(Nov 19, 2024 08:18 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]Based on the novel by William Burroughs, this looks to be deep and sensitive study of a queer relationship between a young man and a much older man set in exotic locations. I'm thinking maybe Oscar buzz for Daniel Craig. The Academy just loves straight actors playing queer characters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eknj5_0tF2s
Now that Craig is 56, I actually expected him to resemble Burroughs better ("William Lee" in the novel) -- which was ridiculous in hindsight. Burroughs was only circa 36 or 37 at the time -- I've gotten too accustomed to seeing him in his old age from the 1970s-80s.
Given the couple of photos of Adelbert "Lew" Marker, he was probably in between Ginsberg's disparaging description of him and Burroughs' portrayal of him as "Allterton" in the novel.
Darned if anyone seems to be able to decipher what really happened to his wife. Did he literally point the gun, or did it fall and discharge? The couple seemed too drunk to realize what they were doing, so at least it probably wasn't premeditated.
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Springfield: Lewis Marker, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg
https://jaxpsychogeo.com/north/springfie...-ginsberg/
EXCERPTS: In the 1940s, to be a teenage boy living with a single mother who’d entered a suit of divorce and won was to be a freak. It was a time when mothers were blamed for everything that might go wrong with a child, and when, most garishly, mothers too flagrantly independent were thought to put their sons in danger of homosexuality, then a recognized mental illness. By 1950, Lew lived in his own apartment on East 4th, having served the United States Counter-Intelligence Corps for a short stint in post-Hitler Germany.
Burrough’s early writing, Ginsberg’s too, stakes an outlaw morality, rebelling wildly against the conservative postwar culture. Marker’s childhood history, combined with a wanderlust enabled by the U.S. military, led him to assume Burroughs, 16 years older, knew his sexuality better than he himself did. He acquiesced to Burroughs sexually when the older writer hounded, harassed and stalked him.
Then Ginsberg arrived in the center of this Southern’s city’s mid-century decay, its grand houses moldering, wanting to know the truth, but already defensive of Burroughs and of himself.
Though Marker gave Ginsberg twelve bucks toward his further travels (more than $100 in today’s money), Ginsberg described his looks viciously in his letter to Kerouac. Whereas Ginsberg calls Marker “starved-looking and rickety,” with bad skin, and “pursey-mouthed,” Burroughs writes, in
Queer: “Allerton was tall and very thin, with high cheekbones, a small bright-red mouth, and amber-colored eyes that took on a faint violet flush when he was drunk.”
“The first sight of him was a shock,” Ginsberg wrote Kerouac. “Poor, poor Bill! To be in love with that sickly myopic pebble-mouthed scarecrow!”
[...] Burroughs’s tone in
Queer toward the Latin American countries he wanders is unrelentingly racist, smug, entitled and elitist. The “William Lee” of
Queer isn’t rebellious, he’s just irresponsible, and his supposed counterculture is paternalistically conservative: toward Latin America, toward Adelbert Lewis Marker, and toward Joan Vollmer.
Whatever Vollmer might later have written and created, she became background for Burroughs’s biography. Burroughs turned her death into the reason he became a writer, though he was already writing. Wrote a novel about Lewis Marker that fails to mention Joan at all, while awaiting trial for killing her. And in late summer 1952, he told Allen Ginsberg that Marker, not Joan, was his reason for writing. Even saying that if Marker didn’t like the novel
Queer, Burroughs would never write again.
How Joan Vollmer died
https://allthatsinteresting.com/joan-vollmer
EXCERPTS: . . . Alongside a love for intellectual conversation, Vollmer and Burroughs also shared an addiction to drugs. Burroughs liked heroin; Vollmer preferred Benzedrine.
[...] On Sept. 6, 1951, Joan Vollmer and her fugitive husband played a game that would take her life.
According to police records, Burroughs told authorities that he had wanted to show off his new pistol and marksmanship at a party with friends. He had Vollmer place a gin glass on her head in a game called William Tell, during which the shooter typically aims for an apple balanced on someone else’s head.
[...] The police report then stated that “Burroughs thought [Vollmer] was joking” when she collapsed after he shot at her. He was apparently too drunk to realize that he had shot her right in the forehead.
While held on homicide charges, Burroughs told reporters that “it was purely accidental. I did not put a glass on her head. If she did, it was a joke, and I certainly did not intend to shoot at it.” He later claimed the gun had misfired after being dropped to the ground.
[...] Through a series of bribes, Burroughs managed to get released from Mexican custody on bail and fled back to the United States. Mexican authorities convicted him in absentia of manslaughter, but he was never tried nor convicted for the murder of Joan Vollmer.
In the ensuing years, Joan Vollmer’s death has both haunted and inspired Burroughs. As he wrote in his 1985 novel,
Queer [its introduction?]:
“I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from passion, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”
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