Castration, Aesthetics, and the Phallus: Luca Guadagnino’s Queer

“The status of the phallus is a fraud,” writes Jacqueline Rose.¹ As such, castration is the other of the aesthetic. While castration separates and subtracts, the aesthetic totalizes and encloses. Luca Guadagnino’s films have often been characterized by their luxuriant aesthetics, dreamy perfection, and heightened sensuality. Even violence in his films, as we see in Suspiria (2018), is presented with a choreographed impeccability. D.A. Miller’s brutal (and in my opinion, unfair) takedown of Call Me by Your Name (2017) finds the “overpowering” and “overdone” beauty of the film highly “exasperating.”² Miller, however, misses Guadagnino’s project of pairing abundance with lack. Both Call Me by Your Name and Guadagnino’s latest, his adaptation of William Burroughs’s 1985 novel Queer (2024), are self-reflexive of the horrors of their own lack. I call this Guadagnino’s castraesthetics, or an aesthetics whose totalizing impulse displays a heightened awareness of its own negativity and castration.

Jacques Lacan maintains that symbolic castration is a prerequisite for becoming subjects of the Symbolic order. This means that as long as we are speaking and desiring subjects, we are all symbolically castrated. Unlike Freud, however, Lacan does not use castration to suggest the literal loss of the penis. In Lacanese, castration implies a fundamental lack, or feeling of incompleteness, in the subject. Jacqueline Rose succinctly explains this: “Castration means first of all this — that the child’s desire for the mother does not refer to her but beyond her, to an object, the phallus, whose status is first imaginary (the object presumed to satisfy her desire) and then symbolic (recognition that desire cannot be satisfied).”³ Moreover, even though everyone is symbolically castrated, the subject falsely assumes that the other is noncastrated and undivided. In other words, the other is mistakenly perceived as having the phallus (a metaphor for power, wholeness, authority, and completion). The discovery of the other’s symbolic castration, therefore, is a traumatic experience, collapsing the fantasy of the other as the complete and perfect owner of the phallus.

Guadagnino’s films touch upon the idea that the alterity of others is the greatest problem of love. As Eugenie Brinkema poignantly notes in Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), “the fundamental difficulty of love” is “the distance between I and You.”⁴ This persistent trope runs through the oeuvre of Luca Guadagnino’s films: how does one completely possess the object of desire to mitigate the grammatical antagonism, or the distance, between the lover and the beloved? We see a version of this in Call Me By Your Name where Oliver (Armie Hammer) implores Elio (Timothée Chalamet): “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.” As if the name, which gives distinct personhood and unique identities to these characters, functions as an impediment between the lover and the beloved, and renders their romantic union impossible.

In Call Me by Your Name, Guadagnino employs powerful visuals to aesthetically communicate the lovers’ longing to commingle with one another. Probably inspired by the iconic scene in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), where the faces of Bibi Andersson (the nurse) and Liv Ullmann (the actress) overlap and blend into each other, the poster of Call Me by Your Name portrays Elio’s head strategically resting on Oliver’s shoulder where it seems that their heads are grafted together like Siamese twins. The film’s poster renders the true import of calling a beloved by their lover’s name and illustrates what it means to lose the boundary of one’s identity and conjoin with their romantic other. But if the poster of the film conveys the phallic fantasy of corporeal oneness, then an earlier scene from the film undercuts such an illusion and betrays the eventual separation of the lovers and their recognition of each other’s symbolic castration.

Let us consider the scene at the archaeological site of Grotte di Catullo. A magnificent ancient statue of a Roman athlete is pulled out from deep under the Lake Garda. Even before we are offered a sight of the beauty and grandeur of this Hellenistic statue, we get a glimpse of its broken arm that has been severed from its body. This castrated hand, a positivized representation of the symbolic castration of the characters, brings Oliver and Elio together. As Elio extends his hand toward Oliver, the latter offers this castrated hand of the statue to him in a gesture of a truce or a pact. At this point, none of these characters recognize that the other is symbolically castrated, and each of them perceives the other as assuming the position of phallic mastery. This scene not only challenges the promise of the phallic organization that the poster of the film evinces, but also anticipates the separation of Elio and Oliver at the end when the game of calling the lover by the other’s name can no longer continue. They will soon be exposed to each other’s lack. The lush scenery and beauty of the film hide the dreadful logic of castration that governs its aesthetic construction. 

“The cut of castration—or the castration threat—gives birth to desire by separating the subject from its privileged object,” notes Todd McGowan.⁵ Symbolic castration, therefore, is the precondition for desire. In Queer, William Lee (Daniel Craig) is left emotionally ransacked and crippled by his desire for Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a nonchalant, self-absorbed, dazzlingly beautiful, and bratty young boy who is the source of Lee’s phallic enjoyment. Allerton is the primary figure in the film who, Lee believes, owns and possesses the phallus. On their first night of lovemaking in Lee’s apartment, when Lee takes off Allerton’s sweater and caresses his torso, the latter declares, “That rib’s broken,” alluding to his castrated, or incomplete, self. But Slavoj Žižek reminds us that “perversion [always] enacts the disavowal of castration,”⁶ and as a self-proclaimed pervert (“The Lees have always been perverts”), Lee chooses to overlook and disregard Allerton’s lack, thereby elevating him to the position of a fetish object. Perhaps, he comes to occupy the position of Eve who makes herself whole from the missing rib of Adam.⁷

In another scene, when Lee attempts to make a sexual advance on a sleeping Allerton, the latter wakes up, startled, and says, “I thought you were going to run your hand down my ribs.” Even though in the screenplay of the film, Lee says, “You do have nice ribs. Show me the broken one,” on-screen we merely see him running his hand down Allerton’s chest, followed by a scene of passionate sex. This repeated emphasis on Allerton’s broken ribs is not without reason: while this scene, on the one hand, pronounces Lee’s fetishistic disavowal of the other’s symbolic castration, on the other, it is almost entirely aesthetically constituted of multiple cuts of the camera. It is as if the camera’s cuts (alluding to the cut of castration), alternately focusing on Lee and Allerton, compensate for the former’s disavowed knowledge of the latter’s lack.

However, it is not for too long that Lee believes that Allerton wears the insignia of the phallus. Under the hallucinatory effects of ayahuasca, when both of their bodies almost merge together, Lee comes closest to Allerton’s lack. This is the most tragic moment in the film, for Lee realizes that the twink is not the non-lacking phallic other he misrecognized him to be. Their bodies gradually turn translucent and eventually fade away entirely from the frame. Once they recover from their psychedelic trip, and decide to return to Mexico City, Allerton abruptly disappears from the plot of the film.

Towards the end of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), Slavoj Žižek observes, “All too often, when we love somebody, we don’t accept [them] as what the person effectively is. We accept [them] insofar as this person fits the coordinates of our fantasy.” Once Lee’s fantasies collapse, not only does Allerton pale into oblivion, but the film’s narrative loses its linear progression. We once again return to the hotel room where Lee hooked up with a Mexican hustler (Omar Apollo) who wore a centipede pendant around his neck. In one of the final scenes of the film, we see Allerton appear in Lee’s dream wearing a similar centipede pendant. We would probably be able to see a pattern if we remember that the unnamed Mexican hustler, who caught Lee’s fancy in a queer bar, had a missing tooth that displayed his symbolic castration. 

When we see Allerton wearing the same pendant, we realize that the circuit of desire in this film runs through these many cuts, castrations, and empty nothings which construct and reflect on the film’s castraesthetic. In an interview, Guadagnino claims: “The centipede is the villain in the movie.” As a misnomer or a signifier of deception (despite the meaning of its name, no centipede has one hundred legs), the haunting presence of the centipede — that connects Allerton and the hustler — is a reminder of Lee’s inability to read and recognize the symbolic castration of others.

Perhaps this plays out most prominently in the two posters of Queer that A24 circulated before the film’s release. If the poster of Call Me by Your Name bespeaks the phallic illusion of corporeal oneness, the posters of Queer figure the cut of castration by subtracting the face/head/torso of the two central characters, effectively reminding us of their lack and symbolic castration. If “queerness,” as Lee Edelman has taught us well, “in its status as a catachresis of ab-sens, exerts an ironic force incompatible with the aesthetic,”⁸ then the film’s castraesthetic force of queerness repeatedly draws our attention to the fraudulence of the phallus, and gestures toward the symbolic exclusions of the aesthetic. Herein lies the pathos of Queer: it is not in the fact that Lee and Allerton’s relationship does not reach fruition, but in the idea that nobody owns the phallus even as William Lee is obsessed with believing that somebody must. 

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1. Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction II” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), 40. 
2. D.A. Miller, “Elio’s Education,” Los Angeles Review of Books (February 19, 2018).
3. Rose, “Introduction II,” 38. 
4. Eugenie Brinkema, Life Destroying Diagrams (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2022), 335-36. 
5. Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch (New York, Columbia University Press, 2007), 96.
6. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York, Verso, 2000), 322.
7. I am grateful to Michael Dango for reminding me of this Biblical allusion.
8. Lee Edelman, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2022), xviii.

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  Rahul Sen

  Rahul Sen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Tufts University. His areas of interest include queer theory, psychoanalysis, cinema studies, and postmodernism. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the ‘twink’ as a form in theory, literature, and culture.