On paper, David Cronenberg adapting the wildly controversial William S. Burroughs novel Naked Lunch sounds like a perfect storm. Cronenberg had a history playing with horror, surrealism, and themes of repression, culminating in what had to feel like a pseudo-tryout for Naked Lunch in Videodrome. Cronenberg's forte, in particular, was in the sub-genre of horror called "body horror", where the human form morphs and mutilates into something horrific. The general concept behind this genre is to make us feel like the source of horror, not just on a psychological level, but on a "dig the bugs out of my skin" while tripping kind of horror. The horror was within, but it was externalizing. You could see this most clearly in one of Cronenberg's earliest horror films, The Brood. The Brood was about little humanoid creatures that budded from a host like fungus, spreading violence wanted by the host. It was a gross but effective film. This sort of surrealist horror, disturbing and thematically layered, was perfect for adapting something by Burroughs. Burroughs' Naked Lunch was infamously unfilmable. It had a sort of non-structure, intended for you to be able to start the novel at any point and still come out roughly the same. It was also unflinchingly graphic, with repulsive depictions of debased drug use and sexual violence on nearly every page. It still remains one of the most controversial novels of all time, contentious in even the most broadly minded literary circles.
And Naked Lunch sincerely deserves this contention. Burroughs' style of writing - where sentences feel crammed together anxiously, as though gasping for air between rapid heartbeats and often without proper punctuation, all the while slipping between one reality into another without so much as the ending of a sentence to remark the break - is invigorating if you're into this type of modernist/postmodernist writing. His style is truly original, and incredibly influential on the postmodernists that would come after him. His writing is also extremely difficult to read if you are not accustomed to this sort of thing, requiring you to often read sections multiple ways, flipping between versions depending on what is happening next in the "story". Burroughs has surrogates in the novel, infamously holding at least three names, but I suspect a fourth as well, with different levels of separation depending on the depravity the character has to either witness or partake in. If one were awfully optimistic, you could consider it to be like peering into the stream of consciousness of a reflective patient in therapy, but that disregards the intention Burroughs places in just about everything in the novel.
Adapting what is literally in Naked Lunch is not just impossible from a practical standpoint, it would also be revolting to the point that no one would ever dare see it, and would more than likely have never been released. Smartly, Cronenberg decided on a new tactic, instead converting the odd story of how Burroughs wrote the novel into something of a similar vain. Naked Lunch, the film, follows a Burroughs surrogate as he loses touch with reality in a hazy drug fueled binge. After he accidentally kills his wife during a party trick, Bill Lee (the Burroughs surrogate) runs off to a place called the Interzone, someplace in northern Africa. He is under the impression he has been enlisted in some sort of covert op, where he is to study and translate the goings on of several key people revolved around sexual depravity and the drug trade. In particular he is to find and report on a Dr. Benway. Bill Lee repeatedly sees giant bugs, often doubling as typewriters for him to work from. These bugs have an anus like apparatus in their back in which they can talk out of, where they give him directions as to who to pursue, and what to write. Hints of the novel are layered within this story, in particular the setting of the Interzone, and the occasional subject of homosexuality, but neither are given the significance they are given in the novel. Instead, the film prefers to focus on Burroughs' drug binge, his tortured writing experience, and his delusional state in which he decides to process this information. It becomes quickly apparent that what Lee thinks he is writing and what he is actually writing are two completely different things. He thinks he is writing concerns and reports over what is happening in the Interzone (occasionally, he writes about his loneliness and his fear of getting off of drugs). What he is actually writing is the manuscript to Naked Lunch.
Cronenberg does a relatively good job not just showing the odd, feverish quality to writing complex and often unconventional fiction, full of doubt and paranoia and dissatisfaction. Lee doesn't necessarily not believe in what he is writing, so much as he struggles with being as forthcoming with the information he has to write. Throughout the film one of his conflicts is in whether he trusts the giant bugs (or the alien Mugwumps, which act at times as counterpoint to the bugs and facilitators) or whether he considers them hostile and dangerous. Both the bugs and the Mugwumps secrete a drug when what Lee has typed pleases them, a disgusting representation of the dopamine secretion when you've written something you are proud of. The complex relationship Lee has with writing is tied up in a particular tragedy in Burroughs' past. Burroughs, back in 1951, accidentally shot his wife in the head, killing her. He has said that it was his wife's death that was responsible for his writing career, which he described as an "appalling conclusion". This line, it would seem, is the thesis behind Cronenberg's adaptation, following Lee's trauma and drug induced state as he tries his best to run away from this particular tragedy into a career as an author.
The issue with Cronenberg's take is that it largely ignores, or otherwise simply teases, the real underlying concerns and personality of Burroughs himself. For a film about Burroughs, it leaves out quite a lot. Burroughs, first of all, was gay. This is toyed around with here and there throughout the film, but hardly made as a particularly poignant point. The novel Naked Lunch shows extreme interest in not just homosexuality, but any sort of non-normative sexuality (but also includes rampant fetishism, so while the above sounds progressive it is much more speculative and, often times, offensive). Burroughs' novel is driven by the conflict of drug addiction and the culture that comes from it. It is full of people who have fallen through the cracks of society into a dark underbelly that exists in the fringe of the glossy "normal". Burroughs may use drug addiction and the horrific lifestyle and emotional trauma of addicts to tell his story, but he continually brings these issues to the conflict of societal norms. Burroughs, if his novel is anything to go by, seems to think all sense of societal norms are oppressive. He talks aggressively about the depravity of capital punishment, of lust for violence, of the animalistic nature of sexuality, and of, essentially, the obscenity of society. Burroughs, however, never sees this as an issue to be solved. There are numerous passages in the book Naked Lunch that show potential overthrows of authority, almost always ending in an orgy of violence and depravity. There is no winning, Burroughs seems to say. We are doomed to our torment.
Burroughs' hellish depiction of, well, reality is not something anyone in their right mind could turn into a movie. I enjoyed Burroughs' novel despite myself, finding it consistently off-putting but always interesting. It is the kind of book I think virtually no one should read outside of literary people interested in the medium for its own sake, because, while Burroughs has good points to make, he certainly doesn't make them all that well. He is unendingly offensive, continually trying to either make you sick or piss you off. It is incendiary art, the kind artists like to say they want but here it is and all it amounts to is hate and remorse. There is a pinch of value in Naked Lunch, but not enough to make up for what it does so horrifically. Cronenberg was right to start from scratch, essentially, looking into Burroughs' life for inspiration, but in his attempt he somehow missed what was actually so great, the buried, sand and shit encrusted diamond that meekly glinted but glinted with a white hot fever of inspiration. Cronenberg tosses out the novel in favor of an outsider's glance towards Burroughs, and he doesn't do the man justice.
Cronenberg's overt attempts may have failed, but, somehow despite itself, the film is still rather good. Taken on its own and only partially inspired by Burroughs and his infamous novel, Naked Lunch is a good movie about the creative process and the self destructive nature of creatives. It glamorizes nothing, makes creativity out to be a hostile and self destructive entity willing to tear a person's life down if only to escape from the head that conceived it. Cronenberg gets these themes across well, and we see that process as less masturbatory as it is frustrated, wishing for a sign that the process was worth it. It takes quite a stomach to watch Naked Lunch given its graphic nature and pervasive drug use and bugs, but if you have it then you won't be disappointed. It is a somewhat sanitized take on Burroughs, but one that does still feel an awful lot like him. It is creative and unique, and though it doesn't add up to its potential, it is more than impressive enough.
8.0
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