Elio Forever

Love and memory, life as a ruined peach

But I am blind!

Unable to create a brow,

a lash, the hollow down

the back of the neck,

the throat!

— Robert Peters, Song for a Lost Son

***

When I first watched Call Me By Your Name I didn’t like it. It was early, or maybe mid 2020, and we were locked down in London for the pandemic, and I was being desperately good about it and therefore was alone inside the house. That went on for most of the year. Perhaps the movie just made me resent what I was missing. But I had read the book some years ago and liked it, and I didn’t hate the film. It just didn’t seem to touch me. With hindsight, now, I think I didn’t get it. 

How is it possible to not get it? Especially if you are gay and you have also read the book? Is there really that much to get? I’m afraid I’m going to argue that there is. (I’m also going to use gay as my umbrella term — which is allowed, since in any meaningful sense so is Elio in fact bisexual and nonbinary, and he hints about this several times, but never uses labels, which is right.)  The problem I had then was not that I had too little in common with the situation. The issue was that there was in fact too much, and my mind had to reject it, for I had not made myself ready to receive it. Looking back, I hardly could have. I think I see it now. 

I called up all the typical excuses. First, there is Armie Hammer. He was then on the cusp of being cancelled (and criminally charged! But it was dropped.) But he’s so wooden in that film, or so I thought then; so withholding. And he’s old. In fact he was younger then than I was when I watched it, a thought that makes me shiver now; horrendous. But he’s supposed to be 24. And he looks so old next to Chalamet, who looks so, so, frighteningly young, so young you can feel worried, like is he really 20? One shrinks back from his tiny-nippled chest. I don’t like the backlash against the “age gap relationship”, how endlessly fucking tedious can we get with this shit.¹ But it’s not hard to see why that was picked up as the symbol, made to bear all our discomfort. We take what weak excuses we can get. 

Secondly, and this one was specific to me, I did not like that the film is not explicit. It’s rated R, but you actually see relatively little lovemaking in the scenes — and especially relatively little gay lovemaking. Moment for moment the film contains more heterosexual sex. I guess it depends on how we count the peach. How should we? A peach is not a boy or a girl, not really, though in an important sense the peach is Elio, at his core, at the centre, at the root. But that just leads us back to masturbation, so, unsolved. 

My objection to this was and is not only prurient, I swear (though it is that). I am tired of seeing gay love fade to black in art, on screen. This was supposed to be the mothership! It was supposed to be the rapture, it’s our time! I guess that I had already missed it. In 2017 when it came out I was graduating. That summer was gruelling. I did not have time for anything. I don’t know if I can generalise this exactly, since perhaps it’s my deficiency, but to me that was a deeply altered period. The gap between graduation and the tenure-track job is an unreal blank lacuna, like a terraform, or salt pan. Nothing natural grows there. The stark barrenness of change is not exciting. In real life, change is not exciting. No, it’s not. 

What my objection actually was founded on was having read the book. I read it before it was a straight phenomenon. And I remembered it as being terribly, exorbitantly graphic. Much, much moreso than the movie. Fomenting my resistance to the film and Guadagnino, posing my lack of a reaction in position, I experienced the film as a betrayal. I was outraged. But in fact my memory lied. 

***

One of the first things that struck me the most upon rereading CMBYN is how academic it is. 

Part one is Elio in the citadel. He has his little empire of time. No one intrudes upon it because no one really cares to. Alone inside there, Elio redecorates the wings of his childhood mind-palace, turning them into an elaborately well-appointed obsession-cathedral, his desperate tapestries around him on the walls. Even when he roams the grounds of his interior castle, even when he goes into the village, he only ever really finds himself there — he and all the villagers, gathered with their candles, burning Oliver in effigy at night. At the edges of his empire he tries to turn his family’s dinner guests against this frightening god-tormenter: Don’t you think he’s impolite when he says “Later”? Arrogant. Just watch. This is how he’ll say goodbye to us when the time comes. 

Oliver is a grad student as a vocation, but more than that, he is an academic, he’s New England incarnate. As much as he presents like he’s a gambler and a jock, those are just his hobbies, academia is his soul, and as such his true lover is his manuscript, sweated on, sweated over, lovingly carried around and fretted about, folded up and hidden, straightened out and interrogated, worshipped, hated, rebuffed and then revised (and resubmitted?).

The first words Elio says in the film, about Oliver, to Marzia, is l’usurpateur, usurper. The man who’s come to take over his bedroom. Elio is banished every summer to a room adjacent to the bathroom that they share — through now-Oliver’s bedroom is his only way out. He’s a princess actually; he’s locked inside the tower. Early on he has a dream or an experience or vision that Oliver comes to him at night and molests him while he’s sleeping. What a nerd. 

What really sticks out to me throughout both the novel and the movie is how estranged Elio is at the interior of his own family.  In the movie the scene where Oliver corrects Elio’s father is played for laughs, and set up as if his Dad said the wrong thing about the latin and arabic roots of words for apricots to test him; in the book, Oliver actually is correcting Elio’s father, outsmarting him, besting him; he knew more about apricots than we did, Elio says in narration, which in his twisted vision means he knows more about sex. Meanwhile Oliver makes very much in that moment of praecox, which shades into praecoquum, then precocious, premature. Elio’s mother tousles Oliver’s hair in this moment; Oliver, the better, perfect Elio; Oliver, the better, perfect son. All Elio can think about is cox. 

Poor Elio. How dreadful. He is the child of academics and everything about him shows it. All he ever does is scheme and read. When he wants to go wild he listens solitarily to music; when he flirts he plays three different takes on Bach. At a certain point in the film, Marzia says I think that people who read are secretive. They hide who they really are. Ah, Elio. She shot ya. 

Marzia is very insightful in her film-version (that’s Ivory and probably Guadagnino, who truly loves to do it for the girls). But she’s not who Elio wants. Elio wants his parents (sorry!) and short of that, it’s Oliver. The drumbeat of Elio in act 1 is this: Nobody listens to me or cares about my opinions. Imagine being the child of academics. Nobody listens to me. Nobody listens. 

There’s a certain freedom in that, and Elio uses that interior legroom well. He finds his ways to really stretch it out, to bring himself some pleasure, though mostly through contortion (he is an intellectual). He whips himself up into a frenzied, crazed anatomy, he makes himself a horny, slavering fool, he develops new positions where the apricot’s his lover, and he can try out puns like apricock. What does it matter what I think or feel in my mind when nobody listens? In here I can do anything I like. 

Things are nice and safe inside that interior mental fuck-palace. But sooner or later you either go mad or come out. So be it if you terrorise the village. If Oliver is the knight then Elio can truly be the prince-or-princess, but this knight is not faithful, this knight leaves. And Elio is anyway also the sorcerer who conjures him, and Oliver fights his way out of the dark — but later — later! — Oliver is lying on the covers, I can’t do this — Elio, I can, from underneath — but I can’t, and he moves away, recoiling.  That later scene is written very well, all in a rush.

I don’t really know how I missed that this narrative is really in some deep way about academics and academia, since I read it just before I left for graduate school. But maybe that reflects the reality that I did not know what to look for, I did not know how little I knew. The only living person in my family who was an academic was one of my great uncles, and I had not then met him yet. We also did not have any academic family friends back then. I only found out what one was by reading Tolkien. From then I was besotted, but really I knew nothing. Familiar scenario, I guess. 

Still, I liked the book very much for what I perceived then as its sexual frankness, but not so much that I felt a need to keep it. I left the book in my parents’ house, having moved back in with them for the six months before leaving for America, my own pilgrimage to New England — somehow, it can call home its disciples — and then both of them read it, to my intense disgust — (but this is exactly what would happen to Elio! Get away from me, Dad, you don’t understand!!)

As a novel, on the whole, it teeters on the cusp of the highbrow which is fitting; this lends the work a certain adolescence, and Elio himself is a confused genre (mood). There is a facile quality to the novel that prevents it from reaching greatness. Nevertheless it adds or added something to the canon that I feel is important — a frank sexually-focused intensity that is fully, deeply gay, “despite” the errant fact of being bisexual. Well, get used to it. More is coming.

Sometimes I think it’s not actually queer sex that is taboo, but our erotic sensibility, or horniness, and Elio is here to break the spell. For this must be the basis of what I had remembered: The text itself is actually not that explicit, but Elio has been cursed by god to be the horniest and most frustrated boy who ever lived. 

He’s just astoundingly horny. I am trying hard to express this without landing up myself in horny jail, but how can I not, or how can anyone — has anyone ever been more completely and irrevocably stuck in horny jail than Elio? Confined and tormented by his inability to quench himself, horny like a madness, horny on main. What is 17 but a relentless carceration? You couldn’t pay me to go back to it, and yet how ineffective has been my own escape; for me, as for Elio telling the story to us years later when it’s his vantage point in New England. When Oliver leaves, Elio tells him he wants him to leave his shorts for him, worn well-used and unwashed — Sick and twisted, Oliver says — Sick and twisted and very, very sad says Elio, that horny little jock-sniffing pervert, enthroned forever, king of the heart and the swimming trunks.²

Elio offers so much up to the canon. First of all that horniness. Second, just by being such a delightful little jerk, fucking Oliver and Marzia on the side, fucking Marzia while waiting for Oliver, almost literally looking at his watch — bad!, so bad, so incredibly bad, down bad, down horrendous. Third, by being honest, like by not being able to ride his bicycle the morning after sex, and deciding to do it anyway. Like this quote, one of the best ones from the book: Every once in a while a sudden soreness triggered a twinge of discomfort and shame. Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It’s the asshole, stupid. Leo Bersani would be proud, here is his son. If the 90s narration in the 80s time period offends you, don’t let it, for this is Elio’s memory, and he’s entitled to his sayings. 

More Elio narration: This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop breadcrumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. Princess! That’s my girl! A little moment later: He could turn out to be a total creep, he could change or ruin me forever, and it’s true, for Elio knows, not really knowing Oliver; that’s not wise-older-narrator Elio but Elio then, Elio-in-that-moment, in the very midst of being with Oliver, he already knew how little he knew about him, about them, and about anything. 

***

I don’t really know if this is love, I think it isn’t. But it’s just so hard to say, for well it might be. The word love never appears in the novel. It feels more like this other thing that happens, when you decide to hurl yourself onto the rocks of another person, off a cliff into the ocean, to smash all your own brains out on the jagged coast and drown. You can dash your body on the rocks of this world if you want to. Life sometimes presents you with a person, and that choice. Marzia dashes herself on Elio, Elio dashes himself on Oliver, Oliver dashes himself on nothing and nobody but what more can you expect from some tall guy who went to Harvard, fuck him, forget him, it’s all really Elio, Elio, Exhibit E, an unequivocal bisexual disaster. 

The one thing that gives me pause about this interpretation — where I submit that this is all happening for and to Elio, and Oliver is merely incidental, and get lost — is the one scene with the toilet. This is also the scene that stuck with me the most the first time I read it, far surpassing the peach: the scene where Elio initiates a mutual communion over the act of defecation. Oliver pressing and massaging Elio’s tummy while he does his ablutions. It’s hard to go past that one. It has that unmistakable quality of father-son. Oliver seems timeless in this moment, but Oliver is only 24. It’s this moment that makes him feel less ordinary than we might suspect him to be, less ordinary than perhaps he is, for here he seems to risk something incredible. It’s not nothing to touch Elio in that moment. It’s not a wonder that they didn’t show it in the movie, though I think Chalamet-Hammer would have sold it, still. Some things are only meant to be in books. 

Now for the magic peach. That peach was made to be in movies. I wonder if they cast it. I said in the first part that a peach is not a boy. But I lied to you! It certainly is one. So here on the one hand being gay forces you to speak in metaphors. On the other hand once you’re in the land of metaphor then you are really free to speak. The love scene between Elio and the peach is more explicit than any love scene in cinema could be without it being literal pornography in the technical sense — real sex would have to be taking place for a comparable scene to occur between people. Real sex is what the peach scene is designed to replace. 

The peach, which is Elio, which Elio splits open with his fingers — god, it’s really terrible, you can see the way the flesh of the peach resists him, his intrusion. He makes this little noise of disbelief at himself and — well, you have to — eats it out. The sound mixing and sound production on that scene are incredible. You can hear the noise his head makes on the pillow. His stuttered breathing is so fucking loud. 

The book describes the peach as Elio; the book describes the peach as raped. (James Ivory repeats this in the screenplay). The moment of excess is when Oliver eats it, specifically trying to eat his semen, generations of Elios. I was quite mad that they don’t do this in the movie. (Oliver only tries.) At least they do show Elio crying after— I was crying because no stranger had ever been so kind or gone so far for me — crying because something was happening, and I had no idea what it was — then he wants Oliver to kiss him — kiss me now before it’s all gone.

Exploration is not the hedonistic joyride that conservatives and clerics try to tell you. Of course, say the preachers, anyone would be seduced by exploration, but god does not want you to do it; but all the while the truth is exactly the opposite. Exploration is terrifying, and that is what god wants.  

Later when Elio is drunk Oliver sticks his finger down Elio’s throat so he will throw up, presumably all over his hand, as Elio narrates, I opened my mouth. Before I knew it I was sick as soon as he touched my uvula. 

What does it mean to fall in love with someone really. Is this fairytale dementia always there? I really wonder. You and I and everyone else can see that Oliver is perfectly ordinary. He’s just another person. It’s Elio who makes this meaning out of his 6-weeks flesh and bones. Aciman says there is no love without obsession, I don’t think so. Obsession is a very particular energy. There is love without obsession and obsession without love; think of Iago trying to get inside Othello, to light destructive fires in his heart. But yes, that these two circles lie together on the diagram, essentially close-quarters, overlapping, tangling knees. One can think of Oliver and Elio as each half of an Iago, half of an Othello, libidinally jealous of each other, scheming how to bring each other down. (The metaphor cannot be completed because there is a lack of a racial element; I am sorry. I leave the remainder of the metaphor as an exercise for the reader, should the reader happen to be Jeremy O Harris.) 

Poor Marzia doesn’t have a chance. She can’t compete with Oliver for Elio. But Elio doesn’t have a chance either: he can’t compete with heterosexual life. It presents as a formidable opponent. Oliver succumbs to it. That’s why we all hate Oliver. Aciman nearly killed him off, nearly drowned him in the sea where he belongs, young and withholding, cruising forever. Kinder to Elio that way, but less of a chance for him to get up to his antics, so Oliver has to stay alive, in northern Italy and then New England, tormenting our Elio from afar with his marriage and his house and his children. Traitor! Elio feels it, even just when Oliver closes the bathroom door. 

Oliver is a bit more sympathetic to me if I imagine that it’s not heterosexual life that he embraces instead of spunky little Elio but instead that he is governed by the reality — that he and Elio barely know each other, that probably neither of them is equipped to have an actual relationship with the other, that six weeks of knowledge of which three weeks is sunk into ethereal fruitarian sex-madness is not necessarily love, that their union is inherently in some sense escapist even as Elio believes the opposite, that Eliot’s later narration describing it as “fucking each others brains out” has never been more accurate to any pair of intellectually-inverted characters who needed their brains fucked out and fucked off — and that even if it is love it will not necessarily produce any kind of sustainable partnership, maybe all of that is in Oliver’s mind and to imagine all that makes him seem more sympathetic, which is a trick that people like us like to perform often, to make you more sympathetic by deciding to see something deeper and better and I’ll believe it never mind that I put it there, I’m trying to quit, but anyway — to be charitable — I can’t help but notice that Elio is living in a bubble of queer acceptance, and Oliver is not.

Oliver has to think of New England. What will people say? I can almost hear the question thrumming underneath him — when I think of it this way Armie Hammer seems to hit exactly the right note with his performance, that secretly perceptive secretly uptight academic New England Jew. I can tell you from my own experience that the New England academic set is not as accepting as they even now imagine. Near the end of the book Oliver asks Elio if his parents know and when Elio confirms his father does then he is jealous: My father would have put me in an institution. Oh, Oliver. It’s almost impossible to stay mad. 

Some critics found the relentless halcyon Italy of the whole picture trying, in some cases, but now that I’ve rewatched it twice, I trust in Guadagnino. He did here the thing that he set out to — he layered his own memory onto Aciman’s. And Aciman was being true to his experience except that it was not Italy but Cairo and not his real life but his mind, though that in itself is Elio also. Interviewers have expressed disbelief that 1950s Cairo could have contained an enclave of homosexual tolerance; I believe it. As long as there have been gay people, forever, there have been social places which accept it. This world need not conform to our flat heterosexual fantasies of a uniform liberal march towards progress. There is really no such thing.

If I am hard on Oliver it is only because I am like him— not in playing at being a heterosexual but in yearning for respectability, in trying to leave this Elio behind. Yearning not to be a hostage to these emotions. Saying I don’t want you to regret anything. Announcing his biggest fear, which is the thing that he subconsciously intends. I’m aware that I’m doing this gauche thing where I treat the characters as people and also that I am arguing with and for the text like a fool but I sort of can’t help it. It is embarrassing not to be able to control the way you speak about something. But I’m an idiot in this regard. It’s even worse to do it with Call Me by Your Name because the characters aren’t even Aciman and aren’t even real in the artistic sense — his goal is not to portray real life and you can feel it, you can sense it, this is his fantasy (some fantasies do not have happy endings).

Look at that father with his beautiful and completely understanding speech, a touch of the unreal about it, it doesn’t ring true and how could it. Aciman’s own father was  serial philanderer who did not even live at home. He speaks positively about him, but that is not my point. When he wrote for us the father everyone would wish to have, the thing he knew that’s real there is the wishing. (This paragraph is straining my disloyalty to my own father.) I feel that here again I am making another stupid error where I take Aciman as a self too literally in the act of creation. I wish I had something else to offer or show for my interest in this work but evidently I don’t. So here you are, here are my stupid choices. 

***

The true subject of Call Me by Your Name is memory, the lodestone, the faithless fucking liar. The statue which is sunken, the body that is dredged. A man is a reanimated corpse within that palace. But we need it more and more as we get old. It’s not a blessing to forget things, it’s a curse, it’s the curse, it’s what haunts us about breakups, about other people’s deaths, that we know we will forget them, and we do. Tomorrow is today, which means, it’s over. The last scene in the book is Oliver claiming that he remembers everything, and Elio rebutting him internally. If you remember everything then prove it. If you remember everything, then call me by your name. You don’t, for if you did, you’d have to live it every day and you can’t hack it. It’s a lot of weight to carry, to remember. 

It’s heavy even if your memory tells you lies, for these lies are really useful, and important. They contain something true at the bottom of them. These lies are really more like mental fiction, they are there to create meaning, like an art. All art is folk art really. All creation starts inside and seeks a union, a way out of separation and of lack. We are made to build coherence out of nothing. We would do it no matter the cost. 

Even our fantasies are meaningful. If Call Me by Your Name has to be Aciman’s fantasy in order to exist then let it be so. It’s a useful fantasy: To burn your hand and cry about it. I hate when people say scars heal — they don’t. Wounds heal. Scars are healed wounds. And your wounds can reopen. And some wounds never close. I love that about Aciman’s sensibility. In interviews he says it: nothing dies. We forgive nothing, we forget nothing. No path closes off to us. When we do not have something, we feel the thing we’ve missed.

The experience that Elio is trying to make meaning of in this novel is the experience of being alone. His company is his memories. That’s why he tells the story. It’s all that he has left. Read between the lines of part 4: he’s all alone here. “Then came the blank years” — I almost put the book down. One of Aciman’s truer sentences. He shot me, too. 

In the movie we don’t see this period. What we do see is Oliver calling the house and talking to the parents first, of course, then Elio, and Elio, being so brave there, principessa, decides to cut the bullshit, and cast his incantation, his little magic name there down the phone, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio. He’s rewarded for this bravery, as he was the time he grabbed Oliver’s crotch when he was a boy, and his reward is just that volley: Oliverrrrrr. The problem is a word is not a man. In the novel, Elio tries this move, but Oliver has already forgotten him, and mistakes what he is saying, and does not know how to play his role in the reply. 

Aciman says the book and the movie are the same text, I don’t think so. The movie ends on a triumphant note: Elio crying ceaselessly into the fire or the camera. Chalamet sells it, absolutely, sticks the landing. I am serious. Elio’s father tells him to feel all his feelings and Elio does so and in this way he remains intact, he does not carve off that part of himself as so many of us do, and so he wins, he does not become less for the experience, but in the book he does — or I think he does — he spends two fucking decades waiting for that man and he gets nothing at the end of it. Twenty years to get over three weeks. And he doesn’t even get over it! Elio! Who is doing it like him? 

But then again, who’s to say movie Elio, that little minx, wouldn’t also do it? Lying in wait for two decades? Fucking off from Italy to do his own PhD in New England? Slut! He’s been following Oliver home! Maybe it is the same Elio, or maybe they are two variations on the theme, or four string voices like the Haydn, maybe there are even more Elios, Elios outstretched around us, Elio at any moment, Elio forever.

The trick that all these Elios have managed, which I myself had not in 2020, is to remain completely connected to that first, primary Elio — not necessarily in that dull and tedious sense of “would my 17 year old self be proud of me?” (How would old Elio answer that? Sniffed any jocks lately, older-self?)³ but more in the sense of have I remained intact enough in myself that I am proud of him, so grounded and intact that I look on him like a son, that I became and become at all times what he needs and needed, that I am and always will be sensitive to his pain, that I hold him right next to my heart. 

Yes, Elio and Oliver are idiots. But it’s right to be an idiot. It’s right to be a ruin and a mess. I think they really showed that in the movie. You have to pull that meaning out a little, but it’s there. There are flickers of the truth there in the novel that expose it. When Elio’s Dad says, What lies ahead is going to be very difficult. When Vimini, who is dying, says Elio, you must forgive me for saying so, but you’ve never been very intelligent. 

***

This is a screencap from the movie. Let’s see if the copyright holders are stupid enough to object to its use in this post.

1. “Is Elio a minor?” Elio is an idea we keep alive in our hearts.

2. I would like to avoid explaining myself too much in this essay but in Australian slang we use jocks to mean underwear. Here it has a happy double meaning.

3. Okay actually this is based, the question becomes good by this metric.