Queer’s ending moments fall in a cascade of dream-like imagery that gathers the various threads of doomed longing and thwarted attraction that were woven throughout the film. After Daniel Craig’s William Lee shares an ayahuasca fugue state with his distant beloved Eugene (Drew Starkey), whatever their relationship was comes to an end and we zoom forward years later to when Lee has returned to the queer ex-pat community in Mexico where he first became enthralled by Eugene. After checking in with his (only remaining?) friend Joe (Jason Schwartzman), he learns that Eugene attached himself to some army officer and took him down into the jungle, presumably to do more ayahuasca with the deranged botanist Dr. Cotter (Leslie Manville).
Lee returns to the love hotel where he shared time with Omar Apollo’s character and falls asleep in the room where he dreams about the end of his situationship with Eugene. Appropriately, the dream is suffused with things we’ve seen throughout the film: the centipede necklace, an exotic snake, the ever-present pistol Lee carries on him, and even the dart gun that Mary used at a party to knock a tumbler from atop a man’s head. In this vision, Eugene sits on a bed and places a crystal tumbler on his head and Lee aims his pistol except instead of the shot hitting the tumbler, it kills Eugene. Eugene’s body fades into nothingness when Lee looks momentarily away and soon Lee follows, disappearing into thin air. We seem to cut ahead again and Lee is once more in the hotel room, this time an elderly man. He lays down on the bed and as he dies, he imagines Eugene is spooning him; a recreation of the time Eugene comforted Lee while Lee suffered from opiate withdrawals. Then we fade to black, the credits start up, and I am left with lingering concerns that I can’t shake.
The themes of longing, chasing objects of affection and obsession that don’t quite return the love given to them are heady and interesting ones, not to mention appropriate for a story about queer men in the 1950s. Centering the story on those themes is a fine choice, especially considering the queasy tension caused by Lee and Eugene’s hot-and-cold relationship is what drives much of the action. The trouble is that the epilogue suggests that this tragically doomed relationship is not just the core of the story, but the core of Lee as a person. His fixation on Eugene is such that his dying sensation is recalling one time Eugene allowed him to cuddle. Part of what makes this a difficult pill to swallow is that we barely understand any of the characters very well, but least of all Eugene, the cipher, the entirely opaque object of Lee’s affections. That’s almost certainly intentional, as the events of Queer suggest that Lee projects plenty of his distortions and desires onto men who don’t fully (or at all) reciprocate his attraction, but it leaves the film in a purgatorial space. What does Eugene want? What does he feel? What does he think? We have no idea, he is merely a twunk, destroyer of worlds, well-dressed and gorgeous, but mostly a mystery. It makes it difficult to believe that he could mean so much to Lee that their affair still haunts him right up until his death.
Setting aside the emotional specifics, there’s an unpleasant implication made by the epilogue: that a queer person’s whole life could pass and the brief time they had with a withholding “straight” guy is what they will come back to. I don’t believe it’s Queer’s intention to suggest this, but rather that in choosing to emphasize the impact of this doomed affair, a side-effect is that Lee never, ever moves on from that point. It would be one thing if that relationship were a source of genuine love in Lee’s life, but it most certainly wasn’t so what was he hung up on? The takeaway may be that being a product of the 1950s has robbed Lee of any ability to engage with men outside the very heteronormativity-poisoned culture that pervades around him. It’s a very real thing, where attraction and aspiration wrap themselves together around the queer heart and it’s only addled further by the regressive gender norms, but the framing suggests sad and sweeping romantic loss so strongly that any suggestion of that gets lost. It carries with it the whiff that even in a queer story, the fleeting, unenthusiastic participation of one bi-curious man must be centered. Again, this doesn’t seem to be what Queer is aiming for, but I think its instincts lead to some crossed wires and unfortunate byproducts.
The epilogue also left me wondering about audiences. Queer is very true to its title and is full of queer people being queer and doing queer things, but statistically, the audience is likely to be far more varied. It made me wonder if Queer was made with that consideration and what it might mean for how non-queer audience members experienced it and whether this is what they want to see. The epilogue made me wonder what audiences get out of seeing queer people in these sad, destroyed states, still pining for some brief, distant attention they once had. It made me wonder if that’s the mode the average viewer is most comfortable seeing queer people depicted in. Especially in Queer where Lee is defined by his vices and painful attachments with little else known about him, the epilogue doubled down on his singular misery and left me with a sour taste in my mouth.