There's not much point in trying to describe the plot of David Cronenberg's film version of the classic novel by William Burroughs. As with that influential, subversive book, if there is a plot, it's only incidental. The real point is to blow your mind with strange takes on drugs, addiction, conspiracies and hidden power structures, reality, desire, homosexuality, creativity, bodily orifices, slimy fluids, and other motifs that I'm probably not picking up on. With subject matter like this, it was perhaps inevitable that Cronenberg (he of The Fly, Videodrome, Crash, eXistenZ) would try to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen, a feat many people thought couldn't be done. And in a sense, it still hasn't been done. Naked Lunch the movie is actually an amalgam of the novel, some of Burroughs' other work, and Burroughs' actual life, which--filled with hardcore drug use, the killing of his wife, and helping found a literary movement--is as interesting as his fiction.The main character, Bill Lee (Peter Weller), is obviously Burroughs himself, and he is surrounded by doppelgangers of his ill-fated wife Jane (Judy Davis), Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul and Jane Bowles. These people live in a world rife with reptilian humanoid Mugwumps, giant cockroaches that talk through sphincters on their backs, addictive bug powder, talking assholes, double and triple agents, and the forbidden pleasures of Interzone, a freezone modeled on Morocco. Weller plays it the way he should: totally straight-faced, a little confused but seemingly impervious. Acting overwhelmed and distraught would've been too obvious and not in keeping with the unflappable image that the real-life Burroughs projected.
The movie is surreal, grotesque, and just plain way-out-there. Like so many other works of challenging art, it helps if you take it on its own terms (just like the novel itself). If you try to force preconceived notions onto it, you might be disappointed. Just enjoy the warped visuals and try to pull the messages from Burroughs' world as seen through Cronenberg's lens.
The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.
