The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Luca Guadagnino · a film · 2024 · about 137 minutes · written by Justin Kuritzkes, from the novel by William S. Burroughs
Mode
Adaptation of a novel turned toward its author’s life; bar comedy, love story, travelogue and jungle vision under one need
Mythos
The quest to the edge of the map for a substance that grants union; the halved beings who seek to be one again; the marksman’s shot turned into a death
Phase
The rounds of the Mexico City bars, the pursuit and the withdrawal from heroin; the journey south; the jungle and the brew; an epilogue in dream
Presentation
Feature film, about 137 minutes, the theatrical cut; a studio city of sets and painted distances; popular songs from decades after its period laid over it
Register
From drawing-room wit at a bar to the sweat of withdrawal and the nausea of the brew; languor, longing and a last quiet
Scale
One man’s consciousness, a young man who stays opaque, an expatriate society at leisure, a botanist in her compound, and behind them a writer’s life
Governing Proposition
An American in Mexico City around 1950, a man of drink, heroin and wit, makes his rounds of the bars, fixes on a young man who will not quite answer him, and takes him south to Ecuador in search of a drug that is said to grant telepathy. The wager of the film is that the need for a drug and the need for a lover are one need, and that a man who cannot bear to be seen asking dreams of being known without speaking; it gives that dream in image, in hands that leave the body and bodies that pass into each other, and then turns it, in an epilogue, toward the nearness of possession and violence.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
William Lee makes his rounds. In the Ship Ahoy and the other bars of Mexico City around 1950 he drinks, talks, performs his wit for whoever will listen, and approaches young men who turn him away. The white suit he wears goes grey with drink. The film repeats the round until the repetition is the subject: a loneliness made by habit, a man returning each night to the same failure. When Eugene Allerton appears, he enters a pattern already set, and the pursuit that follows reads as appetite before it reads as romance.
The city Lee walks through is plainly a set. Luca Guadagnino built Mexico City largely on stages at Cinecittà in Rome, with painted distances, and the film does not disguise the artifice; it declares it. A city that is so evidently a stage is the city of a man who lives inside his own fantasy, and the film’s first formal decision is its best argument for itself. Popular songs from decades after the film’s year are laid over the streets, and they place the feeling outside its period, as desire is outside time. The first sight of Allerton across the street, under one of them, lifts the film from period piece into reverie.
Guadagnino directed the film from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, after William S. Burroughs’s novel Queer, written in the early 1950s and published in 1985. Daniel Craig plays Lee, Drew Starkey plays Allerton, Jason Schwartzman plays Joe Guidry and Lesley Manville plays Dr. Cotter. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom photographed it, Marco Costa edited it, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wrote the score, and Jonathan Anderson designed the costumes. It was shown in competition at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024 and released in the United States by A24 late that year, where it found a small audience. It runs about 137 minutes, and this page judges the theatrical cut, the one version.
Movement II
Lee sits across a table from Allerton and does not reach for him. A second, spectral hand leaves his body and crosses the table to touch the young man, while his real hands stay where they are. It is the film’s best invention and its plainest statement of what it knows: desire, in a man who cannot bear to be seen asking, acting in the conditional. The device recurs, and it gains force each time, because each time the distance between the hand that moves and the hand that stays is the whole of Lee’s situation.
What the film brings into the open is that this desire is continuous with addiction. Lee is withdrawing from heroin as he pursues Allerton, and the film makes the two needs one: the sweat, the sagging body and the face that collapses in withdrawal belong to the same man who preens and jokes at the bar. Craig gives the film its spine here. The voice performs wit to hide need, the body betrays what the voice conceals, and the performance is the best work in the film and bears its weight.
The other half of the two-hander does not answer. Allerton is opaque by design, since he is the one who cannot be reached, but Starkey’s performance is also inexpressive, and the second figure is under-realised. The disclosure is one-sided as a result: the film knows Lee from inside and Allerton only as Lee sees him. That is part of its subject, and it is also a limit. What Allerton feels, and whether he consents to more than he resists, are questions the film leaves open, and they will keep it open to argument, but they are open partly because there is little in him to read.
Movement III
Lee takes Allerton south to Ecuador in search of yagé, a drug he believes may grant telepathy. The dream of telepathy is the dream of a lover who need not be persuaded, and the journey is the film’s quest: a journey to the edge of the map for a substance that will grant union. The form changes as Lee’s hope changes. The film leaves the bar comedy of Mexico City for a travelogue, and then for something stranger, and the change of register follows the drug and the need.
The joints show here. The journey south is episodic. Its bus and hotel interludes restate the imbalance between the two men without advancing it, the pacing slackens, and the passages are flat where the city was rich in texture. The division into parts separates more than it shapes, and this part is a container of incident. Lee’s talk and his need carry the two men through a Latin America that the film sees as a traveller sees it, and the colonial appetite of that traveller is held in the film, while the country itself, its people and its labour, is scenery.
The longest stretches of the journey render a mood of languor rather than extend the meaning. The film is about a slow failure, and how far these passages are that failure and how far they are dilation is the open question of its necessity. The answer the film gives is mixed. A short novel has been carried to about 137 minutes, and the scale is permitted more than compelled; the parts before the border are required by what the film has to say, and too many of the parts after it could be shortened without loss.
Movement IV
In the jungle the two men find Dr. Cotter, a botanist in her compound, played by Manville at a pitch of comic grotesque the film has not set up. She prepares the brew. The two men drink it and vomit, and then their bodies pass into each other: the union Lee wanted, granted once, as hallucination and nausea. It is grotesque and tender at once, and the score turns from pulse to drone beneath it. This is the film’s height, and its truest image of what it knows.
The quest fails as such quests fail, by granting what was sought once and in a form that cannot be kept. Behind the merging lies the myth of the halved beings who seek to be one again, here made literal, and the film builds that myth into its plot rather than gesturing at it. The centipede, Burroughs’s emblem of what disgusts and attracts, is carried as a talisman. The archetypes arrive late, mainly in this last third; the Mexico City of the opening is particular without being archetypal, and the myth does not reach back to hold it.
Mukdeeprom makes the jungle green and close, as he made the stage city glow, warm and false. But the effects of the visionary sequences are uneven, and some of the imagery reads as illustration rather than vision. The inheritance shows. David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) had already fused Burroughs’s life and hallucinations with the horror of the body, and the hallucinatory turn of this film follows that map. Its own turn is elsewhere: on its director’s Call Me by Your Name (2017), whose luminous youth becomes here the unreachable one, and whose lover is now old, abject and addicted.
Movement V
The epilogue leaves realism for dream. A shot glass rests on a head, and a legendary act of marksmanship becomes the record of a real death: Burroughs shot and killed Joan Vollmer in 1951, and his novel was written in the shadow of that death without showing it. The film shows it, and changes its own law as it does, from desire to guilt. The truth it adds is darker than the rest: that the fantasy of possession and the act of violence lie close. But it depends on the audience’s knowledge of Burroughs. The film gestures at that truth more than it builds it from its own material, and its dream logic is announced rather than prepared, so the last form arrives as a change of film.
The last movement is quiet: the old Lee in a bed, and the younger man lying beside him. Whether this is a dream of guilt, a prophecy, or Lee’s death imagined in advance, the film does not say. The ending is moving, and it holds the film’s one law in its last image, the need to reach another being without the risk of asking. Across the film that law governs the bar and the jungle, the hands and the deathbed; it bends at every join, and the parts strain against one another without contradicting.
The film stands at 7.1, in the band of Tier III. What holds it below Tier IV is a necessity that fails after the border, a reach into its field that two years cannot yet show, a world that holds one consciousness and leaves Mexico and Allerton outside it, and a form that changes rather than completes. Its nearest neighbours on the desk make the measure. The Killer (7.5), shown in competition at Venice a year before and scored by the same composers, is the tighter film, governed where this one is loose. Punch-Drunk Love (7.3), another star turned to a study of a man’s need, is leaner and more formally governed. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (8.8), an ageing man’s doomed desire for a youth abroad, ending in death, builds the myth and the form that Queer evokes and strains for; Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (8.3), from the same circle and the same years, has the necessity of its journey. Queer attempts much, and governs less than it attempts.
Act III · The Twelve
The Mexico City section resists subtraction better than the rest. Lee’s rounds of the Ship Ahoy and the other bars, the repeated failed approaches to young men, the white suit going grey with drink, are required: the loneliness is made by repetition, and Allerton enters a pattern already set, so that the pursuit reads as appetite rather than romance. The withdrawal is required too, since the need for heroin and the need for Allerton are one. The joints show after the border. The journey south is episodic, its bus and hotel interludes restating the imbalance between the two men without advancing it; Cotter’s compound dilates on eccentricity; the epilogue is necessary in idea and overextended in execution. A short novel carried to about 137 minutes: the scale is permitted more than compelled.
Score: 6.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: desire, in a man who cannot bear to be seen asking, becomes the wish to be known without speaking, and that wish is continuous with addiction; the dream of telepathy is the dream of a lover who need not be persuaded. The film gives it in image. Lee’s spectral hands reach from his body to touch Allerton while his real hands stay on the table, desire acting in the conditional; in the jungle the two bodies pass into each other, union granted only as hallucination and nausea. The epilogue adds a darker truth, the nearness of possession and violence. What holds it: Allerton remains opaque, so the disclosure is one-sided, and long stretches render a mood of languor rather than extend the meaning.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Elevation comes as erotic charge, dread and visionary strangeness. The first sight of Allerton across the street, held under a pop song from decades after the film’s year, lifts it from period piece into reverie. The ghost hands are a small sublime of longing, repeated, and they gain force each time. The jungle night is the height: Cotter in her compound, the brew, the two men vomiting, and then the merging of their bodies, grotesque and tender at once, as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score turns from pulse to drone. The epilogue’s last movement, the old Lee in a bed with the younger man beside him, is quiet and moving. What holds it: the heights cluster in the jungle and the epilogue, the travel passages are flat, and some of the visionary effects read as illustration rather than vision.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The quest is built rather than evoked. The plot is a journey to the edge of the map for a substance that will grant union, and it fails as such quests fail, by granting it once and in a form that cannot be kept. Behind it lies the myth of the halved beings who seek to be one again, made literal in the merging. The centipede, Burroughs’s emblem of what disgusts and attracts, is carried as a talisman. The William Tell shot bears weight in the epilogue: a legendary act of marksmanship turned into the record of a real death. What holds the axis: the archetypes arrive mainly in the last third, the Mexico City section is particular without being archetypal, and the allusion to Joan Vollmer’s death depends on knowledge outside the film more than on construction within it.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The inheritance is triple: the Burroughs adaptation, where David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) had already fused the writer’s life and hallucinations with body horror; the queer romance of art cinema, including Guadagnino’s own Call Me by Your Name (2017), which this film turns inside out, the beloved youth now the unreachable one and the lover old, abject and addicted; and the period picture. The turns are real: a Mexico City built as visible artifice, songs of later decades laid over 1950, sex staged explicitly with an actor known worldwide as James Bond, a last act that leaves realism for vision and then for an imagined death. The stake was real for a production of its scale. What holds it: the hallucinatory turn follows Cronenberg’s map, the artifice belongs to a familiar manner of studio pastiche, and the departure is one of temperament more than of form.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The studio Mexico City is the instrument: a city that is plainly a set is a city seen by a man who lives in his own fantasy, and the anachronistic songs place the feeling outside its period, as desire is. The ghost hands are the form’s best invention, a device that says what Lee cannot. The shift of register after the border, from bar comedy to travelogue to jungle vision, follows the drug and the need, so that the form changes as Lee’s hope does. What holds the axis: the division into parts separates more than it shapes, the journey is a container of incident, and the epilogue’s dream logic is announced rather than prepared, so that the last form arrives as a change of film more than as the necessary end of this one.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Two years cannot demonstrate return, so the axis is forecast, and the forecast is modest. The questions are open and seem durable: what Allerton feels, and whether he consents to more than he resists; whether the film believes in the telepathy its jungle sequence appears to grant; what the epilogue is, a dream of guilt, a prophecy, or Lee’s death imagined in advance; how far the film reads Burroughs’s life into a novel written in the shadow of Vollmer’s death that does not show it. On return the colour plan, the rhymes of hands and bodies and the placing of the songs reward attention. What holds it: the yield so far has been debate about the last act and the lead performance more than new meaning, and the Mexico City section, rich in texture, does not seem to deepen on return.
Score: 6.8 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2020s, and reach can only be what two years show. The intrinsic force is real but not reorganising: a major star’s persona turned to abjection; an explicit queer love story at an international scale with a hallucinatory last act; a model of the literary adaptation that reads a writer’s life into a book he wrote before the event. Each has its precedent. The hallucinatory Burroughs is Cronenberg’s, the turn of a star’s persona is a known gesture, and the studio artifice belongs to a broader current. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a competition premiere at Venice, a small box office, and a critical reception divided over the last act, with no redirection of the field yet to be shown. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, over two years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, recently made, with nothing lost. Its presence is that of an art release of some prestige: festival, limited theatrical release, streaming and home video, and a share of critical attention, but not the widest presence. A film under five years old is held at 7.5 or below, falling with the span, and at two years, with modest presence, the figure sits below that. The surface is less fixed to its moment than many recent films, since the period setting and the declared artifice keep the film at a distance from its own date; the casting of a star at the end of a famous role, and songs of the 1990s heard as a sign of the 2020s’ taste, may date it.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Daniel Craig gives the film its spine: a body that sags, preens and sweats, a voice that performs wit to hide need, a face that collapses in withdrawal; it is the best work in the film and bears its weight. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s photography makes the stage city glow, warm and false by design, and the jungle green and close. Reznor and Ross’s score, pulsing under the bars and dissolving in the jungle, is placed well, and Jonathan Anderson’s costumes carry the decay of Lee’s white suits. The charges fall where they matter: Drew Starkey’s Allerton is opaque by design and also inexpressive, so the second figure of a two-hander is under-realised; the pacing slackens through the journey; the effects of the jungle and the dream are uneven.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Lee joking in a bar with Joe Guidry, near drawing-room comedy, and the two men’s bodies passing into each other on a jungle floor. One law governs both, the need to reach another being without the risk of asking, comic in the bar and literal in the vision; the withdrawal, the hands, the shot glass and the deathbed obey it. What holds the figure is that the law bends at the joins. The journey belongs to a looser film; Cotter’s compound plays at a pitch of comic grotesque the film has not set up; and the epilogue moves the law from desire to guilt through an event outside the film’s own story, so that its most distant elements meet partly by the audience’s knowledge of Burroughs. The parts strain; they do not contradict one another.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 137 minutes holds. Lee’s consciousness is held fully, from inside and in image; desire and the body, ageing and addiction; the expatriate society of Mexico City around 1950, Americans at leisure on the GI Bill and cheap living; the colonial appetite of the traveller in Latin America; science at its edge, in Cotter’s botany; mortality, in the epilogue; and behind it all a writer’s life. They are integrated through the one need. What holds the figure: Allerton’s consciousness is absent; Mexico itself, its people and its labour, is scenery; the family and the state barely enter; and history is the margin of a private story.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 7.5, then The Unconcealment, The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 7.3. A lead performance that gives the film its spine, in a body that sags and sweats and a wit that hides need, with a stage city that glows warm and false; a disclosure given in image, desire continuous with addiction and the dream of being known without speaking; a jungle night of grotesque and tender union; a quest built rather than evoked; and the ghost hands, a device that says what Lee cannot.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 6.4, the lowest: real force in a star’s abjection and an explicit love story with a hallucinatory last act, each with its precedent, and no redirection of its field yet to be shown. Above it, The Encompassed at 6.6, one consciousness held fully, with Allerton’s absent and Mexico, its people and its labour, as scenery; then The Bottomless Well at 6.8 and The Inevitable at 6.9, a forecast of modest return, and a structure required before the border and episodic after it.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 6.9 falls short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.3, The Made at 7.5, The Inner Law at 7.0, each against 7.0, the last exactly at it. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 7.3, The Archetypal Deep at 7.3, The Swerve at 7.2, The Imperishable at 7.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 6.4 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at Pressure on Tradition, 6.4, The Bottomless Well, 6.8, The Inevitable, 6.9, The Inner Law, 7.0, The Swerve, 7.2, The Imperishable, 7.2, The Unconcealment, 7.3, The Sublime, 7.3, The Archetypal Deep, 7.3, and The Living Form, 7.3, all below 7.5; only The Made reaches it, at 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.1, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Queer as released in 2024, the theatrical cut, about 137 minutes, in its one version, from Lee’s rounds of the Mexico City bars to the epilogue: directed by Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, after the novel Queer by William S. Burroughs, written in the early 1950s and published in 1985; photographed by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, edited by Marco Costa, with music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and costumes by Jonathan Anderson; Mexico City built largely on stages at Cinecittà in Rome; shown in competition at Venice in September 2024 and released in the United States by A24 late in 2024. The film is the object: the novel is not part of the work scored, and Burroughs’s life bears on the film only where the film calls on it. No print, screenplay or recording was consulted. The principal sequences are known well; individual shots, cuts and lines less well, and they are not described. No dialogue is quoted, since no line is certain to the word. Details that could not be verified, among them the number and titles of the film’s divisions, the interval before the epilogue, the songs used and where they fall, the staging of the withdrawal on the journey, the forms in which the centipede appears, Lee’s talk of governments seeking a drug of thought control, the awards the lead performance received, shot counts and the share of dialogue, are not given.