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The Appropriate Tune: 'Heroin' by The Velvet Underground
As I wrote in the Fear & Loathing review my tastes in literature skewed towards the odd, and one of the oddest in the bunch was William S. Burroughs. While my peers, if they were aware of the Beats at all, were drawn more to Jack Kerouac, I quickly became more interested in William S. Burroughs. Kerouac was the James Dean of the group, the freewheeler who made rebellion look cool and hip, but Burroughs felt like a true break from the miserable conformity that has come to define American culture in 1950s. Graphic depictions of heroin addiction, frank discussions about gay sex, frequent dips into science-fiction all of jumped out out of the page like a shotgun blast to the head. Kerouac and Ginsberg always felt like the writers that were cool to read, but Burroughs is the guy that you shouldn’t be reading, so I chose the latter.
Released in 1991, Naked Lunch was written and directed by David Cronenberg and produced by Jeremy Thomas and Gabriella Martinelli through the Recorded Picture Company, based on the 1959 novel by William S. Burroughs. Peter Weller plays William Lee, a writer turned bug exterminator who ends up getting addicted to the powder they use to kill roaches through his wife Joan. After getting busted by the cops on a narco rap, a giant bug reveals to Lee that he is actually a secret agent, that his wife is an inhuman agent of the evil organization Interzone Inc., and that he must kill her. Lee balks at this, but after shooting up some black centipede dust, he ends up accidentally killing her anyway. Unsure of what to do next, he meets with an alien creature known as a Mugworm, who gives him his next assignment: infiltrate Interzone, insert himself within their ranks and carry out his missions, making sure to write reports along the way. Which he does, but Interzone is far more dangerous than Lee first realizes. Enemies and intrigue lurk behind every corner, a vast web of conspiracy grows larger by the day, and the centipede dust flows like water. A lesser agent might falter at such a monumental task, but Lee is just the type of guy who can pull it off.
Yes, that actually happens in the movie.
There’s obviously some parallels one can draw between Naked Lunch and our previous entry, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Both are infamously bizarre works of literature that deal heavily with substance abuse, and both were made into films by popular genre film directors with a penchant for extreme visuals. Fear and Loathing was an adaptation of the original novel however, while as far as I can tell Naked Lunch…isn’t. Some of the names are the same, terms like Interzone, the conceit of Lee being an ‘agent’, but as far as I can tell it’s not actually an adaptation of the novel so much as it is an amalgamation of parts of the book along with portions of Burroughs’ own life, in particular the murder of his common law wife Joan Vollmer and his time spent in Tangier (which is referred to solely as ‘Interzone’ in the film). While it’s hard to blame Cronenberg for not adapting word-for-word a novel that’s intentionally obtuse, the fact that the biographical moments are also riddled with untruths makes things even more muddled. Joan wasn’t a user of morphine or heroin for example, clearly what the bug powder is meant to symbolize, but amphetamines, and she was killed in Mexico not New York City, in fact the entirety of Burroughs’ time in Mexico and South America is removed entirely. So it’s not really a proper adaptation, and it’s not really a proper biopic, so what is it?
Weird, as it turns out.
Yes, up until this point Cronenberg had built his career on pushing the boundaries of horror and science fiction cinema, but that doesn’t mean they were always the most straight-forward movies in the world. Sometimes you got The Fly, and sometimes you got Videodrome. So when Dave got the chance to bring Naked Lunch to the screen, he used it’s lack of coherent structure to write this semi-biographical, pseudo-detective story built around William Lee’s relationship with Joan Lee rather than Burroughs’ relationship with Joan Vollmer. All of which seems like a lot more work than necessary, but hey, I’m not the famous director here.
I mentioned Gilliam, but after watching a good portion of Cronenberg’s films, especially Crash and eXistenZ, I’d say the director he most wants to emulate in Naked Lunch is David Lynch. The noir influences, the surreal art design, the way the score breaks out into discordant saxophone solos (courtesy of legendary free jazz musician Ornette Coleman), the dazed, almost emotionless way Peter Weller delivers his lines all feel like Cronenberg trying to evoke the dreamlike atmosphere that is irrevocably attached to Lynch. For any of his faults however Lynch crafts worlds with a painter’s brush, time and space and reality and metareality all melding together into one sensory experience. Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch on the other hand is largely linear, going against Burroughs’ own ethos of crafting stories to be read in any order, and the weird turns the story takes has a robotic utilitarianism to it. Weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and compared to what Cronenberg did in Videodrome, and would do later in Crash and eXistenZ it doesn’t feel as weird as it could have been. That being said we do get to see Peter Weller rubbing a bug sphincter with morphine, so it’s not all bad.
Speaking of bug sphincters, the visuals were always a major part of Cronenberg’s early success as a filmmaker, and that’s the case for Naked Lunch as well. The set design for both 50’s New York and Tangier is excellent, but it is of course the practical effects that are the most striking. The bug typewriter, the Mugworm, birdcage scene, the giant centipedes carved up like steaks, it’s unmistakably Cronenberg. On the other hand you could argue it’s a lot less sexually charged than several of Cronenberg’s other films, and that most of the eroticism we do get is of the heterosexual variety. That Burroughs struggled with his sexual orientation could certainly have been the case, I’m not a scholar on the man, but one of the books he wrote before “Naked Lunch” was literally called “Queer”, so I think he was less confused about his sexuality than this film would imply. A demand from the studio heads, perhaps, whose tolerance for LGBTQ people ebbs and flows with the tides of the stock market, and who were afraid that too much support for ‘the gays’ would drive away moviegoers driven into a paranoid frenzy by the propaganda surrounding the AIDS crisis. Or maybe Cronenberg just can’t write a good gay sex scene, I dunno.
Regarding the casting, Peter Weller is an interesting choice as he feels both right and wrong for the role. I mean I like Weller, he’s in the A-list of cult movie actors and a prime catch for Cronenberg, but arguably he’s too good. Too suave, too cool. If he were supposed to be Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe it’d be fine, but he’s supposed to be playing a heroin junkie who thinks his typewriter is a bug and dabbles in teenage boys. Even that listless way he delivers his lines can’t distract from the fact looks like a marble statue given life. Judy Davis as Joan Lee is more in line with the tone of the story, a woman who could be called beautiful before drugs robbed her of the vitality that accompanies beauty.
Naked Lunch gets the recommendation. As an adaptation of an unadaptable novel it has its issues as I mentioned, but for those Cronenberg faithful it delivers those grotesque visions that they knew and loved, and would have to subsist on as the director would take a break from the bizarre for a few years with his adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s Madame Butterfly. If you’re a fan of the dream noir of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet or the vicious chaos of Catch-22, then Naked Lunch might be up your alley. And do not under any circumstances try to inject bug killer into your body, it will not turn out well for you. You probably shouldn’t proposition North African teenagers for sex either, just to be safe. Unless you yourself are a North African teenager, in which case go nuts.
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