‘Naked Lunch’: the movie David Cronenberg views as a “meditation on the artistic process”
Reality-bending Canadian director David Cronenberg has run the gamut from cerebral to squeamish. Not unlike one of his own characters, his career has undergone a steady yet uneasy transformation from the known into the unknown.
In Cronenberg’s case, the new flesh is the slightly more abstract and restrained tempo of his latter works, where outward body horror has been replaced with the terrors of the psychosocial; the literal James Woods chest vagina in Videodrome gone in place of the identity-stripping terror of celebrity pressure in Maps to the Stars.
In his gradual metamorphosis, Cronenberg delivered a chimeric middle period with both the grotesqueries of his early work and the clairvoyant intellect of recent films. In an era spanning from 1986’s The Fly to 1999’s eXistenZ, the king of body horror delivered perhaps his most artistically risky offerings.
He explored the boundaries of self with Jeff Goldblum’s Gregor Samsa act in The Fly and Jeremy Irons’ double role as twin gynaecologists in Dead Ringers. In Crash, M Butterfly, and eXistenZ, he depicts characters lost in shared delusion, rewriting the rules of social reality as a balm to uncared-for pains.
However, it’s in 1991’s Naked Lunch that Cronenberg most openly takes a clear-eyed look at the work of the creative and, in doing so, a look at himself. In conversation with Film Comment, Cronenberg called his adaptation of William S Burroughs’ surreal classic “a meditation on the artistic process”.
Perhaps the heart of that comes from the original book’s reputation as difficult to adapt. An anarchic soup of bizarre images and disconnected vignettes, Naked Lunch had historically resisted adaptation by the likes of Antony Balch, who dreamt of a Mick Jagger-led version.
However, the difficulty of turning the cut-up routines of Naked Lunch into a coherent narrative appeared to scare off most would-be adapters until Cronenberg stepped up to the plate with a solution. Instead of a straight filming of the page, he’d incorporate elements of Burroughs’ own life into the final product.
And so Cronenberg spliced together an unholy beast of a film, as much about the life of the Beat Generation’s grouchy uncle as it is about pesticides and talking typewriters. Burroughs had his own story worthy of depiction through Cronenberg’s filters; in Mexico City in 1951, he allegedly shot and killed his wife with a shotgun while drunkenly trying to aim at a highball glass balanced on her head.
This tragic moment set his life on the trajectory of drug abuse and neo-shamanic spontaneous writing that would make him a household name within the counterculture. Following the incident, he said he had been possessed by something called the ‘Ugly Spirit’, which could only be exorcised by the sorcery of cut-up writing.
So when Burroughs’ stand-in within the film – a Peter Weller freshly out of his RoboCop armour – shoots and kills his own wife, it sets him forth on a collision course with the terrible fate of becoming an artist. Cronenberg seems to almost equate this with death. When asked whether Naked Lunch eschewed the usual inevitable death many early Cronenbergian characters are resigned to, he compares the self-annihilation of characters like Goldblum’s fly-man with the prolonged self-assault Burroughs visited on his own psyche.
“The ordinary view of that is, this is a guy who’s trying to destroy himself with drugs. He’s hallucinating, he’s dangerous, he kills his wife accidentally and is hardly aware of it; this man is trying to commit suicide,” he said. “But we know that Burroughs is still alive and that his experiments with drugs have not killed him. So it’s your knowledge outside the film that can allow you to say that.”
Burroughs died just months after the interview, at the ripe age of 83. But it’s clear that Cronenberg saw death as just one of the myriad horrific changes a human can go through, and Naked Lunch remains arguably his best meditation on what it takes to create and what it takes to destroy.
