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I've read that the movie Naked Lunch (1991) is - not - an adaption of William S. Burroughs novel by the same name. Rather it is part biographical, part novel and part Burroughs drug-induced writing process.
There might be some spoilers below. I've setup the plot without following it. Read at your own risk.
I haven't read the novel and, therefore, not being predisposed to expect any certain thing, I interpret the film as a first person hallucinogenic journey down a personal dark hellish hole filled with the paranoid notions of the author, William S. Burroughs....staggeringly wigged out on various mind altering substances while writing his novel Naked Lunch. (morphine, opium, pot, ?, etc.)
Director: David Cronenberg and staring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider and other notables of similar presence in the film industry of 1991.
format: DVD
Themes. Hard drug addiction
Atmosphere: surreal
Morals: Rated R for sex
Homosexuals abound.
The film's protagonist is William Lee, a struggling poet and a writer of fiction. Lee likes to hang out at the coffee bar with other struggling poets and writers also waiting to get published. *
To pay the rent and uh, buy more drugs Lee works for an exterminator and spends his working days making house calls to residences spraying his bug powder into the cracks and crevices where bugs hide. But things go awry when Lee runs out of bug powder in the middle of a job. Next we see 1-1/2 inch long roaches crawling out from the cracks in the wall to get away from the bug poison. This doesn't go well.
Lee's wife Joan (played by Judy Davis), has been getting into Lee's bug powder and getting high off it. Evidently, in this movie, bug powder is a very potent high and with addictive qualities much like heroin/morphine. That solves the mystery of where his bug powder has been going.
It gets weirder from there. Pretty soon Lee himself is getting into the bug powder. Evidently it is a pretty good high.
Typewriters are a theme. In the movie writers obsess over them. In an hallucination Lee's typewriter turns into a giant cockroach that speaks out of its ass hole to him. This continues to happen throughout the movie.
Homosexuals abound. All part of the atmosphere. Evidently Lee is somewhat ambivalent with regard to his own sexuality.
There is one transgender experience that involves a particularly dominant female character who zips down her outer skin to reveal a different character, then zips off -that- outer skin to reveal yet another character, a man. Pretty good special effects there.
For this viewer it was difficult to tell the hallucination from what's real. I'm tempted to consider that everything happening in the movie is just one long surreal drug induced nightmare,.... and that no one was actually killed. But there is room for doubt.
Anyway, I found the experience of watching this movie to be, at first hilarious if you can get past the amoral human behaviors , the ridiculous creatures, absurdities, etc. But then as the movie played on I was just waiting for the poor William Lee to wake up from this very strange dream.
I'm not sure how to rate this film. It is definitely not essential, unless you are looking to vicariously experience a drug induced hallucinogenic ride down into the hellscape of William S. Burroughs' strange mind.
* Burroughs was known to hang out with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In the early parts of the movie it is assumed that Burroughs (Lee) is meeting with Kerouac and Ginsberg at the coffee bar. And in another scene they are seen at Lee's apartment.
Anyone else seen this?
-Steve
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