Critics reviews

The narrative allows Cronenberg to consider Burroughs' life and work in multiple contexts, switching between perspectives in a manner akin to Burroughs' free-form prose. Burroughs emerges as a complex figure, a man torn between multiple identities; in this regard, he's truly Cronenbergian, a mysterious entity even to himself. NAKED LUNCH is also very funny and features some excellent showboating from Judy Davis, Roy Scheider, and the puppeteers behind the strange creatures.

The problem with films about the Beat generation is that so few are genuinely transgressive. But Naked Lunch is a different beast altogether... Rather than attempting to adapt the book in a literal sense, Cronenberg treated Burroughs’ schizoid prose as a secondary source. He gave it structure, but it remains essentially a bizarre work.

Cronenberg is admirably committed to keeping the viewer on the back foot, and crafts a dense, sardonic stew in which the constant slippage between different levels of hallucination—there is no "reality" here—is barely perceptible. Horribly sweaty close-ups, repugnant sexual imagery, and squalling, epigrammatic jazz blasts from the Ornette Coleman trio complete the package.

The film marries Cronenberg's renowned on-set improvisation with what amounts to a miraculous balancing act between the cinematic and the literary, fiction and nonfiction, creative and destructive urges, and even Cronenberg and Burroughs's dueling sexualities. Here, the director's trademark obsessions aid in maximizing the spirit of Burroughs's eponymous, "unfilmable" novel.

Burroughs purists may be disappointed, but this dark distillation of the novel's themes gets closer to its essence than any 'straight' adaptation could hope to do.

To see Naked Lunch is to ponder anew the connection between Burroughs and Poe (or between their interpreters Cronenberg and Roger Corman). Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer. There's never been a pithier definition of the artist's relation to art than Bill Lee's remark that he's addicted to something that doesn't exist.

Jim Isaacs's creatures are remarkable, as is the film - unique, disturbing, wicked. It loses its way in the web of its own imaginings, but remains, for all that, a paraorgasmic experience.

For the most part this is a reductive and messy riff on the novel's exploration of addiction as a control system... Provocative, but never as clever as it thinks it is, Cronenberg's film is ultimately a misfire.

Naked Lunch has its icky moments, but overall it is a fully certified art film, slow and reflective. The director's control over performances, images and an indelible brand of sick, ironic humour has never been more subtle or masterful. Yet Naked Lunch is also an elusive film. At times, it seems as if Cronenberg is determined to capture the banality and monotony of a junkie's inglorious existence.

I yield to no one in my admiration for the second edition of Naked Lunch. It may not be politically correct, but neither is War and Peace (as Tolstoy, in his subsequent born-again decrepitude, was the first to admit). Neither, for that matter, is David Cronenberg's highly transgressive and subjective film adaptation of Naked Lunch, which may well be the most troubling and ravishing head movie since Eraserhead.

[Naked Lunch] feels like what it is -- a Canadian eulogy to a Burroughs novel... It has been uttered more than once that Cronenberg is the only director who could have done this movie (adaptations have been attempted and abandoned before). But, if anything, his college-try efforts prove that no one should do it.

While I admired [Naked Lunch] in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy.