and we are at the end of vanity

gonna try to keep this as short as possible but basically queer (2024) dir. luca guadagnino stars daniel craig as william s burroughs' fictional persona william lee that appears in the novella junkie and the sequel queer. the entire film is about this man's incredible bone-deep loneliness that he tries to heal by pursuing young men and it is shown to often be futile and lead to upsettingly impersonal sex, but then he meets a young man called eugene, who keeps him at arm's length the whole movie, but also gives him a lot more of himself than lee ever expected to get. the connection lee craves is so desperate and deep that a lot of the special effects in the film are used to display his yearning to touch and hold and get under the man's skin.

lee takes eugene all the way down to south america and bothers the locals because he heard that ayahuasca is a magical drug that makes your souls merge with another person. so they find it and do it and there is a beautiful sequence where they begin to meld into one another but it's also just a scary, unnerving drug trip that wears off and they're left within their flawed bodies again. eugene says "i'm not queer, i'm disembodied". he never accepts the queer lifestyle fully, not the way lee would like him to. the story ends with lee alone and old, still a lost soul, and on what we can construe as his death bed all he remembers is how it felt to be held by that young man that for a moment almost gave him everything.

behind the scenes, daniel craig chose this character as part of his cathartic shedding of the hypermasculine image of playing james bond for over a decade, and this film project has been said to have really made him get in touch with himself and feel more authentic (meaning, we can infer, more openly queer). obviously playing blanc who got to be incredibly flamboyant and implied to be married to hugh grant in glass onion has played a part in this too, but what's crucial about queer and the parallels with wudm is that:

a) daniel craig got to have a say in picking his costar and he chose a handsome young man he really liked and it shows in the movie and in their press tour, and

b) daniel craig plays lee so openly and vulnerably it's almost uncomfortable to watch sometimes. he has not had another performance as vulnerable and desperate as this. and i think that was the part that he enjoyed the most.

now enter the latest knives out sequel. the protagonist is suddenly a young man for the first time which already veers from the pattern of young lower middle class women of color being blanc's watsons, which seemed like a downgrade to many people (including myself before the brainworms got me). but what in my opinion makes and saves the movie is the same thing that makes queer stand out as more than just a stylistic exercise:

a) daniel craig got to pick his costar - rian johnson had no idea who josh o'connor even was before craig suggested him as the next knives out protagonist, and then rian watched challengers and la chimera (both influences you can feel in the movie), and you can tell that daniel craig knew what he was doing because josh has won people over in this role and their chemistry both in the film and in their actors on actors is very fun to watch

b) for the first time ever, daniel craig plays blanc as vulnerable and erratic and desperate for something, though we don't quite learn what. even when he's losing his mind during covid in glass onion, blanc is mostly just comically bored. but in wudm everything from his styling (which screams midlife crisis/divorce/grief so clearly that interviewers actually asked rian johnson about it and he gave a non-answer because that's probably daniel craig's jurisdiction as these movies are very collaborative), to his impassioned dialogue, to his taking this case very personally and having no physical boundaries with jud compared to the women from the previous cases (going from lightly tapping marta's foot with his shoe to hauling father jud across town for 90 minutes) ...

all of this paints a picture of a blanc that is at the end of his rope in some personal way that we haven't seen before. the hints are there: he has trauma from being raised catholic (?) by an estranged (possibly recently deceased) mother. that's already enough to explain a lot. but again, craig choosing to play opposite josh o'connor 1. at all (by getting him the role) and 2. so physically and erratically, reminded many viewers of his desperate yearning for the younger man in queer.

and i can say with confidence that that is exactly what craig was going for! he got a taste of playing a vulnerable gay man and he peppered it into blanc and it worked wonderfully for the premise of this movie. shipping goggles aside, this isn't me tjlcing about a mystery romp secretly having blasphemous gay sex in it (although i know both me and daniel craig would love that and would see zero things wrong with it), i just picked up on there being something in blanc that was responding to jud on a queer level, which makes perfect sense since blanc is a queer man and jud is a handsome vulnerable young priest that is struggling to disembody himself from his earthly needs and only care about his faith.

in a detective romp like this, everything that could be about anything else is about the detective mystery first and foremost, so when jud rejects blanc, it's about solving the case together. but really he is also rejecting blanc's lifestyle, which is a queer one, and their falling out is filmed like a dramatic break-up in the rain. craig's injured acting in that sequence would not be out of place in queer (2024). the subtext here is that whatever temptation jud feels with blanc feels dangerous to him, and blanc has to find a way to stop this kid from self destructing while not making the burden of detectivism (here once again subtextually implying the queer lifestyle) his problem. an atheist serving as guardian angel for a man of god. a gay man saving a priest from himself.

and much like queer, wudm ends on the fantasy of a reassuring embrace. jud hugs him in the church, and craig plays blanc as incredibly moved by the gesture, and this is once again huge if you take into account that blanc is gay and jud very likely knows or at least senses that and initiates an intimate embrace in a church even after "rejecting" that lifestyle for himself. much like queer, the one embrace is all you get. any happily ever afters are pursued alone.