Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs is not the most film friendly writer. His books are Beat-style forays into the human experience masquerading as prose novels. His most famous work, Naked Lunch, is a fascinating, obscene, wildly imaginative and wholly surreal story of…something. I’m not really quite sure, and I’ve read it twice. The attempt to make it into a film would have challenged even the most surrealist directors, but David Cronenberg did give it the old college try.
Naked Lunch stars Peter Weller as Lee, an exterminator whose wife (Judy Davis) has begun using his insecticides as a drug. He becomes involved in the drug as well, and during a trip accidentally murders his wife. Afterwards he flees to Interzone, where the film takes a turn for the even weirder. In the midst of drug-induced hallucinations, Lee begins writing reports for a “handler,” which in turn become the book Naked Lunch. There are typewriters that turn into bugs, strange alien-like creatures, and Roy Scheider as an evil doctor.
As an attempt to make a totally narratively disconnected book into a film, Naked Lunch does its best. It uses the device of mixing some of the real events of Burroughs’s life – such as the accidental death of his wife – with the loosely connected events of the novel in an attempt to create a cohesive narrative. The film starts to fall to pieces as Lee plunges deeper into drug addiction and the world of Interzone. Unfortunately, that does not make for a meta-narrational commentary on the character. It’s simply a mess. Utilizing some of the obscene imagery from Burroughs’s work to rather predictable Freudian affect, Naked Lunch also incorporates other pieces of the author’s books, and tries to tie the whole thing together via a meta-narrational “writing of Naked Lunch.”
Naked Lunch cannot quite decide what it is: an adaptation of Burroughs’s book, an examination of the author himself, or a strange dystopian sci-fi. As such, it fails to be any of the above.
