Naked Lunch [DVD] [1992]

Like many previous Cronenberg outings 'Naked Lunch' deals with ideas on how by affecting the body, you alter your reality. In fact there probably wasn't a better director around who could so accurately evoke Burroughs visions.

Although 'Interzone' is set in Tangiers, the film crew had to shoot all the interiors in Toronto as North Africa was off limits during the first Gulf War. Films about writers usually involve a static quality where the writer spends a lot of their time in front of the typewriter. Cronenberg has made his writer live the hallucinatory situations that made him put pen to paper. 'Interzone' becomes William Lee's hallucinatory state of mind, where his writings are not just musings on past events, but 'reports' on everything he sees and experiences around him at that moment. Like Max Renn in 'Videodrome', Cronenberg sees Lee's imagination as a disease, as a mind constantly 'on', unable to turn off the constant stream of images that prevades his reality.

Cronenberg totally reshaped the original book for the screen, most noticably in playing down the homosexual aspects of the original novel. The 'bug powder' and the black stuff given to Lee by Dr. Benway were used as a euphamism for drugs. Obvious references to coke, heroin and crack weren't used so that there wouldn't be a 'Just Say No' campaign against the film. Although even if named drugs were overtly mentioned, it's difficult to see a mainstream audience coming to a movie like this. 'Naked Lunch' is unlike any movie you've seen before or anyone you're likely to see hence and for that reason alone, it's worth the admission price.

Cronenberg at his best - as usual full of interesting ideas and excellent actors. He sure knows how to make a film.

This is a good but not a great version of the book simply because few producers could've got away with a film of such a faggy,druggy,repulsive book as the Naked Lunch but it's also true that the director is creatively enough on the cult writers wavelength to've hybridized the literary with the kinematographic,having imaginatively metabolized Burroughs own fiction as a fan himself to produce this mulatto creation,the film of THE NAKED LUNCH.

As such,there's no need to think the film a strict translation of a book and not least because of the directors own input of talking insect typewriters and Julian sands character but because it is more brazenly biographical than Burroughs own book/s-the mood of the film is slightly Genet,very Giger,a tad Hammer,a wee bit Thompson,a mite Bladerunner and Ortonish and very Weimar-oddly enough it has some quite witty moments not least because of Wellers fab deadpan performance...he is the star,as the writers substitute but all the actors are great and Sands once again,the underrated man.

The film is a good and gross insight into a pot/post-war Yippy-Beat outsider mindset that fuellled the sleazy rise of the sixties bourgeois revolutionaries generation,say,Clinton,into power within the ZOG mafia who have now destroyed western civilisation from within and become the rabbinical persecutors and Grand Inquisitors of everyone not brazenly gay,(Ginsburg)Yiddish(Kafka,'Jackdaw',another Jewish writer,of the Metamorphosis,is namechecked in the screenplay)or druggy or acceptable in a long list of alleged minorities et cetera-the film ist zweifellos entartete kunst und Kultur Bolschewistisch and not one tovarish Stalin would enjoy,either,as a product of western decadence but certes,it is not as ehrful as his The Fly,perhaps the grossest film ever.

On the commentary,Cronenburg admits the ravishment of the gigolo scene could've been somewhat better and I remove one star for this alone as the Henson studio or stopframe might've given a better effect and personally,I'm not a purist when directors lack the budget or technology to make the film they would've wanted to so this scene would be better computer generated as it looks a tad mediaeval mummer show...I approve of the enhancement of the Devil Rides Out special effects on Blu-ray and I haven't seen them and think all monochrome films should be colourised at least as a choice
.
The dvd itself as chronic entertainment comes in at just under 5 hours with a documentary,intervue,trailer,photo gallery and commentary and some irrelevant opportunist trailers-read the book for a comparison but the book is the same modernist nihilism of the kind the film more or less tones down and which righteous Liberals love to wallow in,masochistically.