Different kinds of fucking in the film Amadeus

1. After I watched Amadeus, I went keening, keening, to two of the smartest people I know: “Why does it feel reductive to say that there’s something deeply gay going on here?” Their conclusions were similar: the relationship between Mozart and Salieri isn’t deeply gay. The gayness is not in the black depths of the lake. It is in the shallows, very visible, very obvious, and full of floral life. Their relationship is open and it is consummated.
2. Mozart and Salieri never fuck in the traditional sense. I don’t think they want to. Instead, they compose together — not as two artists, but as an artist and an impassioned fan, whose goal is to make the artist really see that nobody understands the work like he does. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one was topping.
3. Salieri vaguely and inconsistently plans to murder Mozart, sure (and by the time he’s old, he’s convinced that he meant it). But what he’s really doing, by railroading him into a place of lonely illness, is forcing him to see only Salieri and recognize the million-watt intensity of his fandom. They haven’t invented the lamp yet that could be a good metaphor for Salieri’s fandom. He can only express it in candles, which must be frustrating.
4. Salieri wants hurt/comfort, too; he’s a slash writer. He wants Mozart to be hurt so he can cure him.
5. And Mozart’s into it. His hunger for love is so intense that it takes either an adoring crowd or a single person with the energy of an adoring crowd — lashed into the long, filament-like, velvet-encased body of a clinically depressed Italian — to make him feel alive. The scene where he dictates the Requiem to Salieri on his deathbed is furiously romantic, everything a fan could ever want. Mozart, feverish and damp, says he’s been wrong all along about Salieri, thought he “didn’t care for” Mozart’s work, asks him to be the conduit for the Requiem, gently dampens Salieri’s ardor when he’s too exhausted to go on. For a fan, this is an elf-feast so grand that all you can do is wander in a daze, breaking off the occasional bonbon from an ornamental tree. It disappears at dawn, and it leaves you to starve forever.
6. I want to emphasize that Salieri’s musical lust is not sublimated sexual lust. He speaks of the promise he gave God as a child — to trade sex for music. God’s curse, like all the others he showers on Salieri, is to literally reverse the two. From now on, music will fill the role that fucking does for most people, and fucking will fill the role that music does for most people. He’s like a man with feet for hands, and now he has to figure out how to play piano.
7. Of course, his desire for Mozart is still gay desire. The only difference is that it takes a different route through the body. I don’t think Mozart is also a mousikēsexual, but I do think that he is bi.
8. Is queerness about non-heterosexual attraction, or is it about the ability to have an expansive idea of what sex and love can look like? Is it defined by what it’s not, or by what it is? The obvious answer is both, and Amadeus makes the same argument.
9. People write slash fanfiction for all sorts of reasons. In my peak slashing years — 1999-2009 — it was already a truism that any reason outsiders could imagine was reductive. At the same time, we couldn’t explain it any better. Any answer we gave felt reductive too.
10. It’s interesting to think about this impulse to declare something reductive without actually knowing the real answer. In a sexual and bodily context, it often means that there’s an obvious answer which we refuse to see. In the context of slash, that answer is often body-denial. Slash is one way to feel love without thinking about your own body.
11. Salieri fits this trope quite well. Oh, I don’t think his relationship with his body is troubled in the exact way mine has been. If it’s troubled at all, it’s because long ago, before he promised God that he’d become music, he possessed an impolitic interest in men. But he doesn’t seem zoned out from his body; he lives in it, works on it like a mechanic endlessly tuning a hot rod, and he shows his work.
12. His posture and gestures are robotic and exquisite. Every time he moves his hands to conduct, he makes a conscious choice, flipping a tiny switch to control each sliver of muscle. He has developed a routine with women where he pretends to be charming and they pretend to be charmed. His wig is the saddish color of iron oxide. Somehow he has made his guts into a metal-lined corridor, through which sweets pass undigested.
13. Not to overanalyze a fart joke, but Mozart skewers Salieri when asked to impersonate his playing (asked in fact by a masked Salieri, who prefers to swap the order of the Wildean aphorism: give a man a mask, and he’ll beg for the truth). It’s not accurate, not even as a caricature, because you can’t caricature Salieri. He’ll resist the pen; there are no rough edges, nothing excessive, nothing raw. What Mozart does, with his impression of a flatulent and flailing maestro, is taunt Salieri with the fact that he can’t control his body. Mozart is not working from observation here, but from the fact that he knows a couple of universal truths: opera is the most conversational form of music, Constance is a catch, he is the best composer alive, everyone poops.
14. Mozart doesn’t deny his body anything. Salieri does, mostly, and he lies about the rest. But these are just different ways of avoiding the recognition that their hungers — for alcohol, sugar, love, music, strong emotion, adulation, and in Salieri’s case the Obliteration of twinks — are insatiable. Both the path of hedonism and the path of abstinence are leading them towards an unfulfilled death. It’s not that either path is bad, it’s just that their needs are too grand for human things.

I suppose my final remark is about the film’s obsession with the beauty of work. Salieri’s take is that he’s worked very hard his whole life to be half as good as Mozart, whose effortless talent comes from God — and yet they are the two hardest-working men in show business. Mozart doesn’t even make it look easy. Music comes to him easily, but he’s also the one who fucking dies of Music.

When Salieri rhetorically asks “how does one kill a man,” he’s asking in the spirit of a seasoned DIYer. It’s all too easy to imagine him watching a YouTube video or two on the subject, the white glow of the screen reflecting off his long face, a bag of cookies at his side. The videos are unhelpful. The angles are all wrong.