Digesting a Naked Lunch

Lay off of the bug powder... - Courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

PREFACE
Before launching into my review of Naked Lunch, I’d like to briefly mention the cultural “phenom” called Jersey Shore. I stumbled across this on MTV yesterday and thought I’d give it a look since it’s garnered so much press. Have to say that it was a total waste of time. It was 30 minutes of overly tanned, tattooed 20-somethings swearing at each other. Ronnie was breaking up with Sammie “Sweetheart”, and his total dialog had to be bleeped as he threw her bed and belongings on to the porch. Sammie crouched and cried dramatically when she saw what he’d done. Rivers of mascara flowed, and mingled with the over-applied lip gloss. Every person on the show is a ham who emotes dramatically to the camera every few minutes, seeking audience approval. Jersey Shore is so very bad that it might almost qualify as camp humor – something to watch and laugh at with friends. I won’t give this show any more coverage because it doesn’t even deserve as much as I just gave it. Let’s proceed to the weightier matter of Naked Lunch…

NAKED LUNCH
Being in my middle age, I’ve seen many strange movies in my day. I didn’t think you could really top the coprophagy of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos or the bizarre blue box antics shown in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Imagine my surprise today, when I happened upon Netflix' offering of Naked Lunch -- David Cronenberg’s ambitious 1991 film adaptation of William Burroughs’ famous 1959 novel. I thought that “psycho-sexual” surreality had to be a byproduct of the 1960’s mind-expansion era. It seems that Burroughs cornered everyone, decades earlier with his bizarre, semi-autobiographical “drugalogue“.

Let me speak to a couple of things right at the outset… The book Naked Lunch is so non-linear, strange and impressionistic there is no sane way to capture its essence in a movie. Some in the literati world even figure Burroughs was schizophrenic -- his “rants” couldn’t translate to celluloid. Cronenberg added a rational, almost “film noire” structure to the story making it flow from beginning to end, and he made it a sort of symbolic telling of Burroughs’ life. The story involves giant, talking insects, a conspiracy of intelligent centipedes, typewriters that can morph into cockroaches, and people who ingest exterminators’ bug powder like cocaine. I won’t try to tie all of this together intelligibly -- as I watched the movie I assumed that much of the weirdness was the hallucination from a drug ingestion in an early scene.

When I looked at Burroughs’ life story, I was totally surprised to find that much of the weirdness was true! Burroughs was something of a spoiled rich boy, who became addicted to drugs in the late 40’s before it was “cool”. Much of his writing was autobiographical in nature. He was also an out-of-the-closet gay man in an era where very few Men of Arts (at least in America) were bold enough to do that. He was friends with two other renegade writers of the time -- Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department, Burroughs really did kill a woman in a gun accident. He really did travel to North Africa and other exotic locales in pursuit of drugs. He really did cavort with gay Germans, who were running from the Nazis. He also did work as an insect exterminator very briefly as a young man. If he had committed his history to paper without the insect imagery, it still would’ve been incredibly strange.

What might we make of the book or the film in 2011? The material is so radioactive, that it remains controversial to this day. The movie has very strong sexual imagery -- talking anuses, giant vaginal-looking orifices, and marauding penises. It has S&M scenes as well as centipedes engaged in an act which is a cross between sex and cannibalism (with a human). It twice shows the main character shooting his wife in the forehead (deliberately?, accidentally?). Apparently the movie has actually softened and quieted the sex and violence themes that permeated the pages of the book.

I did an earlier blog about Marquis de Sade -- I concluded that he was a brilliant, albeit very disturbed man. I have to likewise conclude that Burroughs inhabited a bleak, nightmarish landscape. He’s said to have hated insects, which may have much to do with their prevalence in his book. During his drug forays, and even between, he must’ve felt the unholy presence of creepy, crawly things that unsettle the soul. I hope on a more personal (and less literary) note that Naked Lunch was not a final, real summation of Burroughs' complete life.

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