Naked Lunch (1991)

 

The adaption of the 1959 novel by William Burroughs by David Cronenberg. The film sits between the novel and Burroughs biography. It captures the sentiment of Burroughs' writing well, but it does not reproduce the dark, chaotic and humorous qualities of the novel. For the dedicated Burroughs fan or curious novice, the film should be accompanied by the novel (I have read it 5 times and did my MA thesis on it), along with Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan. Combined you will get a good image of not just an intense and intricate series of narratives, but a heightened literary experience concerning one of the greatest English language novels of the 20th century.

"The whole human position is no longer tenable," announces a character early in William S. Burroughs' Cities Of The Red Night. The story that Burroughs' biographer Ted Morgan - whose previous subjects include Winston S. Churchill, W. Somerset Maugham and Franklin D. Roosevelt - tells in Literary Outlaw is that of someone who has spent an entire literary life attempting to reconcile a belief that human existence is unendurable with the knowledge that it is also inescapable, and whose literary life itself derives from the event which confirmed him in that belief. On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, William Seward Burroughs - alienated scion of the Midwestern upper-middle class, grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine, demimondain mentor to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, junkie, gun fetishist - was attempting to demonstrate the virtuosity of his marksmanship by doing a 'William Tell act', which involved shooting a glass balanced on the head of Joan Vollmer, his common-law wife and the mother of his five-year-old son, Willam Burroughs Jr. Burroughs père, being both drunk and stoned at the time, allowed his aim to slip, drilling Joan Burroughs through the forehead and killing her instantly. "I am forced to the appalling conclusion," Burroughs wrote almost three and a half decades later in the introduction to Queer (an autobiographical novel written in the early '50s but not published until 1985; and one of the most affecting tales of unrequited love in the English language), "that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death [which] maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."

In 1953, exterminator William Lee finds that his wife Joan is stealing his supply of insecticide to use as a recreational drug. Lee is arrested by the police, and he begins hallucinating due to being exposed to the insecticide. Lee comes to believe that he is a secret agent, and his boss, a giant talking beetle, assigns him the mission of killing Joan, who is allegedly an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Lee dismisses the beetle's instructions and kills it. Lee returns home to find Joan having sex with Hank, one of his writer friends. Shortly afterwards, he accidentally kills her while attempting to shoot a drinking glass off her head to emulate William Tell.

Having inadvertently accomplished his mission, Lee flees to Interzone, located in a city somewhere in North Africa. He spends his time writing reports concerning his mission; these documents, at the insistence of his visiting literary colleagues, are eventually compiled into the titular book. While Lee is addicted to assorted mind-altering substances, his replacement typewriter, a Clark Nova, becomes a talking insect which tells him to find Dr. Benway by seducing Joan Frost, a doppelgänger of his dead wife. There is a row at gunpoint with Joan's husband Tom, after Lee steals his typewriter, which is then destroyed by the Clark Nova insect. Lee also encounters Yves Cloquet, who is apparently an attractive young gay Swiss gentleman. However, Lee later discovers that Yves is merely disguised as a human, and that his true form is a huge monstrous shapeshifting centipede.

After concluding that Dr. Benway is actually secretly masterminding a narcotics operation for a drug called "black meat" which is supposedly derived from the guts of giant Brazilian centipedes, Lee encounters Tom's housekeeper Fadela, previously observed to be an agent of the narcotics operation. Fadela reveals herself as Dr. Benway in disguise. After being recruited as a double agent for the black meat operation, Lee completes his report and flees Interzone to Annexia with Joan Frost. Stopped by the Annexian border patrol and instructed to prove that he is a writer as he claims, Lee produces a pen. When this proves insufficient for passage, Lee, now having realized that accidentally murdering his wife has driven him to become a writer, demonstrates his William Tell routine using a glass atop Joan Frost's head. He again misses, and thus re-enacts the earlier killing of his wife. The border guards cheerfully bid him welcome to Annexia, and his new life as a writer. Lee is shown shedding a tear at this bittersweet accomplishment.

Now, repeat after me: "Homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had."