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William S. Burroughs was a gay drug addict. A knot of contradictions, he was also deeply homophobic, sexist, racist and a gun-loving conservative, a passion that would eventually lead to him to be convicted of manslaughter. Needless to say, his life was as wild as his fiction – just watch Luca Guadagnino’s new film Queer.
The film is an adaptation of Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella of the same name, which was written in Central America, to where he had fled after drunkenly – and unsuccessfully – attempting to shoot a whisky glass off his wife’s head at a party. The story follows William Lee (an avatar for Burroughs, brilliantly played by Daniel Craig) as he stalks through 1950s Mexico City looking to indulge in gorgeous men and mind-altering substances.
If you’ve delved into Guadagnino’s back catalogue you know his filmic world is heady, steamy and deeply sensuous. Think of the bitten peach dripping with nectar in his queer coming-of-age film Call Me By Your Name, the dizzying and dangerous dances of Suspiria, and the hot love triangle in his most recent film, Challengers. His world is one of feverish longing, and Queer continues this legacy.
Our reviewer, American literature expert James Miller, found it to be a fairly faithful adaptation of Burroughs’ novel. The first half follows Lee as he becomes obsessed with a tall good-looking young veteran called Eugene Allerton. In the second half, the pair embark on an adventure to South America to find yagé (the hallucinogen ayahuasca).
It’s a beautifully shot film that, as Miller writes, “explores the tension between personal freedom, transgression and control – themes that endured throughout Burroughs’ work”.
Queer is in cinemas now
Read more: Queer: Daniel Craig is superb in this courageous William Burroughs adaptation
The task of translation
Queer could have been a tricky book to adapt – Burroughs’ writing is highly experimental and laden with trippy images, which Guadagnino has somehow managed to evoke. Another impressive feat of translating a book to the screen is Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, based on the epic Colombian saga by Gabriel García Márquez.
The book is a sprawling work of genius, responsible for popularising magical realism as a literary genre and winning García Márquez a Nobel prize. Surprisingly, despite its popularity, it has never been made into a film – the author himself considered it unfilmable.
I get where he was coming from. Surely no studio could have the resources to render its wild mix of reality and fantasy the way our own imaginations can. But Netflix has grasped the nettle and gone big in what is one of their most expensive and lavish productions.
Split into two parts, the first of which is eight episodes, the studio’s adaptation “does not disappoint in its scope or ambition,” according to Liz Harvey-Kattou, an expert in Latin American studies. A surprisingly faithful and detailed retelling, it will please those who adore the novel and bring new fans who love a beautiful period drama – as well as those who enjoy fantasy.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is on Netflix now
Read more: One Hundred Years of Solitude: Netflix adaptation is faithful, ambitious and beautifully realised
Keeping on the theme of translation, this time from one language to another, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has just published his latest novel, The City and its Uncertain Walls. The book revolves around two parallel stories, one about a 17-year-old boy, and the other of a 45-year-old man. After reading it in Japanese and English, Japanese studies scholar Gitte Marianne Hansen happened upon an fascinating difference between the way these two stories are set apart in each version.
In English, the reader becomes aware that the two narratives are distinct as they get to grips with the different worlds they inhabit. However, in Japanese the difference is immediate because the language has several ways to say “I”. This might not seem like a big deal but, as Hansen’s piece outlines, it changes the story and the way the reader interprets it in several interesting ways.
Read more: Haruki Murakami and the challenge of translating Japanese’s many words for “I”
New digital horizons
In As You Like It, Shakespeare famously wrote, “all the world’s a stage” and during the pandemic, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen took this to heart and ran with it. With theatres closed, they took every part of Grand Theft Auto’s online open-world game and made it a stage for a unique production of Hamlet. For future media academic Andy Miah, Grand Theft Hamlet is the hilarious film documenting the making of this ingenious, boundary-pushing production.
As well as showing the possibilities of theatre in digital spaces, it’s just a very funny and heartwarming film that will entertain theatre and games lovers in equal measure. I for one laughed out loud at frequent calls for actors and audience members to “please refrain from killing each other”.
Grand Theft Hamlet is in select cinemas now
Read more: Grand Theft Hamlet documentary shines a light on reinventing Shakespeare in a virtual world
Also pushing traditional art forms to new places is the Tate Modern’s new exhibition Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet. Featuring 150 works, it is one the most ambitious exhibitions at the Tate to date, bringing together groundbreaking works by artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation up to the early 1990s.
It’s a fascinating look at our relationship with technology before the commercialisation of the internet. As our reviewer Geoff Cox, an expert in art and computational culture, notes, there’s a sort of utopian hope, something innocent almost and idealistic, which we are missing now.
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet is at Tate Modern, London, until 1 June 2025
