Sunny Melancholy: Call Me By Your Name’s Fleeting Preponderance
Aciman and Guadagnino temporarily shifted the aesthetics of gay storylines
2017. First year of the first Trump presidency. Uncertainty, but also some exhaustion, which made the uncertainty easier to bear. A year later, Greta Thunberg would go viral for warning us about climate change. In 2017, we maybe were not ready to hear warnings of any kind. It was in 2017 when Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, the film adaptation of the novel by the same name by André Aciman, propelled French American actor Timothée Chalamet’s career to new heights. If Tumblr still held the cultural weight it did half a decade ago, stills from the film would’ve adorned the entire site. A Jewish Italian boy coming of age after a summer romance with an American in his 20s against the background of sunny 1980s Italy — you can’t get more “aesthetic” than that. The soundtrack including piano tracks and 1980s one hit wonders in three languages was just as seductive as the film. For how melancholic the novel and film are, they are not associated with the colors gray and black. The warm and vibrant (but not overly so) reds, yellows, oranges, and the sky blue can surprisingly capture melancholy just as well. Nostalgia, too. Call Me By Your Name received plenty of criticisms: the inappropriate age gap in the relationship that drove the plot, and the predictable whiteness of its queer storyline (compared to Moonlight, the Best Picture winner over Call me By Your Name) were two intriguing critiques. But neither truly faded its cultural cache.
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Right around that time, in fact, the image of a homoerotic relationship against the background of the Mediterranean (or some similar coastal land) became ubiquitous. Music videos, album artworks, films, and literature could not get enough Call Me By Your Name-esque scenes. Even Disney Pixar blatantly copied the formula and made it child-friendly enough for global distribution with Luca (2021). What, if anything, explains this late 2010s proliferation of postcard perfect, coming of age, gay-coded, coastal scenes? At a moment in time when people felt dejected and favored the sardonic over the endearing, it was puzzling that an aesthetic so earnest, sometimes to the point of cheesiness, exploded like this in popularity.
A simple capitalist explanation amounts to replicating previous successes: if Call Me By Your Name worked, then repeat its formula and profit. Sure. Maybe it became easier to dream for the Mediterranean in the 2010s, when mass tourism made travel to that region more affordable than ever before. Barcelonans hadn’t yet splashed oblivious tourists sitting down at cafés with toy water guns in protest of the AirBnBfication of the city. Venice did not know that Jeff Bezos would try to rent the town for his wedding. COVID-19 hadn’t destroyed entire economies and killed millions. Maybe we could allow ourselves some aesthetic contemplation of the sea. Where’s the harm?
The mood of most gay coming of age stories isn’t nearly as sunny. The End of Eddy, God’s Own Country, and Boy Erased favored grayness and gloominess over long summer days. The tragic coming out/coming of age story has unfortunately not lost relevancy in a world where that is still the reaction many queer children anticipate after coming out. Moonlight, the innovative gay film about Black men, also leaned towards the tragic. These portrayals are honest, and thus resonate well with older generations of queers. They are necessary, too — if rejection continues to be an issue, then these narratives will need to keep speaking out against it. But when there are lots of tragic queer and gay storylines, we can understand the appeal of a slightly different mood and outcome. Do not be fooled by the sunny aesthetics of Call Me By Your Name and its derivatives. These stories often end just as tragically, but they also indulge in euphoria, however fleeting it might be.
Where are the sun-kissed gay stories in 2026? After a global pandemic, a lackluster economic recovery, the return of the far-right in half of the planet, and the development of new wars, perhaps we simply can’t afford to dream of the Mediterranean in the 1980s anymore. Or even of the Mediterranean in the 2020s, for that matter, thanks to increasingly prohibitive travel costs. Sometimes, nonetheless, lightness comes to help us during moments of darkness. Perhaps that twee-adjacent, carefree beach setting is due for a revival.
