Diksha Sundriyal
In Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer,’ Daniel plays the role of William Lee, an American expat living in Mexico City, trying to drown his days in alcohol and sexual encounters with strange men. As his days roll into one, with more of the same, a flicker of change arrives in the form of Eugene “Gene” Allerton. Lee is attached to him at first sight, but he is confused by Gene because, on the one hand, he entertains Lee’s advances and spends time with him. But, at the same time, he doesn’t clarify whether he identifies as gay or not, forcing Lee to be overtly cautious around him. At least in the beginning.
When they have sex, Lee is beyond himself. He is happy that the man he has fallen for reciprocates some of his feelings, but soon enough, he discovers that that is the extent of what he will get from Gene. Following their first sexual encounter, Gene puts a distance between himself and Lee, which makes the latter even more desperate to win his affection. In the end, he offers Gene to accompany him on a trip to South America, where he will take care of all the expenses. He even gives Gene the freedom to indulge in romantic endeavors with the other sex. The only condition is that Gene should be kind to him at least twice a week.
After showing some hesitation, Gene agrees to accompany Lee. However, the trip immediately turns sour when Gene falls ill due to the withdrawal faced by the lack of drugs. Still, as he gets better (after he gets drugs prescribed by a doctor), things get better between them, and they have sex. Eventually, they enter the final leg of their journey, where Lee seeks out Dr. Cotter, with the help of whom he hopes to access the telepathic properties of yage, aka ayahuasca. He and Gene take the drug trip together, but what should have consolidated their relationship tears them further apart. SPOILERS AHEAD.
What Happens on the Trip to Dr Cotter?
Despite all the sexual encounters Lee had had in his life, the only thing that he really wanted was to have a connection with someone. He suffered from a severe case of loneliness, and it could only be treated by being with someone who loved and cared about him like he loved and cared about them. However, he never found someone to feel so strongly about, until he met Gene. It was love at first sight for Lee, and the more time he spent with Gene, the further he’d fall for him. The desire to be with him turned Lee desperate and needy, but he didn’t care about all that. He was way past caring for the shenanigans where he’d act like he didn’t care when he actually did more than anything else. The same could not be said about Gene.
While Lee seemed more comfortable in his skin as a gay man, Gene still seemed to be making peace with it. At times, he would genuinely be interested in Lee, but then they’d be in public, and Gene would act like he didn’t care one bit about the man he was with. The more Lee clung to him, the more Gene felt like getting away from him, but in the end, it was not Gene’s desperation for his love but his own insecurities that led him on a path that permanently separated him and Lee.
During their trip to Dr. Cotter, Lee, and Gene share an incredibly intimate moment when they consume ayahuasca together. The drug trip pulls down all the walls between them, giving Lee the telepathic ability to share his thoughts and words without saying a thing. Sure enough, he doesn’t say a word during the trip. Even when he tries to speak, his words are muted. Slowly, he and Gene start to communicate in a different language, one that fuses their minds and bodies together so much that they might as well merge and become a single person. For Lee, this is the level of intimacy that he’d been searching for his whole life, but for Gene, this experience is an eye-opener that burns his insecurities with greater intensity.
What Happens to Eugene? Does He Die?
Despite all the sex, this is the first time they are intimate with each other in the truest sense of the word, and this scares Gene because he hasn’t reached this level of intimacy with anyone before. Dr. Cotter sees this, too, which is why she tries to talk to Gene, encouraging him to stay and explore it further rather than running away from it. However, he doesn’t change his mind, and Lee knows what this means. If his young lover hadn’t already been distant enough from him, he becomes so after the trip. Even as they leave, Gene walks forward, maintaining a distance that doesn’t allow Lee to catch up with him no matter how hard he tries.
In the end, Lee sees Gene at a distance, stopping to drink water, and that’s the last he sees of him. As soon as Gene disappears, Lee finds himself falling upwards and then through the darkness of space from where he lands on a beach two years later in New Mexico. This sudden fall and darkness represent Lee’s state of mind following Gene’s departure. This is the man he truly loved and wanted to be with, which is why the rejection hits so hard that it takes time for him to come out of it. The two years that the movie skips pass in a haze for Lee as he tries to get himself back on track. When he lands on the beach, he finally has stability, and he can function without breaking down and thinking about Gene all the time.
Still, Gene is always in the back of his mind, and it is this desire to run into him again that leads him inside the Ship Ahoy. When he reunites with his friend, Joe, he gets news about the lover who jilted him. It turns out that Gene has taken other lovers over the past two years. According to Joe, he is now with an army colonel, whom he is accompanying on a trip to South America as a guide. Or at least, that’s what everyone heard of him last. He hasn’t been around for people to get further updates on him. Joe, too, can see Lee’s heartbreak, but there is nothing that can be done about it. Gene has moved on with his life, and Lee will never see him again. And that is something that he will have to accept.
What Does the Dream Sequence Mean?
Later that night, Lee checks into the hotel that he did at the beginning of the film, where he had a one-night stand with a young man he met in the bar. He sleeps uneasily, but he also has a dream that taps into the inner crisis that has been bubbling up inside him for a very long time. First, he sees himself in a different room in the hotel, where there is a miniature replica of the hotel on the table. As Lee peers through its window, he sees a miniature version of himself walking through its halls and entering a room. As soon as Lee enters the room, he sees a snake eating itself on the floor. This ouroboros is weeping and disappears when Lee focuses on other things in the room.
The snake represents the unending cycle of heartbreak, misery, and loneliness that Lee has suffered throughout his entire life. All the relationships that were worth pursuing and giving his heart over went through the same cycle of Lee getting deeply invested and then getting left behind. Gene is neither the first nor the last person to break his heart, but still, he is the only person that Lee ever truly loved, and it is the thought of him that lingers in his mind, even in his final moments. So, when he looks away from the snake, which is a jarring representation of his life, he sees Gene in front of him.
If Lee is represented by the tragedy of the snake eating itself, Gene is represented by the centipede, which reflects his suppression. The tragedy of his life, or at least the one that factored into their relationship was the fact that Gene couldn’t make peace with his homosexuality. He refused to acknowledge the feelings he had for Lee, even after they became thoroughly evident following the ayahuasca trip, and that marked the end of the relationship between them. Lee wonders if Gene has taken the same insecurities forward and if he will be caught in a tragic repetition of his own that will destroy his life. But more important than that is Lee’s desire to break out of his own vicious circle.
A moment of distraction pulls Lee’s focus away from Gene, and when he looks back, Gene is sitting on the bed and puts a glass on his head. Lee promptly takes out his gun and fires away. He is supposed to shoot the glass, but he ends up hitting Gene, though it takes a moment for him to realise that. At first, he thinks he has shot the glass, but when he sees it roll out in front of him, he realizes what he has done. He embraces and kisses his former lover, but his grief is cut short by the sound of the wind. He takes a moment to look at the open window, but when he looks back, Gene is gone, and the entire room is empty. Lee heads towards the door, but he doesn’t open it. He stops right in front of it and slowly disappears.
This is not the first time he has felt like disappearing. He experienced this state of loneliness several times in his life, notably once while sitting right next to his dear friend, Joe. However, disappearing right before opening the door shows that Lee is permanently trapped in the room that he has made in his heart for Gene. While it may have been years since Gene left him, Lee hasn’t been able to remove him from his heart and thoughts. Even when he shoots the man, the room is left empty without him, which makes it worse. Lee disappearing by the door shows that he could never find a way out of this emptiness he housed within himself and no one else took Gene’s place either. Eventually, he drowned in this loneliness, and his whole life disappeared into this empty room.
Does Lee Die?
What may have worked against Lee in his relationships with other men could be traced to his clinginess. His strong desire to connect with a person would come off as desperation and put off the potential lover. On some level, he is aware of this, but despite his best efforts, he cannot change his nature, just as the other person cannot change their nature, which comes with its own set of challenges and insecurities. The same clinginess leads Gene to react with a greater indifference, and when he eventually feels Lee’s desire to cling to the relationship reflected in his own thoughts, he decides to drop the whole thing and departs for good. Still, in between those moments of heartless indifference, he gives Lee moments of deep tenderness, the best of which is the time when he puts his leg over Lee’s when the latter is dealing with withdrawal symptoms and is terribly sick.
This act was special for Lee because it caught him by surprise, showing him that there is a semblance of affection in Gene’s heart, even if he doesn’t care to show it. It is just Gene’s leg over his, but for Lee, it might very well have been the embrace he longed for his entire life. And so, it is this moment of tenderness that he clings to for the rest of his life, remembering what was once almost within his reach. It is also the only consolation he has from the failed relationship. If nothing else was real and meaningful, then at least in this moment, Gene showed him love, and that’s what Lee returns to in his final moments. Because they never saw each other again, for Lee, Gene remains trapped in the amber of those memories, staying perpetually young, just as he was the last time he saw him.
It is this image of his former lover that returns to an old Lee who is still trapped in the hotel room where he once had sexual rendezvous. He hears Gene call his name one last time, and when he lies on the bed, trembling just like he did when he had withdrawal, he thinks about Gene snuggling next to him and putting his leg over Lee’s to comfort him like he did all those years ago. In some ways, this has been Lee’s lifeboat in the turbulent sea of emotional distress all this while. His life after Gene has passed away in a haze that he doesn’t care to remember anymore. Only his memories have occupied his mind. So, in the end, it makes sense that he would prefer to relive the memory that is dearest to him right before he breathes his last.
Read More: Is Daniel Craig’s Queer a True Story? Is William Lee Based on a Real Person?
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