Better Than Me: On Call Me by Your Name and Coming of Age
“Oliver may be very intelligent–,” I began. Once again, the disingenuous rise in intonation announced a damning but hanging invisibly between us. Anything not to let my father lead me any further down this road.
“Intelligent? He was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. He was good, and you were both lucky to have found each other, because you too are good.”
My father had never spoken of goodness to me this way before. It disarmed me.
“I think he was better than me, Papa.”
“I am sure he’d say the same about you, which flatters the two of you.”
–Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
Luca Guadagnino, director of the film version of Call Me by Your Name, has said that the movie is “about a family, compassion, transmission of knowledge, of being better people because someone’s otherness changes you.” I love that last part about how we can be changed, made better, through our connection with another, just as I love the exchange in both the book and the film in which Elio confesses to his father that he believes Oliver is better than him.
I am drawn to people who are better than me, not because I am not as good as them but because their goodness and their genuine humanity resonates with the best parts of myself, which have become covered in pain and bitterness. The connection I can feel with a person who has retained their humanity in this world–an exceedingly rare and radical thing, in my experience–reminds me that those real and warm and loving places are still alive in me, too, that healing is possible and that I might one day live in the fullness of myself.
That fullness of the self requires a close connection with another. It is through our relationships with others that we explore, shape and determine ourselves. Of course, solitude can also be necessary. Some people live their lives so crowded by the expectations and demands of others that they have no chance to exist for themselves and to determine who they are. (2017’s My Happy Family is an outstanding film about this kind of life, and how patriarchal expectations so often deny women the opportunity to live as full human beings.) But I’m not talking about connections like this, that reduce people to roles, that saddle them with obligations and expectations that are not rooted in what both people want for themselves and each other. I’m talking about clear-eyed, compassionate connections in which two individuals come together to be both themselves and, together, something new that may take work, that may involve expectations or obligations for both parties but expectations and obligations which are taken up willingly, and which are shared, in pursuit of creating something together which makes both of their lives better.
Some people say Call Me by Your Name is a coming-of-age film. I wonder what, then, does it mean to come of age? I’m 41, but I feel as if I have not yet come of age. I’m tremendously inexperienced. The world constantly makes me feel invisible and undesirable. I fall in love rarely, and hard, and have still never really known a mutual experience of love. So I am 41, but it is not untrue to say that in some ways I am still 17. I am still so much like Elio before Oliver.
The last time I fell in love with someone was over four years ago. My feelings were not reciprocated. Sometimes I think about the exchange in the film Carol, where Carol says to Therese that she’s been “flung out of space.”
I don’t think Therese has been flung out of space so much as she’s been pulled down by Carol’s presence into a space where she belongs, a space where she can begin to discover herself and begin to truly be herself. I feel like I’m still floating in space, left stranded by the unrequited loves of the past, waiting for someone to come along who both has the right kind of gravitational pull to bring me down into their orbit and who actually wants to be there with me and for me and wants me to be there with them and for them.
I think part of coming of age, something I’ve never experienced, is being truly seen and known and loved. That changes us, and we can take it with us into other parts of our lives. The radical kindness and love at the heart of CMbYN’s much-talked-about “peach scene” is Oliver’s demonstration through action that Elio doesn’t need to be ashamed with him, that he loves Elio in his entirety. Is it any wonder that this act of tremendous tenderness cracks Elio open immediately, leaving him sobbing, telling Oliver “I don’t want you to go”?
Call Me by Your Name takes place in the summer of 1983, and part of its power lies in the way that people look–really look–to each other and not to their phones. Elio does have a Walkman, however, and he often wears a Talking Heads t-shirt. The album Speaking in Tongues came out on June 1st, 1983, and I imagine Elio listening to “This Must Be the Place,” one of the all-time great love songs, often during that long, lazy summer.
“And you’re standing here beside me
I love the passing of time”
That’s how it was with her, for me, the last person I loved. I just loved being around her. Sharing space with her. I felt more connected to the earth. More present. More real. More myself. More able to think, to laugh, to play and to have fun and to cry. Less ashamed. Less invisible. When Elio says to Oliver, as the two of them lay in the grass, Elio wearing his Talking Heads shirt,
“I love this, Oliver.”
and Oliver responds, “What?”
and Elio responds, “Everything,”
I think this is what he means. With Oliver beside him, he loves the passing of time.

Was he my home, then? My homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you.
–Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
I was undone by her. I need to be undone by someone because I am so very done. Done up with doubt, insecurity, anxiety, fear. But with her, it didn’t matter. She felt like home.
People don’t know what to do with a 41-year-old who has not come of age, and who still loves like Elio loves. It scares them. But there has to be a chance for us. The models we see in TV and film and games (like Gone Home, Butterfly Soup, The Last of Us: Left Behind, etc.) of people coming of age and connecting deeply with others when they’re still young don’t accommodate all of us. Some of us have slipped through the cracks, and are still waiting to be seen and known and loved by someone we also want to see and know and love in the fullness of themselves. There have to be other possibilities for us. There just have to be. I can’t accept the alternative.
–The Jane Hotel, NYC, 12:49 AM, January 26, 2018
Notes
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