D.A. MILLER
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 postcardperfect 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 do foresee 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 93
