Inside Queer's trippy and tragic ending: Daniel Craig, Luca Guadagnino decipher the surreal coda

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Queer.

The final chapter of William S. Burroughs’ Queer, the unfinished, semi-autobiographical novella published in 1985, picks up two years after expat William Lee travels with his younger lover, Eugene Allerton, into South America to find the psychotropic drug yage, otherwise known as ayahuasca. Lee returns to Mexico City, where the story began. He wanders the streets, snapping photos of locals along the way, hoping to run into Allerton or, at the very least, learn what happened to him. Allerton had stopped returning Lee’s letters some time ago, and the sting of their broken relationship lingers. 

All of that is there in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, the adaptation of the story. What’s different is the depiction of Lee and Allerton's profound, hallucinogenic experience while on ayahuasca and the movie’s full jump into the surreal with its epilogue.

The Lee of the novella references various dreams he has about reuniting with Allerton again, but it doesn’t compare to the fantasy that Daniel Craig’s Lee experiences on screen. It’s as if his past, present, and future collide together. Images depict Lee falling alone through space, gazing inside a miniature apartment complex to see himself walking down a hallway, holding a gun alone in a room, seeing Allerton one last time, and lying in bed as an aged man, among other snapshots. 

Craig interprets that ending slightly differently with each new viewing. “The movie is this fever dream, this alternative reality that we're in all through the beginning of the movie into the quest to South America,” the actor tells Entertainment Weekly. “The imagery is crucial for any Burroughs fan; those people will pick up on the meaning. Every sequence is beautifully relevant, mainly because Luca directed it, but it also is something about where the rest of his life is, pre-Allerton and then post-Allerton. I sometimes think that the end of the movie is an extension of the ayahuasca trip. We never quite leave it.”

Weeks prior to the film’s debut in theaters, during an early Queer screening event in New York City, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, who also wrote Guadagnino’s Challengers, spoke about incorporating aspects of Burroughs’ life into the movie, given how Lee is a stand-in for the acclaimed author. “We wanted to make it clear that we weren’t making a biopic about Burroughs. We were making a fictional story about Queer, about his book,” Kuritzkes explained at the time. “But there is this very beautiful afterword to Queer published in one of the versions where he says the shooting, death of his wife was the thing that forced him to be a writer.” 

Burroughs wrote the majority of Queer while awaiting trial for the allegedly accidental homicide of Joan Vollmer, his common-law wife at the time. He shot her in a drunken stupor while at a friend’s apartment in Mexico City. Burroughs initially claimed he and Joan were performing a William Tell act, wherein he attempted to shoot a glass balancing on top of her head. He later retracted this account and said the gun accidentally went off. Among those who witnessed the tragedy was Adelbert Lewis Marker, the real figure who inspired the Allerton character in Queer. 

While out on bail, Burroughs took a cue from his lawyer and fled the country. A Mexican court convicted him in absentia of manslaughter and gave him a two-year suspended sentence.

Allusions to that history blend with lingering memories of Allerton to create Lee’s psychedelic dream, during which he grapples with the main traumas in his life. “The task that we gave ourselves was always to make this a very romantic movie and a testament to this romanticism between Lee and Allerton, no matter how much they are in sync or not throughout this story of their encounter,” Guadagnino tells EW. “So it was irresistible with editing, with the miracle of cinema, to jump into a lifetime. It goes from that moment to, boom, the future. Also, I think I said, ‘Why don't we make him at the end of his life?’ Then Justin said yes, but in the process of going into the other side, he meets Allerton again in the very pivotal moment of contact that is not a sexual contact, but it's a contact of caring.”

The filmmaker points to the moment in the dream sequence where Allerton places his foot on top of the now-elderly Lee, mirroring an intimate moment they share in bed on their trip to South America. “I think once you establish a profound connection with someone, no matter [if] this connection is interrupted because of internal impulses of repression or external obligations not to pursue this connection, the connection is going to stay there forever. And what better way than cinema to present this miracle of life?”

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"It's such a deep feeling that I feel watching at the end," Craig remarks. "It encompasses so much of Burroughs' loneliness, his searching, his constant questioning, and then it just boils down to love. We invented this [for the movie], that's the one thing in his life that meant the most to him. So that's what he was feeling as he passes at the end."

A particular line from Lesley Manville's Dr. Cotter, Lee and Allerton's gateway to the ayahuasca in South America, still rings over this coda to Queer. "Door's already open. Can't close it now," she says. "All you can do is look away, but why would you?" If the door is indeed open, then it was Lee's hallucinations in the jungle that opened it.

Craig and Starkey recall filming the sequence, which involved Lee and Allerton performing an interpretive dance around a fire where it appears as if their hands and arms slip underneath each other's skin. The actors rehearsed the choreography for months before shooting began. "I'm not a dancer, and I've never been through an extensive choreographed rehearsal period before," Starkey says. "It was a really great way to stretch ourselves. Daniel and I were both at the same level."

They performed the choreography for the camera on top of coffee grounds. As Starkey puts it, "We were essentially naked. [Guadagnino] was like, 'They're going to get cut up after the first take. Their skin's going to be ripped to shreds if it's just dirt.' So they laid these mats out, these crash pads almost, and then it was coffee grounds [on top of that]." There was one minor side effect: "By the end of the night [when] we shot that, Daniel and I were wired," the actor continues. "I guess the coffee can absorb into your skin. I was up for hours after."

Guadagnino feels the sequence was necessary to give Lee (and, by extension, Burroughs) "that connection he was longing for all his life. At the same time, even though they go there [and] they have this connection, they run away from it. That's what connects back to the book: they cannot sustain the impact of what it means to have found the other, to have found yourself in the gaze of the other. It's too much."

Queer is now playing in theaters.