Naked lunch (1991)

As much as films about Artists and Creativity tend to irritate and bore me – DAMN IT, Naked Lunch is a funny, disturbing film, one of the fewest films about "creativity" I can actually stand. Clearly, I have a thing for perversely talking typewriters. Even though I don’t like all of his films, David Cronenberg’s interest in metamorphoses and corporeality tend to make for good movies.  As you know, the film is based on Burroughs’s famous novel. Our hero is William Lee, exterminator. We learn that the powder that kills the bugs is not only good for that particular purpose – Will and his wife use the powder as a drug. At a drunken party, they play the Wilhelm Tell game. Will aims a gun at an object on his wife’s head, accidentally killing her. William is approached by a giant bug. We learn about “Interzone”, some kind of North African country. William goes there – or is that where his druggy hallucinations take him – to write some kind of report. Under the influence of drugs, he starts to write a novel. The typewriter he uses is not a dead tool. It’s a communicating creature. So – there we are, in a strange country, where American men (and some women) hunt boy toys, where eerie talking bugs lurk around the corner, and where there is a scheming corporation that William is destined to get in contact with. Nothing is quite what it seems here. Naked lunch builds layers and layers of dread and paranoia. But it does so humorously, almost gently. Even some of the grotesque machine-bugs are gentle. That I have no idea what this is all about doesn’t worry me one bit. I wasn’t really looking for hints about Burroughs’s life and pals. I enjoyed Naked lunch immensely. Even the slightly predictable free jazz soundtrack works just marvelously. I also like the sleazy feel of the sets and the brown desaturated color scale of the cinematography. Every little detail of Naked lunch is just right, even the cheesiest bit of quasi-sexual (always very queer) imagery (you see some literary eroticism going on here … for sure). Sleazy entertainment! "Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to."