Does Elio from ‘Call Me by Your Name’ actually exist?

Now that the awards season is over, the pedophilia attacks on Call Me by Your Name in the right wing media are done with and the movie is doomed to TV, tablet and laptop screening, it feels finally safe to discuss the pink elephant in the room.

The film Call Me by Your Name is seductive. Italy is very, very beautiful.The 17-year-old Elio is tenderly beautiful, is in all respects a genius and absolutely no sissy. His well rounded, beautiful and gentle parents are beacons of high European culture and understanding. The 24-year-old guest Oliver who Elio passionately falls in love with, is also very beautiful; he is a confident blonde top-student of Elio’s father and he is definitely no sissy either. All main characters speak next to English, also French, German and Italian, and because the father is an archaeologist, presumably also Greek and Latin. The servants who are authentic and beautiful Italians who only speak Italian, but with a beautiful rich accent. And all the sex between Elio and Oliver is passionate and beautiful.

Call Me by Your Name is seductive for those who want to be seduced and seen from here in New York that is besides homophobe and conservative America almost everyone. The film won three nominations for the Oscars, even won one for Best Adapted Screenplay for James Ivory, director of among others the just as ‘beautiful’ movie Maurice after E.M. Forsters posthumously published gay novel. The success of the movie was remarkable in a year in which cultural and gender diversity stood central. After all, the film is an almost complete expression of a white Western civilization ideal, that is: the classical, Greco-Roman tradition, with some Christian and Jewish, but certainly no non-Western influences, an ideal in which traditionally women were mothers, ‘accidental lovers’, servants or nuns, and men had sex with women, but loved and educated boys.

My 12-year-old daughter is in health class in school and sexuality is on the program as every year, but now because of the age of the kids more intensively than before. It is a precarious topic, but at her school the teachers talk with the children in the co-ed class frankly about wet dreams, vaginal secretion, gender identity and pornography.

The parents were invited for an information session about their children’s sex education on an early morning last month. I went there and was the only gay parent in the group. In the discussion after the presentation of the subject matter by the teachers Call Me by Your Name was mentioned. The parents sighed almost collectively: ‘So beautiful’. One parent was silent at first, looked at me for a moment, gathered courage and then said that she had been to that movie with her 17-year-old son and that he had found the boy’s relationship with the older man ‘creepy’. She had discussed this experience with the health teacher who had then taken a group of his male class mates to the film. And ‘creepy’ had been the general opinion of the boys.

Their judgement is not an iron truth and its unanimity could be considered as ‘groupthink’, but the students of this socially liberal school count among the most talented in New York, and their opinion can, as in the case of gun control, not be ignored.

For me, that reaction to the main theme of the film, the love between a boy and an older man, was in any case a relief. I research and write about sexual abuse of boys and young men by older men in an Amsterdam cult, formed around the German emigrant and writer Wolfgang Frommel. The rationalization of their abuse found the cult members in an ideology based on the Greek idea of the pedagogical eros, the education of a boy by an older man, of a beloved by a lover. Plato writes about it in the Symposium; Frommel followed a variant that he had found in the work and life of the German poet Stefan George (1868–1933). That same rationalization was used in the horrendus German Odenwaldschule sexual abuse case as well. And I guess that some of the teachers in the recent sexual abuse scandal at the Horace Mann School in New York will have used the same classical excuse.

In Call Me by Your Name the classical context is consciously chosen to embed the love between a younger and an older man and to present that love as unproblematic; the embrace of the film of a virtually pure Greco-Roman tradition and imagery legitimizes that love. Those who have seen the movie wil recall the ‘peach sex scene’, which is — no surprise — motivated and explained by the symbolic meaning of that fruit in as the fruit of Venus in Roman mythology. Oliver wants to eat the peach which is ‘used’ by Elio, but the fruit will be thrown away eventually.

Next to that classical context, by putting the perspective — and the passion — in the movie with Elio in the present and making him the lover and the older friend the beloved, thus by reversing the usual power relationship between young and old, every implicit or explicit negative commentary by Elio in the film itself on what is actually going on, is made impossible. And when there is for Elio an opening for reflection after Oliver has left him, any uncomfortable feeling he might have had about this affair and about the age difference, is blown away by a rather artificial sermon of his understanding father on the importance and greatness of this unique friendship, which he himself had hoped for in his life. He suggests that Elio’s mother, his wife, wouldn’t understand that friendship. It’s a men thing! (A mysogynist men thing at that. The nonchalant treatment of girls and women by both Elio and Oliver is rather unsavory.)

My Amsterdam research shows what such an erotic or sexual friendship in the Greco-Roman tradition, when the power relationship is not inverted as in this movie, can mean for a boy or a young man in the long term. In retrospect, that experience for many of those boys and young men doesn’t look like the one of Elio at all, but is — often years an years later — relived as a traumatic experience.

Call Me by Your Name is a very, very beautiful film that describes a very, very beautiful reality within that film. Whether Elio, his friend Oliver and his parents, and Italy for that matter, also exist outside it, I really doubt. Out there it all looks less beautiful.