Film “Queer” with Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, Author Burroughs, and the Art of the Outsider: Why Stories That Challenge Us Matter 🌈
Published by Ryan Gollan / 27 Feb 2025
Recommend playing this soundtrack while reading.
So as Sydney Pride 🌈 is just around the corner, I thought I’d watch an LGBT film as my way of celebrating. (I know, I am lame lol, but hey, I’m easily satisfied.)
I wasn’t sure what I was getting into when I started watching Queer.
I knew it starred Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey (Oh, and yes, love Drew wearing glasses! I have a thing for glasses!). I knew it was based on William S. Burroughs’ novel. I knew it wasn’t going to be a mainstream, easy-to-digest film.
But what I wasn’t prepared for, was how it would make me feel.
The movie is trippy, fragmented, and disorienting, like slipping between dreams and reality without knowing where one ends and the other begins. At one point, I found myself questioning:
Wait, is this part real? Is this happening? Or is it just inside his head?
There’s a particular kind of beauty in being unsettled by art - when something refuses to fit neatly into categories, when it doesn’t give you everything on a silver platter but instead asks you to come closer, to pay attention, to feel.
And so, I did what I always do when a film stays with me after the credits roll. I dug deeper.
Burroughs & the Art of the Outsider
I started reading about the book, the author, and the world this story was born from. And suddenly, the film made more sense.
Burroughs was not just a writer. He was a radical, a literary anarchist, a man who lived on the fringes of convention and comfort. His life was chaotic, marked by addiction, tragedy, and self-destruction. Queer - both the novel and the film, isn’t just about being queer in the literal sense. It’s about being an outsider, about longing for connection, about feeling alien even in your own skin.
It’s about navigating spaces where you don’t quite belong but can’t seem to leave.
And when I saw it through that lens, Queer stopped being just a film.
It became an experience - a disorienting, intimate, deeply vulnerable look at loneliness, desire, and self-destruction.
Burroughs' writing was never meant to be mainstream. His words were meant to disrupt, to disturb, to shake something loose inside you. And the film does the same.
The Power of Stories That Challenge Us
Not all art is designed to be comfortable.
Not all films are meant to entertain in a traditional sense.
Some are meant to shift something in you.
We often gravitate toward stories that feel familiar, safe, and digestible.
Mainstream films are structured in ways that give us closure, and a sense of resolution. But the real world isn’t always like that.
That’s why films like Queer - or anything that emerges from the underground, the unconventional, the avant-garde, are so important.
Because they make you feel something different.
Because they refuse to be easy, to be nice, to be neatly packaged.
Because they ask you to sit in the discomfort, to question, to think.
Some of the most powerful art in history started as underground, misunderstood, too weird, too risky.
The Impressionists were once rejected by the art establishment. Now, they define entire museum wings.
Kubrick’s films were often criticised for being too slow, too long, too cerebral - yet now they are masterpieces of cinema.
Jean-Michel Basquiat painted the streets of New York before he became an icon.
David Lynch’s films still confuse audiences today, but they also inspire filmmakers to experiment, to challenge what cinema can be.
Art moves us forward. Not the safe art, but the art that pushes boundaries, questions norms, and makes people uncomfortable.
Why We Should Pay Attention to the Underground
There’s something incredibly powerful about supporting stories, films, and artists who don’t fit the mainstream mould.
Because often, those are the stories that will define the future.
Films like Queer remind me why we should seek out art that challenges us. Why we should watch things that make us uncomfortable, that don’t give us easy answers, that ask us to feel something beyond the ordinary.
Because if we only consume what is safe, what is predictable, what is easy, we miss out on the extraordinary.
So, for me…
I went into Queer not knowing what to expect.
I left it feeling something I couldn’t quite put into words at first.
But now, I understand… more.
Art isn’t always supposed to be clear, logical, and easy to categorise.
Sometimes, it’s just meant to be felt. Just like how we want to be felt.
This film is currently showing: at Palace Centra Cinemas, Dendy Cinemas Newtown
