withnail and i
drifting into the arena of the queer
One of my happiest, queerest memories of uni is, as a first year just starting to come out, being introduced to Withnail and I by two of my college’s Trans Elders (not much older than me, to be clear, but I thought they were impossibly cool), wonderful friends who had decided — entirely correctly — that this film was what I needed. We all piled into one of their single beds and drank along to the film — red wine and whiskey, I think. We drank every time a character did, which is to say a lot. It was a wonderfully, irreducably queer experience, a defining moment which made me so certain in and grateful for the queer, trans family I was becoming a part of. There are some movies which, no matter how many times I watch them, will always transport me back to the initial encounter: Juno, lying in my room, a teenager unaware of my gender or sexuality but finding a moment of undefinably queer recognition in the film and in fancying Elliot Page; Rocky Horror, drunk and giggling hysterically with my crush on the floor of a friend’s room for Halloween — something close to perfection, even if I couldn’t remember the latter half of the film; and Withnail and I, tracing the contours of that indelibly queer tenderness on the screen and with that family. Since then, I’ve made it my mission — as, really, every queer should — to introduce as many other queer people to the film as possible; consider this newsletter a continuation of that effort.
content warnings for this piece: mention of attempted sexual violence, homophobia
But I worry that I may have given the wrong impression of Withnail. As much as I associate it with warmth and family and love, these themes are only intermittently visible in the film itself: for the most part, it’s just depressing, saturated with the particular melancholy of poverty and repression. While the film is pretty explicit in portraying queer characters and themes, it can be difficult to locate any joy in its conception of queerness1, which returns again and again to secrecy and shame more than to intimacy or love. To an extent, that’s the point: set at the end of the sixties, homosexuality’s legalisation was a recent memory, and illicit sexual encounters were still very much the norm for the queer community. It’s difficult to imagine an honest queer account of that period which doesn’t grapple with those issues. Of course the earliest mention of queerness in the film is when the narrator — ‘I’2 — is called a ‘ponce’ on his way to the pub toilets and has a panic attack over graffiti reading ‘I fuck arses’ once he gets there: that was a central aspect of how queerness was experienced in that time and place. Of course, at the end of it, neither Withnail nor I can never quite express their love for one another, and of course the nature of their relationship is left uncertain. Queerness is lived in ambiguities like that, especially when it’s stigmatised and pathologised.
For all that, though, I insist — sentimentally, perhaps — that Withnail and I is a film with a deep warmth at its core, which takes a real and genuine joy in queerness. It finds bits of love and intimacy growing inside the repression and poverty its characters experience, just as its funniest jokes come out of the darkness of their circumstances. Humour is key to this: the film really is just fantastically, absurdly funny. One of the first scenes — even before I visits the bathroom — has the titular pairing attempting to resolve the dilemma of their kitchen sink:
What this scene shows us about their living conditions is almost hilariously grim (‘there are things in there… there’s a teabag growing!’), and I always watch it with a mixture of horror and hysterical laughter. This describes, honestly, much of my experience watching the film: as much as their actions and their circumstances pain me, I can’t help but laugh, and I occasionally slip with friends into just quoting our favourite lines at one another. The performances are astonishing, and Richard E Grant’s drunk acting is sensational even before you realise he’s medically unable to drink.
Beyond the humour, though, there’s such a wonderful, semi-parodic domesticity to their relationship, where, for instance, they switch from accusatory tones at the start of the dishes scene into mutual concern and — I suppose — solidarity. The film never quite clarifies the nature of their relationship, but it’s certainly something more than friendship. Their intimacy, whether platonic or not, means there’s a tenderness to their actions here, as they clearly realise that neither can quite handle the task on their own and so attempt it together. It’s notable that even when I asks Withnail to do something he doesn’t want to — which is often — Withnail will always complain but very rarely refuses. There’s a trust which can sometimes slip into codependency — one wonders, at the end of the film, how Withnail will survive without I around — but which speaks to an intimacy and a level of connection I just adore.
The flipside of this, however, is the collaborative self-destruction they so frequently slip into — although this, too, feels decidedly queer. For much of the film, they’re both doing stupid, reckless things with absolutely insufficient planning and little regard for the safety or convenience of themselves or others. Although their selfishness — particularly Withnail’s — does lead to them hurting one another, and more generally the pair are frequently awful to one another, their shared affection is never really in doubt, and they so frequently support each other in their ridiculous endeavours. One of the best jokes in the entire film is when Withnail drinks some lighter fluid — a move which I strenuously opposes — but when, after having done it, he asks for antifreeze, I’s objection isn’t that drinking random fluids is a bad idea, but that ‘you should never mix your drinks!’ I takes Withnail on his own terms in a way which echoes a central dynamic of queer relationships, whether platonic or romantic: attempting to prevent but, once made, supporting someone you care about’s bad decisions, whether it’s sleeping with the wrong people, drinking antifreeze, or buying stupid clothes.Â
Trying to locate a way of being outside of the straight or cis norm is difficult, and you’re going to make bad decisions and hurt yourself; caring for others frequently means accepting that tilt towards self-destructiveness as inevitable given the fact that part of undoing the ‘normal’ is destroying it within yourself. When Withnail and I go for a holiday in the countryside, it’s easy to imagine much queer filmmaking striving to figure their cottage as a kind of queer idyll. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, for example — a film which, for the record, I adore — the departure of the Countess, Héloïse’s mother, heralds a brief period in which the house becomes a space almost entirely outside of the patriarchal, heterosexual order. In Withnail, on the other hand, their isolation is disastrous: these people do not know how to fend for themselves, and it’s only once Monty arrives — and causes his own set of problems — that they manage to obtain regular sources of heat and food. At one point they attempt to butcher a chicken themselves; it does not, really, work. That cottage is a space outside of heterosexuality, but a messy, self-destructing one, because inventing something new is always painful and difficult.
The only thing which really threatens to compromise their relationship — at least, until the end of the film — is Withnail’s actions with his uncle, Monty, who he convinces that I is gripped by unreciprocated love for him. This prompts Monty, who is also queer, to attempt first to seduce and then to rape I; he fails on the former and relents on the latter after I tells him that:
We're an affair, we have been for years. But he doesn’t want you to know, he doesn’t want anybody to know. We’re both in it, we’re obsessed with each other. But he's ashamed, he refuses to come out and accept what he is. That's why he's rejecting me while you're here. On my life Monty, this is the first night we haven't slept together for six years. I couldn't cheat on him, it would kill him.
This is only one of many deceptions and manipulations Withnail engages in with I, but it’s the only one which he understands as a betrayal. When he confronts Withnail and only gets excuses, I asks him:
What is all this tactical necessity and calculated risk? This is me, naked, in a corner. And how dare you tell him I love you? And how dare you tell him you rejected me? How dare you tell him that?
It’s the most heartbreaking line in the film, most of all because of the excruciating ambiguity at its centre: the movie never specifies whether Withnail’s betrayal is in lying that I is attracted to him or, rather, in lying that it isn’t mutual. The way Paul McGann spits out the word ‘rejected’ causes me physical pain, and always makes me assume the latter; but maybe I’m projecting what I want to happen. The film never contradicts the idea that they might have a sexual relationship with one another, but it never precisely confirms it either. Their intimacy exists in a middle space, undetermined and uncertain but undeniably queer.Â
It’s not just the central couple who are treated with a deep and important tenderness. Monty would be an easy character to turn into either a monster or a caricature. A hopelessly posh and effeminate gay man, he spends a lot of the film complaining about his cat and waxing lyrical about Oxford, ‘the passing of an age’, and plant life:
I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts. Prostitutes for the bees. There is, you'll agree, a certain je ne sais quoi about a firm young carrot.
And then, of course, he attempts to commit an unconscionable crime. While the film never forgives him for that, and does spend a lot of time mocking him, he’s only the butt of the joke if it’s about his poshness; jokes about his queerness, like the fixation on carrots, poke fun but never disparage. The film recognises his moral failings, but also that these don’t make him a monster, and when I confesses (or ‘confesses’) the nature of his relationship with Withnail, his reaction is deeply affecting and humanising: ‘Oh my dear boy… if I’d known that, I’d have never tried to come between you… you’d better go to him.’ When he leaves, humiliated, that night, he leaves a note, saying ‘I do sincerely hope that you shall find the happiness which, alas, has always been denied to me.’ His reminiscences about his ‘sensitive crimes’ in Oxford (‘I often wonder where Norman is now’) were funny, but alongside this they build up into a heartbreaking portrayal of queerness before legalisation. Richard Griffiths’ performance as Monty is frequently hilarious, but he manages to find a real depth and pain inside his character, and while he might be a little absurd, he’s never a caricature; while he’s the closest the film comes to a villain, he’s not a monster.
The film ends with I moving to Manchester for a potentially career-making role, leaving Withnail behind. While Withnail’s insistent on walking him to the station, I’s resistant, and ends up leaving Withnail in a rain-soaked Regent’s Park in front of the wolves after a painfully tender, insufficient goodbye. What is Withnail left to? His alcoholism, and the rain, and the speech from Hamlet he has memorised but will likely never perform to anyone but the wolves. It’s beautiful, but so deeply sad. Withnail could only be one of the funniest films ever made, and that would be enough; instead, it’s both that and one of the most moving pieces of queer art I know. Whatever its writer intended, I can’t help but view it as a film about the faulting, failing tenderness we share with one another within our queer families, the joy of finding the people you can be yourself with, and the pain of losing them. Perhaps this is because of how I first viewed it, because of what it’s come to mean to me. But when queer people face rising prejudice and trans existence risks being legislated into the shadows, returning to a film like Withnail reminds us of what tenderness we owe to one another and what joy we can share.Â
It has been argued that the film frequently approaches queerness from the perspective of ‘gay panic’, especially in its portrayal of Withnail’s uncle Monty. Writer and director Bruce Robinson, a straight man, has said that he based the character on his experience as the target of unwanted sexual advances by actor Franco Zeffirelli on the set of Romeo and Juliet (1968). To an extent, it’s clear that this was Robinson’s intention with the film and you can see traces of homophobic anxieties, but this is complicated by the fact that the avatar of these moments of panic, I, can himself be understood as queer. The intended meanings of the filmmakers, I would also argue, don’t limit what Withnail and I can mean to queer audiences, and what we can find in it. It feels appropriate if Robinson made a wonderful work of queer cinema by mistake.
I am aware he’s called ‘Marwood’ in the script, but that’s not in the movie and I enjoy the tortured grammar of using ‘I’ as a proper name in the third person singular.