Directed by: David Cronenberg.
Written by: David Cronenberg based on the novel by William S. Burroughs.
Starring: Peter Weller (Bill Lee), Judy Davis (Joan Frost / Joan Lee), 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).
On
the Criterion Blu-Ray of Naked Lunch, writer-director David Cronenberg
(rightly) says that a faithful version of William S. Burroughs classic novel
Naked Lunch would cost $100 million and be banned in every country. Burroughs’
book, as brilliant as it, is essentially un-filmable, as it contains so many
different outshoots and tangents, so many different characters and places and
has chapters that Burroughs has said were written so that they could be read in
any order. The last line in the Wikipedia plot summary of the novel is “The
book then becomes increasingly disjointed and impressionistic, and finally
simply stops.” – Which is pretty much accurate. Filmmakers had tried for years
to find a way to adapt Burroughs book, but were never able to get it off the
ground. What Cronenberg does is take elements from Burroughs’ novel, elements
from other Burroughs’ writing and elements from Burroughs’ life itself, and
mixed it up with Cronenberg’s own unique sensibility and the result is one of
the strangest, most disturbing films you will probably ever see.
The
film stars Peter Weller as Bill Lee – an exterminator living in New York, who
along with his wife Joan (Judy Davis) gets addicted to the bug powder that he
uses in his job. Eventually, Bill will meet a giant bug who talks out of his
ass, who tells him that his wife needs to be killed- and soon after, Bill and
Joan will do their “William Tell” routine, that results in Bill shooting his
wife in the head (much like the real Burroughs did to his wife). Bill will meet
a giant Mugwump (you’ll have to see him to believe him) who “specializes in
sexual ambivalence) and flees to Interzone – a strange locale, that somewhat
resembles Tangiers, except of course the typewriters there have a mind of their
own, and produce intoxicating narcotics when Bill produces something they like
– which, of course, is the novel Naked Lunch. More characters enter his life –
Tom and Joan Frost (Ian Holm, and Judy Davis again) a pair of, well, something,
their strange maid Fadela (Monique Mercure), a homosexual playboy (Julian
Sands) and the infamous Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider). There are conspiracies built
within conspiracies – and everyone wants the “black meat” of the Brazilian
centipede.
That’s
the plot of the movie – kind of – but it doesn’t really give you an idea what
the experience of watching Naked Lunch is really like. This is a surreal nightmare
of a film, with lots of Cronenberg’s trademarked gross out special effects.
Like his work on Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986) and later eXistenZ (1999),
the special effects here are about the melding of technology and biology. The
typewriters in the movie are living, breathing, speaking organisms. And that’s
just the start – there are other gross out special effects – a deranged sex
scene in a birdcage, and another scene where one character takes off a suit –
which is essentially a different character of a different gender. Cronenberg
has often made movies about identity – about the horrors coming from within not
outside forces, and the same is true of Naked Lunch.
It
is also a film about writing – and oddly came out the same year as another
masterpiece about writing – the Coen Brothers Barton Fink. That film was about
a talentless hack who calls himself a writer. Naked Lunch is about a talented
writer, who insists he is not a writer. Throughout the movie, Bill Lee is
writing what will become Burroughs Naked Lunch – but refers to it all as
“reports”. Oddly, Judy Davis plays the doomed muse in both the Coens and
Cronenberg’s films – but plays three vastly different characters. Like Miranda
Richardson in Cronenberg’s later film Spider (2002), the greatness of Davis’
performance is how she creates two different characters, that still feel as if
they share an identity of sorts – if that makes any sense (and after seeing the
movie, I think it does). Peter Weller, best known for playing Robocop, delivers
a surprising great performance in Naked Lunch in the lead role. He has the same
deadpan, monotone that actors often affect when playing Burroughs, as Viggo
Mortenson did in On the Road and Ben Foster in Kill Your Darlings recently, but
without some of the more overt theatrics those two actors used.
The
film is a mind-fuck of a movie as only Cronenberg (or perhaps Lynch) could have
made it. Perhaps one day someone will figure out how to make a “straight”
version of Burroughs novel – yet I hardly think it would work as a movie – at
least not nearly as well as it works as a novel. What Cronenberg did is what
more filmmakers should do when confronted with a brilliant, yet difficult
novel, and find a way to capture the spirit of the work, filtering it through their
own sensibility and coming up with something wholly unique and different. Naked
Lunch is like nothing else you’ve seen before – which is appropriate because
the novel is like nothing else you’ve ever read before. The two works are
startling different – but they share the same DNA.
No comments:
Post a Comment