“Call Me by Your Name”: Queer Soundtrack in the Coming-of-Age

The coming-of-age film is, in many ways, a fairly straightforward genre. The surface may be fraught and bewildering—gun-toting Breakfast Club nerds, suicidal Wallflower episodes, or all manner of American Pie nonsense—but the structure remains the same. Something Happens and the protagonist emerges fundamentally changed.

The closet, with its in-or-out dichotomy, inherently lends itself to this genre. At least in terms of sexuality, a coming-out story is so often a coming-of-age because it has the same structure: passing from an existence deemed sheltered and innocent into one that is enlightened but dangerous. Of course, it's never that simple, because the coming-out process itself is totally diffuse. By the time the words “I’m queer” have passed your trembling lips, you are already somehow responding to the event of coming out to yourself. According to Badiou, an event is a collection of processes/things/energies (a “multiple”) that don't make sense according to the existing situation, and therefore force the situation itself to change (an “intervention”). The "intervention" of coming out changes everything, for sure, but everything has to have already changed for the coming-out to happen in the first place. Consequently, while coming out is a distinct act—something you do in the moment—coming-of-age films, as much as real-life coming-out stories, derive all of their drama, their pain, and their elation from the ambiguities of their surfaces. What that passing glance meant, what the feeling in the pit of your stomach means, and why.

What could such a surface sound like? Can this event-structure sound at all? How queer can a soundtrack be?

Transcription

If you haven’t seen it already, this essay will be full of spoilers. But anyway, here’s IMDB’s plot summary of Call Me by Your Name:

In Northern Italy in 1983, seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) begins a relationship with visiting Oliver (Armie Hammer), his father's research assistant, with whom he bonds over his emerging sexuality, their Jewish heritage, and the beguiling Italian landscape.

Elio is somewhat bookish and introverted, spending much of his time listening to music through headphones and transcribing it. He resents Oliver’s gregariousness, finding him arrogant, and baulking when he squeezes his shoulder while they’re playing volleyball. In fact, Oliver’s initial, flirtatious touch plunges Elio into moody angst for the rest of the day. When his parents insist he play the piano in the evening, he plays Erik Satie’s Sonatine Bureaucratique. Diegetic at first (as in, real within the world of the film), it bleeds into the non-diegetic—interrupted by a scene in which Oliver interrupts him masturbating—to underscore establishing shots of their worn shorts, crotches conspicuous, hanging to dry from taps while Elio pretends to ignore Oliver’s body rippling through the water they swim in. This jaunty, ironic piece seems as unlikely an underscore to these sensuous scenes as it does evening family entertainment. But Elio is disrupted and bewildered, so we get disruptive, self-consciously twee music.

The Satie is a spoof of Muzio Clementi’s  Sonatina Op. 36 No. 1, and is the first in a series of playful parodies and transcriptions that Elio plays in Call Me by Your Name. His acts of transcription and musical mockery first break away from his solitary frustration when he transcribes “Postillion’s Aria” by J. S. Bach. Flirtatiously teasing Oliver, he first plays it “the way Liszt would’ve played it if he’d altered Bach’s version”, then “the way Busoni would’ve played it if he’d altered Liszt’s version”, and finally the way Oliver asked for it. Ivan Raykoff has written poetically of the act of touch in this scene, reading the piano as a kind of cipher for Oliver’s body:

The original tune and the two arrangements allow Elio to touch the piano keys—and by extension to touch Oliver, who is standing directly in line with the keyboard in this frame—in a variety of expressive ways: delicately, cleverly, intently, forcefully, madly [….] Elio teasingly alters it in these different pianistic guises, emoting dramatically. After this passive-aggressive foreplay he finally offers the original tune, revealing his true feelings through the gentler sounds his touch produces.

There is something inherently camp about transcription and parody: as flirtation, as a way of posturing, and assuming different guises. Zubin Kanga has written of transcription as a queer strategy in terms of its blurring of ego boundaries, where new and pre-existing musical material enter into a playful relationship of fluctuating dominance and submission. He cites composer Michael Finnissy putting it baldly: “I always fuck my subject matter. Though the results are always different, the relationship is always intimate”. Similarly, Earl Jackson has theorised gay male sexuality as "a circulatory system of expenditure and absorption, of taking/giving and giving/taking", and the gay male body as "polycentric and ludic, sexually actualised as a playground". When music is transcribed, it is taken up, played with, subjected to, and redressed. Its very identity is rendered ambiguous.

Musical ambiguity extends beyond the act of transcription in Call Me by Your Name, however, when its diegesis is obscured. Like the Satie, the non-diegetic bleeds back into the diegetic through yet another transcription: Bach-Busoni’s “Zion hört die Wächter singen”. It shifts from underscoring Elio’s agonised diary entry following the Bach interaction (“I was too HARSH when I told him I thought he hated Bach I thought he didn’t like ME”) to being barely audible to us through his headphones as he attempts to distract himself from Oliver, transcribing it again. The Alessio Bax recording used is relatively slow (compare it to Ton Koopman's iconic recording). The obbligato right-hand and the resonant left-hand octaves are solemn, austere, and repentative. In Call Me by Your Name, transcription is always an expression of Elio’s subjectivity and an assertion of his Otherness, fluctuating between solitary introspection (read: closetedness) and flirtatious, playful extravagance.

Dancing

We are often invited to spectate while Oliver dances, and he always dances with women. In the first instance, Elio and his friends gawp jealously at Oliver’s and Chiara’s slow-dancing to Giorgio Moroder’s “Lady Lady Lady”. We only hear the second verse, the lyrics of which read like a shopping list of seductive, desirous commands:

Time like silent stares

With no apology.

Move towards the stars

And be my only one. 

 Reach into the light

And feel love's gravity

That pulls you to my side

Where you should always be.

Seductive “stares” and the “pull” of the “gravity” of attraction fit Elio and Oliver’s burgeoning dynamic down to a tee, but the actual acts of touching, dancing, and kissing are being performed with (for want of a better word) a surrogate. The disposability of women will emerge as a theme in Call Me by Your Name, and Oliver certainly makes, as “Lady Lady Lady” puts it, “no apology”.

In so many ways, though, the first verse would have been a more obvious choice:

Frightened by a dream

You're not the only one.

Running like the wind

Thoughts can come undone. 

 Dancing behind masks

Just sort of pantomime

But images reveal

Whatever lonely hearts can hide.

Perhaps this verse is as conspicuous in its absence as men are from the song’s title. Fear underpins almost all queer narratives (how could it not?), and the double-metaphor of the mask as a closet is not a new one—in many ways it’s the flipside of the guises that Elio playfully assumes when he parodically plays the piano. The question with Oliver is in what domain, and with whom, his “pantomime” actually takes place.

Call Me by Your Name is not Oliver’s coming-of-age. The film is framed by his arrival and his departure and it is, in a very literal sense of the word, a vacation for him. He admits as much in the final, fatal phone-call with Elio, announcing his engagement to a woman Elio didn't even know existed. Oliver is at his most carefree, and consequently careless, when he dances. The best examples of this by far are the two times he dances to “Love my Way” by The Psychedelic Furs which, like his arrival and departure, bookend the film:

Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes

In an interview with Creem magazine in 1982, singer Richard Butler stated that the song was “basically addressed to people who are fucked up about their sexuality, and says, ‘don’t worry about it'. It was originally written for gay people”. The allure of the invitation to “love my way” is matched by Oliver breaking away from his kiss with Chiara, instead gyrating on his own to the song’s marimba riffs and ghostly synth tones. Elio joins the dance floor, but still skirts around him.

“Love my Way” is also Oliver’s last dance. Drunkenly roaming the streets of Bergamo, he and Elio encounter a group of twenty-somethings blasting the song through a car radio. While Oliver whisks a girl away to dance, Elio watches once more. The foreshadowing of his ultimate engagement to a woman, leaving Elio alone, is devastating. Drunk but also overwhelmed by Oliver’s looming departure, he vomits. “Love my way” is no longer Oliver’s seductive invitation, but Elio’s plea. In the face of this tragic inversion, the final verse seems like cold comfort indeed:

So swallow all your tears, my love

And put on your new face

You can never win or lose

If you don't run the race

Elio has “lost” in all sorts of senses of the word, but his “new face” has nevertheless been hard-won. The “race”, the transformative coming-of-age experience, is crystallised in this, the only explicitly queer song in Call me by your Name’s soundtrack.

Transformation

At the beginning of this essay, I wrote that coming-of-age films derive their efficacy from an ambiguous surface which conceals a transformative event-structure. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that the most distinctive feature of Call Me by Your Name’s soundtrack is its use of minimalist and impressionist piano repertoire. For example, the first, startling modal shift of John Adams’s “Phrygian Gates” drops as Elio’s father suggests they swim in Lake Garda while Elio and Oliver run their fingers, exploratively, over the lips and torso of a boy’s statue. Baptismally drawn from the depths of the water, it is the visual anticedent to Oliver’s sudden and unexplained full-body sideways roll into the fountain a few scenes earlier. This submersion as man and resurrection as boy is another hint of the Ego-blending, the Narcissan personality-merging, that will culminate in the eponymous statement, “call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine”. The boy is, of course, a statue, and therefore in a state of arrested development that Elio is not.

The first movement of John Adams’s “Hallelujah Junction” opens the film, and the credits are imposed upon a collection of Polaroids of similar such statues. The shot changes to a new collection of photographed boy-statues (and a new cast-member's name) every time a new voice enters: first the second piano's antiphony, then the high, right-hand octave hits, and then the bass. It is a dense and alluring audio-visual polyphony of classical imagery, voices, bodies, rippling keys, and old cigarette packets that fades into the summer soundscape of "somewhere in Northern Italy". “Hallelujah Junction” returns in earnest roughly a third of the way through the film, marking Elio’s first explicit enactment of his attraction towards Oliver. Burying his face into his swimming shorts (seen dripping during the Satie), he inhales and arches his back. The heady Italian heat breaks apart into a cathartic thunder storm, as "Hallelujah Junction" marks a new rotation in the film's structure.

The final, stabbing chords of "Hallelujah Junction's" first section are heard the night that Oliver returns home late, ostensibly having had sex with Chiara, and closes Elio’s alluringly open door. “Traitor”, he declares, to peremptory musical jabs. The second section’s dotted figure in the first piano echo the opening, but in its relative minor, and marks Elio’s retaliatory decision to have sex with his (somewhat neglected) girlfriend Marzia. On a more immediate level than the instances of transcription, these non-diegetic underscores are very explicit expressions of Elio's subjectivity.

Throughout this mid-section of Call Me by Your Name, the constant, circling, negotiations between Elio and Oliver are infiltrated by strains of Ravel’s “Une barque sur l’océan” from Miroirs. This is especially poignant, writes Raykoff,

in the remarkable single-shot scene at the monument where [the] music rises and fades as they draw towards and pull away from each other in a touching dance of desire.

The constant A-major arpeggios (“you know I’m not going anywhere”, says Elio) lend an almost unbearable constancy to the sighing, repeated right-hand motif: open fifths and fourths descend and draw near to one another, only to break apart into fifths again and again, as the pair circle the monument, speaking in euphemisms.

So much of the music in this film is for drawing out these stretches of desire. The hours between Elio finding Oliver’s note (“Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight”) and the first time that they have sex are perhaps the most musically rich of the film: Adams’s China Gates simultaneously underscores Elio’s agonising wait and Oliver and the Professor flicking through slides of statues. “They’re so incredibly sensual”, remarks Oliver. “Not a straight body in these statues [….] Hence their ageless ambiguity, as if they’re daring you to desire them”, the professor replies. The entire episode is drenched in subtext.

Ryuichi Sakamato’s “Germination”, F.R. David’s “Words”, and the Poulenc that Elio plays to entertain his parent’s friends (an older gay couple) are all punctuated by shots of his wristwatch, even while he has sex with Marzia. By contrast, his sex scenes with Oliver—the first night in his bed, the brief fellatio in the doorway the following day, and the scene in which Oliver finds him asleep after having masturbated into a peach—are conspicuously silent. The sexual soundscape of kissing, moaning, and licking goes some way towards compensating for these scenes’ visual prudishness; the climactic first sex scene, the culmination of so much anguish and desire, is greeted with a slow camera pan towards a frustratingly chaste shot of a tree through the window. There is barely any male nudity in this film: compare and contrast, for instance, with Queer as Folk, which brought scenes of a fifteen-year-old being rimmed to British television in 1999. James Ivory’s script was originally much more explicit, but was edited down by director Luca Guadagnino, who even considered removing the now bordering on iconic peach scene.

Beyond the surface ambiguities and underlying transformations of these repetitious pieces of music, perhaps there’s an even more arresting queerness: Susan McClary has written of minimalist textures and their eschewal of goal-orientation in terms that remind me of Jack Halberstam’s concept of “queer time”. Queer time is the “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” by which queer people depart from the social expectations (marriage, babies, careers, etc.) imposed by a dominant heterosexual culture. As Foucault writes in his delightfully wholesome Friendship as a Way of Life, “to be gay, I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life”. Minimalism’s mode of being—refusing to depart from a sonority, denying more-than-implied tonality, revelling for long stretches in the sheer enjoyment of a texture—is, unsurprisingly, right at home amid Call Me by Your Name’s idyllically sensuous scenes of tanned torsos, long lunches, and orchard fruits.

The Arcadian is at work on absolutely every level of this film, not just in the Classical statues and rolling Italian countryside, but to the extent that there is virtually no conflict. Marzia, who has been all-but wordlessly, post-coitally abandoned by Elio in spite of confiding in him her fear he would hurt her, is unfeasibly understanding and sympathetic when he returns from Bergamo. Elio’s parents, too (granting that they’re woke academics) are also almost unbelievably supportive by today’s standards, let alone by the standards of 1983. Nevertheless, I don’t think I mind. The reason there’s barely space for any characters other than Elio and Oliver to become three-dimensional in Call Me by Your Name is because it expends, beautifully, so much energy on the tiny nuances of their relationship. There’s no space for antagonism, except between the two of them. Here is a film in queer time, and the back-and-forth, brusquely egalitarian ricocheting between two pianos playing the same figure in Hallelujah Junction really is a very fitting musical landscape to underpin it.

If Oliver is, in fact, Elio's antagonist, it renders his father’s final monologue all the more moving. The professor’s insistence that Elio feel, as acutely as possible, all of the pain of heartbreak—to revel in it, even—as much lends itself to queer time as the camp rhetoric of excess. The monologue is underscored by a final piano duet, the (very camply named; Ravel moved in queer Parisian circles himself) fifth movement of Ravel’s Mother Goose suite, “The Fairy Garden”. But really, as a gesture, this piece is so much balm. There are yearning appoggiatura seconds and sevenths all over the place. “In your place, if there is pain, nurse it”, says Elio’s father. “Right now there’s sorrow. Pain. Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt”. The nursing of pain, through a sort of faux-nursery rhyme children’s piano piece, of all things, really does render this scene a moving expression of parental love. When I first saw it, I couldn’t help thinking of the unresolved sixth at the end of Ravel’s second opera, “The Child and the Spells”, sung by the boy-protagonist to the word “maman”.

Before the professor's monologue, I said that the last verse of "Love my Way" was cold comfort. In light of this reclaimed queer grief, however, I think it's worth visiting a final time:

So swallow all your tears, my love

And put on your new face

You can never win or lose

If you don't run the race

The consolation of having lived some semblance of an authentic life is how we swallow these tears, and put on new faces. The flux of queer time, and its future stretching-out beyond the event of coming out is, to quote Halberstam again, an "art of failure": the ability to embrace loss and indulge pain. So, what’s in a queer coming-of-age, and how does it sound? Perhaps it is a Hallelujah Junction: a meeting and departure of the twain, and a sacred one at that.