Let’s talk about David Cronenberg. In the cult circles he may largely remain, but it can’t be denied his films make an impact—in different ways for some I guess. From Shivers to ExistenZ, there’s always the element of the grotesque and the shaping of flesh—diving into the plasma pool, if you will. There’s of course his bigger titles like The Fly with Jeff Goldblum, and my personal favorite with the reality-reshaping mindscrew Videodrome. With a lot of them, it’s best not to indulge too much with a lunch beforehand.
So it makes some sense that with such a weird and oftentimes surreal output, that Cronenberg took on adapting the work of William S. Burroughs—one of the defining authors of the new waves of postmodern American literature in the fifties, alongside the likes of Jack Kerouac. Where the mainstream of that time would mostly attempt to keep everything prim and clean, the inevitable backlash of the beat generation manifested in Naked Lunch, a barrage of surrealism, drug use, obscenity, and everything else you can think of that by all logic would make it defy adaptation. It says a lot that the resulting film is still pretty toned down next to the source material.
Essentially what Naked Lunch is can be described as the last act of a David Lynch film, stretched out over an entire feature. Peter Weller plays an exterminator in 1950s New York who ends up getting high on his own chemical mixtures—with giant insects summoned out of his stupor to give him commands. He ends up accidentally shooting his girlfriend, or maybe he doesn’t—either way, he ends up taking a trip to ‘Interzone’ (based on the International Zone in Tangiers), and things only get weirder from there.
You want a conventional, sensible narrative? Let it be stressed—this ain’t the film for you. What even is ‘real’ in the context of the ‘story’ becomes something less and less definable as it goes on, and just when you think you might have a hold on it, the film is all too happy to pull the rug out from under you. You want to match wavelength and go along with the ride—oh, there’s fun to be had, but it’s quite a demented wavelength alright.
Ian Holm, Roy Schneider, and Judy Davis are all recognizable faces that make their own impacts throughout—and, as our lead veers around on what might be either orders from extradimensional intelligences, or just his psyche seeking out ever more extreme highs and powders, they might just be about the closest thing to grab onto as anchoring points through it all. Combined with the twisted special effects, from centipedes to rather indescribable things in cages…well, you may not really comprehend what’s going on, but there’s no denying it’s memorable.
Naked Lunch in either form is basically a demented stream of consciousness from a mind that’s on precisely the wrong kind of meds—and whether you’ll enjoy it depends on whether that sounds like something you may want to experience. Even next to the likes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which we should hopefully get to soon as well) this deliberately annihilates anything like convention—but with Cronenberg’s style, that’s sure enough to leave us with a cult classic. If you fancy your trips as weird and as stomach-churning demented as they get, you can’t top this one…
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