REVIEWED: Luca Guadagnino's Adaptation of William Burroughs' early novella Queer.

 William Burroughs – A man who shot his wife, battled drug addiction throughout his life, cut off his little finger on a Van Gogh kick, and found himself in trouble with the law in pretty much every country he ever lived in, and, as Luca Guadagnino’s recent film reveals, was definitely Queer.

Before shooting began, expectations were high. James Bond legend Daniel Craig plays the author during his troubled time as a Mexican expat seeking companionship and direction. During this period of his life Burroughs became perhaps the first American outside of funded research college programs to venture into the jungle in search of Ayahuasca. Nowadays college kids do it on their gap year.

Burroughs bounces from alcohol to heroin addiction with all the free will of a Rizla paper in a cyclone, while being drawn, moth-like, to Allerton, a young American expat student, played by Drew Starkey, who frequents the local Ship Ahoy bar.

Burroughs has always been an interesting character to dramatize. Movies such as Beat, Kill Your Darlings, and the adaptation of Naked Lunch have, perhaps lazily, chosen to base their characters on the cold, dry, nasal-spoken persona Burroughs offered to the media. Remember, Burroughs was no slouch when it came to the media. His uncle, Poison Ivy Lee, was a PR man who handled Hitler’s American publicity campaign – “We don’t report the news, we write it,” Ivy would yell to his nephew while scoping a bird and pulling the trigger on their weekly duck-hunting expeditions. A seven-year-old Burroughs knew from an early age that the world was run by deep, inherent corruption. Old whiskey-drinking cigar-smoking card players made rich through striking oil and getting cured or inheriting it from long lines of dynastic wealth.

Guadagnino decides to go deeper than the gun-wielding anarchist of popular mythology, deeper than the inner causmanault on voyages of drug-addled self-discovery. This new film brings Burroughs to an entirely new generation, precisely because of the sensitive portrayal of his personal life, and at a time when they need him most.

Can we really celebrate a society that tolerated a man who shot his wife, bribed the judge, and sailed to Morocco to live among thieves, drug addicts, artists, and magicians? Of course we can. And here he sits on the bookshelf, next to Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Bulgakov’s The Master and the Margarita. Deep beneath the turmoil and the chaos of the man and the writing, there was something profoundly honest and human in the writer. Burroughs believed in the Johnstone approach to life – mind one’s own business and help out others when needed.

Like drug addiction begins for many youths, my own introduction to Burroughs started as a dare. Warned by close friends not to touch Naked Lunch as a kid, I was naturally curious but wisely began by dipping into the less murky, literal pools first. Junky is straightforward, hard-boiled prose typical of the pulp press that originally published it—think Dashiell Hammett or Chandler, with simple declarative sentences: "Junkies wore hats—if they had hats."

Next up, the beautifully bizarre world of Cities of the Red Night—his masterpiece. A dreamscape world of pirates, gumshoe detectives, aliens, and foreign lands. Convinced this shady literary character was a genius, the interviews, letters, and folklore did little to throw me off the trajectory of his career. There was, of course, the problematic cut-up period, where many of us lost the thread, but his work during that time on tape recordings and film makes up for the lack of narrative form.

By the time I read Queer, I was familiar with the landscape. The film is close to the novella, lifting some of the best lines for the screenplay – “Get off of your ass, or what’s left of it after five years in the navy” springs to mind, or the part about the boyfriend cleaning out the place rather than cleaning up.

The film looks beautiful. Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, best known for his work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, frames scenes both expansive and restrictive, evoking the spirit of the book. The interior shots of the bar and the apartments are both authentic and realistic. The soundtrack, composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, adds to the film – Nirvana’s Come as You Are plays as locals crowd around a symbolic street cockfight. Lee notices Allerton, the hunt is on.

Could we have done without the erotic love scenes? Possibly yes. Nobody really wants to see their literary hero blow a dude in a shabby apartment room, but if Luca Guadagnino felt it essential, then blown he must be. The two lead roles play cat and mouse (Allerton isn’t gay but accepts Lee as a friend) before flying to South America. Here Burroughs suffers the unpleasant flu-like symptoms of opiate withdrawal before hacking through the jungle and encountering a symbolic anaconda at the entrance to the hut of an old botanist doctor. The crazed herbalist is played brilliantly by Lesley Manville swinging her handgun, again, symbolic-like, mid conversation.

Here, in the jungle, the film switches source material from Queer (the book itself ends with the idea to find the telepathic drug) to The Yage Letters, a book of correspondence from Burroughs’s time in the Amazonian bush. Luca and Sayombhu attempt the impossible at this point by representing, in images and sound, the effects of a hallucinogenic trip. A long sequence of body close-ups in studio environment ensues among jungle exteriors before the audience is dumped back in Mexico City, where the death of Burroughs’s wife, never used as a plot in the earlier part of the film, is referred to as a central motive.

Sure, the ending is confused, but even more so if the life story and the books have not been digested. Craig makes no attempt to mimic the voice or movements of Burroughs as caught in archive footage – instead, he relies completely on the text and the screenplay for his direction. Whatever the method and approach, the result is a picture that brings the Burroughs legend to many more people of a young and liberal disposition.

This can’t be a bad thing.

Bngkok City of Angels - Feature Length Documentary Released.

 

Bangkok is the most visited city in the world and also the most misunderstood. This documentary film tracks the development of the Thai capital city from a small trading post in the late 18th Century to the sprawling metropolis of today. Written by Matt Carrell and directed by James Newman this film uses a blend of archive and contemporary footage alongside interviews with some of Bangkok's most colourful expats and local residents such as novelist Christopher G. Moore, journalist Tom Vater, publisher and historian Narisa Chakrabongse, Youtuber Bangkok Pat McKay, the only man to escape from the Bangkok Hilton, David McMillian. Running for over 40 minutes this is a feature-length documentary that covers the history of the city from the cholera outbreak in 1820 to the Covid Epidemic of 2020. Well researched and covering a lot of ground this film is a must for anybody interested in the city that never sleeps.   

The film is now avaible to rent or buy on Amazon Prime.  

Did Jack London Kickstart Dark Tourism?

Dark tourism is usually considered an ultramodern phenomenon; a selfie-obsessed movement propelled by cheap international flights, crumbling global politics, and post-COVID disposable income. Its roots, however, lay much deeper, submerged at least as far as the slums of Victorian London, and probably a lot deeper than that. 

In August 2021 the Daily Mail reported that 21-year-old student Miles Routledge, more commonly known as Lord Miles (having bought a lordship online for 15 pounds sterling), had become trapped in war-torn Afghanistan amid the Taliban takeover. Lord Miles had resigned to the fate of his probable execution in a viral social media video amassing a sizable online following in the harrowing process.

Abandoned by the British Embassy in Kabul after jetting into the warzone on holiday, the Loughborough physics accademic bivouacked himself in an United Nations safe house among fifty others of different nationalities. Speaking to The London Times last year, the student explained that he had decided to visit Afghanistan after watching content on YouTube. Prior to his hiding Mr. Routledge had posted photos of himself smiling beside heavy machine guns aboard armed military convoys.

Since his ordeal Lord Miles has rebranded his image as a YouTuber, internet celebrity, and card-carrying war tourist. Returning to the conflict zone in 2023 for the third time Lord Miles was detained by Afghan authorities for eight months. Undeterred by this experience, Miles described his imprisonment as “a holiday” with a lifestyle akin to “living the lap of luxury.” Perhaps the only detail barring Miles from attempting to return to Kabul is the obligatory immigration black-listing a prison sentence naturally occasions.    

This all happened during the surgency of the vacation movement known as dark tourism. Ethically questionable tour operators across the globe offer flights and accommodation into war zones and places of recent upheaval. On the ground, guides and tour operators fix excursions and day trips. One can fire an M1 Bazooka at a cow within reach of the Killing Fields in Cambodia, dip into hot springs in radioactive Ramsar, Iran, go cherry picking just outside Chernobyl, purchase a key-ring in the Dachau Concentration Camp gift shop, or scramble down the Cu Chi Vietnamese foxholes, where US Soldiers eventually found God in the 1960s.

North Korea, East Timor, and the mountainous ethnic political tinderbox of Nagoro-Karabakh have all been ticked off the proverbial bucket list by Norwegian Erik Faarland whose next dream destination is San Fernando in the Philippines to watch locals crucified in homage to Jesus Christ. Unsurprisingly, Eriik usually travels alone, his wife preferring a paperback novel and a cocktail on the beach in Majorca to being nailed to a cross in San Fernando.     

At some point the amateur anthropologist must become the budding social detective. When and where do sinister dark attractions cease to become morbid titillations satisfying instead more serious historical investigations?

“It’s not a new phenomenon,” says J. John Lennon (non-Beatle), a professor of tourism at Glasgow Caledonian University, in Scotland, who coined the term ‘dark tourism’ with a colleague in 1996, “There’s evidence that dark tourism goes back to the Battle of Waterloo, where people watched from their carriages the battle taking place.”

To find documented evidence of dark tourism, one could do a lot worse than turning their attention to Victorian London towards the turn of the century. Oh yes, Jack London. The city, my home city, was then a bustling metropolis of stark contrasts as the Industrial Revolution had firmly entrenched itself bringing prosperity to the elite, and profound social challenges for the poor who inhabited the overcrowded slums as the city rose predatorily above them. Nowadays the lines of poverty are less divided in London. It's all over the fucking place.   

In 1902, American author Jack London decided to outfit himself as a typical London pauper and walk the mean streets of Whitechapel. Just a decade following the world’s most infamous serial killer had claimed the lives of five women on the streets in 1888, the East End of London was still one of the most dangerous districts in the world. Overcrowded housing, poor sanitation, and omnipresent poverty charactered these slums. Perhaps the greatest example of dark tourism lays within the pages of London’s seminal work published after his seven weeks living in the inner-city ghetto of London, entitled The People of the Abyss.

“I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to the explorer. I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my mind, rather than by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had not seen and gone before.”

The themes of London’s London are bleak – destitution, inequality, and resilience. Like the dark tourist today he is traveling into an uncomfortable new world. The author is shocked at the suffering, yet heartened by the togetherness of the people."If you're in trouble," John Steinbeck once wrote, "go to the poor people - they are the only ones who will help - the only ones."

Back in London's day, around 1890, there were no tour operators, nor guides willing to enter Whitechapel. The online umbilical cord of safety afforded by social media was yet to be invented. The author struggles to find a guide or tour operator inclined to take him east. Approaching a Thomas Cook travel agent representative in the West End, the response to his request to tour the other side of the city is met with an exhalation of amazement. No bloody chance. The agent counters: ‘You can’t do it, you know,’ ‘It is so, ahem, unusual.’

Before venturing into the abyss, London stops at a clothing store to purchase second-hand rags in order to fit in with the locals. As the days pass he is amazed at the massive waste of human potential wandering the streets in search for food, shelter, sleep, and work. London couldn't help but feel a sense of sheer waste, a vast reservoir of untapped human potential trapped in a cycle of deprivation and despair.    

  “Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.”

Jack London, was, of course, a real warrior. His sensibilities were earnest. This is a far cry from the ‘lap of luxury’ experienced by Lord Miles at the hands of the Taliban. Yet if we substitute the written word and book for the camera and the social media platform could Lord Miles have a claim as a serious contributor to the canon of dark tourism?

It seems unlikely.