Queer and All of Us Strangers had primed me for disconsolation, but at the last moment, they reneged in favor of a gorgeously hollow, tepidly consolatory cohesion.
A gay man is in bed with a ghost. It’s the ghost of his former lover—a man who is not really there, but instead a phantasm conjured up by desperate imagination. After this reunion: a shimmering aurora, a miasma of color, an aestheticized rendering of… the gay male soul? And then, the end credits play.
This is how both Luca Guadagnino and Andrew Haigh have chosen to conclude their most recent films, Queer (2024) and All of Us Strangers (2023). Because Queer is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s long-unfinished novella of the same name, Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes had to devise a new ending. The ending they chose: just before the aged William Lee (a Burroughs stand-in) breathes his last breath, his former lover Eugene Allerton (an avoidant cypher, a potentially queer but straight-passing twink extraordinaire) is magicked back for a last-minute reunion, a deathbed game of footsie. Lee’s soul then begins swirling in front of him, before the frame fades to black. In All of Us Strangers, a gay screenwriter named Adam discovers that Harry, the younger man with whom he’s been having a tentative, tender affair, is dead. That he has maybe been dead the whole time. But then Harry’s ghost shows up, and the two men get into bed, pressed tight like the skeletons of those who burned together in Pompeii, who died clutching each other. The camera pans higher and higher until they’re just barely visible—bodies fused, they’ve become a star.
Why do both of these films—which depict gay men in the throes of substance abuse, alcoholism, sickness, hallucination, profound loneliness—end on such maudlin notes? Why are these gay men being apotheosized, hurtled into the heavens, subjected to feverish deathbed reunions, ensconced by shimmering orbs? What’s with these oddly spiritualizing conclusions? For if, as Barry Levitt writes, “Queer is a film deeply invested in how lonely it can feel to be queer,” then why not narrate the full force of such relational difficulty? Why leave viewers with a tentative sense of resolution, of reunion? And if All of Us Strangers similarly takes as its subject the many subtle agonies of queer life and familial homophobia, then why end so cheesily? Are we not tired, as Paul McAdory has wondered, of the “flattened emotional landscape” from which so many contemporary queer narratives derive the full power of their “sincerity”—their “weepy” explorations of the “human experience”?
For the wary viewer—which I was, at first—an easy answer emerges. Trauma, sadness, immiseration + last-minute reunion = narrative closure. This was the mercenary formula that I initially thought was governing the narrative machinations of both of these films. If, as Kevin Brazil suggests, “to be gay is to be defined by suffering” in some abiding way, then these films show all the pain—the difficulty of loving someone who can not accept their own sexuality and thus does not accept you; the agony of being gay and therefore unknown by your parents. Then, they dwell in this pain, languishing in it. “Evoke the wound,” Parul Sehgal has observed, in her polemic against the trauma plot, “and we will believe that a body, a person, has borne it.”
At the last possible moment, however, these films switch gears; the plot has to end somehow. The story must be tied up; its narrative veins must be cauterized. And so why not do it with some panache, some zest, some true beauty? Though gay love comes up against persecution in life, it needn’t face such a fate in the aestheticized halls of cinema. Send the gays off in the only style appropriate to their otherwise unglamorous suffering: a splash of color, a hint of the otherworldly. Such seemed to be the affective logic at work in these two endings, and it disconcerted me. It seemed abruptly and perhaps even disingenuously recuperative, running counter to something I’ve long admired about queer media: the capacity to index what Heather Love has called “backward” feelings, or what Sara Ahmed identifies as the “affirmative” possibilities of “narrat[ing] unhappiness.”
Queer and All of Us Strangers had primed me for disconsolation, but at the last moment, they reneged in favor of a gorgeously hollow, tepidly consolatory cohesion. With an even more dramatic flourish than, say, the more somberly stylized ending of Tom Ford’s adaptation of A Single Man—wherein a dying man fantasizes being with his lover, once more—these films give cover to earthly tribulation underneath a vague but unmistakably spiritualized veneer. To be turned into a star—to have one’s soul become a beautiful, floating miasma—is this not the aesthetic equivalent of religious salvation, of transmogrifying the troubles of the body into the pleasures of the spirit? As someone who has long abandoned the prolepticisms of evangelical Christianity, these endings rubbed me the wrong way. The idea that current suffering might find later redemption via aestheticization seemed like a cop-out, anathema to many of the lessons of queer life and queer theory. Thematic rupture, formal rupture! Discomfort and ambiguity! Difficulty and resistance! Are these not some of the most enduringly powerful strategies of queer cinema?
Are they? Must they be?
These endings, however, kept gnawing at me. I found myself returning, again and again, to the strange mixture of feelings they had prompted in me: awe that gave way to skepticism, buy-in that turned into befuddlement, aesthetic overwhelm that curdled into a cloying sentimentalism. Were there other ways to view these final scenes? Could I lower my defenses, and see their endings anew?
A longtime fan of Guadagnino’s, I have always admired his ability to pull off a lushly affected and effective ending, one merited by all that comes before it. Take, for example, his 2017 adaptation of André Aciman’s novel, Call Me By Your Name. Set over the course of one summer in northern Italy, the film depicts seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman’s queer sexual awakening, sparked by a visiting American graduate student named Oliver.
Beyond the other most famous scene in Call Me By Your Name—the one where Elio fucks a peach on a particularly desultory, particularly horny afternoon—the film’s final three minutes have become a touchstone for the power of queer feeling (and a testament to Timothée Chalamet’s bravura, Oscar-deserving acting chops). The film ends in winter, months after Oliver has returned to America. On the phone, he tells Elio that he is getting married. “You never said anything,” Elio says, shifting in his seat, visibly flustered but trying to keep his cool.
Oliver replies that this other, heterosexual relationship has been off and on for the previous two years. Elio’s eyebrows jolt up in surprise and anger at this belated admission. “That’s wonderful news,” he manages to say. At the very end of their call, Oliver says that he remembers everything about their affair, which elicits the smallest of smiles from Elio. He hangs up and wanders into the dining room, where the table has been set and candles flicker in the Hannukiah.
Elio sits down in front of the blazing hearth, and for the next three minutes, we watch him cry. I have loved you for the last time, Sufjan Stevens laments, in a non-diegetic song that plays over the scene. I have touched you for the last time. Elio continues crying, quietly. His mother comes in and finishes setting the table in the background. She calls his name; he looks, just for a moment, directly into the camera—at us voyeurs—before turning his head to his mother, and the frame goes black.
Though this scene has been satirized for its excessive, even melodramatic sincerity, the ending of Call Me By Your Name continues to move me with its blunt acceptance of affective overwhelm. Gayle Salamon has remarked that there is no real difference between feeling incapacitated and being incapacitated. To feel bereft, then, is to be bereft. And if, as the phenomenologist Kym Maclaren writes, the perspectives of others can “sweep us up,” then Oliver’s absence proves particularly damaging not only because he is no longer there, but also because Elio feels disconnected from Oliver’s way of being, his particular mode of apprehending the world and moving through it.
Elio’s positionality is not so different from Lee’s endless pining for Allerton, nor from Adam, who remains so guardedly captivated by Harry. What distinguishes the ending of Call Me By Your Name from the final scenes of Queer or All of Us Strangers, however, is the former’s willingness to depict Elio’s emotional incapacitation in the wake of Oliver’s moving on, to name a seemingly irrevocable loss for what it is. Elio accepts that Oliver is gone, that he is here no more—and the film does not attempt to resurrect him, for such resurrection would amount to a kind of affective falsification, a breaking-away from the truth of Elio’s feelings. Stranded in the liminal and lonely aftermath of a now-concluded intersubjectivity, all Elio can do is feel what he feels. His fireplace weeping is conclusive and merited, a human moment of resignation unabetted by deus ex machina, by comforting fantasies of reunion.
The embrace of one’s beloved takes place in what Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, calls a “deranged interval”: an affirmative but finite moment of unity. Such moments testify, Barthes thinks, to the simple fact that “fulfillment does exist,” but as something we must “keep on making… return.” But what if the Other does not return? What if they leave us or abandon us? Or, more thornily, what if they leave but the derangement does not? What if they continue to feel inextricable from our thoughts and perceptions—in short, of our felt reality? These are questions that Call Me By Your Name presses no further than teenage Elio’s wintry catharsis. What happens next? What comes in the hours and weeks and decades of Elio’s life after Oliver—in all those moments marked not by his presence but by his absence? (Though André Aciman’s 2019 sequel-of-sorts, Find Me, does try to answer some of these questions, its plodding insufficiencies are best left unremarked upon.)
Here, then, is my own last-minute-conversion—my attempt to tie up the loose threads, to see these endings anew, to offer some sort of reparative cohesion, unearned though the reader might find it. For one thing is undeniable: All of Us Strangers and Queer do not shy away from wondering what comes after separation. They plunge into the phenomenological depths of our felt relations with others, even if those others are no longer present.
Deranged by the affective power of being with Allerton, Lee tries over and over to make and remake their connection. He says that the difficulty lies in persuading another that he is, in fact, “really a part of you.” Not even an ayahuasca-laced, mind-bending, body-merging trip is enough to convince Allerton of their connectedness. But this connection continues to feel real for Lee, long after it ends.
Or take Adam, who throughout All of Us Strangers returns to his childhood home, where he reunites with the ghosts of his parents, who were killed in a car accident when Adam was young. He reintroduces himself to them as a grown man—and more specifically, as a gay man. He even tries to bring Harry along to meet them. In his final encounter with his ghostly mother and father, Adam asks his mom if what they are feeling is real.
“Does it feel real?” she asks.
He agrees—it does feel real.
“There you go, then.”
But he presses her, dissatisfied. “For how long, though?”
“I can’t answer that,” his mother responds gently. “I suppose we don’t get to decide when it’s over.”
Yes, these endings are sentimental; they are a bit absurd. Yes, Guadagnino and Haigh indulge in a weird aesthetic splendor, but perhaps this is not only intended as a form of narrative closure. Perhaps my initial dissatisfaction proved occlusive; perhaps these films pivot to aestheticized spirituality in order to make a much more basic, biting point: that feeling is both ephemeral and enduring—and that we don’t get to decide when it’s over. This holds true for life and for cinema. A since-concluded experience might continue to make itself felt as an affective reality. This, I now see, is the departing insight of Queer and All of Us Strangers: that to be loved or to be unloved, to be together or to be apart—these experiences might feel like being catapulted beyond the self, beyond the world, and into the realm of something more.
Ian Jayne is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia, and a predoctoral fellow at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. He writes about queer fiction and contemporary life—and he prefers his martinis filthy.
Thumbnail photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash