Naked Lunch (1991)

"Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to".

A few days ago, I landed a copy of The Criterion Collection edition of David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. I've been an admirer of the director since his work on eXistenZ and The Fly. He is my other Terry Gilliam. Great concepts, great execution and lots of visual flair. As for William Burroughs, I've tried (unsuccessfully) many times to get a copy of The Naked Lunch. For four years, I looked and looked. The library of the university I used to go to has a most impressive collection of fiction. The book is listed in the library catalogue but for some reason, it has mysteriously disappeared from the shelves. I did, however, find Junky, and ever since developed an appreciation for drug-themed literature.

Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991) is a metaphoric comment on the mysterious writing experience. William Lee (Peter Weller) is an ex-junkie who has come clean and found his profession as a bug exterminator. That is, only until he sees his wife, Joan (Judy Davis), shooting up a syringe full of bug powder or pyrethrum. "A Kafka high", she tells him, "You feel like a bug". It is safe to say that after this scene, only the third in the film, nothing on screen and in Cronenberg's world can be considered as happening in "reality" any longer. The disjuncture is faintly obvious at first. At the police station, for example, where Bill is brought after being arrested for possession of narcotics, we meet the first product of his imagination. It is a gigantic talking bug with a pouty pink anus for a mouth and the impossibility of its existence allows us to dismiss it as a hallucination.

But is it? Reality rapidly spirals out of control once the Interzone, Inc. conspiracy is unveiled. Bill is convinced that his wife is an agent sent to kill him and murders her in a William Tell routine (i.e, a whisky glass on her head, a pistol in his hand, shot fired, glass unbroken). Due to overwhelming guilt, he falls back into his old habit and into an arabesque world from which he emerges only once, when his friends discover him wondering in the streets with a pillowcase full of a candy shop of drugs.

I mentioned earlier that this is a film involved with the writing experience. In this one moment of semi-sobriety, Bill is read a few lines of a novel he has apparently been writing in his apartment throughout his drug-induced hallucinations. It is significant that Bill fails to recognize the words as his own. This raises some important questions about the issue of ownership in relation to content. In his case, writing under the influence made him forget what he was doing, his writing was not a conscious act even though it has the clarity and linearity of a conscious act. Who owns it? Bill, of course, disclaims ownership of this New Jersey story. His brain is fried and his wires are reconfigured into Interzonal laws.

On one hand is a beautiful piece of writing and on the other, the weak, addicted mind that produced it. The dichotomy between the two is such a sublime comment on literature and their authors. Writing is assumed to be a noble profession because it is judged by its output (Ulysses, Homer, The Divine Comedy). Literature is instrumental in creating and recording culture and history. It is assumed that the mind that writes it, that gives birth to it, is equally as noble and refined. Yet Cronenberg's adaptation shows us another truth: that it is capable of living in and thinking of the greatest filth as well, that it can be a polluted gutter teeming with all variety of insects.

The bug references are not only a symbol of mental decay and degredation, they are also one of the many elements in the film that are a tribute to Kafka. After shooting a load of insecticide into her breast, Joan tells her husband that it's "a Kafka high. You feel like a bug", a clear reference to The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a gigantic insect. There are a plentitude of Kafkaesque sequences as well. Bill is arrested for a crime but when he escapes the prison, no one makes any inquiries into his disappearance. Moreover, we are never told exactly why he was arrested and there are no official proceedings. Additionally, if we accept his murder of Joan as a real event, which it likely was because there was a witness, and not another product of his hallucinatory voyages into the unknown recesses of his mind, then the fact that we do not see any lawful consequences is extremely bizzare. This is the complete opposite of Kafka's approach although it has a similar disconcerting effect on the audience/reader. Kafka's trick is to produce dire consequences but he always remains elusive on the cause. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa is transformed into a bug but we never know why. In The Trial, Josef K. is hunted and killed for an unexplained crime that he did not commit. In The Castle, the main protagonist never reaches the castle and dies trying to manoeuver through bureaucratic labyrinths. In Cronenberg's universe, a law-transgressive crime has been committed but it has no lawful consequence. We know Bill has not been caught because the Interzone still exists, its story is ongoing.

The film is packed within three bubbles. In the inner bubble are the pyrethrum-inspired visions of giant centipedes and bugs, squirting typewriters, doppelgangers, homosexuals, uninhibited sexual activity, a conspiracy about an illegal drug market and Bill's tangled involvement in this outlandish, alien world. The middle bubble is more subtle, characterized by the sort of reality one observes of in the first five scenes. Of this world, of New York City but with pink elephants and flying pigs. In the outermost layer is a world that runs on a complete breakdown of the laws of cause and effect. Even outside the drug experience, Cronenberg's world spins on some disconcerting, disorienting point of reference which is always unrecognizable, unseeable.