Warning: This post contains spoilers for the movie Queer.
Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, based on the semi-autobiographical novella by William S. Burroughs, appears fairly straightforward on its surface. It follows Lee (Daniel Craig), a middle-aged gay man in 1950s Mexico City. He’s the kind of guy who exudes outer confidence, proudly flirting with any man he can. But it’s a false swagger; underneath lies crippling loneliness and misery. Lee regularly drowns his sorrows in drugs and alcohol, but when he meets Eugene (Drew Starkey), he finds hope that everything can change: a devastatingly handsome solution has arrived, as if conjured from a dream.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Queer explores Lee and Eugene’s relationship for much of its 137-minute runtime, but the third act takes things for a loop, an explosion of psychedelic imagery, grief, longing, and desire. And things get extremely, nearly undefinably, weird. The story’s ending is unexpected, challenging, and bizarre, laden with symbolism that may not be immediately obvious. But within the greater context of queer longing and loneliness, it’s not too difficult to understand. Let’s unpack the ending of Queer.
In this third act, seeking to achieve clarity in his life, Lee travels deep into the Ecuadorian jungle with Eugene in tow to find Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), who possesses an incredibly potent drug that could provide some answers. The two men take the ayahuasca and go on an extremely intense trip. By the campfire outside Cotter’s home, their bodies dissolve away, and the voice of Eugene tells Lee that despite what they’ve experienced together, he’s not queer. This clearly crushes Lee, who screams furiously at Eugene, though his words are rendered inaudible amid the trip—Lee cannot make his voice heard. The same night, Lee tries to reconnect with Eugene, but the latter resists, telling him to go to sleep. They lie together, Eugene fast asleep, and Lee wide awake, looking deeply troubled. Even in the midst of an immeasurably intense drug trip, he knows the love of his life is going to leave him. The self-loathing that never really went away will come back in full force; the cycle of misery continues.
Read more: Daniel Craig Offers Himself Up Completely to the Shimmering Sensuality of Queer
The next day, Eugene too, is troubled. Dr. Cotter tells him, in reference to the previous night’s revelations, “Door’s already open, there’s no going back now. All you can do is look away. But why would you?” He and Lee set out to make their way back to Mexico City, but Lee loses Eugene in the jungle. He’ll never see him again.
Two years later, Lee returns to Mexico City and meets his old friend Joe (Jason Schwartzman) at the bar where they spent so many drunken nights. Lee inquires about Eugene, and Joe tells him that he went to South America as a tour guide for an Army Colonel.
Then things get bizarre—or rather, even more bizarre. We’re dropped into a hotel room, the same one Lee had a hookup in at the beginning of Queer. The camera pans slowly around the room to find Lee lying alone in his white suit. He gets up, only to find things have changed. He’s now in a different room, with a spiraling carpet—a suitable metaphor for his mental state—and a dollhouse on the table, a replica of the hotel he’s in. He peers in with one eye and sees himself walking the red hallway, alone. His miniature self walks to the last room on the right, which is almost entirely empty.
Dr. Cotter’s words ring particularly true here. While she was talking to Euguene about an open door, we don’t really see the results of his newly open mind. We do, however, see how the ayahuasca has opened Lee’s, via a series of mysterious dreams that punctuate the end of Queer. The dollhouse represents Lee’s past, a seedy encounter that happened before he first fell for Eugene. Here, Lee’s sadness manifests in a desire to revisit the past, a time before he fell for Eugene. But he doesn’t wish to erase the memory of Eugene; instead, placing himself in the dollhouse affords him the chance to try again—perhaps if he wasn’t so detestable this time around, Eugene wouldn’t declare he isn’t queer, and he’d stay with Lee.
He closes the door behind him and finds a snake eating itself in the shape of the infinity symbol. This is an ouroboros, a representation of the natural cycles of life, death, and rebirth. Yet this snake sheds a tear. Lee looks up and sees Eugene on a single bed, with a glass pane over his crotch area. Eugene’s centipede necklace—the same necklace worn by the man Lee seduced at the beginning of the film—has come alive and is moving. Lee looks down, and the snake is gone. Looks up, the glass is gone, and Eugene is sitting on the bed. Lee stares at him.
While Eugene’s symbol (the centipede) is moving ahead, Lee’s (the snake) is consuming itself, doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. Eugene is able to carry on after his romance with Lee, while Lee is confined to a life of falling into the same miserable cycles of loneliness and addiction, a feeling manifested by the snake shedding a hopeless tear. Eugene can walk away from Lee—and from queerness—but Lee cannot escape who he is, nor the repressive society he lives in, and it’s bound to eat him alive. In an interview with TIME, Guadagnino spoke to the movie’s symbolism, explaining that the centipede represents repression: “The centipede is the villain in the movie,” he said.
Eugene then places a shot glass on his head, and Lee pulls out a gun from his jacket pocket, a weapon whose eventual use has been foreshadowed in several earlier scenes. He fires the gun, shooting Eugene square in the temple, killing him. Lee smiles wickedly, as if he’s freed himself from the pain, but then quickly realizes what he’s done, and runs over to Eugene, tenderly holding his face and kissing his lips one last time.
While this particular moment reads like a sort of fever dream, it’s the one moment in Queer’s confounding conclusion that’s probably grounded in reality. Burroughs, the author of the novella the film is based on, had a similar encounter with his second wife, writer Joan Vollmer. One night in their Mexico City apartment, the pair engaged in a drunken game of William Tell, in which Burroughs tried to shoot a glass of gin off Vollmer’s head. Instead, he shot her in the forehead, killing her. (He was later convicted in absentia.) It’s an important detail that gives Lee’s smile in the film a rather sinister bent; Lee smiles momentarily because he’s freed of the love that’s emotionally paralyzed him for years, and the real-world tie suggests that Burroughs was pleased to be free of a heterosexual marriage that held him back from his homosexuality. Still, as the wave of grief post-smile confirms, both have killed the person they love, even if only figuratively in Lee’s case.
Lee then hears a sound at the window and looks toward it, but when he looks back, Eugene is gone and the room is empty. He leaves it, fading away at the door instead of opening it. He’s then in another room, similar to the first, but now he’s wearing all black and has aged significantly. Lee sits on the chair next to the green table and wearily, slowly, takes his hat off, revealing his white hair. He then sits down on the unmade bed and shakes—not unlike the earlier depiction of his drug withdrawal—as he tries to fall asleep. There is nothing Lee can do to shake the memories of Eugene, a man who isn’t just the one who got away, but a symbol of the sexual and romantic freedom and confidence that has eluded Lee his whole life.
The changing rooms and sudden aging—as well as the particular shade of green—recall a similarly mystifying movie ending: that of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. While astronaut Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) has to travel to Jupiter for his personal odyssey, Lee remains trapped in variations of his hotel room. Though Queer recalls 2001 from a visual standpoint, its conclusion is far less optimistic than its sci-fi counterpart. While it would require much more space to dive into the complexities of 2001, the film ultimately suggests a hopeful evolution of humanity into something greater, as Dave is reborn as the Starchild. Queer does not share this optimism.
Lee imagines his younger self embracing Eugene, a man he desperately loved, but who did not love him back. Even here, the camera only shows them from the waist down, disembodied. We close in on Lee’s face, the camera getting tighter on him as the sound fades away. His lips tremble slightly, then stop, as he dies, hopeless and alone.
Though there was no hope for Lee, the film’s final seconds—a haze of blues, purples, and yellows—offer something more optimistic. The dancing streaks of color give the impression of glowing embers, lighting a new desire. Queer is a film deeply invested in how lonely it can feel to be queer, and what we put ourselves and our bodies through in an attempt to escape from that gnawing loneliness. Perhaps, in these final moments, these sparks emerging from Lee remind us that one day, for future generations of queer people, light will spring from darkness, and the loneliness might not be so all-consuming anymore.
