"Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to." A product of the Beat Poetry generation, writer and drug addict William S. Burroughs' 1959 Naked Lunch novel's title takes it's name as described best by the author: "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". The book was notably banned in many places and deemed unfilmable until Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg (Videodrome, The Fly) took the project into his own hands in 1991, adapting from Burroughs' other works as well to tell the story of this surreally strange science-fiction drama. Combining Howard Shore, known for his thunderous choir and full orchestra scores and Ornette Coleman's dizzy saxophone of free jazz together for the film's astounding score was certainly an audacious choice, as the notes sporadically swell and sway, seeming to add a hazy atmosphere to the drug-fueled ambiance of the picture. Peter Suschitzky's queasy green-and-gray-tinged cinematography only adds to the collision of varying sensibilities of a sickly uneasiness as well throughout. Did Cronenberg succeed at filming the unfilmable? Let's take a look.
Peter Weller plays Bill Lee (a pseudonym of Burroughs and the name under which he published his first autobiographical novel Junky), a man of whom wants to write but exterminates insects to pay the bills. Bill sometimes hangs out with his nebbish writer friends, (of which Burroughs' modeled after fellow beat poet friends Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg) Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker), of whom are both sleeping with Joan under Lee's very nose. Lee's wife, Joan, (Judy Davis), becomes addicted to Bill's bug powder dust, as she describes a shoot-up to feel like a "literary high"; a reference to Franz Kafka's 1915 short story 'The Metamorphosis'. He soon joins her in a world of unorthodox hallucinogens, involving meeting the kindly but sinister Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), walking away with his first dose of the black meat he gives to Bill: a narcotic made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. When a party trick game known between Bill and Joan called the William Tell routine involving a liquor glass and a gun go awry, accidentally killing Joan, Bill flees to the Tangiers-like Interzone (Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in the city Tangiers). Here in this Mediterranean location, he encounters talking insectoid typewriters, double agents, offbeat aesthetes, Mugwumps spouting and oozing from phallic appendages and plots within plots.
Cronenberg's collaboration with the banned work of Burroughs between the realms of fiction and non-fiction allows the film itself to concern that nether region between the real and unreal as well, where the inspired and imaginative impetus for the creative process are not driven by drug-fueled hallucinations but are the product of it instead. With a fragmented touch of film noir realism, random routines and creepy-crawlies galore,'Naked Lunch' is a bizarre plunge into a narcotic delusion echoing that of a bitter cry from the bellows of the Earth. When combining both worlds regarding the exterminated species of the entomologic kingdom along with a few hits of insect powder, the thin line of what is tangible fades into a twisted oblivion, giving us a picture not for everyone but remains a good hit that still manages to shock and stun even today thanks to it's daring director, even with all of the bugs and the drugs.
6 out of 9 found this helpful