Madison, who plays Ani, is certainly remarkable in her relentless determination and unflappable spirit. She and Yura Borisov, who plays a sensitive goon, have garnered numerous nominations and critics’ awards. Skinny, pimply Mark Eydelshteyn, as Vanya, is a bouffant brat extraordinaire. The movie got a standing ovation and the Palme d’or (grand prize) at Cannes. It hasn’t been as big a hit stateside, but that’s probably because neorealism is not a box office draw.
But Baker is certainly onto something here. The emptiness of the American Dream, the alienation of sex and pleasure in our digital consumer society: there’s nothing new about either. But there’s something about the sweet ninja spirit of the movie that gives one hope. The violence — mostly smashed glass — the jiggly flesh, and the booze and drugs, is plentiful, but no one really gets hurt in Anora. The characters are trapped in a capitalist fantasia, but they refuse to see it as an endgame. And these days, a little hope goes a long way.
