Burroughs' groundbreaking novel was first published in 1959 and long banned. Its biting wit, twisted sense of humor, and fearless treatment of addiction and homosexuality made it the perfect outsider's book: the ultimate Beat novel. Wildly inventive and without a coherent narrative structure, it was also considered unfilmable.
David Cronenberg, not a stranger to the dark side himself, decided to make "Naked Lunch" into a movie by combining his favorite passages with bits and pieces from Burrough's life. The result is not what you would properly call an adaptation. Cronenberg compares the synthesis to Jeff Goldblum's fate in "The Fly:" strands of DNA are meshed, and the result is a new creature.
For starters, the movie has a recognizable storyline. Bill Lee (Peter Weller), an exterminator, finds out that his wife Joan (Judy Davis) shoots up his bug powder, and soon both are addicted to the stuff. As the wonderful Judy Davis explains: "It's a Kafka high." Sure enough, Bill starts talking to giant bugs who identify themselves as extraterrestrial agents and demand that he write reports on squishy typewriters and kill his wife.
It only gets weirder in Interzone, but I won't ruin the film's many surprises. The fact that "Naked Lunch" shows its many odd sights in perfectly lit scenes adds to its disquieting effect. More than ten years after its premiere, the creepiness of Cronenberg's film is undiminished, and its existential ambiguities can still rattle.
The Criterion 2-DVD set of "Naked Lunch" comes with audio commentary featuring David Cronenberg and Peter Weller, a quality documentary about the making of the film, audio recordings of Burroughs reading from his novel, a collection of Allen Ginsberg's photographs, and a 32-page booklet with essays by Janet Maslin, Chris Rodley, Gary Indiana, and William S. Burroughs.
