The Horror of Desire: Burroughs & Bacon on Film
Daniel Craig moderates a conversation between “Queer” and “Love Is the Devil” — two biographical fever dreams of uncanny love.
The great American poet Allen Ginsberg thought that Francis Bacon paints the way William Burroughs writes. While distorted figures and geometrical structures may have little to do with the cut-up technique and dense prose on the surface, it is known that the two contemporaries’ telltale stylistic attributes share, besides an appetite for peeling the skin back on the morbid, obscene and unsettling, a dismissive attitude towards rules and molds: a reputation of breaking out of conventions or fashions and putting the emphasis on a naturally terrifying unconscious, thus surprising, provoking.
Bacon and Burroughs’ minds were vaguely in rapport throughout their middle-to-later career stages, following their introduction (facilitated by Ginsberg) in Tangier, Morocco in the 1950s. “I remember [...] we’d have several discussions about painting,” reminisces Burroughs upon reconnecting with Bacon in 1982 for a segment of Burroughs: The Movie, a documentary on him directed by Howard Brookner. Recounting a recent visit to a Paul Cézanne exhibition in Paris, the painter muses on Cézanne’s association with Cubism — “decoration,” he remarks, echoing his view of the height of the fashion in abstract painting decades ago. He notes three garden paintings from the exhibition for which Cézanne seemed to have “completely forgotten all his theories.” “They were absolutely superb images,” Bacon says.
At the time of their meeting, the artist had found himself in Tangier on the trail of his extremely violent then-lover Peter Lacy who had moved there and with whom Bacon sustained a nearly fatal sadomasochistic relationship, utterly infatuated with Lacy’s dangerous, dominant streak he allegedly couldn’t bear to be separated from. The same era, of course, had caught Burroughs technically on the run after murdering his wife, Joan Vollmer, in an infamous “shooting accident” during a drunken game of William Tell in ‘51. Yet while awaiting trial, the writer was also in the process of composing the manuscript of his unfinished novel, Queer: the narrative of a doomed affair between his own stand-in, middle-aged, heroin withdrawal-experiencing Mexico migrant William Lee and young GI Eugene Allerton — a character based on Adelbert Lewis Marker who Burroughs had tango with in real life.
Despite encouragement from fellow Beat Generation writers Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Queer wouldn’t be published until 1985. In the 33 years leading up to its eventual publication (with the addition of a lengthy introduction by Burroughs himself penned exactly 40 years ago), the author referred to the draft as juvenile and unpublishable, in the way one might dismiss any attempt at honest vulnerability as stupid, best kept secret. “While it was I who wrote Junky,” his first novel, completed with the concrete motivations of “publication, money, recognition” also reflected in its protagonist, “I feel that I was being written in Queer,” reads the book’s introduction, where Burroughs also goes on to acknowledge the ghost of Vollmer’s loss as a haunting presence behind the story, still breathing menacingly through the page.
By accident or design, it’s the same biblical number of years that it took director Luca Guadagnino to reach the realization of his Queer adaptation for the silver screen. The Gen X-er, best known for Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Challengers (2024), who read the novel while coming of age, first came up with a “terrible” script at 20 years old. His subsequent efforts didn’t come to fruition until Challengers collaborator Justin Kuritzkes got handed a copy of the book in 2022 and turned in an appropriate screenplay just as the rights to adapt it became available. Assuming an experimental angle that doesn’t shy away from hyperrealism and entire lynchian sequences, Guadagnino effectively channels Burroughs’ writing in Queer (2024), a borderline hallucinatory tale of asynchronized love against the dreamlike backdrop of the writer’s memory’s Mexico City.
None other than Daniel Craig is employed for the role of the author’s self-insert, Lee: a man whose sanity, or rather, social facade is hanging by a thread, uncovered and rendered raw from having just shed his protective blanket of drug influence, and prone to volatile acts of childlike intensity, whether behavioral, emotional, or sexual. It’s a complex portrait which Craig embodies masterfully, with profound sadness lacing his every effort at pulling his own strings, no matter how silly or plain bizarre. Pathetic clown tricks involving performative monologues and minute transgressions seem to hold Lee hostage in a glass cell as he moves through the world with a systematic approach to “scoring” in the sexual sense. His most sincere desire — to be holistically communicated with, touched, seen — is exposed and burning, yet incapacitated, immutably repressed.
It’s easy to see even obliquely, through the film, how Burroughs equating Queer to an open wound of sorts ultimately justifies its delay for publication. Guadagnino’s empathetic depiction of Lee’s character provides a, perhaps, unexpectedly delicate layer to the fascinating myth of Burroughs, who is renowned for idiosyncratic, zany works like Junky and Naked Lunch, and whose real-life persona, determined by his deep, masculine voice and stoic mannerisms, could be said to maintain closer resemblance to the character of his love interest, Allerton, at least based on Drew Starkey’s faultlessly sharp rendition of him. Allerton himself reads opaque and distant in spite of his impeccably polished, breathtakingly attractive appearance. Hot on the outside, cold on the inside: the human equivalent to a “Baked Alaska,” as described in the book and quoted in the movie.
This iteration of Craig’s is, understandably, very distinct from his career-defining body of work as agent 007, though viewers who’d consider the dichotomy novel or shocking would be in for a treat discovering a pre-Bond gig of his from 1998. BBC’s television film Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (written and directed by John Maybury) sees the then-30-year-old English actor in shoes not unlike Starkey’s in Queer, playing the elusive George Dyer to Derek Jacobi’s eccentric, much older Francis Bacon. A biographical story with a fictional sheen, featuring lens tricks that give it the chaotic yet enclosed look of Bacon’s art, the project cinematically interprets the painter’s relationship with his post-Lacy lover in the 1960s, born on the heels of the latter’s death; a relationship which reversed the emotional dynamics in Bacon’s love life by appointing him the upper hand in terms of both age and status, given Dyer’s precarious profession of small-time theft and economic reliance on Bacon. Referring to Dyer, Jacobi delivers the phrase “combination of amorality and innocence” in the film.
Here’s an occasion where Burroughs, in his conviction about his and Bacon’s diametrical character differences despite their common creative association, got proven fallible. Love Is the Devil seems to be winking at the fact. Towards the end of the film, as Dyer begins a downward spiral into alcoholism and substance abuse, Craig stars in a bar scene, where Dyer is chatting with another man (“The sad thing about old photographs is that everybody’s dead,” he says. “Not always,” the man responds.) Their brief dialogue comes across at best drunkenly incohesive and at worst nonsensical, leaving, however, some interesting words tumbling out of Craig’s mouth: “That’s because he likes middle-aged lorry drivers and I like young boys.”
I can’t be sure as to what extent Craig was aware he was quoting a future role there. In response to the sentence that opens this piece, Ted Morgan, in his biography Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, writes that “Burroughs, although fond of Bacon, denied that there was any connection, and said: ‘Bacon and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum. He likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys [...]’” — a passage that was quoted in Daniel Farson’s The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon which provided Love Is the Devil’s basic text.
Whether there is any real metatextual significance beyond a nod here is unclear to me and perhaps illogical, though, besides Craig’s involvement in both roles, the take that looks at Lee as a fantastical natural progression of Dyer’s character (had he not committed suicide at 38 and casting aside the chronological inconsistencies) captures some of my attention. Beyond the common thread of heroin addiction, could there be something to be said about a type of evolution for a brooding, macho yet affection-seeking personality like Dyer’s (who, in the movie, addresses Bacon with the line “I don’t like it when you get queeny”) or Burroughs’, as he’s come to be known in the cultural zeitgeist (austere, aloof) but with the awareness of what Queer announces about his interiority?
As sensitively portrayed by Craig, Lee, down to his body language, is defined by both a hesitant embracement of his “proclivities” and a disavowal of stereotypical models of queerness. The ambivalence comes together brilliantly in a scene of overlap between two figures that seem to shape his perception around social expression according to sexuality. As he tries to gauge whether Allerton is queer, Lee notices him interacting with the character of John Dumé (Drew Droege), described as the most inconspicuous member of a “little clique of queers” who frequent a place called The Green Lantern and whose reputation reveals itself through the phrase “a bunch of screaming fags.” Moments later, as he opens up to Allerton about his homosexuality, he confesses having been taught the “duty to live and to bear [his] burden proudly for all to see” from a “wise old queen” named Bobo; in the film, an almost mythical presence invoked as a symbol of faith in the possibility of love; yet in the book, a martyr whose tragic death’s graphic details are included in the same dialogue.1
“I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be that I was one of those subhuman things?” starts Lee while recounting his experience of discovery, and it’s one of Queer’s most gripping narrative themes, to observe its two men navigate falling in love with intentional disassociation from all social signifiers of queerness — a titular question the film asks. When Dyer is heard disapproving of Bacon’s femininity, the latter compares him to his father who was always “frightened of the woman in [him].” He continues, “I suppose only the very young can get away with drag. Nothing more revolting than old, painted poofs.” It is from both perspectives that the feeling of aversion towards the tragic figure of the older queen is palpable; a figure who represents, in some garish way, queerness in its original definition, perversion, fragility, but also decay — loneliness. A symbol of an unwanted fate.
“I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,” is the line Lee and Allerton repeat to each other in reality and dream; their testament to a siloed existence-non-existence in the nebulous realm of sanction-free desire, obtained through careful curation of unassuming social identity. In their relationship, their shared witnessing of each other as if on opposite sides of a mirror, manifests the gift and terror of being seen — physical, therefore unsafe. Burroughs, in Queer’s 1985 introduction, describes Lee as “disintegrated, desperately in need of contact, completely unsure of himself and of his purpose.”
What Lee is looking for is contact or recognition, like a photon emerging from the haze of insubstantiality to leave an indelible recording in Allerton’s consciousness. Failing to find an adequate observer, he is threatened by painful dispersal, like an unobserved photon.
He adds:
Lee does not know that he is already committed to writing, since this is the only way he has of making an indelible record, whether Allerton is inclined to observe or not. Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction. He has already made the choice between his life and his work.
To the final sentence, I hear Jacobi’s Bacon distantly respond, “The selfishness my work demands leaves no room for an emotional self. Can tenderness ultimately only manifest itself in the motion of a brush? Even this remains invisible.”
Thank you so much for reading. I love both of these films so much and couldn’t resist writing a little something about their overlap which is so very fascinating to me. Let me know what you think as always!
"Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre's Hispano-Suiza when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe-skin upholstery. Even the eyes and the brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound. The Duc says he will carry that ghastly shlup with him to his mausoleum... Then I knew the meaning of loneliness."
just watched love is the devil finally and had to peruse through twitter to relocate this post, incredible!!!