Call Me By Your Name (2017): A Beautiful and Evil Love Story

Call Me By Your Name (2017): A Beautiful and Evil Love Story

March 23th, 2023

It’s the 6th blog and 6 is an evil number in some traditions. Some of these traditions influenced my own worldview, and we’re going to explore that a bit today. I recently rewatched a beautiful and evil film: Call Me By Your Name (2017) starring Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer. I thought a lot of things and felt a lot of ways about this movie, and I’d like to share some of these with you today.

I watched the movie recently for the second time, and I have a lot to say it. First of all, I love this film. It’s a 5 out of 5 on my scale (read the 5th blog for an explanation on how I rate movies). I stand by the claim, it’s a beautiful and evil piece of art. I don’t need to explain the beautiful part, anyone who has seen the film will likely agree the cinematography and set locations are gorgeous. The movie takes place over a summer “somewhere in northern Italy”. From the dress, cars, and posters, it seems like the late 80’s or early 90’s. The plot is a coming of age story for our main character, a 17 year old boy named Elio, played by Chalamet. I adore Timothee Chalamet as an actor. Every role in every movie I’ve seen him in has been a memorable performance. He consistently plays characters in strong and charismatic ways. In the film, Elio and his American-French family spend their summers in northern Italy, his father a professor at a nearby university. For summer this year, a good-looking 29 year old American exchange student named Oliver comes to spend the season with Elio’s family. Over time, the plot follows Elio falling in love with Oliver, played by Armie Hammer.

Further explanation is needed on what I mean by “evil”. In this context I mean evil in a technical sense, that is the film celebrates an inversion of traditional values, especially inherent within most love stories. Please know that I call this evil not as not a judgment or religious condemnation on my part. I do not have the hubris to judge other humans on their sexuality or who they choose to love. It’s evil in a “sinful" way. I mean the film is evil in a technical sense from a Western esoteric tradition sense. The main characters share a perverse love, in violation of taboos. The film explores topics inverted to traditional Western values. Allow me to lay out the argument and you can decide for yourself if you agree or not.

It’s worth mentioning I plan to read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil but have not tackled it yet. It’s on my reading list, but I stumbled upon a Reddit post recommending classic works before reading Nietzsche. I’m on that journey now, reading through Plato and Aristotle. I have become distracted and awestruck by the “rediscovering” the beauty of Western civilization. Reading through classics is like gaining insight into topics I thought I already knew so much about, but there is always more to learn and bring back to the present day. So bear with me on my journey, as this is why I’m here writing a blog instead of doing further work into finding out what I actually think about good versus evil. Full disclosure for your context, I grew up in an American protestant Christian church, which was traditionally conservative and biblically fundamentalist in many ways. I’ve gone my own way since I was 18, and hold many conflicting ideas in my head in the last 12 years. I consider Judeo-Christianity as a fundamental aspect of Western Culture, and I’ve been spending the last few years of my life deeply researching exactly what that means for me and my role in this crazy world I find myself inhabiting.

In Eastern philosophy, prevailing thought is that all things are connected with each other. An example of this is the taijitu symbol of Yin and Yang. There is something masculine within all women, and vice versa etc. Due to a lack of Christian influence (what Tao Lin would call dominator religion), prevailing Eastern philosophical traditions would say there is a little evil in all good people and vice versa.

In Western philosophical tradition, there is a separation of the object and subject. There is a right and a wrong, a good and an evil. In the Western Esoteric tradition, evil is an inversion of the traditionally good.

There is one room that captures the essence of all of historical Western Culture: the Stanza della Segnatura (Room of the Signatura). It’s one of the four famous Raphael rooms in the Vatican. Here’s a picture of me there:

The Parnassus (above) and the School of Athens (below) represent the tying together of Greek literature and philosophical traditions to Roman Catholicism, i.e. the basis of Western Culture.

This is a picture I took of Raphael’s “School of Athens” fresco. Painted between 1509 and 1511, at the height of the Renaissance, this fresco symbolically ties together all of the Greek philosophical tradition into Roman and Catholic Christian thought. In the center left is a representation of Plato. A man with a white beard, who looks like Leonardo Di Vinci, seen pointing with his right hand up towards the sky. This represents his idea that the world we see is but an illusion, and he points upwards and towards the light of the perfect world of the Forms. Aristotle is in the center left, in the blue robes. His right palm gestures towards the ground, representing the view that the world in front of us is all there is. Aristotle is the traditional first scientist, denoting the importance of rational understanding through direct observation. Pythagoras is on the left, writing in his book and teaching students gathered around him. Pythagoras is interesting because he ran mystery schools. Euclid is on the right side of is fresco, on the side of Aristotle. This is appropriate because while both men discovered secrets of how the universe works through geometry, Euclid was the more objective and scientific. He is seen drawing geometric shapes and showing his students. There are more figures, and it was stunning to experience the fresco in person, as seeing this was the coming together of so much of my background growing up in the early 21st century in the West.

In Call Me By Your Name, there are themes of inversion throughout. As the young men enter Elio’s room for the first time, there is an inverted pentagram on a poster on the wall, a symbol used by the Church of Satan as a harsh rejection of Christianity.

Its location at the entrance can be a reference to his room being a temple in which their sexual acts are performed. That or I am reading way too much into a teenager’s rock music poster, which is equally likely.

A working definition of evil in this context is the inversion of traditional values. Call Me By Your Name celebrates inversion of traditional western values. The movie, although fundamentally about love, is about a perverse kind of love. A kind of love that should not exist, which is often the most enticing. The movie is about a love of oneself, a hedonistic love. In a way, it’s made more perverse by the fact Elio’s mother and father are so accepting of the older man Oliver’s sexual attraction to their boy. Unlike in Romeo and Juliet, where the titular character’s romance is not accepted by the family, in the movie, the perverse love is encouraged by the boy’s family.

There is a scene in the film where Oliver suggests they call each other by each other’s names. This dialogue takes place after the first time they’ve made love. The characters are framed upside down.

On my second viewing, I received different impressions of this and other scenes. After Elio and Oliver spend their first night together, they go swimming in a lake. Here, Oliver, the older man, asks Elio if he will hold this over his head or use this as blackmail against him in some way. Elio lets out a sigh and reassures him no, he won’t do that. My impression is that Oliver wants to commit the taboo and sleep with the boy, but is also nervous and scared, and doesn’t want to get caught and punished for it, either by public shame or perhaps by legal authorities. The couple go back to the house together and enter separately through their connected rooms. Oliver approaches the threshold of the bathroom connecting their rooms and calls Elio over (Oliver uses Elio’s name in this scene, despite his suggestion in the scene above they call each other by their own names). Oliver tells Elio to take his trunks off and goes down on him.

Oliver then almost stops immediately and gets up and says “Good. That’s promising, you’re already hard again.” Oliver then closes the door on Elio and smiles to himself.

At first, I thought Oliver was being a tease or just an asshole to the younger boy, playing with his emotions. In my second watch, I saw something much darker. I saw Oliver as hedonistic, gaining pleasure that he has power over the boy. He lets out a sigh of relief as he realizes he’s going to be okay, his pride can remain intact. Oliver is self centered. He has love for the boy, but in a selfish way, enjoying the feeling of being desired. Oliver has a Luciferian pride of himself. His love is love of being adored. He feels relief at Elio’s boyish innocence. As I connected my thoughts on this during my second viewing, I realized I appreciated the darkness of this scene, especially due to Armie Hammer’s acting. He pulls it off and the whole scene looks great. I admired the acting while being disturbed at the subtle darkness and beauty of the scene.

At the end of the movie, two scenes stand out, each involving Elio and one of his parents. First showed Elio’s sadness and his first reaction was to call his mother to come pick him up. It was after Elio and Oliver had to say goodbye to each other at a train station, unable to share a final kiss together in public. With tears in his eyes, Elio makes the call to his mother, and part of me died when I watched that part. I’ve been that boy, and I’ve made that phone call to my mother after my heart’s been broken.

Somehow the second scene with Elio and his father is even better and more heartbreaking. Sometime later, after his mother brings him home, Elio goes and visits with his father in his father’s study. Elio sits on the couch and waits for his dad to tell him something that makes sense. His dad explains how rare and special the relationship was between Elio and Oliver, and how love should never be taken for granted. The story ends on a somber note, and I’m glad for it. It shows the reality of how love and relationships when you are young often do not end on a happy note. As I conclude and reflect on this piece, I see the beauty in this story and see I may have been too harsh on my criticism about calling this an evil movie. Can any good story about love be evil? There are themes of hedonism, perverse or inverted values, but it’s about love and love seems fundamentally good. Love is messy and complicated, but good.

There is no better conclusion than to share the father’s final monologue to his son. See you in the next post. Enjoy:

“When you least expect it, Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember: I am here. Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it’s not to me that you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you obviously did.

You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, to pray that their sons land on their feet. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it. And if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out. Don’t be brutal with it. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster, that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything ― what a waste!”

-Michael Kuhlman

March 23th, 2023