Heya!!!
Just reviewed David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991) for the awesome Dunedin zine "Marrow"... Also been postering for their promotional gig for the last few days with my illegal bucket of paste hehe so much fun! But don't say I told you that because I'll deny it to the authorities.
And here's the film review! I rented it from the coolest DVD rental place- Mint. It's next to the Dunedin train station and you get stuck in it for hours every time.
Although this film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel is, at most, only abstracted from the literary work, by no means does it detract from the overall experience. Widely criticized for not being close enough to the original text, it's important to remember that Burroughs himself wrote "it is probably an understatement to say that the novel does not obviously lend itself to adaptation for the screen". What Cronenberg does instead, and very effectively, is combine aspects of the hallucinatory and disjointed novel with other works by Burroughs, alongside his biography and the psychological effects of narcotics use, switching them around to be suitable for film. We are thus presented with what is quite a comprehensive commentary on all that is William S. Burroughs and the culture surrounding him.
Burroughs, also the author of Queer and Junkie, was born into a wealthy American family in 1914. Educated at Harvard, he graduated with a degree in English and Anthropology and went to study Medicine in Verona, Italy. But despite the potential to have such a romantic life story, he got hooked on opiates- monetary support from his family gave him an immense freedom, and he instantly got in with the underground crowd of the time. Now, there is always unrest in the world- that's inevitable- but when Burroughs was writing it was particularly strong. World War 2 had ended in 1945 and what proceeded to occur was a period of absolute conformity. The self-reliant hero had survived in the depression songs of Woodie Guthrie and the novels of John Steinbeck and had been transformed into the GI during World War 2, but young men returning from the South Pacific and Europe were not told to brave new frontiers. Instead they were to get an education, a family and a home; all at government expense. The final years of this was epitomized by President Kennedy, leading the very conservative "new frontier" back to the favorite high-school English theme of the American Dream. Basically, Burroughs was an integral part of forming the public mind-set which got the president assassinated. I wasn't there, and I couldn't possibly imagine how boring life would have felt during those years without the Beat Generation. There's no wonder why they came about. They were a strong liberal movement which involved experimentation with drugs, different forms of sexuality, minimalism and personal expression. You could go so far as to say they were related to Bohemians and evolved into Hippies, and the main creative works of the movement were Allen Ginsberg's extended poem "Howl", Jack Kerouac's novel "On The Road", and Burroughs' "Naked Lunch". These three writers weren't just contemporaries but also great friends, and had a huge influence on the world.
Anyway, the cinematic technicalities of this film are a solid effort on Cronenberg's part. Peter Weller is amazing in the role of protagonist Bill Lee- a character who represents Burroughs himself. His gaunt face and distant gazes are perfectly matched to the images of a young Burroughs we've all seen, as he convincingly stumbles after injections, stares blankly over coffee, and shoots his wife in drunkenness. The Mugwumps of Burroughs' invention with their jissom-excreting phallic head crests are wonderful considering there are no special effects, as are the type-writer-cum-beatles which talk to a doped Bill. The film even has an original jazz score for the soundtrack- both chronologically and cinematically fitting because of the atmosphere it creates and the influence of opiates on the jazz culture around the same period. Another point Cronenberg seems to understand implicitly is that a lot of the beauty of Burroughs' novel is his prose. The particularly striking chapters are often experienced simply as a dialogue by Bill Lee- they're far too obscure to attempt on film and would lose beauty and meaning without Burroughs' exact wording. Cronenberg achieves quite an interesting feat in doing so, as he maintains prose and film as separate entities, playing to the strengths of film in replacement for the strengths of prose. As far as film-for-film's-sake is concerned, Naked Lunch is stunning.
With the central themes of sexuality and drug use in both the novel and film, there is still variation between the two. Cronenberg only alludes metaphorically to the homosexuality and violent sexual encounters Burroughs wrote of, and the strong anti-narcotics message of the novel isn't felt at all to the same extent in the film. Rather than showing the heroin and cannabis Burroughs wrote of, Cronenberg substitutes his own fictitious drugs such as Mugwump jissom, bug powder and The Black Meat. I must admit that at first I was deflated by this sense of the film being dumbed-down, but enthusiasm returned with due haste as I realized that this was Cronenberg putting his own personal stamp on the work, finding horror in the alluded-to rather than the explicit. It's hard to believe this film was made 20 years ago (happy 20th birthday!!!), yet this also could possibly explain his restraint from presenting marginalized subjects. Although Burroughs' novel was released 32 years prior, censorship in film has been a lot slower to progress, and had Cronenberg not taken precautions in the subject matter, it is a feasible proposition that it may not have made it off the ground.
The creative process, and in particular the writing process, is also a central idea because the plot is built around it. At the end of the day, this is quite fitting considering it's about a writer. His type writers give him missions and attack each other, he has to 'prove' he's a writer to cross the border into a fictional country called Anexia, and he can't remember writing most of the manuscript. Burroughs himself said that he wouldn't have become a writer had he not shot his wife, and this key event sits nicely at the start of the film before all the crazy heroin trips start. A really kick-ass moment for this aspect of the film is as Bill Lee writes Naked Lunch in Interzone (an opiate-clouded Tangier). The characters who represent his friends Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac tell him to "stay until you finish the book, but then come back to us." Having seen the chaotic and dangerous haze Burroughs writes in, it's surprising any writer or artist ever finishes a creation alive.
