***½/**** Image A
Sound A-
Extras A
starring Peter
Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider
screenplay
by David Cronenberg, based on the book by William S. Burroughs
directed
by David Cronenberg
"A group of children have tied an idiot to a
post with barbed
wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial
curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire
with insect agony." —William
S. Burroughs, Naked
Lunch
by
Walter Chaw "Sexual ambulance, did you say?" asks Bill Lee
(Peter Weller), erstwhile exterminator of rational
thought
(and cockroaches) and stand-in for William S. Burroughs (who used the nom
de
guerre himself in Junkie) in
David Cronenberg's impenetrable,
impossibly complex, surprisingly funny, curiously pleasurable Burroughs
adaptation Naked Lunch.
Bill is responding to a
statement–an introduction, really–to a creature called a "Mugwump,"
named after a political group that split from the Republican party in
1884 to
support Grover Cleveland in protest of their own candidate James
Blaine's
financial corruption. Those Mugwumps were members of a social elite;
these
Mugwumps, Cronenberg's, are reptiles or insects (or should I
say
"also reptiles or insects"?), each voiced by Peter Boretski in his
insistent, Columbo-esque rasp, asking just one more clarifying
question.
This Mugwump declares itself to be a master of sexual
ambivalence, leading to Bill Lee's miscomprehension of it as "sexual
ambulance"–which, as mondegreens go, is a fairly loaded one. Naked
Lunch
is, after
all, invested in language and corruption. Describing to
Bill what it's like to get high by
injecting the
toxin Bill uses to kill roaches, Bill's wife Joan
(the
great Judy Davis) says, "It's a very literary
high–it's a Kafka high, you feel like a bug"–the processing of which
provides by itself a kind of
literary high.
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It's the best way to begin a conversation
about typewriters that look like bugs and orgy scenes transformed from
the book into inter-species (inter-kingdom, really) bestiality
that
better represents the unnatural at best/unsavoury at least melding of
the
warring ideological classes described in Burroughs's writing. The
picture presupposes a pretty strong literary background, in other
words, and
has faith
in its audiences' critical rigour, which acts as Rosetta Stone for
the
sign/signifier maelstrom it only just contains. It's
Cronenberg's Alphaville,
and the comparison isn't only about the two films' relative
difficulty.
In both Naked Lunch and Alphaville,
human emotion is secondary (tertiary?), a vestigial by-product made
irrelevant.
Both are takes on the tropes of the American noir
cycle, their
hardboiled seekers seeking neither truth nor absolution but the form
and
function
of contagion in emptied-out, flattened dystopias. Both discover inhuman
designs
beneath the bland surface of their worlds; both discover femmes
fatale who were perhaps always as flattened and asexual as
they have become; and both, fascinatingly, are invested in language as
corruption,
taint,
artifactor. "In the beginning was the Word," says John 1:1, "and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God." I wonder how often
Burroughs
and Naked Lunch
have been read through the lens of the Gospel of St.
John. They're similarly out of order and intoxicated by
language.
"Well these are the simple facts of
the case–There were at least two parasites one sexual the other
cerebral
working together the way parasites will–And why has no one ever asked
'What is
word?'–Why do you talk to yourself all the time?" —William S.
Burroughs, Naked
Lunch
Bill Lee, playing at William Tell one night, accidentally
kills his wife Joan,
just as Bill Burroughs, drunk one night in Mexico, plays at William
Tell and
kills his wife, Joan. Bill flees to Interzone, where he's accused of
homosexuality. He encounters expatriate writer Tom (Ian Holm), Tom's
wife Joan, and the debonair Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands); and he traces
a
mysterious heroin-like substance called "black meat" (ground from the
flesh of giant
centipedes) to the evil Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who, in an
otherwise-oblique
film, bluntly comes to represent Burroughs's sometime gender confusion.
Bill's
friends Martin (Michael Zelniker) and Hank (Nicholas Campbell) bear
witness,
representing Burroughs's buddies Allen Ginsberg (who testified at his
obscenity
trial and with whom he had a brief, disastrous affair) and Jack
Kerouac, who
typed the manuscript for Naked
Lunch and confessed it made him sick. Naked
Lunch isn't so much an adaptation of the book as it is an
adaptation of an
author's entire ethos. It's a feat that wouldn't be
done again, or this well again,
until
the Coens' True Grit.
"I understood writing could be danger,
I didn't know the danger was in the machinery." —William S.
Burroughs, Naked
Lunch
Bill Lee's vocation–he's bug man, as
Burroughs once was and wrote about in his short story
"Exterminator!"–allows
for Cronenberg's deeper exploration of his own obsession with insects.
I've
often thought of Cronenberg himself as an insect of sorts, an alien
anthropologist observing the interactions of human beings with equal
parts
curiosity and apprehension. It would explain his sympathy with
scientist
Seth Brundle of The Fly and
schizophrenic
Dennis Cleg of Spider.
In Naked Lunch, the auteur
appears as typewriter-shaped bugs
that, in a nod to one of the most famous/notorious bits of the novel,
speak out
of prominent assholes square in the middle of their abdomen. He also
appears
in a pair of sex scenes, one of which fuses a centipede with a
young male
prostitute in Interzone/Tangier, the other of which posits a ménage
a trois
between Bill, a woman identical his wife (the other Joan
(Davis,
again)), and a beautiful antique Oliver typewriter that has
metamorphosed into
something between a human-fleshed centipede and a well-formed pair of
buttocks.
Obscene? Certainly obscene–and incomprehensible in a literal
sense, but made
intricate, sticky, in the characters' insistence on calling the
Oliver
typewriter "the Mujahideen" (a Muslim having difficulty walking the
path of Allah). What Cronenberg has done, essentially, is understand
Burroughs's prose as not obtuse–obtuse is the easy portion to
diagnose–but usefully
obtuse, no matter that the author may simply be hiding himself in a
cloud
of
nonsense words and repugnant signs. Burroughs is constantly hinting
that this
is so. He is as much a deconstructionalist as Derrida, designing novels
meant
to be flipped through and read at random. He is Hunter S. Thompson,
really: a
gonzo journalist, his quarry the primacy of the Word.
The pairing of this material with Cronenberg is
an intriguing one. A failed novelist, he was hoisted on the
twin petards of Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov, finding
himself
incapable of
creating outside of their influence. Through that, it feels as though
Cronenberg has internalized Burroughs's warning that language is a
virus, a
contagious disease, easily spread, that results in addiction and
painful DTs.
Burroughs said once that he feared he was addicted to an
invisible
drug
and furthermore feared the withdrawal; what Naked Lunch
attempts to do is
describe the feeling of literary madness in something that is at once
Theatre
of the Absurd and surrealism. All its themes of enslavement speak to
intoxication through the Word–its writer-heroes are insensate
prophets to
soulless Gods, writing their streams of holy consciousness on Byzantine
machines that become, through their agency, intensely biological. The
typewriters in Naked Lunch ooze, send out phallic
tentacles in the
full maturation of the appendage devised for Cronenberg's own
tax-shelter
creeper Rabid, interact like flesh and bend in
kinship with the
television monitors of his Videodrome. It's a
manifesto, of sorts, this
Naked Lunch, a summary of the
director's body of work up to this point as well as a hint of many of
the films to come (eXistenZ
owes much of its
imagery to Naked Lunch, for instance)–a picture
that represents the
same thing the Gospel of St. John represents to the nature of
Jesus,
especially, in the New Testament: It seeks to explain the ways of this
creation
to the created. Watch it in conjunction with Alphaville
for a more
complete picture of how semiotics informs certain movies, for a
lesson in how
an artist in one medium can provide clarity for himself and for a
source
from
another medium simultaneously, and how one of our most
consistently-innovative and intelligent filmmakers transitions from the
more
literal horrors of his early career to the more cerebral ones of his
later
masterpieces.
THE
BLU-RAY DISC
Criterion brings Naked Lunch to
Blu-ray in
a beautiful 1.78:1, 1080p transfer that retains DP Peter Suschitzky's
intensely-saturated palette. The whole of it suggests a freshly-painted
pulp
cover–this
is what noir would have looked like if its key
pictures were in glorious
three-strip Technicolor. Close-up detail is gratifying, dynamic range
is supple, and grain is neutralized without disappearing altogether,
yielding a well-balanced, filmic image. It's unbelievable, really, and
the best I've ever
seen this picture look in or out of a movie theatre, frankly. The
accompanying 2.0 surround DTS-HD MA track presents Howard Shore's
discordant score–or should I say Orentte Coleman's jazz
solos?–with lovely fidelity. A low-key mix crisply and faithfully
reproduced.
Upscaled to HD, a 50-minute documentary, Naked
Making Lunch,
by Cronenberg
on Cronenberg author
Chris Rodley, spends a lot of vintage 1991 time with Burroughs and
Cronenberg as
they speak of this project during its conception. It's always a
hoot to
watch/listen to Burroughs, no less so than in a joint interview from a
press
junket where Burroughs says he's not disappointed in the film
because he
didn't expect it to capture even a fraction of his novel, so
in
that regard it did not disappoint. The composed Cronenberg non-reaction
is
classic. Judy
Davis, effervescent and irresistible in her native Aussie accent,
confesses
that she
was a little offended that Cronenberg asked her to play Joan in the
picture–what could possibly remind him of her, she wonders. Her
appearance
that year in Naked Lunch
and Barton Fink in, in
many ways, identical roles
says something interesting about synchronicity. For the record, Davis
would be
anyone-worth-his-salt's muse on any day. "Special Effects Gallery"
is a collection of images from Chris "The Fly"
Walas's
creature shop as they developed the Mugwumps and typewriters for the
picture.
Jody Duncan contributes running text commentary for each
image. This section
made me
long for a line of Naked Lunch
vinyl statues.
"Film Still & Design Sketch
Gallery" is another series of stills, while a "Marketing" tab offers
links to the original trailer (2 mins.), a short vintage
"Featurette" (7 mins.) that's far more along the lines of a typical
EPK,
a "B-Roll Montage" (4 mins.) that is watchable mainly for Davis and
Weller (one can never get enough of Davis and Weller), and
two one-minute TV Spots. All of this material is upscaled to
1080i. "William Burroughs Reads Naked Lunch"
(64 mins.)
is
an excerpt from a 1995 audiobook that has the author reading the entire
thing,
cover to cover, and is one of the real aural experiences of the Lost
Generation. "Photographs of William S. Burroughs by Allen Ginsberg"
are from the poets' private collection and culled from the period
during
which Burroughs wrote the eponymous book. The photos aren't
particularly well curated,
but for
Beat junkies, here's that fix. Incidentally, the Martin character in
the film
recites some choice Ginsberg in a pivotal scene that should deliver
some of the same thrill that these photos do.
The centrepiece is a commentary, ported over
from Criterion's 2003 DVD release, by Cronenberg and Weller
(recorded separately)
that
not only demonstrates Cronenberg's surpassing intelligence but
also contains
invaluable insight into the making of the film. How else would one
learn that
the creature design for the Mugwump was based in large part on
Burroughs
himself? His posture, his expression… I appreciated
Cronenberg's acknowledgment of specials effects that don't
hold up, to his regret. Moreover, he reveals
that the obsession with writing machines is his and not Burroughs's.
There's a
wealth of information here and it's well worth a listen. A
medium-thick
booklet accompanies the disc and features a nice overview by Janet
Maslin, a
deeper dive by Rodley, and a good article on Burroughs by the
curiously-named
Gary Indiana. Burroughs himself submits an essay about the film
adaptation,
written in September of '91, mourning the downplaying of his
homosexuality but hailing the
invention of
imaginary drugs as a "masterstroke." What
strikes me most about this piece is its essential kindness and
generosity of
spirit.
When reading Naked
Lunch proper, I never once associated those words
with
Burroughs. Then
again, before seeing Cronenberg's film version of it, I didn't know how
funny Burroughs was, either. I love being taught.
