Cronenberg’s highly intelligent, brave and uncompromising venture into the mind of William S. Burroughs

David Cronenberg is quite brilliant in analyzing and deconstructing the human psyche through quite serious works disguised in the robes of body horror and unnerving visual atrocities. The Canadian Baron of Blood’s take on William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel Naked Lunch is easily one of the most bizarre films we’ve seen, as it’s strange even for Cronenberg’s standards, but this controversial, intriguing and to a degree obviously biographical film stands out as a highly intelligent, brave and uncompromising venture into the mind of a writer. Despite its constant shifting between being attractively peculiar and alarmingly repelling on a visceral level, Naked Lunch is a weird bag of praiseworthy aestheticism and genuinely original but never obtrusive symbolism dancing cheek to cheek with plenty of delightfully dark humor. Peter Weller, our hero from RoboCop, wonderfully handles the dry, doleful, emotionally clearly detached and disturbed role of an unsuccessful writer trying to cope with life, as he’s steadily losing his grasp on reality, and is provided with nice support from Judy Davis, Roy Scheider and Ian Holm. Cronenberg’s long-time collaborator Howard Shore is responsible for the memorable score, further empowered by the use of free jazz musician Ornette Coleman’s material. Burroughs’ peculiar, rich and somewhat original writing style proved no problem for Cronenberg to adapt, as the film manages to bring to life the author’s way of literary expression with ease and style. Naked Lunch might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s an exotic tea we like to enjoy whenever we feel the world has become perhaps a bit too ordinary.

Dear every screenwriter/filmmaker, read David Cronenberg’s screenplay for Naked Lunch. Based on the novel by William S. Burroughs [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available from Criterion Collection. Absolutely our highest recommendation.

David Cronenberg and The Making of Naked Lunch performs just what it says on the tin, as the director and many of his collaborators, including Burroughs, speak on the film, which offers an increasingly paranoid look at one writer’s process and also his fear of slowly growing bugs in New York City. The documentary examines just how Burroughs life seeped its way into Cronenberg’s vision—including events related to those portrayed in the recent Allen Ginsberg drama Kill Your Darlings—and how they made the decidedly uncinematic act of writing compelling. “In order to convey the act of writing to someone who hasn’t written, you have to be quite outrageous,” says Cronenberg. Anyone who’s seen the final result can confirm its success on that front, but now we can take a look at the puppeteers behind the many grotesque creations in the film and appreciate. —Charlie Schmidlin

The Canadian director David Cronenberg has redefined the notion of what a horror film can be. While horror and science-fiction films traditionally have been about threats from the outside—monsters or alien forces—Cronenberg’s films have been about threats that come from inside our own bodies, and our psyches. It was fitting, then, that Cronenberg should be the director to adapt William S. Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, with its grotesque and comical mix of the organic, the chemical, and the hallucinatory. Cronenberg spoke at the Museum of the Moving Image with a premiere screening of Naked Lunch  on the opening day of a complete retrospective of his films.

At one point in the snake hunt, Cronenberg sees some sort of insect hovering over nearby tall grasses and cups his hands to try and gently catch it. Burroughs waves it away with his cane. ‘William, are you interested in insects?’ says Cronenberg, mostly for my benefit, a question that causes Burroughs to regard the two of us warily. ‘Not entirely,’ he finally says. After a few minutes of completely addled discussion, Burroughs exclaims, ‘Oh, insects! I thought you said incest.’ ‘The most awful creature to me is the centipede,’ he says. A number of them crawl slimily through the movie version of Naked Lunch. ‘I don’t go into hysterics or anything, but I look around for something to smash it with. I used to live out in the country when I first moved here, and there were a lot of centipedes in the house, and I set out to kill them all. A program of genocide. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d know there’s a centipede in this room. And there always was. And I couldn’t go to sleep until I killed it.’ —Interview with William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg by Lynn Snowden

BBC2’s arts programme The Late Show looked at David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, including an interview with Cronenberg.

David Cronenberg and the Cinema of the Extreme is a 20 minute documentary about Cronenberg’s films, broadcast on the BBC in 1997 and never repeated. It contains contributions from Cronenberg, George A. Romero and Alex Cox.

The making of Naked Lunch. Still photographers: Attila Dory & Brian Hamill.

 

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