The Erotics of Fruit; or, Elio and Oliver and the Giant Peach

Extract

Introduction

Released in January 2017, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, adapted from André Aciman’s 2007 novel, has ascended into queer cinema fame and infamy. Grossing nearly $42 million dollars at the global box office, the film received critical acclaim at the Oscars, Critics Choice Awards, and BAFTAs, boosted by the headlining cast starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer as star-crossed, queer lovers. Both the film and the novel primarily follow a lone summer (1983 in the film and the vague mid-1980s in the novel) in which Oliver (Hammer), a postdoctoral Classics scholar, takes up a residential fellowship in northern Italy under the tutelage of archaeologist Samuel Perlman. While staying at the Perlman villa, a whirlwind romance unfolds between Oliver and the Perlmans’ sixteen-year-old son, Elio (Chalamet). Although the story’s cult following has been deified as a totalizing form of gay media representation—what Phillip Henry calls a “white, gay fantasy”—this essay turns to Call Me by Your Name to examine the queer ecological erotics that infuse the novel, its filmic adaptation, and the novel’s sequel, Find Me (2019).