Why it’s queer, what the difference is, and why it matters
Call Me By Your Name was an indie hit when it came out in 2017; directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in its leading roles, it follows the story of two young men as they fall in love in the stunning Italian countryside clad in almost as stunning 1980s short-shorts. Every scene is redolent with that heady mix of languid humidity and desperate desire so specific to teenaged summers. Elio (Chalamet), a professor’s son in his late teens, becomes increasingly captivated with the graduate student — Oliver (played by a tanned Hammer) — that his father is hosting for the summer, and the film wanders through various facets of desire as Elio broods and agonizes. The whole thing is swimming with Old World intellectualism and sun-dappled shots of European villages and nostalgia for the long, sticky days of swimming and lounging and the long, muggy nights of cigarettes and dancing and flirtation we never actually had — and yet we all did, in one way or another, and it’s here, sensuously evoked.
Of course, any film featuring a love story between two men attracts attention and politics. Call Me By Your Name was lauded for providing a new paradigm for gay love stories, in which the love can develop untouched by the tragedy, politics, or family rejection that usually defines the genre — revolutionary for providing a positive, unreservedly beautiful representation of LGBTQ love. The AIDS epidemic is conspicuously absent. There are brief allusions to that their relationship might not be socially acceptable (Oliver and Elio avoid kissing publicly in the small village, and Oliver vaguely mentions “being good” by avoiding romance with Elio) but the feedback from their immediate society is actually positive; Elio’s parents are clearly aware of their son’s desire for the older Oliver — many meaningful glances are exchanged — but they’re permissive, and even encouraging. The film explores the nuances of desire and love as universal concepts which simply happen to be, in this instance, realized between two men.
For other critics, however, this universality is the downfall of Call Me By Your Name. Miz Cracker and and Billy Gray argue that the absence of history not only prevents the film from being revolutionary, but also from deserving the label of gay. How can it be radical while avoiding controversy? And, besides while many (including myself) find the movie to be deeply sensual, we never see the actual queer sex. The long-awaited consummation of Oliver and Elio’s flirtation features long hugs, a few kisses, some foot-nudges, and then a pan out the window to a tree just as things get hot and heavy. All the sexual tension comes from waiting and allusions. But we can’t ascribe it to a stylistic choice meant to evoke desire; Elio also pursues a female love interest, Marzia, and their sexual experiences get more screen time and are more explicit — as is Elio’s masturbatory experimentation with a sun-warmed peach.
Yet either one of these stances denies the movie its full due. Call Me By Your Name is not a “gay movie” — fine. But neither is it a straight movie. Call Me By Your Name is a masterpiece of queerness, of the impossibility of subsuming the complexities of identity or desire to any given label. Elio is in love with Oliver, yes, but his relationship with Marzia is completely genuine, even if it lacks the sweeping grandeur of his hunger for Oliver. He never appears to be faking with her, nor does he question the idea that he could want both a man and a woman, and want them simultaneously. Besides, Elio’s desire for Oliver is actually harder to fully capture than it first appears — the similarities between the two men (both are Jewish intellectuals who love Heidegger and Heraclitus and Bach) conjure the possibility of Elio’s desire as an autoerotic one as much as it is one for another man. Even its soundtrack is built around two tracks from Sufjan Stevens — a singer often claimed as a queer icon, yet who has never discussed his sexuality publicly and whose ambiguous lyrics evoke men, women, and God with equal romanticism. Everything about the movie transcends and rejects categorization.
And it does not shy away from queer physical intimacy. The floundering of Elio and Oliver’s physical interactions is more a touchingly raw portrayal of a gawky, desperately needy (and inexperienced, and apprehensive) teenaged body than one of squeamishness. The exposed awkwardness of the sex scene, the semen gleaming on their chests after they’ve finished and the ensuing cleanup with a dirty shirt grabbed from the ground, is in many ways more explicit and intimate than the depictions of straight sex we’re accustomed to in any R-rated movie. Likewise, Elio’s interactions with Marzia and with himself (and the iconic peach) are just as raw, full of hesitance and embarrassment and giggles and shocking intimacy. To accuse the movie of shying away from anything when it comes to desire or physicality is to miss the point.
For me, desire has always been a mutable thing. I’ve struggled with desires that didn’t fit into society’s accepted categories, not because my desires were for the wrong gender of human, but because I liked too many people all equally and at once, or because I couldn’t figure out how I liked someone — friend or romantic, admiration or aspiration or jealousy-desire. Call Me By Your Name confronts exactly this issue of the multiplicity of desires, and does so with nuance and elegance. Not once does it suggest that any form of desire is wrong or lesser; instead, it explores the beauty of feeling overcome with yearning for everything and everyone and actually letting yourself want all of it and do all of it without feeling wrong. To be undefined and unsure and yet wholly realized.
Call Me By Your Name speaks to today’s realities, despite its circa-1980 Walkmans and short-shorts. Gay politics then demanded proud ownership of identity labels as part of the fight for rights and acceptance, but today’s reality is full of those kinds of identity politics; the radical concept of queerness, the concept that makes us most uncomfortable, is to defy categorization entirely — to have ambiguous genders and nationalities and sexualities. To resist the consolidation, reification, and policing of identities. This is the ideal of Call Me By Your Name: the possibility for queer desire toward any other being, in which every object of desire is equally legitimate; and potential for an identity that doesn’t have to choose a label, however uncomfortable that makes society. Categorization makes us feel safer — humans like defining things because it makes us feel that the world is an understandable place, and getting rid of those boxes makes us nervous. But it also opens infinite possibilities. Call Me By Your Name’s radical nature lies in its transcendence of categorization, an honest, raw exploration of what desire and intimacy can be when the rules and boundaries are removed.