Naked Lunch

David Cronenberg, UK/Canada 1991, 115 minutes

William Burroughs' novel `The Naked Lunch' is at best a bloody confusing book. The bizarre ramblings of a heroin addict render the book somewhat inaccessible, and it was the act of a very brave man to try and adapt this book, widely recognised as unfilmable. David Cronenberg (possibly the only man for the job) takes his screenplay partly from the novel and partly from Burroughs' writing process itself.

Working closely with Burroughs, Cronenberg brings us William Lee (Peter Weller) - a New York bug exterminator who finds that his bug powder is going missing and eventually traces it back to the fact that his wife is shooting up on it. He decides to experiment also, and somewhere along the line a typewriter turns into a giant beetle and tells him to go to `Interzone' to escape the enemy and write regular reports. Most of the film shows Lee's fight for survival in the seedy, exotic Interzone (or junkyland, as it has been called).

The single most telling scene of the film is one in which Lee is seen lying in a pile of dirt, crying and hiding. He tells his friends he must get to Interzone and holds up his plane tickets, but all his friends see is a vial of bug powder dust. The whole film is a document of Lee's narcotic-fuelled fantasy and the reports he writes (to whom is never revealed, or indeed relevant) form the pages of `The Naked Lunch'.

Weller himself has very little to do in the film apart from bounce helplessly around Interzone at the mercy of the various creatures that inhabit it (watch for a suave and terrifying Julian Sands). The most fascinating aspect of the film is the very fact that it was made - a full-blown Technicolor portrait of the workings of a heroin-addled brain. It can be disjointed and confusing in places but this fits the main theme - disorientation and confusion. It remains one of the most ambitious films ever made, certainly fascinating, and a must-see piece of celluloid.

"Stretching himself with each new work, Cronenberg has come up with a fascinating, demanding, mordantly funny picture" - Variety

Review by Andrew Hesketh
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97