Waiting

Crossing over into consciousness, I’m feeling fulcrum-y this morning or as I used to tell my parents, stretching from my crib: I’m waiting…I’m waiting for the sun to come UP!  

I wait for as long as it takes. Ain't no sunshine when...

It is not an understatement, I don't think, to say that Luca Guadagnino's sun-stained adolescent romance film Call Me By Your Name (2017) changed what cinema meant to my generation, or certainly to the "normal people" I went to high school with, introducing to them—and to the Reddit-brained—cinema consciousness, creating will-to-difference (in the end, also an exercise in conformity), where before there was mainly shame. Difference came in through the film's cautious, very diligent and stylized approach to emoting which complemented the migration of Tumblr screencap "aesthetics" to the more immediate pictorial hyperloop of Instagram, alongside the rise of niche streaming platforms like Filmstruck, and production studios like A24. (It paid off, too, in allowing Guadagnino to pursue current projects like setting an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' early novel Queer on stage instead of in a physical location, and with entirely non-cinematic references).

Rewatching the film recently, I follow Timothee Chalamet's child body and remember how it used to be my body and that his child's longing used to be my longing and because I have grown with this movie and seemingly it with me I feel less like Chalamet's Elio and more so like Oliver, Armie Hammer's character, nearing 24, doing battle with the world. What battles, anyhow? For the feminine side of duality represented in Elio, the battle resides in his waiting—like Penelope for Odysseus, or the princess who needs her knight to speak (that Elio’s parents seed as a symbolic device from Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron), or Persephone anticipating her few days of freedom, or Eurydice lost to eternity. He waits for the sun—Oliver is glorious, tanned, beaming Apollo—to come up (and when he does, after they’ve slept together, I wanted to make sure that you’re still hard Elio tells him, in giving the briefest blowjob, a reversal of their waiting dynamic). 

Masha Tuptisyn writes about Call Me By Your Name as a film founded on anticipation, on hoping and desiring as active verbs that extend into time through the drumming fingers of the camera frame, the score, Chalamet's performance. Tupitsyn observes how Elio waits for Oliver with weltering eyes and a crumpled torso in a special, designated place, and that because he has a place to wait, he has a portal into another timescale, that of the story within a story, where his relationship with Oliver can be stretched past platonic bounds, where their script can be edited and re-edited as chronology is given over to the kairotic. This portal is opened through the upended "durability" (rather than, in Guadagnino's vocalization, "ephemerality") of the filmic material, through a "divine accident" (Orson Welles): an all-green still, a surreptitious lab "fuck-up" that marks the conclusion of Elio's grave wailing wait, prefiguring a turning point in the plot-line. 

Tupitsyn evokes how Guadagnino's film charmed viewers as a window onto that very thing in our culture that we are perhaps aware of being hammered out to an abstraction, but struggle to articulate: the slow, still beauty of Elio's singular longing is a state fundamentally antagonistic to a world of rapid, ceaseless gratification, distortion, and distraction. How long does this cinematic window last—only the length of the film? It is a window in real life, too. Strange how few people I knew in their forties who watched the movie "got" it, and yet they were the ones who witnessed, who had lived through, its (pre-AIDS) before. They told me they were disturbed by the folding limbs of Elio’s child and Oliver’s no longer child bodies, that the camera’s choreography did not shake them to core, but that maybe if they were my age it could have. It was almost a rebuke, their rejection of the window, of its light and all the textures that the light revels in. It is a film that retains much through the most minimal touch, whereas, outside of art, we are predisposed to say little with a lot.

My first round seeing Call Me By Your Name was with my friend Adrien at the Paris Theater, the year I was working in DC. I was back in town for the holidays, and afterwards we snuck into the bathrooms at The Plaza, full of tourists, and had Scandinavian coffees and complained about our parents. It was a Friday afternoon, almost Sun-down, the Sabbath hour. When I returned home to those parents for dinner, and crumpled my body on the floor as Elio did his, they could not understand my devastation, why I was still bawling…from only a movie…I thought it was a religious reaction, to some of the motifs in it I had not previously seen on film, or to the longing that it encapsulated…but more likely it was grief in the face of the window’s open and close—which is also, grief in the face of embodiment as severance from light-source, grief because it can be so hard to commingle in body when you are used to commingling in light: that is what Elio and Oliver began by doing—light is the delta of their synergy—and that was how I arrived in the world. And as a baby, I was always waiting for the sun to collect me, to come fetch me back into its orbit.

With this latest revisit, older, more attuned to light-work, I could not experience Call Me By Your Name in my body, it failed to linger like that, and in this, I felt relief, relief at having developed past the non-cosmic nuances of it: past the hemmed-in-ness of youthful want, past Elio's valences of appetite, though never past the landscape, the natural environment, the atmospheric elements that carry the film so—that help renew it into fresh being. In a sense, the movie is a dusty, wind-feathered tent for the soul, warm and well-pitched, with routes in from several sides (polyglot mélange that it is, audially), it is perfect in the way that an amuse-bouche is always perfect, meaning in a way it shyly regrets. Guadagnino's work invites a winding-back to longing that as it and its audience mature also facilitates a continuous goodbye-to-self, as a waiting place where we, too, might encounter our Olivers, not, as it was for Elio, our objects of lusted-after futures, but husks of persons, like grasses, now gone (Later! being his trademark—Apollonian—expression).

song: Falling From Grace, by The Gentle Waves (2000)