Because 2017 just wouldn’t have been the same without the discovery of something fizzy, new shoes, an incredible book, a lazy lawn game, a baby hippopotamus, a new app, women empowerment, running shorts, prescription meds, and a love story. Behold, the list:
1. Celery Soda
I’m not a big soda drinker. And I’m not even a celery super fan, so I was as surprised as anyone that I found the unexpected marriage of carbonation with the subtle hint of something green to be so delicious. I won’t be popping the top off of a Coke anytime soon, but I’ll gladly keep stock of celery soda for a fizzy refresh.
(Tip: Doc Brown’s Cel-Ray is great, but if you can make it to Made Nice in NYC, they’ve got the best celery soda fountain drink.)
2. Pons Sandals
I wasn’t expecting a lot. All I needed was a pair of leather sandals that could stand the test of a sticky hot summer in the city, so when I found Pons, a super simple sandal that fit my basic requirements in a Chinatown pop-up, I gave them a chance at being my summer go-to. Pons, with their uncomplicated, straight-forward design – a result of 72 years of handcrafting in Spain – translated to an easy, painless and blister-free break-in and my favorite sandal.
(Notable mention: The Camper Oruga Heel Strap Sandal is equally versatile and with a throwback look to the original Teva sandal.)
3. All The Light We Cannot See
My daily commute got longer this year and with it so did my reading list. I called it my Reading Renaissance because I fell in love with stories again and the feeling of not wanting to leave a world captured within the pages of a book. Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning All The Light We Cannot See, a compelling and often heartbreaking story of morality, survival, and love told through the lives of two young Europeans on opposing sides of World War II, held me close for all of its 530 pages, and turned my daily treks across Manhattan into an escape that always ended too soon.
(Also check out Shoe Dog, the incredible memoir of how Nike founder Phil Knight conceived, launched and almost lost one of the most influential brands in the world)
4. Cornhole
How did it take me so long to fully discover the joy of cornhole!? Sure, I’ve been a casual player for a few years, but my brother-in-law made me a custom cornhole set for my birthday, thus taking my love for the game to a new (and slightly competitive) level. It’s the ultimate summer-time hang out game!
5. Fiona The Hippo
Between planning escape routes in case of a North Korean missile striking New York City, wringing my hands, and yelling at our current president for pretty much anything he said, I tried to find happy news that had nothing to do with possible nuclear war or politics. I found was 29 pounds of exactly what I needed to smile: Fiona the Hippo. Born six weeks early at the Cincinnati Zoo in late January, Baby Fiona, with her chubby hippo body and gigantic smile, was my daily moment of news joy this year.
6. Transit App
Year after year, I keep saying that I’m working on being more patient. But waiting for a bus in New York City can be the ultimate test. Enter the Transit app, a real-time location tracker of subways and buses with up-to-the-second accuracy that has yet to let me down. I’m still trying to be more patient in other areas of my life, but with the Transit app, at least I know how long I need to try.
7. The Women’s Movement
Has there ever been a more empowering and exciting time to be a woman? Actually, yes. Women gaining the right to vote in 1920; Jeanette Rankin becoming the first woman to serve in the Senate in 1922; and Sandra Day O’Connor being sworn in as the first female Supreme Court Justice in 1981, just to name a few seminal accomplishments. But for someone who wasn’t alive to witness the legislative milestones of the 1920s and too young to remember when the glass ceiling of the nation’s highest court was shattered, the women’s movement of 2017 - from January’s epic march that spanned 680 cities and 137 countries worldwide, to the reboot of the Me Too movement - was the most inspiring and electrifying cultural shifts in years. And we’re just getting started.
8. Nike Modern Tempo Running Shorts
If you’re a woman and a runner who has never had a perfectly good run ruined by your shorts chafing the inside of your legs, you won’t understand the miracle that is the Nike Modern Tempo short. For the rest of the female athletes in the world, there’s hope. I almost gave up on running shorts altogether and resigned myself strictly to tights, but these made me a true believer in running without paying the price afterwards.
9. Clomicalm
This one is as much for me as it is for my small rescue dog, Dill, who has been working hard on overcoming his separation anxiety since October 2016. Sometimes, though, you just need a small pharmaceutical intervention to deal with the challenges of everyday life – even if you’re a dog who has it pretty good. Dill got on a low dose in 2017 and three weeks later life got a whole lot better. Thank you, Clomicalm (and Dill’s vet).
10. Call Me By Your Name
I’m not surprised that Call Me By Your Name made it onto my annual favorite things list. It does, after all, include some of my most favorite things: early 80’s fashion, Italy, director Luca Guadagnino, and gay themes. But it’s just how much I love this movie that’s surprising. The third in Guadagnino’s desire trilogy (I Am LoveandA Bigger Splash are also among my favorites from years past), Call Me By Your Name is the delicate, subtle, and elegant story of Elio and Oliver whose unexpected love surpasses their time in history and is also limited by the fact that in 1983 being gay was simply not an option for many young men. The film is like a vivid, enchanted dream with dialogue that reveals entire characters in quick, but poignant and direct lines. And like a good dream, I didn’t want Call Me By Your Name to end.
D.A. Miller explains just how reactionary and sick this film’s message is: a paean to the Neo-Gay lifestyle.
FromLA Review of Books: THROUGHOUT THE EXASPERATING TRADITION begun by Maurice (1987) and continued with Brokeback Mountain(2005) and Moonlight (2016), the mainstream gay-themed movie (or MGM) has pursued three consistent objectives. First, to elicit sympathy for gay male love in its struggle to affirm itself under the barbaric repressions of the closet. Second, to limit the visibility of gay male sex, whose depiction is scrupulously kept from approaching the explicitness reserved for hetero-consummations (which the MGM by no means dispenses with: the gay protagonists regularly pass through the bisexual antechamber). The synergy between these aims hardly needs to be stated. Only by averting our eyes from the distinctive gay male sex act can we defend a man’s freedom to perform it; in the classically abstract liberal way, all is approved of on condition that nothing be looked at.
More interesting is the MGM’s third objective: to be a thing of beauty — beauty so overpowering, or overdone, that (provided the other objectives are met) it persuades viewers they are watching a masterpiece, “gay sex or not.” This mandatory aesthetic laminate, which can never shine brightly enough with dappled light to win critical accolades, is a curious phenomenon. Other mainstream cinema with a liberal agenda can be less careful about its appearance — good intentions are felt to count for a lot. But “breathtaking” beauty is as essential a requirement of the MGM as a quick shot of a man’s crotch. Not that these are at all the same things. The ballyhooed beauty never refers to the onscreen male bodies or to the film’s strategies for eroticizing them; it’s what we are asked to look at instead.
No surprise, then, that Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, the MGM’s latest exemplar, has been praised, as rotely as if the phrase had its own keyboard command, for being “beautifully shot.” Or that this means, among other things, for not having shot the gay sex scene that it’s spent well over an hour making everyone anticipate, a scene that might have taken our breath away for real. Just what is being “beautifully shot”? When Guadagnino’s lovers finally get around to doing it, the camera modestly pans away to contemplate, not for the first time, the lovely orchard outside. The photogenic backdrop is typical of the MGM, be it the Wyoming mountains or Trinity Great Court, a moonlit Miami beach or the Palazzo del Commune in Crema, Italy. The beauty of this beauty is that it gets us outdoors, to a scene that, because no more than scenery, is not homosexual.
Yet Call Me by Your Name takes the MGM’s beauty requirement radically farther than its predecessors. Here, the sporadic bella vista serves to promote the sustained loveliness of an ethos, of a whole Beautiful Life. The story unfolds one summer at the Perlman family villa “somewhere in Northern Italy,” an Arcadia where we get to realize the dearest dream of every tourist: not being one. Here no migrants or sightseeing buses disturb our casual — yet deeply rooted — intimacy with the resplendent plains, lakes, and mountains. Our daily round takes us past charming old buildings and squares, for which we never need a guidebook because we’ve never not known them. We dine all’aperto, in an orchard, washing down the homemade tortelli and fresh-caught fish with frizzante, and finishing up with an espresso — these Italian words being perhaps more flavorful than the dishes themselves. And because we too are indigenous, the old men playing scopa cut us in, and the peasant woman stops shelling beans to fetch us water; the picturesque is literally at our service.
There is more and better: the good things of life coexist here in perfect harmony with the finer things, the world of the mind and the arts. The Perlmans are possessed of these things, too, in almost parodic profusion: from the father, Samuel, who is a university professor of Greco-Roman antiquity, to the mother, Annella, a multi-lingual translator, down to the 17-year-old son, Elio, a musical prodigy. They are joined by Oliver, a post-doc preparing a manuscript on Heraclitus and Heidegger! More astonishing than the Sontagesque range of high culture on display is the exquisite facility with which the family commands it; the acquirements are so natural, or naturalized, that that they show no sign of having had to be acquired. “Darling,” says Annella to her husband, in the tone a lesser woman would use for her sunglasses, “Have you seen my Heptaméron?” She finds a copy, but — how did that happen? it’s in German! No matter; she translates a tale on sight — even in the dark — for the entertainment of father and son. Young Elio, too, moves easily between languages, for no apparent reason but to demonstrate that he is as proficient in them as he is at the piano, an instrument he plays like a virtuoso without needing to practice. As for the professor, his unstudied scholarship glides through classical archeology, art history, philosophy, and philology alike. No arduous dig for this archeologist; his latest find has simply floated up from the bottom of the nearby lake. “What a beautiful place to work!” someone says to the creatively blocked director in 8 ½. The irony of Fellini’s spa seems no more than the simple truth of Guadagnino’s villa. Except that in this locus amœnus, there is no work to do; stripped of drudgery and even effort, it has become play — Schiller’s aesthetic state stands achieved.
Yet in this aesthetic state, remarkably, nothing is pursued for aesthetic reasons alone. If the villa, with its statuary and frescoes, is a fitting abode for the Perlmans’ erudition, that erudition remains cozily domestic. However extreme, it never leaves the proximity of home for gratuitous pedantry or autonomous formalism; it’s as lived-in as the villa itself. Indeed, the more extravagant a reference appears, the more relevant it proves to the family drama of Elio’s crush on Oliver. The tale from Marguerite de Navarre, for instance, spurs the boy to tell his beloved everything; his mother has probably chosen it for that reason; and certainly, Elio has only to allude to its tongue-tied hero for Oliver, equally familiar with the story, to bring the conversation to the point. Similarly, when juice, pressed from the orchard fruit, becomes the occasion for Oliver’s jaw-dropping etymology of the word “apricot” (from the Latin praecox, or early-ripening), the intellectual display hangs in the air as a misty, soon-to-be condensed, allusion to Elio’s precocious and fruity cock. In his later sex play with a peach, Elio himself takes this subtext out from between the lines. The art/life interfacing culminates when the professor calls Oliver’s attention to the “ageless ambiguity” of Hellenistic male nude bronzes: it’s as if, he says, “they’re daring us to desire them” — and as if Praxiteles himself has come to bless the age-blind homosexual desires harbored by Elio, Oliver, and (as we will later discover obliquely) the professor himself.
Though the film is said to take place in the early 1980s, it more truly unfolds in that mythic time when, as Georg Lukács famously put it, “the starry sky is the map of all possible paths,” and life, radiantly authentic, is identical to its meaning. The Perlmans’ mesh of self-reference holds their milieu so tightly together that nothing ever goes to waste, or does not belong. Such organic unity suggests that their Beautiful Life is the naïve form of a work of art — in other words, the embryonic form of this very film. Grounded in that life, but raising it up to artistic self-consciousness, the film points to itself as the Beautiful Life’s last and finest flower. Guadagnino took pains to show himself as at home in this narrative world in the most literal fashion, moving the action from the Liguria of André Aciman’s source novel to Lombardy, where he lives, and furnishing the villa with objects from his apartment in Crema. Even at this level, Elio’s world has been subsumed in Guadagnino’s artistic identity as its mouthpiece. “I’ll call you by my name” indeed!
¤
The Beautiful Life admits homosexuality in three manifestations. As the ancient Boy of the “beautiful” and “sensual” bronzes, of course, homosexuality wins Professor Perlman’s unreserved enthusiasm. In the avatar of the modern Gay, however, represented by an older male couple who come to the villa for dinner, it is the object of more equivocal mere tolerance. The Perlmans all find Isaac and Mounir a bit absurd; their dandified matching outfits are as embarrassing as the shirt, of a kind formerly euphemized as “festive,” that they’ve sent Elio from Miami. The beauty lies not with these gays but rather in the family’s acceptance of them even so — which is why Elio must wear the hairshirt to dinner. His father explains to him: “You’re too old not to accept people for who they are. What’s wrong with them? […] Is it because they’re gay or because they’re ridiculous?” But since they’re obviously both, the message ends up mixed, as messages of tolerance typically do: these silly queens just happen to be gay.
But the third and most memorable way the Beautiful Life welcomes homosexuality is in the parents’ diligent incubation of the sexual relation between Elio and Oliver. Quickly and quietly, these watchful parents grasp their teenage son’s desire for a grown man, and they do something cleverer than fighting or condoning it, behaviors that would just bench them. Instead, they superintend its consummation, so that they will never not be in the know and everything will remain in the family. Having privately ascertained from Oliver that he “likes” Elio, Annella shares the encouraging information with her son. Samuel, for his part, emboldens Oliver with his praise of the desire-baiting bronzes. Together, they even organize an unchaperoned sleepover for the boys in Bergamo. Mother and father behave beautifully, some might say — and the father pretty much does say, when he is alone with Elio after Oliver’s departure. “In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away […] but I am not such a parent.” This smugness comes in the middle of a long, Hollywoodly-wise speech in which, with a mighty twinkle of the magisterial eye, the professor proposes to explain Elio’s experience to him.
The speech is a bona fide head trip, but let me be clear: what’s repulsive about it is not that it expresses sympathy for Elio’s gay desire or its being acted out with a grown man. Give Sammy and Annella this: most parents in their place would be too busy worrying about an older man “preying” on their son to recognize the fact that their Tadzio might be the one cruising him. No, the speech is repulsive in the root sense: it seeks to drive away every possible understanding that might make the relation with Oliver a serious sexualexperience for Elio — and thus also make it that significant social experience we call “coming of age.” The father’s knowingness (capped with this masterful finishing touch: “Have I spoken out of turn?”) leaves no breathing room for the son’s self-knowledge.
It is worth pointing out a few of the avenues that this smother-father blocks. One, quite simply, is the possibility that the encounter with Oliver might clarify Elio’s sexual orientation, that (like the queens his liberal parents can’t help mocking) the boy might be gay. A second, consequent possibility is that something besides misery and bad shirts (an original relation to life? some hot guys?) might intervene between the teenager’s broken heart and the moment of future suicidal despair evoked by his father, where “no one looks at [your body] much less wants to come near it”! Of whose superannuated body can this merely middle-aged man, who still enjoys the occasional PDA with his wife, be speaking? But the problem with the paternal sagacity is less that it comes from a can than that it seems aimed at turning a 17-year-old gay boy into a closet case with one foot in the tomb.
This is why a third foreclosed possibility is most pertinent of all to this film: the chance that Elio’s sexual being might rupture the close-knit family circle, and with it, the roundedness of the Beautiful Life, which is the halo around that circle. These enlightened parents believe they can curate their son’s sexuality in the same way they must have chosen his piano master, or seen to his French lessons. So of course now, the father’s idea of loving care is to bury his son’s homosexual experience under his own beautiful idea of it. Like the closet case he admits to being, he does everything he can to embellish — and thereby desexualize — the relation with Oliver. “You two had a beautiful friendship,” he affirms, going on to lift a phrase I once wrote for a personal ad: “maybe more than a friendship.” A reference to Montaigne and La Boétie sets the high-cultural seal on this transfiguration of the sexual relation into an amicable relationship; and the father’s faux coming out — “something held me back or stood in the way” — is just more holding back. The vaguely gestured-at “something” that blocked his own homosexuality remains standing behind his beauty treatment of Elio’s.
¤
The film’s own manner of holding back will suggest what the trouble is. The camera’s demure retreat from the sex act, almost comic in its old-school Hollywood decorum, is all the more striking in a film that gives us so much uninhibited man-on-man kissing. Guadagnino has offered a couple of rationales for his reticence. At the New York Film Festival, he has claimed that “to put our gaze upon [the gay] lovemaking would have been a sort of unkind intrusion.” In another Q-and-A, he advances the contrary suggestion that it is not the gay lovers who require protection from our gaze, but we who need to be screened from something we might see in them:
I didn’t want the audience to find any difference or discrimination toward these characters. It was important to me to create this powerful universality, because the whole idea of the movie is that the other person makes you beautiful — enlightens you, elevates you. The other is often confronted with rejection, fear, or a sense of dread, but the welcoming of the other is a fantastic thing to do, particularly in this historical moment.
The incoherence of all this sanctimony is dazzling. To gaze on love-making had been perfectly acceptable when Elio lost his (heterosexual) virginity with Marzia; to speak now of an “unkind intrusion” is inevitably — and tellingly — to confuse the act of seeing with the act that is not being seen: the wrong kind of fuck. And it’s anyone’s guess how preventing people from “find[ing] any difference” in the homo coupling might facilitate their “welcoming of the other,” since it is precisely the other’s Otherness that has been left out. In any case, who is welcoming whom? Are we welcoming Elio and Oliver or are theywelcoming one another? And are these welcomes of the same kind?
No doubt, I’m overthinking remarks better understood as fashionable repressions. While his camera is flying out the bedroom window, Guadagnino finds it helpful, à la Peter Pan, to think wonderful thoughts. But make no mistake: his enthusiasm for welcoming the Other, like the professor’s appreciation of friendship, is far more homophobic than any simple elision of gay sex. That, after all, has the advantage of leaving everything to the pornographic imagination. By contrast, the beautification campaign in and around Call Me by Your Name runs gay sex through such grandiose sentimental misrecognitions that we would no longer know it even if we did see it. Only in the neo-closetiness of present-day sexual liberalism could “the welcoming of the Other” be anything but a very funny bowdlerization of what Elio does with Oliver in bed.
Even the film’s discreet connotative codes are more precise, and everyone who hasn’t willfully ignored them knows exactly what it would be unkind to show or off-putting to see here: the unlovely spectacle of blood, shit, and pain that is the initiation of Elio’s desiring asshole. Such a spectacle is not likely to be a fantastic confirmation of our humanity at this or any other historical moment. Montaigne, as the professor might have remembered, extolled his beautiful friendship and condemned “Greek license” in the same essay. And though this initiation has been the object of Elio’s keenest desire, his post-coital mood swings do not suggest that he unambiguously enjoyed it. Certainly, he gives no evidence of the ecstatic discovery of the same-sex body. This sexually unforthcoming film is, of course, politic enough to assure us that the sexual relation, desired by Elio and sanctioned by his parents, was not of a nature to get Oliver “in any trouble.” But the fact that Elio was not abused or harassed has not kept him from experiencing the awkward, unhomely, compelled self-dispossession inherent in sex itself. It is this negativity of sex — epitomized, of course, in felt ugliness of the via rettale — that revolts both the Beautiful Life and the beautiful film that speaks in its name.
It is an irreconcilable difference. Even when the homosexual lovers have done their thing, and the camera finds it safe to return to the bedroom, it offers us an arty close-up of their faces upside down. It is as if Guadagnino wanted to make up for the invisibility of the prohibitively “different” gay sex by this eye-catching show of post-coital ordinariness. And indeed, attention must be paid, for it is during this distracting shot that Oliver makes Elio the proposition that gives his and Elio’s love its leitmotif and the film its title: “Call me by your name, and I’ll call you by mine.” Elio accepts — the names are already near-palindromic — and together they coo an enraptured duet of soul-mating, in which the many obvious differences between them are at once acknowledged and abolished. Under the spell of equivalence, Elio moves his head to the other side of Oliver’s so as to give the verbal exchange of names a visual counterpart. And yet, even at the call-me fantasy’s core articulation, tiny flaws throw off the symmetry: Elio calls Oliver “Elio” three times, but Oliver only manages to call Elio “Oliver” twice before the shot cuts off, with a bit of Oliver’s own brusqueness, leaving Elio’s crossover incomplete as well. It starts to seem as if the fantasy’s appeal (for both parties) consists in fantasizing over what would otherwise appear as a painful one-sidedness in the relation.
And now the shot’s upside-downness makes a kind of sense, as we absorb the affinity between the horizontally reversed image attempted by Elio within the shot and the vertically reversed image that is the shot itself. Guadagnino’s image seems bent on performing a similarly wishful affirmation of parity against the obscene (off-screen) dissymmetry of phallic top and anal bottom. But what Aciman’s novel calls “the fungibility, of […] bodies” can occur here only in a topsy-turvy world in which the protagonists’ pillow-talking heads appear to lie below their waists, and thus to be replacing those nether parts whose own manner of intercourse has not enjoyed the same mutuality. Guilt-ridden Oliver will do almost anything to make amends to Elio for fucking him — sup his semen, kiss his mouth after he’s vomited — anything except let him take a turn topping. And abjected Elio, too, has his own imaginary way of righting matters. As he intrudes his cock between the halves of another kind of stone-fruit, the film’s metaphorics let us understand, even without benefit of the Emojipedia, that fucking the full-grown peach is the reparative counteraction of having been plucked as a precocious apricot.
Whenever the film, or anyone in the film, confronts the negative in sex, the call-me fantasy surfaces as consolation. Oliver’s “billowy blue shirt,” as the novel calls it, puts the pattern in a nutshell. This is the upper-body garment, not to say top, that the self-assured American wears on his arrival at the villa. But it later serves as the wipe used by Oliver and Elio to clean themselves after sex. (Nervous Elio: “Mafalda always looks for signs”; confident Oliver, wiping away, “Well, she’s not gonna find any.”) The soiled shirt speaks gay sex more loudly than anything in this whisper of a film ever does, and the camera lingers over it lying crumpled on the bedroom floor. To a too-close viewer, the smutty shirtwipe seems to bear all the signs that it has been used to keep the snoopy housekeeper from finding; as Guy Hocquenghem has aphorized, “A dick always brings back some shit.”
But having allowed us to glimpse, or imagine, as much, the shot, in a variation on the earlier pan out the window, dissolves to the image of a beautiful lake at dawn. We recognize, of course, the conventional use of a dissolve to convey the passage of time; but the overlap more pertinently suggests that Guadagnino couldn’t wait to put the dirty shirt in the wash. Has ever a dissolve been used more literal-mindedly: to do a solvent’s work of removing stubborn stains? But, in a sense, the deep-cleaning had already begun when, having just tossed the actual wipe to the floor, Elio asked Oliver for the remembered top as a keepsake. Oliver will oblige, of course, and after the shirt has been properly laundered, Elio finds it on his bed accompanied by a note that launders it yet again: “For Oliver, from Elio.”
¤
I liked this movie so little that I broke my longstanding habit of sitting through the end credits; I left as soon as the words “Call Me by Your Name” appeared in the shot of Elio tearfully looking into the fire. But when (for purposes of this review) I saw the film a second time, I understood that, by leaving when I did, I had cut myself out of the best shot in the film, a shot so good that it caused me to wonder whether, in reading the film against its grain, I had in fact been faithful to a complexity in Guadagnino’s intentions. With the credits rolling over it and spectators checking their phones, the shot was destined to be a throwaway, but that, I belatedly realized, was its ethical dare to us not to overlook what wasn’t crying out for attention. The shot had been lost to me initially; what could I find in it the second time around?
Call Me’s summer romance has a winter coda; the family has returned to the villa for Hanukkah. The postcard-perfect snowfall only enhances the holiday warmth inside: latkes a-making, a fire in the hearth, the table shimmering in candlelight. All of a sudden, Oliver calls and Elio picks up. “I have some news”: he’s getting married. “You never said anything.” “It’s been off and on for two years.” The pain is submerged — or converted into pain of another sort — by the booming jubilation with which, breaking in on the extension, the parents wish Oliver joy: “Wonderful! Congratulations! Mazel tov!” At harmonizing thrilled surprise with gratified foreknowledge (for in conjugal culture, we doforesee these things), Sammy and Annella could not be better if they tried. But they’re not trying; the point is that they’re naturals. No matter how far their liberal conscience has taken them, their unconscious will always side with the marrying kind. They are hard-wired partisans of positive, publicizable sex, the sex whose “signs” need never be hidden from the housekeeper, the once and future nanny of such signs. The fact that the conjugal imperative seems to command a deeper, more automatic attachment than he does cannot get easier for Elio to swallow when Oliver, back to one-on-one, remarks that the professor is treating him like one of the family, “almost a son-in-law.” If only he had a dad like that — Elio is so lucky! Predictably, Elio tries to resume the your-name game, but he’s playing alone. Oliver echoes him only once, then tersely relegates the habit to the past: “I remember everything.”
Elio’s devastation at this moment comes from what we can think of as the social enforcement of his sexual abjection: having been fucked, he is now being fucked over by the deep norms of a world where marriage sweeps all before it. No explanation is required for why his lover has retreated into a heterosexual engagement without “saying anything”; or for why his parents have applauded the retreat as a return to fundamental form; or for why his father has found a son-in-law (read, a son who will carry on the patrilineage) in the man Elio presciently called “the usurper.” In the general engulfment, even the solicitude of which Elio has been the pampered recipient must give way to indifference.
To render the boy’s sudden extreme isolation — the near-absoluteness of his nonrecognition — Guadagnino shoots him crouched near the hearth, looking into the fire, and crying. It’s a very different shot from the ones that, by contrast, it must recall for us: crybaby Elio with his mother, his father, Oliver. This time, the boy takes care that no one see his tears because what they lament is his newfound, unsought identity as someone no one can see. He looks “into” the fire, at nothing but an inwardness that he can no longer imagine finding expression in the blur of the Beautiful Life behind him. (Could he really explain to the parties concerned how completely the spontaneous bond they have formed around heterosexual marriage, and the right kind of sex, has annihilated him?)
The strength of the shot lies precisely in its uncomfortable prolongation, its stubborn dwelling on Elio as he would grieve his social death, while the credits rush him along like a quick-and-cheap funeral service. The exhaustively inclusive roll call of names seems to intensify his loss of both a name and a sense of belonging, almost as if he knew they were sharing the screen. The infinitesimal nuance that Timothée Chalamet, the virtuoso actor who plays Elio, keeps bringing to the boy’s expression suggests that the shades of privation are infinite, that the shot, in this respect, might be as interminable as end credits always feel. Annella of course is the first to summon her son back to the Beautiful Life: “Elio?” Mechanically — it’s a familiar drill — he starts to turn his head toward her, but he pauses to wipe his eyes on his shirt before answering the call. For these are, effectively, the last tears of his youth; it is with “wash’d eyes” — in Cordelia’s sense of a cleared-up vision — that he will take his place at the dinner table. There, the film lets us suppose, the only thing that will diminish his enjoyment of the comfort foods on offer is the knowledge that he has just become, in every important sense, a ghost. And that knowledge, this more-than-exasperating film also lets us suppose, is what gay coming of age — so different from gay coming out — still amounts to.
I noticed too that people from the US are more sensitive about the “age” topic, and I also see that it’s originating from the fact that you are considered an adult when you’re 21 there.
Here in Hungary 18 is the year when you become an adult and you are no longer considered a minor if you turn 14 (basically when you’re starting high school).
Me and my bf have a 9 year age difference and we’re together for almost 10 years now. I was always attracted to older men, and even now that I’m 29, I can’t picture myself with someone even my age. For me, men around thrity are still seem quite irresponsible and some of them are still acting like kids, so I’m totally comfortable in this relationship.
Thank you for that! It was precisely what I was thinking about. In Europe it’s probably more normalized than in USA and for that, we tend not to judge these types of relationships.
WhileCall me by your name is about young love and heartbreak, Find Me is about hope and patience.
And if you think that the book only got sequel bcs it got lit, trust me, read the last part of cmbyn, especially the last pages, and try reconsidering it - because the hints of possible sequel were there.
As I’m reading Find me, the book has one tiny, itsy-bitsy flaw.
Sami and Miranda’s story. I mean, it’s not bad, it’s sweet… But I don’t really care about Elio’s father. I care about Elio. I bought the book because of Elio, not to read about his father.
Once Elio’s here, being as lovely as ever, I can finally connect to the book on the same level I connected to Call me by your name. Until that… I don’t know, the story lacks something.
Okay, first let me remind you - this is my POV on the book as a whole. Everyone has their way of understanding of what exactly happened in Call me by your name (the novel) and you don’t have to agree with everything I am about to say - WHICH IS TOTALLY FINE.
Second thing - I’m going to be using translations and page references to my copy of the book - that being the first Czech edition from the year 2018, translated by Lucie Podhorná because it varies from the OG book itself (for example, when Elio talks to Vimini, my copy says “when did he tell you?” instead of “when had he tell her?”; it’s just small nuances). Also, that’s why I’m referring to Oliver as ‘Oliver Ulliva’, because my copy canonically confirms this being his last name - it refers to his last name being ‘Ulliva’ a few times since Mafalda cracks his egg open.
What made me even wanna write this rant? I don’t wanna in any way talk about the author or the director, or the actors. But… Well, quite a few things - especially the statement that their relationship was predatory since the very begging (simply because Oliver is seven years older) and that it was practically a ‘consensual ra*e’ and… Listen.
1. The Age Gap
Most of these were from the American audience who viewed the movie - but let me explain why Europeans might view this relationship differently and why you might change your opinion about it as well. I am not saying Americans don’t do these things as well, but from what I’ve seen on the forums, etc., it seems to me that European x American view on age gaps is way different.
For the sake of this statement, I interviewed 10 of my European friends - of which were mostly all Czech. Europeans do not see a problem with having a seven-year (and more) age gap between the partners - you rarely find a couple of which both are the same age; three-years being the “standard” gap.
Young people, around 17 - 19, at least in my country, are attracted to older partners for various reasons - some like the intellectual potential of their partner, some are searching for a form of certitude in an older partner having their priorities sorted out and figured out their lives and what they want to do with themselves; whether we are talking about m/m, w/m, w/w or a non-binary relationship. One of my friends told me she searches older partners solely because they feel more protected by them. It’s the sense of serenity, a different feeling of connection and different understanding to your other half.
I’ve talked to four of my friends, who both have partners of the same age or max. 1-year gap and even they told me they absolutely can see themselves dating a partner older by minimally five years. So, it’s not a controversial thing here, really.
Maybe it’s more common in here, but rarely anyone frowns upon such relationships. At the time of my first relationship, my first partner was five years older than me - and I honestly couldn’t see myself with someone my age. From my experience, the relationships and bonds have a higher probability to last longer (we had a beautiful relationship of three years), it isn’t only driven by hormonal side of things and such, the feelings can develop into something more meaningful than just simple and shallow lust. More for that matter - most of these age-gap relationships didn’t end extra-bad breakups and the partners tended to continue seeing each other as friends.
When I interviewed my friends, asking them about the length of these relationships, it was never less than a year. Usually, they said that they learned a ton of new stuff about themselves and having a healthy, normal relationship than from dating someone their age. So… Yeah. I guess that personal, first-hand experience is what makes us see the relationship for its good and bad, but still assures us not to perceive the relationship as predatory.
Now, you might say that while were living in the 2020s’, Call me by your name took place in 1983 - and guess what? It was written in the year 2007. Does that mean something? The answer is - no. My grandma met my grandpa in the 80s’ (I asked her about this as well and they have 14 years gap; my other grandma and grandpa met at the end of 80s’ and the start of 90s’ and they, as well, have 8 years between them) and by this, you can see that the situation is more or less the same as it was.
For all of the above, I can see why Elio fell for Oliver so quickly. First and foremost - he mentions Oliver being older like… Three, four times in a book that has word count 76.996? Elio doesn’t care about age - it’s a story about two human beings falling in love. It’s not trying to research the problem of age and such. Stop judging the story for the wrong reason, ffs.
2. The ‘consensual ra*e’ argument:
Another thing I’ve encountered is the audience calling the story 'consensual ra*e’… Let me elaborate and tell you why you’re wrong. In America, the age of consent is 16 - 18. In Europe, we have the age of consent established at 15 (the lowest being Estonia with 14) and you are a lawful adult at 18 years old. Given that Elio was 17 in the summer and 18 in November, he was already perceived as an adult; given what were his parents like and what relationship they had to him. (Again, I am looking at the story from today’s perspective since the audience did as well). He was a man at the time Oliver came to Italy, he was a man at the time he had sex with Marzia, he was a man when he had sex with Oliver and he was a man when he traveled to Rome.
Elio should be perceived as an adult who carries most of his personal responsibility on his shoulders (since you’re more than partially punished for the laws you break from the age of fifteen) and if he decides that he wants to be in a sexual relationship with an older man - he can rightfully do so. Surely, the relationship had another big B U T (for some people) - homosexuality and homophobia. And from the historical standpoint, I don’t wanna spend too much time over it. The LGBT movement foundation ties back to 1969; given that Italy was in the capitalistic pro-American part of Europe (Czechia was under the Communist regime at the time, so homosexuality was barbarically punished in my country), I think there wasn’t a problem with a subtle, not-too-obvious gay relationship. Sure, you couldn’t walk into the open and hold hands and such, but you wouldn’t get you beheaded.
Yeah, I mean, I’m not an expert on Italian war history and I don’t particularly know what happened with Italy after WW2, but I know that in 1985, first LGBT organization got founding from the republic and from that I assume the situation, especially if it would be a subtle relationship, wouldn’t be as bad.
In the story, it is hinted that both Sami and Anella were aware of the whole relationship - I mean, come on. Sami knew (since he had the big speech about being corrupted at the age of thirty, (“I think he’s better than me, dad”.; “And I am sure he would say the same about you, which both of you makes seem like good people.” - Call me by your name, page 221)) and Anella perfectly knew at least in the movie - I mean, the car-ride home? Oh, she knew very well and she even told Marzia at the dinner, IMO.
Now tell me why would the relationship be a consensual ra*e? Because it is not bent to accommodate American laws? Because it not an ordinary every-day relationship? In which way is it ra*e? At the age of 17, you are taken as A D U L T who has their responsibilities to fulfil, at least here in Europe.
3. Oliver didn’t love Elio as much as Elio loved Oliver:
… What? I mean… What?
Sure, you are seeing the whole story from Elio’s eyes and for that, you are more likely to take Elio’s side in this matter. In the end, it was Oliver who was getting married, right? And he was the first one to reach out, right? Well… It was a both-sided thing. At the first few pages, Eliosays ““Do you want to look at them?”Not now, maybe later.“ Polite indifference, as if he noticed my out of place zealous effort to make him like me as he pushed me away briskly.”; page 12 and on page 18, Elio states “We started - he must’ve seen the hints way sooner than I did - to flirt.”, let alone that Elio describes that probably, Oliver visited his room while he was asleep.
I can see where the opinion that Elio loved Oliver more could’ve come from - he was young, hasty and captivated by the entirety of Oliver. Since we see the story by his side, Oliver can seem to be the less active out of the two. But trust me, he loved him the same amount, if not more. This was confirmed by both Sami and Vimini -
Page 92, a conversation between ElioandVimini, Oliver went to the sea with Anchise:
“Do you know where Oliver is?” “I don’t know. I thought he went fishing with Anchise.” “With Anchise? He’s crazy! He almost killed himself the last time!” No response. She was looking at the sun slowly setting down. “You like him, don’t you?” “Yes,” I responded. “He likes you too. More than you do - I think.” You really think so? - No, Oliver does. - When did he tell you? - Not too long ago.
and page 220, when SamiandElio talk about their trip to Rome:
“Oliver may be very intelligent—,” I began. Once again, the disingenuous rise intonation announced a damning but hanging invisibly between us. Anything not to let my father lead me any further down this road. “Intelligent? He was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. He was good, and you were both lucky to have found each other, because you too are good.“
Which obviously shows that both of the people who are indirectly watching the relationship between Elio and Oliver blossom in front of their very eyes are aware that both were very much in love. And Vimini, even if she said 'Oliver does think he loves Elio more’, she could see that these two are very much attracted to each other. She was spending a lot of time with Oliver throughout his stay in Italy and she was beyond intelligent - these two were an incapable pair idiots compared to her.
So, no, Oliver doesn’t love Elio more; he’s just not being as childish about it as Elio is. Once more, the age gap is tying into this topic; while Oliver has his 'hot-headed’ days, he already went through the phase of being obsessed by someone (or at least the phase being obsessed and letting the surroundings know). He is slightly more mature than Elio, so he just doesn’t let himself go that easily.
And I think that he maybe suffers from internalized homophobia - page 224, Olivertalks with Elio as he comes back for Christmas:
”You should leave then. They (Elio’s parents) know about us.“ ”I figured so,“ he responded. ”How?“ ”By the way your father spoke. You’re lucky. My father would have me carted me off to a correctional facility.“
In this short piece of dialogue, you can see that Oliver’s father isn’t okay with LGBT (not too much to wonder about, the American society was different than it is now, it wasn’t a safe space for queers). And it’s plausible that if Oliver had listened to this as he grew up, he got scared when his mind and body reacted to Elio in this way. We can see that for Elio, he lets go for some time; as they sleep in the 2nd part of the book and visit Rome together in the 3rd part of the book. He tried to overcome the fear and simply because he was in love with the boy, he did overcome it.
But you can see the broken shell (which was tore down in Italy) slowly getting together as Oliver gets back to the USA. He, once more, is under the pressure of American society who is not LGBT friendly at the time, his own father would’ve never supported his decisions regarding his love life, it could cost him his academic career… And for all of these reasons, it was more logical for Oliver to get married. It was his way of putting order back into his life; it was his way of being good as he says Elio.
So, yeah. Here you have it. Oliver was in love, the relationship could benefit both parties and it wasn’t a consensual ra*e, thank you very much.
Okay, first let me remind you - this is my POV on the book as a whole. Everyone has their way of understanding of what exactly happened in Call me by your name (the novel) and you don’t have to agree with everything I am about to say - WHICH IS TOTALLY FINE.
Second thing - I’m going to be using translations and page references to my copy of the book - that being the first Czech edition from the year 2018, translated by Lucie Podhorná because it varies from the OG book itself (for example, when Elio talks to Vimini, my copy says “when did he tell you?” instead of “when had he tell her?”; it’s just small nuances). Also, that’s why I’m referring to Oliver as ‘Oliver Ulliva’, because my copy canonically confirms this being his last name - it refers to his last name being ‘Ulliva’ a few times since Mafalda cracks his egg open.
What made me even wanna write this rant? I don’t wanna in any way talk about the author or the director, or the actors. But… Well, quite a few things - especially the statement that their relationship was predatory since the very begging (simply because Oliver is seven years older) and that it was practically a ‘consensual ra*e’ and… Listen.
1. The Age Gap
Most of these were from the American audience who viewed the movie - but let me explain why Europeans might view this relationship differently and why you might change your opinion about it as well. I am not saying Americans don’t do these things as well, but from what I’ve seen on the forums, etc., it seems to me that European x American view on age gaps is way different.
For the sake of this statement, I interviewed 10 of my European friends - of which were mostly all Czech. Europeans do not see a problem with having a seven-year (and more) age gap between the partners - you rarely find a couple of which both are the same age; three-years being the “standard” gap.
Young people, around 17 - 19, at least in my country, are attracted to older partners for various reasons - some like the intellectual potential of their partner, some are searching for a form of certitude in an older partner having their priorities sorted out and figured out their lives and what they want to do with themselves; whether we are talking about m/m, w/m, w/w or a non-binary relationship. One of my friends told me she searches older partners solely because they feel more protected by them. It’s the sense of serenity, a different feeling of connection and different understanding to your other half.
I’ve talked to four of my friends, who both have partners of the same age or max. 1-year gap and even they told me they absolutely can see themselves dating a partner older by minimally five years. So, it’s not a controversial thing here, really.
Maybe it’s more common in here, but rarely anyone frowns upon such relationships. At the time of my first relationship, my first partner was five years older than me - and I honestly couldn’t see myself with someone my age. From my experience, the relationships and bonds have a higher probability to last longer (we had a beautiful relationship of three years), it isn’t only driven by hormonal side of things and such, the feelings can develop into something more meaningful than just simple and shallow lust. More for that matter - most of these age-gap relationships didn’t end extra-bad breakups and the partners tended to continue seeing each other as friends.
When I interviewed my friends, asking them about the length of these relationships, it was never less than a year. Usually, they said that they learned a ton of new stuff about themselves and having a healthy, normal relationship than from dating someone their age. So… Yeah. I guess that personal, first-hand experience is what makes us see the relationship for its good and bad, but still assures us not to perceive the relationship as predatory.
Now, you might say that while were living in the 2020s’, Call me by your name took place in 1983 - and guess what? It was written in the year 2007. Does that mean something? The answer is - no. My grandma met my grandpa in the 80s’ (I asked her about this as well and they have 14 years gap; my other grandma and grandpa met at the end of 80s’ and the start of 90s’ and they, as well, have 8 years between them) and by this, you can see that the situation is more or less the same as it was.
For all of the above, I can see why Elio fell for Oliver so quickly. First and foremost - he mentions Oliver being older like… Three, four times in a book that has word count 76.996? Elio doesn’t care about age - it’s a story about two human beings falling in love. It’s not trying to research the problem of age and such. Stop judging the story for the wrong reason, ffs.
2. The ‘consensual ra*e’ argument:
Another thing I’ve encountered is the audience calling the story 'consensual ra*e’… Let me elaborate and tell you why you’re wrong. In America, the age of consent is 16 - 18. In Europe, we have the age of consent established at 15 (the lowest being Estonia with 14) and you are a lawful adult at 18 years old. Given that Elio was 17 in the summer and 18 in November, he was already perceived as an adult; given what were his parents like and what relationship they had to him. (Again, I am looking at the story from today’s perspective since the audience did as well). He was a man at the time Oliver came to Italy, he was a man at the time he had sex with Marzia, he was a man when he had sex with Oliver and he was a man when he traveled to Rome.
Elio should be perceived as an adult who carries most of his personal responsibility on his shoulders (since you’re more than partially punished for the laws you break from the age of fifteen) and if he decides that he wants to be in a sexual relationship with an older man - he can rightfully do so. Surely, the relationship had another big B U T (for some people) - homosexuality and homophobia. And from the historical standpoint, I don’t wanna spend too much time over it. The LGBT movement foundation ties back to 1969; given that Italy was in the capitalistic pro-American part of Europe (Czechia was under the Communist regime at the time, so homosexuality was barbarically punished in my country), I think there wasn’t a problem with a subtle, not-too-obvious gay relationship. Sure, you couldn’t walk into the open and hold hands and such, but you wouldn’t get you beheaded.
Yeah, I mean, I’m not an expert on Italian war history and I don’t particularly know what happened with Italy after WW2, but I know that in 1985, first LGBT organization got founding from the republic and from that I assume the situation, especially if it would be a subtle relationship, wouldn’t be as bad.
In the story, it is hinted that both Sami and Anella were aware of the whole relationship - I mean, come on. Sami knew (since he had the big speech about being corrupted at the age of thirty, (“I think he’s better than me, dad”.; “And I am sure he would say the same about you, which both of you makes seem like good people.” - Call me by your name, page 221)) and Anella perfectly knew at least in the movie - I mean, the car-ride home? Oh, she knew very well and she even told Marzia at the dinner, IMO.
Now tell me why would the relationship be a consensual ra*e? Because it is not bent to accommodate American laws? Because it not an ordinary every-day relationship? In which way is it ra*e? At the age of 17, you are taken as A D U L T who has their responsibilities to fulfil, at least here in Europe.
3. Oliver didn’t love Elio as much as Elio loved Oliver:
… What? I mean… What?
Sure, you are seeing the whole story from Elio’s eyes and for that, you are more likely to take Elio’s side in this matter. In the end, it was Oliver who was getting married, right? And he was the first one to reach out, right? Well… It was a both-sided thing. At the first few pages, Eliosays ““Do you want to look at them?”Not now, maybe later.“ Polite indifference, as if he noticed my out of place zealous effort to make him like me as he pushed me away briskly.”; page 12 and on page 18, Elio states “We started - he must’ve seen the hints way sooner than I did - to flirt.”, let alone that Elio describes that probably, Oliver visited his room while he was asleep.
I can see where the opinion that Elio loved Oliver more could’ve come from - he was young, hasty and captivated by the entirety of Oliver. Since we see the story by his side, Oliver can seem to be the less active out of the two. But trust me, he loved him the same amount, if not more. This was confirmed by both Sami and Vimini -
Page 92, a conversation between ElioandVimini, Oliver went to the sea with Anchise:
“Do you know where Oliver is?” “I don’t know. I thought he went fishing with Anchise.” “With Anchise? He’s crazy! He almost killed himself the last time!” No response. She was looking at the sun slowly setting down. “You like him, don’t you?” “Yes,” I responded. “He likes you too. More than you do - I think.” You really think so? - No, Oliver does. - When did he tell you? - Not too long ago.
and page 220, when SamiandElio talk about their trip to Rome:
“Oliver may be very intelligent—,” I began. Once again, the disingenuous rise intonation announced a damning but hanging invisibly between us. Anything not to let my father lead me any further down this road. “Intelligent? He was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. He was good, and you were both lucky to have found each other, because you too are good.“
Which obviously shows that both of the people who are indirectly watching the relationship between Elio and Oliver blossom in front of their very eyes are aware that both were very much in love. And Vimini, even if she said 'Oliver does think he loves Elio more’, she could see that these two are very much attracted to each other. She was spending a lot of time with Oliver throughout his stay in Italy and she was beyond intelligent - these two were an incapable pair idiots compared to her.
So, no, Oliver doesn’t love Elio more; he’s just not being as childish about it as Elio is. Once more, the age gap is tying into this topic; while Oliver has his 'hot-headed’ days, he already went through the phase of being obsessed by someone (or at least the phase being obsessed and letting the surroundings know). He is slightly more mature than Elio, so he just doesn’t let himself go that easily.
And I think that he maybe suffers from internalized homophobia - page 224, Olivertalks with Elio as he comes back for Christmas:
”You should leave then. They (Elio’s parents) know about us.“ ”I figured so,“ he responded. ”How?“ ”By the way your father spoke. You’re lucky. My father would have me carted me off to a correctional facility.“
In this short piece of dialogue, you can see that Oliver’s father isn’t okay with LGBT (not too much to wonder about, the American society was different than it is now, it wasn’t a safe space for queers). And it’s plausible that if Oliver had listened to this as he grew up, he got scared when his mind and body reacted to Elio in this way. We can see that for Elio, he lets go for some time; as they sleep in the 2nd part of the book and visit Rome together in the 3rd part of the book. He tried to overcome the fear and simply because he was in love with the boy, he did overcome it.
But you can see the broken shell (which was tore down in Italy) slowly getting together as Oliver gets back to the USA. He, once more, is under the pressure of American society who is not LGBT friendly at the time, his own father would’ve never supported his decisions regarding his love life, it could cost him his academic career… And for all of these reasons, it was more logical for Oliver to get married. It was his way of putting order back into his life; it was his way of being good as he says Elio.
So, yeah. Here you have it. Oliver was in love, the relationship could benefit both parties and it wasn’t a consensual ra*e, thank you very much.
WhileCall me by your name is about young love and heartbreak, Find Me is about hope and patience.
And if you think that the book only got sequel bcs it got lit, trust me, read the last part of cmbyn, especially the last pages, and try reconsidering it - because the hints of possible sequel were there.
I’m sorry, but I’ll be gone most likely for this week, but… Call Me By Your Name dragged me down and doesn’t let go.
Given my brain parkoured through Harry Potter, Spider-Man and Witcher fandom in the last four days, I suspect I should be able to write about anything else than two men falling in love in less than a week.
I’m really sorry, but there’s something about Timothée and Armie’s chemistry in the movie… But the book, oh God. It’s just too good.
i really need to stop dropping things and picking up new things on accident because i just saw a book under my bed and went “oh yeah im annotating that-” like i havent touched it in months.
I’m annotating ‘Call Me By Your Name’ by André Aciman after reading it twice and I got to the scene where Elio keeps changing the way he played the piece and making Oliver frustrated and it took ALL OF MY WILL POWER to not cover the whole scene in highlighter. It’s one of my favourite parts in the whole thing.
