clarity over subtext
This Week in Reading
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
I watched this movie in theaters a couple weeks ago and felt like I was having a tiny gay heart attack every five minutes for two hours. I was immediately gripped by a need to read the original novel, and then rewatch the movie, and then reread the book and then so on and so forth. I used to never watch a movie without reading the book first, but with so many adapted screenplays out there, that type of purity is impossible, and ultimately useless, to uphold. That being said, I rarely feel compelled to read a book after seeing the film adaptation. The movie either so perfectly translates the text that it renders the original unnecessary, or else is bad enough that it quashes any desire to linger in the story longer.
Call Me By Your Name is an exception. The movie is extraordinary, and the book was equally incredible, even though I knew everything that was going to happen. In fact, each experience enriches the other, the movie creating atmosphere and mood, and the book giving deeper insight to the characters’ motivations.
I have never read a book that so clearly feels like existing inside someone else’s brain. Elio is a 17-year-old son of a professor living in Northern Italy. During the course of the book, he becomes enraptured with a graduate student named Oliver who has come to stay with his family. Elio’s thoughts, fantasies and anxieties all tumble together. There is no pause, no breath between any of these things. Elio is intoxicated by Oliver and so we are, too. Oliver, Oliver, Oliver, Oliver, the book seems to chant. The movie too, seems to ache for Oliver, the camera lovingly panning along Armie Hammer’s golden body as he plays tennis or sleeps by the pool. It is the most accurate depiction of gay yearning I have ever read.
Told from Elio’s perspective, the novel weaves back and forth as he makes decisions, doubts them, is overcome with a new flood of emotion, pushes forward. Nothing is justified for the reader. We simply follow Elio’s thoughts as he has them. Though there are moments of inner conflict, there is a refreshing lack of shame in the novel, in the same way that we shamelessly allow our own desires, perversions, and thoughts to flit across our minds.
What I loved most about both the movie and the book is how they are so restrained, yet so direct. Elio is reserved in action, but through André Aciman’s writing, and Timothée Chalamet’s extraordinary performance, it is obvious that this is a boy whose thoughts and desires are bursting just below the surface. Elio is shy, yet bold under pressure. He comes onto Oliver, is persistent in his approach. He says what he wants, he is direct in his desires. His clarity is almost startling.
I have gotten blunter in the past year. I still talk too much, but I hope I have gotten more efficient with my language. I want to say what I mean instead of circling around it. I am no longer interested in clues and signs and hints.
Forgive me if I have already had this conversation with you, but I am so tired of subtext. I am over symbolism and hidden meanings. I am over metaphor. I want things to just be what they are. I don’t want to look at a painting and decide what an alligator stands for, parse out some biblical allegory embedded into the work. I don’t want the color of a handkerchief in a short story to mean something. IdontcareIdontcareIdontcare. In high school English class I was endlessly frustrated by the way my teachers would dissect writing. Our homework assignments would instruct us to break passages into smaller and smaller chunks, until they were no longer ideas, but technical examples of alliteration, bilabial fricatives, similes. I hated this, hated being forced to peer closely enough at a book until it didn’t mean anything at all anymore. Constantly sniffing out some hidden lesson about War and God that the author may or may not have embedded into the novel.
I am tired of symbolism in art. That is not to say that I am only interested in formalism, or surface analysis. On the contrary, I feel like everything already means so much already! Why bother making it a symbol for something else? Everything comes with it’s own history and weight.
We ascribe additional meanings to things because we are afraid that they are not enough on their own. Symbolism is a crutch, a way for us to avoid approaching things head on, a way for us to ensure that something is important when we fear that others will not take it seriously for what it is. When I make art, I hope that the process embeds my intentions into the object itself. At their best, these objects are artifacts of my labor, of my ideas, of the materials they are formed from. I want the things I make to be potent enough alone that they don’t need to reference something loftier.
I am tired of subtext in my daily interactions as well. I am aspiring to deftness. It is exhausting to guess what someone else means, and it is even more exhausting to wait for them to guess what I mean just because I was too cowardly to tell it to them straight.
Take me at my word and I promise to be brave and precise in choosing them.
Further Reading
Other things I would lovingly describe as “gay bullshit”:
I read the Miseducation of Cameron Post earlier this year and already recommended it but I will do so again. It’s a YA novel about lesbian cowgirls so obviously I loved it.
You should watch One Mississippi, Tig Notaro’s show on Amazon. There are only two seasons and each season is only a half dozen twenty-minute episodes so it is essentially no commitment. Both seasons are good but the second season is gayer and I watched them out of order and it was fine.
Also maybe just read this essay Notable Internet Gay, Mallory Ortberg, wrote about shipping straight girls on the Big Bang Theory? It is better than it sounds, I promise.