Life's a Peach: The Convergence of Sexuality and Class in Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name
This is an introduction to my essay “Life’s a Peach: The Convergence of Sexuality and Class in Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name,” which is forthcoming in the eighth edition of the Digital Literature Review.
Food plays a large part in facilitating the sensual, exploratory world of Call Me by Your Name. The 2017 film adaptation of André Acimen’s novel has been ground-breaking in its mainstream reception of a queer relationship. While almost every reviewer has had something to say about the infamous “peach scene”, few have focused on how food overall—its production, presentation, or consumption—functions in Call Me by Your Name. Fewer still have chosen to interact with the working-class characters who not only dot, but paint the lush backdrop of Elio and Oliver’s interactions and who provide for the main characters’ romance through food production. With these two lenses missing, we have been unable to understand this piece of cinema for what it suggests: for these men to have come together romantically, there needed to be a space, such as an expansive villa, where they could escape normative messaging around sexuality without stressing about the fiscal demands required for a fulfillment of the necessities—in this case, eating. I propose food as a mechanism by which we can assess this movie’s romantic leanings as well as its reliance on class divisions to kickstart any meaningful realization of queerness. With this understanding in mind, we can begin to gather a better sense of Call Me by Your Name’s class-consciousness and reckoning with economic forces that, on the surface, suggest entering a capitalistic elite to even clandestinely undermine heterosexism; however, these views ultimately bow under examination to show the inability of any space built on such a class hierarchy to funnel out oppression.
Oliver is a graduate student who has come from America for the summer of 1983 to work under Professor Samuel Perlman, an expert in classical culture. The opportunity introduces Oliver to Elio, the professor’s son, a seventeen-year-old who makes a hobby of notating and re-interpreting Bach pieces and who can switch with ease between English, French, and Italian. Guided by the languid gazes of the professor and his wife Annella, the two young men swim, study, and simmer beneath the fruit trees of this expansive rural villa.
Food becomes its own language in Call Me by Your Name, which follows theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s observation that “[t]he sign-bearing, sign-wearing body is also a producer of signs which are physically marked by the relationship to the body.” So close to the body that it becomes the body, food must serve here where words cannot. Apricots, water, and eggs in this film join the ranks of, if not usurp, the typical signalling method of speech to account for social muzzling –thankfully for Elio and Oliver, little gets lost in translation. This fact suggests the erection of, as theorist Michel Foucault suggests, “a new regime of discourses”, founded to account for the fact that “[t]here is not one but many silences.” The extinction of words is necessary to conceal what is happening symbolically to the people around Elio and Oliver, who, if they did catch onto the code, could only ever become aware of a sublimation from strangers to lovers.
Mealtime, like everything at the villa, is cultivated and polished to a degree almost impossible for anyone outside the bourgeoisie to realize. Both the maid Mafalda and the handyman Anchise are involved in the production and service of food. A large fish that Anchise catches serves as amusement for Elio, who makes faces at what will likely be part of dinner that evening. Elio can take breaks such as this from his music transcription because he did not have to involve himself in the fish’s retrieval, his only real relationship to the fish being its consumption.
But life is only as easy at the villa as long as Elio and Oliver’s relationship remains low-key and local; once Oliver finishes his doctoral studies and returns to the United States, he becomes engaged to a woman and must let Elio know of this over the phone. The reality that they were never going to permanently transcend society’s fury at their relationship speaks to what Foucault wrote, that, for the heterosexists who would look to find some sign to condemn homosexuality, Elio and Oliver’s romance would be “a secret that always gave itself away.” Their reliance on food to communicate to each other speaks as much to the subliminal nature of what they were doing as to the need to be a member of the bourgeoisie to say it. While this sexual search contested the two’s gender scripts and social cues, it is not accurate to say they failed if the pleasure of the peach shall linger with them and the viewer: “Pleasure and power,” continues Foucault, “do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another.” Indeed, the lasting message of Call Me by Your Name is not to resign to louder, more normative messaging, but to better understand the link between what we govern and what governs us.