Naked Lunch
Director – David Cronenberg
1991 – Canda-UK-Japan
Writers - William S. Burrough (novel) & David Cronenberg
Stars – Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm
Cronenberg’s surreal comedy mash-up of William Burrough’s life and work, led by Peter Weller’s sublime deadpan Burroughs impression and bug-typewriters. If the plot and conspiracy are barely cohesive, that’s all part of the druggy paranoia that propels the plot into barely acknowledged trauma.
Although there are plenty of names, skits and autobiographical notes to please Burroughs’ fans, ‘Naked Lunch’ is very much Cronenbergian. It’s trashy and lucid, gross and intelligent in equal amounts in a way that Cronenberg has made his own. It starts with a Saul Bass-style opening credits with Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman's jazzy, retro score, at once ominous and dizzy with Coleman's solos. From the start, the tone is slick and edgy. The set design is colourful and resonant of an imaginary golden age of a decadent scene and cluttered writer's rooms.
But beneath the increasingly crazed WTF surface moments, and wayward plot concerning “double-agents” and sedition, there are numerous baubles concerning creativity and muses. Not least of all an early conversation about writing between Burroughs and characters representing Karouac and Ginsberg, which grips from the first. It’s a heady mixture in which cognitive dissonance and denial are pulled out as Burrough’s true muse, not just sex and drugs and an oppressively permissive North African town. It is repression of his homosexuality and guilt for the William Tell accident that killed his wife. When another character tells Bill “There are no accidents,” Cronenberg proves himself alert to Burrough’s philosophy. He is attuned to Burrough’s plunging into further absurdities, creativity, addiction, disgust and bugged out fetishes in his attempt to spiral away from he is and has done.
Cronenberg seems the right director for Burroughs when he presents the creativity tool of typewriters as sexually active provocateurs, filling the artist with conspiracies. Who would have thought antique typewriters could be so repulsive? And although it’s not subtle, there is something complete in the film’s use of metaphor, in the typewriter-bugs symbolising sexual self-loathing churning out intimate creations, or in the pieces of a broken typewriter becoming a junky’s kit. And then here are the unforgettable mugwumps – Chris Wallis’ creations are unsettling and clunky in the way only practical effects can achieve.
But perhaps it is Cronenberg’s affinity for Burrough’s jet black humour that makes this more than an acolyte’s fawning. It isn’t that. Burroughs and Cronenberg are certainly suitable fits when it comes to expressing the trauma of the human condition with surrealism. Elsewhere, Tom Waits’ collaboration with Burroughs would bring out and prove, somewhat impressively, the latter’s oddball romanticism. And it’s the obvious playfulness and intelligence of the script that evidently enticed such a solid cast: Davis and Holm are deliciously straight; Julian Sands is delightfully camp; Scheider gleefully makes a crazed entrance to chomp scenery and cigar; Joseph Scoren is elegantly soft and charming; and here’s plenty of fine lines to go around.
But if Cronenberg’s awareness of the absurdist humour means it never takes it totally seriously – it’s the comedy of the outrageous, which is in the blood of horror - by the end he finds the core of trauma that humanises such a notoriously chilly subject.
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