ahh well im a bit of a masochist i guess lol because i think the moments i remember most often are in ghost spots... I don’t know, this book really just devastated me in a way that i hadn’t experienced very many times in my life, so those moments in the end stick out to me like no other. 

There’s a moment when they’re together and Elio is asking for Oliver to leave him billowy that literally, just writing that, chokes me up. That moment is so fucking heartbreaking and innocent, and I think it kind of captures the entire story in this one little line:  “I want Billowy too. And the espadrilles. And the sunglasses. And you.”

Like??? Oh my god. I think about that line sometimes and just want to cry lol this entire book/story being told at some point in the future ruins me tbh. Because these things he’s asking for, the bathing suit, billowy, espadrilles, sunglasses -- these are all details he remembers in the current time, at the end of the story. These are things he waxes on about throughout the story, fixating on these pieces of Oliver that he attributed so closely to who Oliver was. He was just listing things he wanted as reminders, perhaps not even really thinking about it too much, but over a decade later he remembers these things as Oliver. We know he does this, another part that always strikes me is when they’ve met up and Elio is contemplating whether he can stand to go meet Oliver’s family and he’s listing things -- Oliver wife. Oliver sons. Oliver pets. Oliver study, desk, books, world, life. -- as these icons that define who Oliver is. I don’t know, something about this thread is just.... ugh. So beautiful? I think it’s one of the more profoundly understated things Andre did with the writing because we all do this. That first love of yours, you have some thing that you always associate with them. And it’s not a conscious thing, it just is. Any time that is incorporated into the story is always really beautiful and tragic to me. Because you know, you know that any time Elio saw those specific espadrilles, or an oversized blue shirt, those sunglasses on a tall blond, you know his heart clenched. 

Okay im rambling but you came to me so really it’s not my fault lmao. 

Another moment is obviously the speech between Elio and his father. An old friend once pointed out to me how badly I needed to hear that speech in a moment where I was really low. And I’d always loved it, always felt inexplicably connected to that piece of writing in a way I wasn’t quite able to express, because I knew I needed it... but a year after reading it for the first time I had those words thrown at me like a gut punch. I think of it often. It is the constant reminder I need in my head. 

But Oliver IS a romantic. He stole a god damn picture postcard and kept it on his wall for 20 years with his handwritten “cor cordium” love note on the back to one day give back to Elio. If that’s not romantic, then smack me on the side of the head.

OMG, I KNOW. It’s one of those things where if you collect all the clues dropped in the book and film, it’s unbearable, almost Brief Encounter levels of romanticism. It’s that André Gregory quote: “But another kind of love is to love hopelessly, to love someone you can never have, the awful sweetness of longing for the unattainable, that strange and blissful frustration.” 

@ghostcat3000 so what I’m legit obsessed with is how O got from “I want to be good” to “see you at midnight.” Maybe he vacillated day to day and E was bold at the right time. But I suspect O had a hard time resisting, and thought to himself, if E comes on to me one more time I’m going for it!

I think for him, the game changer wasn’t agreeing to meet him at midnight necessarily but Pro. Perlman’s sexy statues lecture and pointed gaze. My takeaway from that scene, particularly with Oliver’s what-are-you-trying-to-tell-me look at Samuel at the end, was that perhaps Oliver had a realization that reciprocating Elio’s feelings was not “being bad” because it was mutual, natural, and most importantly, not opposed by outside forces. This is the first time for him, I think, that this is the case. What an intense, heady thing.

@xxsear-bearxx asked me how to explain this concept to people who haven’t read the book, and instead of giving a simple answer (do you know me) I’m writing an evaluative/analytical post to actually explain the depth of reasoning behind this. Because that’s just what I do, and honestly, I think it’s really important with this. 

So it's actually a super interesting complex thing between them that I love. I've written about it on here before a few times but not in many months. It's essentially this concept of wanting to be so close to another person that your souls are bonded, something I used to refer to on here often as “I am you and you are me and we are one.” For them, yes it does become this sexual thing, but it is so beyond that; the only reason it holds any sexual grounds for them is because it's so deeply rooted in something of substance. Before it ever becomes sexual, there’s this hint: “His ability to intuit things in exactly the way I myself might have intuited them. This, in the end, was what drew me to him...” (22) which suggests that this similarity, this sense of being that was one and the same between them was a huge draw all along. We also see this in the importance of their faith, of them being brothers in this sense. It’s all over the book. When it does hit that infamous part of the novel, the context around which those words are spoken are profound and give a lot of context to why this concept is so important to them. 

What is life without this? which was why, in the end, it was I, and not he, who blurted out, not once, but many, many times, You’ll kill me if you stop, you’ll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle the dream and the fantasy, me and him, the longed-for words from his mouth to my mouth back into his mouth, swapping words from mouth to mouth, which was when I must have begun using obscenities that he repeated after me, softly at first, till he “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.” (134) 

Not long after this, Oliver wears Elio’s swim trunks, swim trunks being an important form of imagery in the novel, as well as the act of clothes sharing in general. It also gives insight into this notion of “oneness.” 

But what turned me on wasn't this. It was the porousness, the fungibility, of our bodies- what was mine was suddenly his, just as what belonged to him could be all mine now... No one had ever worn my clothes. Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. he was my secret conduit to myself- like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier's bone together, the other man's heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant. (142-43)

And then again towards the end, after his dad says parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi, he thinks back to the Brontë’s quote, “He’s more myself than I am.” Which is really just half of the significance of that quote-- “He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” 

Then again, my personal favorite, after the blank years have passed, Elio (still so in love), thinks:

It would finally dawn on us both that he was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself. (243)

Not to mention all of the bodily functions these two share in, and the deeply rooted desire to share no secrets in order to be completely exposed and taken by the other. In the end, it is so much less about the act of sex and calling out one another’s names. It is about them becoming one another in a metaphysical way. It is an acceptance of the pieces of their souls that belong to each other, the exchange of not only love but of being, of soul, of essence, that occurred between them emotionally, spiritually, and physically. 

Hello and thank you. :) My interpretation of including that exact quote from The Cosmic Fragments in reference to Elio and Oliver’s relationship (while not at all having studied philosophy for any length) would simply be that... Things must change (the summer can’t last forever), because that is what life is: without us feeling like time is progressing second by second in a linear way, it wouldn’t really be living. And the very nature of our relationship with time implies change is necessary, or else we couldn’t tell one moment from the other, it is inevitable. 

If Elio and Oliver’s relationship is “the river” in this quote, then the quote says that their love can only stay the same by changing (by letting it grow, accepting distance or whatever troubles come their way). Since CMBYN is essentially a coming-of-age story about first love, and the inevitable change (and the fear of change) caused by time is a huge factor within it, one can assume the quote is both about Elio changing, and their love changing - and also withstanding, growing and weathering those inevitable changes (Oliver leaving, getting married, etc). 

This ask is in reference to my tags on this quotation:

You know what’s weird? My favorite moment in my film is one I shouldn’t be able to relate to: when Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays my father, says, “As for our bodies, there comes a time when no one wants to come near them.” That moment shatters me.

Okay so...  first of all, I'mnot saying my experience of the story is "correct" or the "onetrue way" or anything.  CMBYN isa complex, layered work of fiction and is open to many different readings andinterpretations.  If you want to read itas a straightforward soulmate love story, that's more than fine.

For me, the story is also about the phases of life of asame-sex-attracted man.  In this reading,each of the male characters represents a stage of life.  Elio is the adolescent just discovering hispotential for same-sex attraction.  Thebrashness of youth gives him the boldness to seek out what he wants. Oliver, alittle older, is in the full bloom of manhood. He's the object of everyone's desire, but he also has more awareness ofthe risks that come with acting on your attractions.  Prof. Perlman has settled into middle age: heis happy and successful in the path he followed, but he also has regrets.  He looks at Elio and Oliver and recognizesthat while he still feels that kind of desire, it's too late for him to have itreciprocated -- no one will ever again look at his body the way Elio looks at Oliver's.  This is what he tells us in his speech: hehad his chance when he was young and good-looking, but he was too shy or scaredto take it, and he'll never get that chance again.

And then there's Anchise – the old man, whom Elio can only view as"creepy".  Oliver views Anchisewith more compassion, as a "lost soul", but neither of them imaginesfor a moment that Anchise is a sexual being with his own active desires.  Prof. Perlman is the most sympathetic toAnchise, because he sees his own future in him – as an object of fear,derision, or pity, but never of lust. 

I'm not saying any of this is *true* -- that no man over fifty everfinds love or sexual satisfaction with another man.  Obviously that is not the case.  But a lot of people do feel that way, and Ithink that's what Prof. Perlman is talking about in his final speech.  He feels that, as a middle-aged man, the onlyplace left for him in the sexual economy is to watch over his son's affair,providing guidance and support.  Soon, hewon't be allowed even that privilege, as he becomes "creepy" in theeyes of the young.   

As to why this would be the crux of the whole story...  Normally I prefer to take a text on its ownand not speculate too much on the author. But in this case, I can't help but be aware of the fact that Aciman,while writing the story, was closest in age to Prof. Perlman.  I know very little about Aciman's real life,but I can easily imagine that Perlman is at least to some extent speaking forAciman.  The meta-statement of Perlman'sspeech may be that, for a middle-aged man, this kind of sexual adventure canonly happen in the realm of fantasy.  Andthat's exactly what Call Me By Your Name is, in a literal sense – a middle agedman's fantasy of the love affair between two young, beautiful men.  So while on a surface level, it would seemlike the crux of the story should be some event between the protagonists, Elioand Oliver, I think in a larger sense, the story is really about middle agelooking back on youth.  And that's whythat particular line is so crucial to the whole narrative. 

Water is a powerful cinematic motif in Call Me by Your Name, a thematic, metaphoric and audio-visual force of nature that binds Elio and Oliver together, and water features prominently in a majority of their scenes together. In a scene early on in the film, Elio picks up a book belonging to Oliver - The Cosmic Fragments - on the works of Greek philosopher Heraclitus. We hear Oliver’s voice reading a quote from it echoing in Elio’s mind.

”The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing."

This quote is a good starting point to begin to look at how the filmmakers use nature, especially water, as a storytelling tool throughout the film to say a lot of interesting things about Elio and his growing relationship with Oliver. The quote compares Elio and Oliver’s love to a flowing river, read by Oliver in Elio’s mind. Like the river in the quote, their relationship can only stay the same by changing, by letting fresh springs from the mountains into their pond - and it strongly hints at a reunion between the two of them, sometime in the future.

Well, he had all day to kill before his hot date at midnight, and he’s a horny seventeen year old boy. Haha, that’s all the answers I have. I suppose Elio and Marzia have sex once, and then are for a brief few days whatever the 1983 equivalent of friends with benefits is, except Marzia has feelings for him that he doesn’t reciprocate; to him they’re just friends. I definitely think he cares a lot for her, he just goes about it awfully, whether he’s aware of her feelings or not (my guess is not, Elio can’t see anything past Oliver’s chest hair). Passing the time by sleeping with one person, making them think you might care, while never taking your eyes off of the clock, counting down to your planned meeting with another person (whom you actually like) isn’t exactly a... nice thing to be doing. He’s not mentally present for her there at all, his thoughts are with Oliver.

We should all empathize with Marzia, honestly, seeing as what Elio does to her is basically what Oliver does to Elio for the first half of the film - he’s nice, he’s friendly and then he... disappears. It’s incredibly unfair and shortsighted to treat her, or anyone, like that and it’s one of Elio’s many flaws that make him a great, multifaceted and real character, but also something that shouldn’t be excused or ever glossed over. Her story is a parallel tragedy of heartbreak to his.