NAKED LUNCH is based on William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel, a semi-autobiographical account of his drug abuse. The book is basically "unfilmable" because of its surreal and fragmentary structure. Burroughs invented "cut-ups" and chopped his writing into fragments, which he then tossed together in a random order.
Bill Lee (Peter Weller) is an aspiring writer who makes his living in N.Y.C. as an insect exterminator in 1953. His crazy wife Joan (Judy Davis) is addicted to his bug powder, and she persuades him to start mainlining insecticide. She tells Bill, "It's a literary high...It's a Kafka high. You feel like a bug." Then Bill tries a narcotic made from a Brazillian centipede. Bill accidentally kills Joan and flees to a port city in North Africa, Interzone (Tangiers).
Interzone is a Casablanca-like community populated by squares, hipsters, and weirdos. Some of the characters are obviously based on Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Jane and Paul Bowles. It's a paranoid city with double agents and subplots within plots. Bill starts taking another drug called mugwump jism and continues writing in a hallucinatory delirium.
Tom Frost: "They say you murdered your wife. Is that true?"
Bill Lee: "Who told you that?"
Tom Frost: "Word gets around."
Bill Lee: "It wasn't murder. It was an accident."
Tom Frost: "There are no accidents. For example, I've been killing my own wife slowly over a period of years."
Bill Lee: "What?"
Tom Frost: "Well, not intentionally. I mean, on the level of conscious intention, it's insane, monstrous."
Bill Lee: "But you do consciously know it. You just said it. We're discussing it."
Tom Frost: "Not consciously. This is all happening telepathically, non-consciously."
Bill Lee: "What do you mean?"
Tom Frost: "If you look carefully at my lips, you'll realize that I'm actually saying something else. I'm not actually telling you about the several ways I'm gradually murdering Joan."
NAKED LUNCH is nightmarish, psychedelic, and intensely bizarre and grotesque. Director David Cronenberg mixes Burrough's life with fiction, including violence, nudity and profanity at every opportunity. It's a wild ride for those who like it weird.
Blob-like creatures with sexual organs move about. Mutating and oozing giant bugs pervade the film. Bill's typewriter transforms into a cockroach and speaks to him, sounding exactly like the electronic brain in Jean-Luc Godard's sci-fi classic ALPHAVILLE (1965). Peter Boretski provided the creature voices and played Exterminator #2.
Exterminator # 2: "Just remember this. All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill. And a writer? A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it."
The cast also includes: Ian Holm (Tom Frost), Julian Sands (Yves Cloquet), Roy Scheider (Dr. Benway), Monique Mercure (Fadela), Nicholas Campbell (Hank), Michael Zelniker (Martin), Robert A. Silverman (Hans), Joseph Scoren (Kiki), Yuval Daniel (Hafid), John Friesen (Hauser), Sean McCann (O'Brien), Howard Jerome (A.J. Cohen), Claude Aflalo (Forgeman), and others. Music is by Ornette Coleman and Howard Shore.
NAKED LUNCH is one of Cronenberg's best films. It is relatively more coherent than William Burroughs' misanthropic Beat masterpiece. "William Lee" is the pseudonym Burroughs used for his first novel, "Junky". The film is full of absurd deadpan humour, and has very good special effects, cinematography, and period costume design.
