Naked Lunch (1991): a special edition big enough to feed anyone’s addiction (Review)

One of the great things about Arrow Video’s Blu-Ray special edition of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is that the package does the same thing as the film: it uses cutting-edge technology to immerse you in the stranger corners of a now-lost era. In Cronenberg’s case, that meant using Chris Walas’s extraordinary puppets and animatronics to bring the work of William S Burroughs, the most savagely original of the Beat Generation writers, to life. In the case of the Arrow disc, it means using a 4K restoration and two discs’ worth of mostly new bonus features to take you back to a time which, while more recent, seems even more distant: a time when something as weird as Naked Lunch could be an event movie.

Producer Jeremy Thomas was convinced that the film could be marketed as an effects movie for adults: all the lavish creature effects and foreign location shoots of a Star Wars instalment applied to a notoriously difficult work of experimental literature. The novel still had enough outlaw cool for the film adaptation to be a more commercial proposition than it might seem. The obscenity trials it faced in the 1960s were still a relatively fresh memory, and Burroughs himself became a strange kind of celebrity, cameoing in Gus van Sant films, appearing in U2 videos and recording a song with REM. There was a tie-in book published and a behind-the-scenes documentary, the latter of which – Chris Rodley’s Naked Making Lunch – appears in the extras here. It was even the subject of a joke on The Simpsons, with a nauseated Nelson Muntz staggering out of a screening and declaring “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title”.

Given all this, it’s besides the point that the film flopped. What mattered is that a novel primarily famous for being supposedly obscene and unreadable was given a lavish film adaptation. And lavish is the operative word. Cronenberg’s technical film-making skills had come a long way since his low-budget early work, but the luridly colourful neo-noir stylings of Naked Lunch were still a surprise. At the start of the film, the hero (and Burroughs stand-in) Bill Lee lives with his doomed wife Joan in an apartment whose sickly green and yellow colouration practically infects everyone who steps inside it. This is the part of the film before things get weird. Once Lee gets out to “Interzone”, the Moroccan freeport at the heart of the novel’s wilfully incomprehensible conspiracy plot, the film becomes even more visually ambitious. Thomas’s plans for extensive foreign location shooting in North Africa and the Middle East had been stymied by the first Gulf War, but this worked to the film’s advantage. Interzone became what it always should have been, a huge city of the mind, constructed in Toronto warehouses and bearing only a slight, nagging resemblance to any real place.

Many of the film’s indelible guest performances appear in Interzone. The fact that Julian Sands is, at the time of writing, still missing after he didn’t return from a Californian hike makes his performance as Cloquet somewhat poignant. But even without this, it’s one of Sands’s most enjoyable roles, so louche and eccentric that Cloquet’s eye-popping secret identity actually makes a certain kind of sense. There’s also Ian Holm and Judy Davis as the Frosts, two ex-pats loosely inspired by Paul and Joan Bowles, who Burroughs had met in Tangier. Thomas had recently produced an adaptation of Paul’s novel The Sheltering Sky, but he still allowed Cronenberg to treat these characters as harshly as the plot required. Paul becomes Tom Frost, a reality-bending agent of the Interzone drug trafficking conspiracy, who attempts to corrupt Bill by giving him a different sentient insectoid typewriter than the one that gives him instructions. (Writing about Naked Lunch means you have to quickly get used to writing sentences like this) Joan, meanwhile, becomes a reincarnation of Bill Lee’s own wife, who he has already killed in a “William Tell routine” gone wrong, and who his controllers urge him to kill again, as “Women aren’t human, Bill!”

Naked Lunch forms a neat diptych with Cronenberg’s previous film Dead Ringers as an analysis of misogyny, and like the previous film it was accused of being misogynistic. Considering these films were made at the same time Joe Esterhasz was Hollywood’s hottest screenwriter, this now seems like shooting the messenger: those commercial pictures made misogyny look like a cool lifestyle choice, whereas Peter Weller’s stressed, haunted Bill Lee is clearly leading the kind of life no-one can envy. Yet Burroughs’s novel is still no-one’s friend. It is possible to laugh at those 1960s busybodies who wanted the book banned for its drug content, or its homoerotic content, while still being uneasy about its eroticisation of “boys” and its treatment of North Africa as a sexual playground for Westerners. Part of the value of the book is that it contains something to rattle every possible reader.

Cronenberg, for perhaps the only time in his career, toned it down, famously remarking that a faithful version of Naked Lunch would “cost $400-500 million and be banned in every country in the world”. He also alienated two significant parts of the Burroughs fandom. Antony Balch, who had attempted to make a low-budget version of Naked Lunch in the 1960s, accused Cronenberg of not understanding the book, particularly its treatment of drug addiction. While it would be futile to deny that drugs are a central theme of Burroughs’s work, Cronenberg’s film looks fresher for avoiding the cliches of heroin chic. The most baleful part of Burroughs’s legacy is all those wannabe writers over the decades who thought that, just because they were shooting up, they could produce something as good as Cities of the Red Night. Naked Lunch is not a film for them. The drugs depicted are all fictional, ranging from the almost-realistic to the completely outrageous, and this allows Cronenberg to refocus his attention on how Naked Lunch uses addiction as a metaphor. Dr. Benway, the shadowy manipulator played here by Roy Scheider, is a drug pusher in the novel, but he’s also pushing all the other things we’re addicted to: consumerism, sex, health faddism, and the American dream. Cronenberg’s film reduces Benway to a memorable extended cameo but the message still comes through loud and clear, particularly in Weller’s haunted, obsessive performance.

That’s the drug crowd seen to; the film’s LGBTQ+ content is another matter. It is quite remarkable that all of Cronenberg’s 1990s films are queer in some way: this would be unusual for a straight director today, let alone one working at a time when Hollywood was worried Philadelphia would be too much for Middle America. Remarkable, too, that he persuaded Peter Weller to drop out of Robocop 3 to snuggle with a beautiful young Arab man in his imaginary Tangiers. Most of the book’s sexuality, though, is downplayed, perhaps because of its sadism as much as its homoeroticism. Responding to those who accused him of “heterosexualising” Naked Lunch, Cronenberg pointed out that Burroughs himself was uncertain about his sexuality at the time of writing, that he claimed in letters to friends that the book’s explicit gay sex had somehow vented that part of his personality. This obviously didn’t happen, and the film’s Bill Lee is similarly delusional. His belief that he is merely feigning homosexuality as cover to get close to Joan Frost is clearly delusional, not least because he got the idea from the back-mounted talking sphincter of a huge beetle that used to be his typewriter. Frankly, it’s hard to trust anything that thing says at all.

Cronenberg’s fusion of Burroughs’s biography with his fiction was perhaps necessary to give the book some kind of narrative backbone. It also opens up a major pitfall: for a while, you worry that this notoriously nihilistic novel is about to turn into a coming-of-age tale. Is it really going to end with Bill Lee finding his artistic voice and being honest about his sexuality? In the end, the answer is no. Lee moves from being a timid insect exterminator to the man who wrote Naked Lunch – even the name “Bill Lee” is a pseudonym Burroughs used for his earliest work – and for the first time in biopic history, there is no sense of catharsis or achievement about this. Not surprising, when you consider how much trouble writing Naked Lunch got Burroughs into. It’s a cold film, even by Cronenberg’s standards, and its length – nearly two hours, very unusual for this director – can drag a little. But it’s impossible not to be impressed by it.

As with the film, so with the disc. Extras like a conversation with Peter Weller or Tony Rayns talking about Burroughs are appetising enough, particularly when you consider how rarely Weller grants interviews these days. They become actively irresistible when you discover they’re both a whole hour long – and while other conversations with Thomas and Walas aren’t that expansive, they’re no less rich in insight. There is also the aforementioned Naked Making Lunch documentary, an excellent visual essay by David Cairns which, among other things, suggests Cronenberg’s abandoned script for Total Recall might have influenced his structure for Naked Lunch, and two separate commentaries. The first is with Cronenberg, who proves as eloquent, insightful and analytical about his own work as ever. The second is with screenwriter Graham Duff and Jack Sargeant, author of Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. Most of the interviews are brand new, and I haven’t scratched the surface of them in this paragraph: cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and composer Howard Shore are also interviewed, alongside a special featurette on Shore’s Ornette Coleman-assisted score. There’s also a booklet with new writing from Sargeant and Vanessa Morgan, plus archive writing from Chris Rodley and Cronenberg himself; enough to feed anyone’s addiction to facts about this strange, unique film.

Graham’s Archive: Naked Lunch