Main Cast: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider
Release Year: 1991
Country: UK/CA
Run Time: 117 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
This cinematic/literary hybrid fuses motifs from Beat writer William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name with elements of the author's biography and plenty of the cerebral alienation and biomorphic special effects fans of creepy cult director David Cronenberg have come to expect. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) wants to write, but he exterminates bugs to pay the bills. His wife, Joan (Judy Davis), becomes addicted to Bill's bug powder dust, and soon he joins her in a world of unorthodox hallucinogens; he visits the kindly yet sinister Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) and walks away with his first dose of the black meat -- a narcotic made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. Soon, monstrous beetles are whispering conspiracy theories in Bill's ears and his nebbish writer friends Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker) are sleeping with Joan under his nose. When a party trick involving a liquor glass and a gun goes awry, killing Joan, Bill flees to Interzone, a Mediterranean city full of talking insectoid typewriters, double agents, offbeat aesthetes, and plots within plots. As he navigates this paranoid landscape, Bill begins ingesting another drug called mugwump jism and writes fragments that Hank and Martin soon assemble into a novel under the title Naked Lunch. As beat literature aficionados know, Interzone is based on Tangiers -- the city where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. The incident in the film in which Hank and Martin appropriate Bill's writing and have it published closely approximates the real-life circumstances of the novel's publication, although it was Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who helped out the real-life Burroughs. The William Tell incident that kills Bill's wife is also drawn from the author's real life. "William Lee" is both Burroughs' literary stand-in and the name under which he published his first autobiographical novel Junky. Ian Holm, who plays Joan Frost's husband, Tom, would appear in Cronenberg's similarly experimental eXistenZ several years later. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Review
Given that William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch isn't so much a novel as a collection of literary fragments that riff on corporate culture, human depravity, and sexual outrage as often as they filter the author's actual life as a bisexual, expatriate drug addict, it's a wonder the book ever became a movie at all. "Unfilmable" was the adjective most often applied, especially when it was announced that maverick Canadian director David Cronenberg would give it a shot. Cronenberg was hardly faithful to either the contents or the precise spirit of the author's nightmarishly misanthropic beat masterpiece, but he did manage to transform elements of the book and the overall Burroughs mythos into a coherent entry in his own oeuvre of stylized alienation. Most any literal description of the author's prose -- or the film's plot -- will fail to drive home the one element that makes both so enjoyable: the absurdist humor of both auteurs' visions. Talking bugs, amphibian spies, and arcane narcotics sound creepy, and they are. But as with the book itself, Cronenberg's film is full of deadpan humor that wallows in the excretory excesses of his visual metaphors while also driving home their aptness and winking all the while. It helps that his cast is so game, from the ever-shrewish Judy Davis in not one, but two tightly wound roles to the reliable Roy Scheider and Ian Holm and the too-too tight-lipped Peter Weller. The viscous special effects, vivid cinematography, and distorted period costume design all conspire to conjure up a dream-logic 1950s of squares, hipsters, and secret agents awash in neon, cigarette smoke, and junkie delirium. Cutting up the raw materials of the cut-up king himself, Cronenberg fashions a film as idiosyncratically inspired as its source material. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Monique Mercure - Fadela; Nicholas Campbell - Hank; Michael Zelniker - Martin; Robert A. Silverman - Hans; Joseph Scorsiani - Kiki; Claude Aflalo - Forgeman; Peter Boretski - 2nd Exterminator/Creature Voices; Deirdre Bowen; Michael Caruana - Pawnbroker; Yuval Daniel - Hafid; Joseph di Mambro - Interzone Boy; John Friesen - Hauser; Laurent Hazout - Interzone Boy; Howard Jerome - A.J. Cohen; Justin Louis - 3rd Exterminator; Sean McCann - O'Brien; Kurt Reis - 1st Exterminator; Julian Richings - 4th Exterminator; Jim Yip - The Chink; Ornette Coleman - The Ornette Coleman Trio; Barre Phillips - The Ornette Coleman Trio
Credit
James McAteer - Art Director, Deirdre Bowen - Casting, Gabriella Martinelli - Co-producer, Denise Cronenberg - Costume Designer, David Cronenberg - Director, Ronald Sanders - Editor, Howard Shore - Composer (Music Score), Ornette Coleman - Songwriter, Carol Spier - Production Designer, Peter Suschitzky - Cinematographer, Marilyn Stonehouse - Production Manager, Jeremy Thomas - Producer, Elinor Rose Galbraith - Set Designer, Chris Walas - Special Effects, Bryan Day - Sound/Sound Designer, Don White - Sound/Sound Designer, Dave Appleby - Sound/Sound Designer, Peter Maxwell - Sound/Sound Designer, Jane Tattersall - Sound Editor, Wayne Griffin - Sound Editor, Andy Malcolm - Sound Editor, Richard Cadger - Sound Editor, Tony Currie - Sound Editor, David Evans - Sound Editor, David Cronenberg - Screenwriter, William S. Burroughs - Book Author
You couldn't do much better for a soundtrack to David Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' beat classic than have Ornette Coleman team up with Howard Shore, a film composer who keeps within the strictures of classic film score ideals and colorations, but explores them with the intelligence of Bernard Herrmann. Coleman's free jazz complements the schizophrenia of the film and pays homage to the generation that preceded (and gave birth to) him, while Shore maintains the melancholic dread that powers most Cronenberg films. Like the film -- where the Algiers of the story might only be Bill Lee's imagination -- Shore uses Arabian elements sparingly, and in the context of the cool New York sound. Wondrous strange. ~ Ted Mills, All Music Guide
William Lee (Burroughs' pseudonym for his first novel, Junky) is an exterminator who finds that his wife is stealing his insecticide for recreational purposes. When Lee is arrested by the police, he believes himself hallucinating because of bug powder exposure. Lee believes himself a secret agent, and Lee's controller (a giant bug) assigns him the mission of killing his wife, Joan Lee, who is, according to the bug, an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Dismissing the bug and its instructions, Lee returns home to find his wife sleeping with Hank, one of his writer friends. He soon shoots her while performing a William Tell routine.
Having "accomplished" his "mission", Lee flees to Interzone, where the Interzone Incorporated organization is based, and spends his time writing reports on his mission, which become the book Naked Lunch. While in Interzone, the typewriters Lee uses are themselves living creatures, usually giving Lee advice on his mission. Clark Nova, one of Lee's typewriters, tells him to find Doctor Benway, by means of seducing Joan Frost who is a doppelgänger of his dead wife, Joan Lee.
After finding out that Doctor Benway is the head of a narcotic harvesting operation, producing a drug called "black meat", derived from the guts of giant centipedes. Lee completes his report and flees Interzone to Annexia with Joan Frost. Upon meeting the Annexian border patrol, to prove that he is a writer as he claims, he shoots Joan Frost in the head, in the same manner that he shot his late wife, Joan Lee. After seeing this, the border patrol welcomes Lee to Annexia.
The screenplay for Naked Lunch is based not only on Burroughs' novel, but also on other fiction by him, and autobiographical accounts of his life. It can be seen as a metatextual adaptation, in that it depicts the writing of the novel itself. Several characters are loosely based on people that Burroughs knew: Hank and Martin are based on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (who assisted Burroughs in compiling the original novel), and Tom and Joan Frost on Paul and Jane Bowles whom Burroughs befriended in Africa.[citation needed]
The shooting of Joan Lee is based on the 1951 death of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs’ common law wife. Burroughs shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party in Mexico City. He would later flee to the United States. Burroughs was convicted in absentia of homicide and sentenced to two years, which were suspended. Burroughs later said that he “would have never become a writer but for Joan's death.”
The film takes great liberties with Burroughs' novel. The only elements, characters and places taken from the book are "The Talking Asshole" routine, Dr. Benway, William Lee, the Mugwumps, the fictional drug called "the black meat", Interzone and Annexia, all of them arranged and related to each other in a completely different fashion as they appear in the book.
Tom Frost's typewriter is a "Martinelli", apparently named after co-producer Gabriella Martinelli. When he lends the machine to Lee, Frost says of the typewriter, "Her inventiveness will surprise you."
Music
The film's score is composed by Cronenberg's staple scorer, Howard Shore and features free-jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman. The music of the Master Musicians of Jajouka is also featured throughout the film, making it one of the few American releases to feature their music (along with The Cell).
Reception
Naked Lunch was released on December 27, 1991 in a limited release of five theaters, grossing $64,491 on its opening weekend. It went on to make $2.6 million in North America.[2]
Reviews
Critical reaction to Naked Lunch was mixed. It currently holds a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 30 reviews (20 positive, 10 negative).[3]Metacritic also reported an average rating of 67 out of 100, based on 16 reviews.[4]Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy".[5] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "for the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway", but did praise Peter Weller's performance: "The gaunt, unsmiling Mr. Weller looks exactly right and brings a perfect offhandedness to his disarming dialogue".[6]Richard Corliss of Time gave a lukewarm review, calling the film "tame compared with its source".[7] In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe criticized what he felt to be a "lack of conviction".[8]Newsweek magazine's David Ansen wrote, "Obviously this is not everybody's cup of weird tea: you must have a taste for the esthetics of disgust. For those up to the dare, it's one clammily compelling movie".[9]Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" rating and Owen Gleiberman also praised Weller's performance: "Peter Weller, the poker-faced star of Robocop, greets all of the hallucinogenic weirdness with a doleful, matter-of-fact deadpan that grows more likable as the movie goes on. The actor's steely robostare has never been more compelling. By the end, he has turned Burroughs' stone-cold protagonist — a man with no feelings — into a mordantly touching hero".[10] In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, "Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer".[11]
Burroughs scholar Timothy S. Murphy found the film to be a muddled adaptation that reflects Cronenberg's mind more than the novel: he feels that Burroughs' subversive, allegorically political depiction of drugs and homosexuality becomes merely aesthetic. Murphy argues that Burroughs' social and politically situated literary techniques become in the film merely the hallucination of a junkie, and that by using the life of Burroughs himself as a framing narrative, Cronenberg turns a fragmented, unromantic, bitterly critical and satirical novel into a conventional bildungsroman.[12]
The film has been selected for a Criterion Collection release, an organization that releases high quality DVDs for important classic and contemporary films.
^ Naked Lunch - Special Edition Double Disc DVD, Disc Two: The Supplements, Naked Making Lunch (1991), interview with Director David Cronenberg, released 2003, ISBN 1-55940-947-9, and Melnyk, George Great Canadian Film Directors. University of Alberta, 2007, p. 88. ISBN 0888644795
