Naked Lunch
I first laid eyes upon the movie Naked Lunch while wandering through a video store late one night in Japan. Why I was in Japan sporting two rows of stitches in my face isn’t important, but there I was looking for a video to watch whilst lost and stranded in a foreign land when I happened upon a bin of used VHS movies. Casually pushing around the chaotic jumble of Japanese packaging looking for anything resembling an english film I spied an eerie alien face peeking through the suffocating pile of torn cellophane and crushed blunted corners of cardboard packaging. Extracting it from its analog tomb I had in my grasp an english version of the movie Naked Lunch. What this movie was doing in a nondescript store on a quiet street in Morioka I couldn’t say, but I held in my hands a cheap english movie in a strange land, and for that I was grateful. It was something I could watch in my phone booth sized hotel room to help me pass the time while I figured out how the heck I was going to get back to America without a passport.
Man, what a mind frack this movie was to my then twenty-year-old mind. Having read Junky I was familiar with William S. Burroughs, but I wasn’t familiar with David Cronenberg and how warped his imagination was. I had to pause the movie and take a breather when the orgasmic talking insect typewriters began to verbally rape the protagonist of the film.
Since then I’ve come to appreciate David Cronenberg and his version of Burroughs’ unfilmable novel Naked Lunch. I can’t imagine anyone other than Robocop playing the bug poison addicted fugitive. Peter Weller pulled off an amazing Bill Lee (Burroughs’ real-life alter ego)…and kudos go out to the lactating alien, without whom this movie would be but a shadow of its glorious self.
I’ve since purchased three different versions of this film (and if it ever comes out on blu-ray it’ll be four), the last of which happens to be a Criterion release. I’ve scanned a few pages from the included booklet for your amusement. I would like to recommend this film, but that’s difficult to do because I know some people simply would not be able to handle the notorious weirdness that Croenberg is infamous for. If you can handle Videodrome and the much tamer eXistenZ (both of which are amazing films), then I think you’re ready for a screening of the sublimely twisted Naked Lunch.
Again and as always, click the images to embiggen…
