In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
Who else but David Cronenberg could turn William Burroughs’ near-impenetrable, paranoid, junk-addled literary masterpiece into a work of cinema?
The 1959 publication (and subsequent obscenity trial) of Naked Lunch the novel was a landmark for freedom of expression in the United States. A series of vignettes with no narrative order, in which Burroughs waxes lyrical about life as a beat, erudite, sexually ambivalent junkie from New York to Tangiers, Naked Lunch treats the concept of narrative with much the same disdain as Burroughs treated his veins.
Cronenberg somehow manages to rearrange these stream-of-consciousness scenes around a frame of autobiographical anecdotes from Burroughs’ real life, creating something approaching a comprehensible plot and peppering it with plenty of his penchant for interchangeable realities and the grotesque.
Bill Lee (played impressively by a poker-faced Peter Weller) is an exterminator who develops an unfortunate addiction to his yellow bug powder – it’s a very Kafka-high, his wife Joan says, “It makes you feel like a bug.” The pair end up doing so much bug powder with their friends Hank and Martin (avatars for Kerouac and Ginsberg) that they can kill cockroaches with their breath. It all starts to go wrong, though, when Lee is contacted by a giant cockroach that speaks from an anus-like aperture in its back, claiming to be an agent from ‘Interzone’, and ordering Lee to kill his wife.
When Lee does in fact accidentally shoot his wife (a dark incident culled from Burroughs’ real life) he flees to Interzone (Tangiers), where he falls in with the expat playboys and girls and develops an even more crippling addiction to the black meat of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. The giant bug hallucinations and conspiracy theories persist, but are they a function of his drug addiction, or actually real?
Burroughs’ surreal metaphors for homosexuality, hard drugs and addiction synch perfectly with Cronenberg’s love for nightmarish creations, and the story gives him the chance to create some truly weird models that graphically evoke the themes running through Burroughs’ writing – typewriters that turn into bugs or humping severed human torsos, hideous Mugwumps and talking anuses. In short, Naked Lunch is a movie that leaves you feeling in need of strong intravenous opiates, at the same time as it cleverly infers the slide towards inhumanity of unbounded heroin addiction.
- Nick Jarvis
“It can be forgiven its acolyte's soul, for it is willing...to confront Burroughs' signature themes of addiction and control, and to meld them into... an evocation of the master.” Philip Martin - Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.