Naked Lunch (Criterion)
Exterminate all rational thought.
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs' hallucinatory, "unfilmable" novel is finally realized on-screen by director David Cronenberg. Part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict Bill Lee (Peter Weller) plunges into the nightmarish netherworld of the Interzone, pursuing a mysterious project that leads him to confront sinister cabals and giant talking bugs. The fruit of an unholy union between two masters of the hilarious and the macabre, Naked Lunch mingles aspects of Burroughs' novel with incidents from his own life, resulting in a compendium of paranoid fantasies and a searching investigation into the mysteries of the writing process.
Member Reviews
A difficult film - Calzephyr
It took us about two weeks to watch this movie after receiving it. Part of the problem is that I knew it wasn't the kind of movie you watch with friends or if you're in a really good mood. I've never been able to stomach David Cronenberg movies - except for A History of Violence, they tend to be all quite weird, which is an understatement. Videodrome was positively terrifying. If homosexuality and drug use bother you, definitely skip this one. What does it mean when a movie makes you uncomfortable? I'm not sure at the moment...but I was really surprised by what an excellent actor Peter Weller is. Apparently he turned down Robocop 3 to film this movie instead.
Cronenberg certainly doesn't hold back in Naked Lunch which is more autobiographical than derived from William S. Burrough's book. I picked the movie out because I was too young to watch it when it came out. It was a unique way to approach the subject matter because the book is so wildly offensive, graphic and bizarre that I'm sure it would induced vomiting on a mass scale. At the same time, it's an artfully constructed movie with close attention paid to colour and detail and filled many visual metaphors. The one I liked most was that of the talking typewriters that resemembled cockroaches. Come to think of it, the story is something of a beat-era version of The Matrix in which reality is frequently called into question. Layering and themes of duplicity and paranoia abound.It's time to do our Wiiliam Tell Act - omuy
Talking slithering strangely sexual typewriters, addicts of cockroach-exterminating pyretheum powder (who like to breath on cbugs and watch them die while on it), thick-fluid sipping mugwhump creatures, an assortment of strange parasitic characters to represent the sinister parts of you you never knew ere there, and a high as a kite protagonist to narrate it all. What more can I say? This is both a brilliant representation of William S. Burrough's no-holds-barred dark imagination and director Cronenburg's as well, both with the twisted audascity to take all these horrific atroscities of reality and fantasy and breath eroticism & mystery into them...
Impossible to describe or even explain (almost but not quite as incomprehensible as FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS), the movie is not exactly a telling of the book Naked Lunch (even though some characters, namely the vile mugwhumps, show up) as it is a telling of Burroughs writing the book and what he may have imagined while writing it.
The film starts out with the main character William Lee and his even more "creepy" (if anyone in the Burroughs line ever wanted to label what's inside themselves) wife, Joan, are addicted to the roach powder pyretheum, which Lee obtains thru his job as an exterminator. After playing a drunken William Tell act with his wife and blowing her head off so to say (which actually happened to Burroughs and his wife, and is said to have sparked the writing of Naked Lunch), he escapes to Tangiers, Mexico (with a "ticket" which actually appears to be a syringe). There he flows into a seemingly hallucinatory Interzone--a place populated by all the things mentioned above and tons more weirdness. He also meets the wife of a bisexual author who looks almost identical to his wife...and they engage in a particularly freaky sexual practice in which a typewriter tries to join in. If I say any more, the plot will be totally given away, so just watch, and compared to all the elaborate twists and turA Strange and Fascinating Journey - Josh_J
William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg together at last. The combination of the dark humour and perverse subject matter akin to both Burroughs and Cronenberg has resulted in a tantalizing tale called "Naked Lunch". Peter Weller gives a brilliant performance (most people know him only as RoboCop) as the drug-addicted exterminator/writer Bill Lee who becomes involved in a complicated underworld plot involving giant talking bugs and articulate alien creatures. The performances, musical score, direction and cinematography all perfectly fit the atmosphere of the 1950s beat movement from the slightly skewed perspective of a constantly tripped-out protagonist. If you liked "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", you will love "Naked Lunch".
Member Reviews
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A difficult film - Calzephyr
It took us about two weeks to watch this movie after receiving it. Part of the problem is that I knew it wasn't the kind of movie you watch with friends or if you're in a really good mood. I've never been able to stomach David Cronenberg movies - except for ...It's time to do our Wiiliam Tell Act - omuy
Talking slithering strangely sexual typewriters, addicts of cockroach-exterminating pyretheum powder (who like to breath on cbugs and watch them die while on it), thick-fluid sipping mugwhump creatures, an assortment of strange parasitic characters to represent ...A Strange and Fascinating Journey - Josh_J
William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg together at last. The combination of the dark humour and perverse subject matter akin to both Burroughs and Cronenberg has resulted in a tantalizing tale called "Naked Lunch". Peter Weller gives a brilliant performance ...