The many screen lives of William S. Burroughs

There is a seminal event from Burroughs' life that Naked Lunch, Beat and Queer have shown as their climactic scenes

- Aditya Mani Jha

Luca Guadagnino understands the poetry of human bodies in motion, the raw frisson offered by both conflict and convergence. His tennis drama Challengers (2024) was a great advertisement for this quality, as is his latest, Queer (now streaming on Mubi). The film is based on the eponymous 1985 novella by the American writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997). Almost as a counterpoint to the absorbing physicality of his films, there's a poignant moment when Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) tells his older lover, American expatriate William Lee (Daniel Craig) that he's not queer, he's "disembodied". This is especially moving considering everything going on in the story with Lee and, by extension, Burroughs ("William Lee" was a frequent authorial stand-in). His physical dependence on heroin and morphine is so bad it's making him shit blood. He's desperately searching for yage, a psychedelic substance that he believes will help him 'transcend' the body and open hitherto untapped reservoirs of spiritual potential.

Craig's mesmerizing performance as Lee/Burroughs reminds us of just how much we lost in the 15 years he was tethered to the James Bond franchise. Is there even one moment in any of his Bond movies that rivals the eroticism of Nirvana's 'Come As You Are' playing while Lee/Burroughs does the classic movie-star walk? He's now the fifth actor to portray Burroughs, the others being Peter Weller in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), Kiefer Sutherland in Garry Malkow's Beat (2000), Viggo Mortensen in Walter Salles' On the Road (2012) and Ben Foster in John Krokidas' Kill Your Darlings (2013). Weller and Sutherland had lead roles in their films while Mortensen and Foster's can be called extended cameos.

THE BEAT GENERATION