You’re right. Where was all the political satire of Southern sheriffs and drunken surgeons and the narcotics agent who is addicted to addicts? This could have been more of a non-narrative film a la Jodorowsky or someone like that. Cronenberg was a bit out of his depth with the drug content and the homosexual content. Granted, some of the sexual fantasies are probably unfilmable. But Dr. Benway is a more sinister figure than the grinning, drag-wearing characterization here implied. I did think it was interesting that Cronenberg pulled in material from the very well-written and moving introduction to Queer, which had been published about ten years earlier for the first time, to make it a film about how Burroughs comes to terms with his own sexuality. Also the way he incorporates the story from The Yage Letters (I think) where Ginsberg saves all of Burroughs’ long letters and begins to piece together the first draft of Naked Lunch from them — not the whole book, though, Burroughs wrote most of it as a novel, with ten joints on his desk that he smoked every day while writing! And I enjoyed some of Cronenberg’s inventions, mainly the typewriter-insect-rapist, lol. So, ultimately, too Burroughsian for the average filmgoer but not really Burroughsian enough for the person who has read a lot of Burroughs.
I want to see the actual films that Burroughs made with Brion Gysin and Anthony Balch, I was happy to see that they are available on dvd.
Does anyone know if a director has tried to make (or has made) a film adapted from Cities of the Red Night? I’ve been toying with (a) screenplay(s) based on that and The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands.
Agreed. I was hooked from the moment I heard Ornette’s sound. I also dug Cronenberg’s conception: that Bill had never left NYC. His adventure all took place while on the nod. Beautiful. But as for the rest of it, for a true Burroughsiphile, it left one needing a deeper hit. My thing is: if the content is so extreme (which Naked Lunch certainly is), why bother? Wasn’t Cronenberg’s entire project, once upon a time, to dare show the unspeakable? Given that, it’s funny, isn’t it, how he exhibited more (expected?) enthusiasm for butt-fucking between the rogue hets in “Crash”, that the more alien homo outsiders in Naked Lunch (novel)? In fact, in Naked Lunch (film) the sexing was hidden behind mutant typewriters, and horny Ernst-inspired bird-creatures. Weird…
Well, Cronenberg allows Burroughs his Kiki, who was a real life Mexican hustler. And Burroughs and Kiki had a very sexually fulfilled, even loving relationship — though Burroughs did pay him or support him, I believe. But the Julian Sands character, who represents the Bad Homo, who becomes a carnivorous tree and bleeds Kiki in a particularly grisly hallucination, this seems to be just a projection of Burroughs’ lingering unease with the smug queen-like gay. And yet, even here Cronenberg puts too fine a point on things. Burroughs had sympathy for effeminate gays, as witness the wise old black fairy who tells him, “People are shits, darling,” or the Duc de Guise, who dies like Isidora Duncan except it’s his hemorrhoids that get wrapped around the wheels of the car, not a scarf. “And the Baron carried that awful schlupping noise with him to his grave.”
KJ I have to disagree with your reading of the film. It’s called Interzone but it’s definitely Morocco, because that’s where he encounters the famous Moroccan expatriates Paul and Jane Bowles. Plus, Ginsberg and Kerouac track him down in Morocco or Mexico — they’ve made a journey to seek him out in his foreign exile.
Justin, I know you’ve looked closely at the film. I know it. Are you telling me that you missed Cronenberg’s sly insertion of NYC physical references into the “Moroccan” landscape. I don’t have a dvd to refer to, and it’s been awhile, so I’m a little fuzzy about particulars, but there is an entrance to a NYC subway seen as Bill and co. travel by car along a road at night. At another point, through a window, a sign on a brick wall which we’d seen earlier in NYC, is very visible. These telltale signs are cleverly woven into the film to capture the hallucinating imagination of its strung-out writer.
Edit. I did locate this:
Interviewer: You had to cancel shooting in Tangier because of the Gulf War. Were you disappointed?
DC: For one day. Only for one day. When I looked at the script again, it became immediately apparent that we really were seduced by the reality of Tangier, that we were there with Burroughs and that Burroughs had been there to write, but the script has nothing to do with that. Even in the very first draft of the script, it was obvious that Interzone was meant to be a state of mind, and that’s where its significance was. He really never left New York, he probably never left his apartment, this was an interior voyage.
If you’re right then I think it’s an error of judgment on Cronenberg’s part. One must not pay that much attention to what directors feed interviewers — here he was trying to salvage his ego from the accusation that he couldn’t find a way to “get” Tangier. Of course, elements of NYC can come back to the exile, but to suggest that there is no traveling in the story is ridiculous. Burroughs was one of the most traveled, cosmopolitan, worldly writers of his time, living in NY, Mexico City, South American, Morocco, London, and finally Lawrence, Kansas! His work would have been nothing without those cultural influences. Never left his apartment! What a crock. Maybe this is why I don’t wholeheartedly like the film.
So, you won’t agree, in the context of the way Cronenberg has organized his material, he is justified? Talking typewriters, mutants of various kinds- this stuff is so bizarre it makes sense to place it in Bill’s warped mind rather than an actual physical location. I’m not saying that it was better this way, only that the workaround added another different level. Ordinarily, I would agree with you about being careful of what directors rap in interviews, but Cronenberg was responding to a situation over which he had no control- the first Gulf War. So, I think how he managed to get to Tangier after all was nicely conceived. I guess I liked this one a bit better than you. I’ve always grooved to this conceit.
KJ, the hallucinations work for me for the most part, especially the typewriter, the big centipede, etc. I never exactly pictured mugwumps like that, but they were okay. It’s the idea that he doesn’t travel at all — that, I think, is a limitation of the film, and frankly I think Cronenberg may have just made that up on the spot to get out of looking like he had been too scared to go to Morocco when the interviewer backed him into a corner. When I watch it, I think of it as partly taking place in NY, then in Tangier, then in Interzone, where he encounters the real Benway and shoots his wife (again).
All I have to say is that I wish he would have filmed the scene in the book with the gym and the condoms everywhere and the mugwamp jism and the hangings and what have you.
The hospital break out would have been good too.
I wanted to love this film so much when it was released; but even on first seeing it in the theater, I found it strangely…rational…and came away disappointed. Let’s recall that Cronenberg had made the viscous, creepy, kinky, irrational Videodrome like, eight years before.
Michael Zelniker as the Ginsberg character was so wrong it was almost funny (almost); and the actual, anything-goes Kerouac was nowhere to be seen. Julian Sands as what Justin called the Bad Homo is for me the index of the film’s bad faith, and lost me to the film even on first viewing. The forbearance from true adaptation of Burroughs (who was militantly everything , like Bukowski just in-your-face), and the neurotic substitution-by-symbols Cronenberg performs here makes the film too perverse to hold up. I can’t help but think of the burlesque Charlie Kaufman made of The Orchid Thief in Adaptation, and appreciate how well Kaufman re-formed a literary source with which he wasn’t really comfortable…
If you’re hungry for art more evocative of Burroughs, I’d like to recommend to any & all the track by Matmos called “Rag For William S. Burroughs” (off of The Rose Has Teeth In the Mouth of the Beast).
T
“The Judge : ‘Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh … assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release.’
‘That one should stand in an aquarium,’ says the arresting officer.
The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anaesthesizes his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Commissioner and destroyed with a flame thrower — the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels."
Naked Lunch
A ghost in daylight on a crowded street.
I’m a major WSB head. I like this film on its terms (how can I not? the art design is fantastic. the acting is surreal and yet all the characters lock into the same tone, so it feels believable, natural even— at least in terms of its own parenthesis. And the soundtrack’s by Ornette Coleman. And it quotes T S Monk, masterfully. And so on…)
—but the film didn’t come close to doing the text any justice. Cronenberg I know has a deep abiding love for the work and thought of WSB, but his sensibility plays ultimately in this case to the child nightmare puppet show, to the paranoid fantasist, and not the cold blooded ultra-realist that breathes righteous self-indignation between every line of the cut-up that is NAKED LUNCH.
On paper Croney looks like the right man for the job. In practice? I don’t know. My impression is that he was afraid of the material he so admires, and opted for a compromise between his world and Burroughs, and this ultimately makes for a no man’s land of cowed respect and polite handjobs.
Thoughts?
on Burroughs,
on the book,
on the film,
on the principle of cut-up (and its implications for film editing),
or mugwamp jism
or other black powders ground from the bodies of aquatic Brazilian centipedes?