Mugwump Melange

NAKED LUNCH (1991)

MUGWUMP MELANGE

One constant in this world, it seems, is that every generation needs to be rebellious, to exorcise its angst, to find their way, and to endeavor to break away from the life style and traditions of their parents –and for that matter, society as a whole. I felt privileged to be influenced by two youth movements, the Beats in the 1950’s, and the hippies in the 1960’s. Actors like Marlon Brando in the late 40’s, and his disciple, James Dean, in the early 50’s, were certainly considered and labeled as rebels. They had a uniform –long greased back hair, tight clean white t-shirts, rolled shirt sleeves to the top of their biceps, jeans with thick black leather belts and rolled cuffs, motorcycle jackets, and engineer boots with steel-tipped toes. Elvis dug the look, and at first he adopted it too. But what I didn’t understand at 10 years old was that cats like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady had been very cool in the late 40’s, and all the rest of us were just catching aon. In 1947, actor Robert Mitchum was jailed for possession of marijuana. It was reported that he had been hanging around with a “bad” crowd of jazz musicians and poets and writers; some of them were even Negroes. Mitchum was not hurt by his short jail time. Actually his career became somewhat enhanced by his new bad boy image.

William S. Burroughs met Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr in 1943. Older than they were, he encouraged all of them to do drugs and to write, in that order. Burroughs has always been considered, then, the “Father of Beat”, the creative and moving force behind the whole Beat Generation. As a kid, I had been completely unaware of Burroughs drug abuse, the homosexuality, and the cruelty connected with the Beats. I had just responded to the rebellious spirit, the individuality, the costume –and how much it pissed off my parents.

“Butch,” my stepfather said to me in 1959,”You get such good grades in school –so why do you wear your hair shit-length and talk all the time about wanting to be a writer?”

William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather invented the adding machine. It was rumored that the family sold the company and mismanaged the wealth. Burroughs always contended that they were “comfortable, but far from rich.”
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After graduation, he lived in Chicago for a time, and then settled into New York City. In 1933, as a 19 year old during the Great Depression, he lived quite “comfortably” on a $200.00 a month trust fund. He became heavily involved in the New York gay subculture. He cruised lesbian dives, homosexual he-whore houses, the sordid bath houses, and piano bars –and he became immersed in the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground. In the late 1930’s, he almost killed a friend of his, Richard Stern, while playing with a loaded pistol. Burroughs was probably high at the time. Perhaps this was a significant indicator of both his profound arrogance and recklessness—and a bit of a foreshadowing of what would become a pivotal tragedy for him in the early 50’s.

Gary Kamyia wrote,” Burroughs was the 20th century drug culture’s Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenonologist of dread. He had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe—one as thoroughly rendered as Blake’s.”

In the late 30’s, he went to graduate school in Europe, and he lived in Vienna. It is said that he ran wild, naked, and nubile with the beautiful boys of the Baths. While there, he did meet a woman, one Ilse Klapper, who wanted and needed to escape Hitler. [Isn’t it an interesting sidebar to consider how comfortably Burroughs fit into the Austria of the Nazis, so ripe and rife with homosexuality, cruelty, and drugs?] He married Ilse, and brought her to New York City. He never really lived with her, but they remained friends. That one selfless act might have been the apex of Burroughs decency and conscience.

After Pearl Harbor, in 1941, in some odd throes of patriotic fervor, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army –but he was quickly discharged for “psychological reasons”; that’s what they called it in those days.

Burroughs once said,” I’m talking about a simiopath –the technical name for this disorder escapes me. It is a citizen who is convinced he is an ape, or some other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the United States Army –and a discharge cures it. And always remember in America, one has to be a deviant or die of boredom.”


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When he met Joan Vollmer Adams in 1944, she had been married briefly to a young G.I., and had a young daughter. She became part of the Beat Posse. They were all attending Columbia University. Lucian Carr, whom she was sleeping with, introduced her to Burroughs. Joan was addicted to Benzedrine early on. Depending on the source, Burroughs just lived with her as his common-law wife, or he married her. He wrote a short novel in 1946 in collaboration with Jack Kerouac called, AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS. It was in the style of Dashiell Hammett. Publishers were not impressed, and rejected it. Some copies of that manuscript exist today. It was not a very good book I guess. Joan and William had a son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., and they hauled the two kids around with them on their adventures.

Burroughs then decided to become a real outlaw. He would buy stolen goods –mostly drugs, and peddle them at a profit—while still providing for their own growing addictions. They had several brushes with the law. He was not a crafty criminal. So they moved to New Orleans, then Texas, and then Mexico City, where drugs were easily attainable.

While in Mexico, on September 6, 1951, he accidentally killed his wife. While at the apartment of some drug dealers, he attempted a William Tell routine (which I guess they had done successfully several times in the past), and tragically missed the water glass on top of her head and shot her in the forehead. He was tried for murder in a Mexican court, and in accordance with their judicial system, he spent all of 13 days in jail for his heinous crime.

Burroughs once said,” I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death. I live with the constant threat of possession, for control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the Invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have no choice except to write my way out; never forgetting, of course, that language is a virus from outer space.”

After Joan’s death, his parents took Billy, Jr. to their home in Florida. His sad life is the subject of a whole other essay. Joan’s family took the step-daughter. So he left Mexico City and traveled to South America. He was on a junkie-quest, searching for a ghost drug called “yage”. While traveling in Ecuador and Peru, through the villages, towns, forests, mountains, valleys
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and jungles, he kept a steady stream of letters going to his pal, Allen Ginsberg. In 1963, they were all published in a book called THE YAGE LETTERS.

Burroughs was off to Africa next, settling into the Islamic port of Tangiers, Morocco –where drugs and homosexual companionship were very easily attainable. He stayed in Tangiers from 1954-1957. His steady boyfriend was named, Kiki. He began writing feverishly, filling notebooks and using reams of paper. He called the intense influx of verbiage, THE WORD HOARD. Ultimately, thanks to Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, that conglomerate of fact and fantasy was published as several books, like JUNKY, QUEER, EXTERMINATOR, and INTERZONE. With Carr and Ginsberg’s help, he published JUNKY in 1953.

In 1957, toward the end of Burroughs’s stay in Tangiers, Kerouac and Ginsberg paid him a visit. His writing was strewn everywhere. He walked on it, and spilled his meals on it. He might have even used some of it for toilet paper. They began the chore of gathering up the manuscript off the roach-ridden food-encrusted floor, and they attempted to put the pages into a semblance of order. Kerouac titled it NAKED LUNCH.

JUNKY and QUEER were somewhat conventional in style. NAKED LUNCH became his first foray into a full utilization of the “cut-up” technique in a pure non-linear style. The scenes and episodes were shoved together with little or no care as to narrative or through line.

Burroughs said,” Mr. Brion Gysin, who is both a painter and a writer, once said,” Writing is 50 years behind painting.” Why the gap? Because the painter can track and handle his medium, and the writer cannot. The writer does not yet know exactly what “words” are. He deals only with abstractions from the source point of words. The painter’s ability to manipulate his medium led to montage techniques 60 years ago. It is hoped that the extension of the cut-up and follow-up literary techniques will lead to the more precise verbal experiments, thus closing the gap and giving a whole new dimension to writing. These techniques can show the writer what words are –and put him in tactile communication with his medium. This in turn could lead to a precise science of words –and show how certain word combinations produce certain effects on the human nervous system.”

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He continued to work on the manuscript for NAKED LUNCH for two more years. He called it “a picaresque novel narrated by my alter-ego, William Lee.” He shared Carr, Kerouac, and Ginsberg’s “New Vision” –of the writer as outlaw; all working together to create “Literature of Risk.”
NAKED LUNCH was finally published in 1959 by the notorious OLYMPIA PRESS in Paris. It was published in America in 1962. It has been suggested that Burroughs predicted the Aids epidemic, liposuction, and the crack crisis. The book was very popular in Europe, but officially it was often banned. Some copies had to be done on underground presses, and then smuggled over borders. In the book there is a great steel dildo that he called, “Steely Dan” –which later became the name of a great 60’s rock & roll band. The landmark obscenity trial that came about in 1966, where the book was judged as “not obscene”, served to end literary censorship in America.

Norman Mailer wrote,” Bill Burroughs is the only American writer living today who might conceivably be possessed by genius.” Many critics, however, felt he was overrated. Burroughs was considered to be a novelist, poet, essayist, social critic, and spoken word performer. He often referred to all of his writing as “One vast book”.

Burroughs was quoted as saying,” I think the novelistic form is probably outmoded and that we may look forward perhaps to a future in which people do not read at all, or read only illustrated books and magazines –or some abbreviated form of reading matter. To compete with television and photo magazines, writers will have to develop more precise techniques producing the same effect on the reader as a lurid action photo.”

The first couple of pages of NAKED LUNCH set the tone for the rest of the book:

I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train –young good-looking, crew-cut Ivy league advertising exec-type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type that comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, calls the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing
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somebody in a white trench coat –trying to pass as a fag I guess) hits the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit with his left hand, right hand on his piece,” I think you dropped something, fella.” But the subway is moving.
“So long, flatfoot,” I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look into the fruit’s eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the 200 dollar shark-skin suit, the button down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying THE NEWS as a prop. “Only thing I read is LITTLE ABNER.”
“Ever see a hot shot, kid?” I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. A hot shot is a cap of poison junk sold to an addict for liquidation purposes. Usually it is strychnine, since it tastes and looks like junk. That’s the way we find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit –kid, it was tasty.
Recollect when I was traveling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi –we was working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigilante shows up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunk of tin on it, and a lariat strung over his shoulder.”

Dennis Cooper, writer, said,” Along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs helped make homosexuality seem cool and high brow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge.”

In the 1970’s, in New York City, Burroughs hung out with folks like Terry Southern, Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, and Susan Sontag. By the 1980’s, he was considered to be a counter-culture giant –everyone’s favorite freak, a ghost who walked. He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. The acknowledgement given to him in the credits at the end of Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER (1982) was for legal reasons only. Burroughs had written a screenplay with an identical title, and a completely different story line –but it was never put into production. Later, however, it was published in book form. In the Gus Van Sant film, DRUGSTORE COWBOY (1989), Burroughs appeared as a character based on him. Also in 1989, he appeared as Butler in the film BLOODHOUNDS ON BROADWAY, also with Matt Dillon.

HIGHLANDER director, Russell Mulcahey bought the rights to the Burroughs book, WILD BOYS in the early 80’s, planning to make a feature
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film. When that project fell through, he went on to use the book as a basis for the 1985 DURAN DURAN rock video of the same title. Burroughs was the “man in the barn” in TWISTER (1990). Also in 1990 he released a spoken word album, DEAD CITY RADIO, with musical back-up by the rock group, SONIC YOUTH. He collaborated with musician Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson to create THE BLACK RIDER –a play which opened at the Thalia Theater in Harrisbury, VA. in 1990 –to critical acclaim.

David Cronenberg’s film, NAKED LUNCH (1991) opened to good critical reviews. In 1991 Burroughs collaborated with the rock group R.E.M. on an album. He was also a good friend of rocker Kurt Cobain. He was slated to appear in NIRVANA’s rock video titled, HEART-SHAPED BOX, as Jesus Christ –but later backed out of the project. Some time later though, he did make an EP with Cobain called, THE PRIEST THEY CALLED HIM. Burroughs died in Lawrence, Kansas on August 2, 1997, of complications from the previous day’s heart attack. He lived to be 83 years old.

Rudyard Kipling once wrote,” Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

Roger Ebert of the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES wrote,” William S. Burroughs is one of the most pathetic figures in modern literature, his sadness made more poignant because it has been drawn out for so long. Burroughs comes across as a man who walks around with something wounded inside, something that hurts so much that his spirit simply shut down. He inhabits the madhouse of his mind, and he reacts to everything around him, real or imagined, in a cold detached way.”

Joe Pettit, Jr., of IMAGES JOURNAL wrote,” Antony Balch and Brion Gysin, longtime friends of Burroughs, admirably took on the challenge of translating NAKED LUNCH to a screenplay, but their production fell through due to lack of funding. Frank Zappa approached Burroughs about composing a musical version, but that never happened either. In 1984, David Cronenberg queried Burroughs making the movie, and the film took 7 years to come to fruition.”

Jack Kerouac certainly was a fairly successful writer in the 50’s-60’s. He considered himself to be an outlaw journalist, and he fancied himself to be a poet.
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From HAIKU

The smoke of old
Naval battles
Is gone.

The tree looks
Like a dog
Barking at Heaven.

I found my
Cat –one
Silent star.

50 miles from New York,
All alone in Nature,
The squirrel eating.

Chief Crazy Horse looks
North with tearful eyes –
The first snow falling.

From SAN FRANCISCO BLUES

San Francisco is too sad
Time, I can’t understand,
Fog, shrouds the hills in
Unshod feet so cold,
Pity the poor Pomo, St. Francis and the birds,
Fills black rooms with day,
Dayblack in the white windows
And gloom in the pain of pianos,
Shadows in the jazz age
Filing by; ladders of flippers,
Painter’s white bucket,
Funny 3 Stooges comedies
And fuzzy-headed Hero,
Moofle lip suck it all up
And wondered why
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The milk and cream of Heaven
Was writ in gold leaf
On a book –big eyes
For the world
The better to see –
And big lips for the word
And Buddahood
And Death.
Touch the cup to those sad lips,
Let the purple grape foam
In my gullet deep
Spread saccharine
And crimson carnadine
In my vine of veins
And shoot power
To my hand,
Belly, heart, and head;
This magic carpet
Arabian World
Will take us
Easeful zinging
Cross the Sky
Singing madrigals
To horizons of golden
Moment emptiness
Whither wence uncaring.

Allen Ginsberg was a successful poet, who fancied himself to be a novelist and essayist. His most famous poem was:

HOWL

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
Madness, starving hysterical naked,
Dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn,
Looking for an angry fix,
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
Connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery
Of night,
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Who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
Up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
Coldwater flats floating across the tops of cities
Contemplating jazz,
Who bared their brains in Heaven and under the El and
Saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement
Roofs illuminated,
Who passed through universities with radiant clear eyes
Hallucinating Arkansas and Blake light tragedy
Among the scholars of war,
Who were expelled from the academies for crazy
And publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
Skull,
Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear burning
Their money in wastebaskets and listening
To the terror through the wall,
Who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana fro New York,
Who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatorial their
Torsos night after night
With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
Alcohol and cock and endless balls,
Incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and
Lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Carrada and Paterson, illuminating all the
Motionless world of time between
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery,
Dawn’s wine drunkenness over the roof tops,
Storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
Blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
Vibrations in the roaring waiter dusks of Brooklyn,
Ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
Who chained themselves to subways for the endless
Ride from Battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine
Until the noise of wheels and children
Brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked
And battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
In the neon light of Zoo.
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Just reading Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs brought on a Beat fever, and seemed to stimulate some of my own latent beatnik creativity. Over lunch one day, while at the office, a blistering Beat poem crashed its way to the surface.

ALBATROSS ANEW: BITCH IN HEAT

Albatross,
What flotsam is this
Held carefully in your beak,
Falling abyss tenderly
And warm?
It appears to be
A high wild flower
With small breasts
And a tiny waist,
With nine bracelets chiming
Along a thin bony wrist, first
Peeking out of paisley puffed sleeves
Then clanking like demure box cars;
Whose minty soft breath caresses the small
Of my thick neck, swirling
Long locks into curly tangles;
Like a jeweled isle
Pouting small in a dark gray corner
Of the San Juans,
With only three trees still standing,
But deceptively beautifully solid with shores
Lashed hard by tall waves,
Turgid with nets and broken pieces
Of driftwood and computers, yes definitely
Female, fecund, smelling of fish,
Providing complex coitus with a tasseled cushion,
Steaming sex devoid of din and teeth,
Just hanging on for a ball-busting ride
On that bullock orgasmatron,
Tearing at the fabric of propriety
Like a sad rat chewing dead fingers
To the bone;
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Connected, you dig,
But not whole,
Fragmented like a Monet
Swirl of dot matrix,
Drenched deep in the sin of many colors,
Yet frightening, dude,
As the chilling screams of the innocent millions mingle
Into one horrific chorus
On the 6:00 News
Just before I came
To my senses and tried in vain
To see who the hell you actually were
Cradled in that musky brown beak,
A swallowed thing that still lives,
That I could kiss without lips
Leaving your vanilla essence in my hot mouth,
Startled by a flurry
As you flew without wings
To Atlantis,
And all I could in Christ’s world do
Was stand mute watching your contrail
Dissipate into husky mist,
And wait impatiently
For my own feathers
To sprout.

Glenn A. Buttkus March 2006

After seeing the film, NAKED LUNCH again, and after being immersed soul deep in Beat poetry, prose, and philosophy –one’s mind runs to those very few other movies that could be labeled as “Beat Films”.

The first one that came to mind was, BEAT (2000), from director Gary Walkow. Keifer Sutherland played William S. Burroughs, finding the purring fey beneath his normal actor’s macho and swagger. This was just prior to his success on television with his series, “24”, now in its fifth season, or day, depending on how you view it. I just read recently that he has signed a deal with 20th Century Fox to do three more seasons. Courtney Love played Joan Vollmer, and it easily was the best acting she had ever
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done. There was just one degree of separation for her from her former husband, Kurt Cobain and Burroughs himself. It is funny, the synchronicity of events, and the veiled connections of things. I did like her as Andy Kaufman’s girlfriend in MAN ON THE MOON (1999), with Jim Carrey, but she was better in BEAT. Ron Livingston played Allen Ginsberg, and he did a credible and sensitive job, just prior to his big break in the Spielberg mini-series, BAND OF BROTHERS (2001). Norman Reedus played the lothario Lucien Carr. Daniel Martinez played Jack Kerouac, and Kyle Secor played the doomed Dave Kammerer.

Another film was HEART BEAT (1980), directed by Jack Byrum, with John Heard as Jack Kerouac, Ray Sharkey as Allen Ginsberg, Nick Nolte as Neal Cassady, and Sissy Spacek as Carolyn Cassady. In addition film was THE LAST TIME I COMMITED SUICIDE (1997), directed by Stephen T. Kay, based on letters written by Neal Cassady –with the hunky Thomas Jane as Neal Cassady, Keannu Reeves as Harry, with Adrien Brody and Marg Helgenberger.

There was a bizarre film, CHAPPAQUA (1966), directed by Conrad Rooks, that kind of fits the mold as well. Jean-Louis Barrault played Dr. Benoit, a kind of Benway clone, William Burroughs played a character called Opium Jones, Allen Ginsberg played Messiah, and Ravi Shankar played the Sun God. This movie is worth a look just for its drugged-out weirdness and uniqueness. Added to this short list is a “short film” (30 minutes) called, PULL MY DAISY (1959), written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, directed by Robert Frank, and featuring Allen Ginsberg.

David Cronenberg said,” For six years I was faced with an almost insurmountable problem. To fully adapt the novel (NAKED LUNCH), it would have to be the mother of all epics. I would cost 400-500 million dollars if you wished to film it literally –and of course it would be banned in every country in the world. There could be no culture that could withstand such a film.”

David Paul Cronenberg was born in Toronto, Canada in 1943. Many label him as “Deprave” Cronenberg, I think because of his courageous tendency to reach into the dark and squeamish places with his horrific and creepy cinematic imagery. His father was a journalist, and a book store owner. His mother was a musician; a concert pianist. David played classical guitar at
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age 12. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Literature. But rather than teach, he found himself attracted to film. He did an experimental apprenticeship in independent filmmaking through the Canadian television industry.

Cronenberg said,” Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it is inevitable that it should come home to roost. My dentist said to me,” I have enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?” I think one has to believe in God before you can say that there are things that man was not meant to know. Everybody is a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. Drugs and creativity do not go together [ See THE LAST MOVIE (1971) to view the cinematic equivalent of a Burroughs’s book; drugs seemed to muddle director Dennis Hopper’s mind, and all that was retained was a chaotic home movie that comes to nothing in the end.] Like everybody else in the 60’s, I did some drugs. But it has been 40 years since then. What I need today is clarity.”

In college he gathered some acclaim for his experimental short films, STEREO (1969), and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970). From 1970-75 he wrote a lot of teleplays and directed some Canadian television shows, bidding his time, and nurturing his considerable talent.

He said,” As an artist, your responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you talk about social or political responsibility, you have amputated the best limbs you’ve got as an artist. You are plugging into a restrictive system that is going to push and mold you, and is going to make your art totally useless and ineffective.”

His first feature film was SHIVER, aka THEY CAME FROM WITHIN (1975), starring Barbara Steele, the English bombshell who had starred in many Hammer and American International horror films in the 60’s. In the film an odd strain of parasites infects residents in a high-rise apartment building –and it turns them into sex-crazed zombies that could infect others with just the slightest touch. Then he gave us RABID (1977), with Marilyn Chambers as a sex-crazed vampire, whose victims infect others, until a whole city explodes in bloody erotic chaos. Next up, as a change of pace, he directed FAST COMPANY (1979), a drag race programmer with William Smith, Claudia Jennings, and Nicholas Campbell. Also in 1979 though, he
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directed THE BROOD, with Oliver Reed and Samantha Egger –all about mutant children who double as blood thirsty killers. 1979, I guess, was a banner year for Cronenberg. He married Caroline Siefman that year, and they have remained married for 27 years. They have 3 children together. I begin to pay attention to him, and his films, after seeing SCANNERS (1981), with Michael Ironside, and Jennifer O’Neill.

Cronenberg once said,” Civilization is repression. You don’t get civilization without the repression of the unconscious, the id. And the basic appeal of art is to the unconscious. Therefore, art is somewhat subversive of civilization –and yet at the same time it seems necessary for civilization; for you truly do not get civilization without art.”

In 1983 he directed Stephen King’s THE DEAD ZONE, with Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen. That same year he dipped into his whacky bag and presented us with VIDEODROME, aka ZONEKILLER, with James Woods. Who will ever forget that orifice that opened up in Woods’s abdomen that looked like a vagina? He chose these two films to direct that year, even though it was reported that he had been offered a chance to direct STAR WARS VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), but he declined the offer. That film was the weaker of the first Lucas trilogy. It gives one pause to consider what Cronenberg might have done with it.

In 1986 he directed a landmark film, THE FLY, with Jeff Goldblum. This was not just another vapid remake of the older versions in 1958-59, with Vincent Price. This was an incredible film, brilliantly written, conceived, acted and directed. I think it should have been nominated for an Oscar –but we all know most horror films do not get a shot at Academy gold.

Cronenberg said,” Censors tend to do what psychotics do –they confuse reality with illusion. I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation –that make you have to confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you are making a horror film doesn’t mean you can’t make an artful film.”

In 1988 he directed DEAD RINGERS, with Jeremy Irons and Genevieve Bujold. Irons portrayed twin gynecologists that were fascinated with antique tortuous medical tools. It illustrated how abused and disrespected women have been medically in the past. He was set to direct TOTAL RECALL
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1990). He even wrote a few drafts of the screenplay before Paul Verhoeven took the reins. NAKED LUNCH came to the surface in 1991, after years of preparation. There was M.BUTTERFLY in 1993, again with Jeremy Irons, and John Lone, exploring the dynamics of gender bending and obsession.

Cronenberg said further,” If religion is used to allow you to come to terms with death, and also to guide you in how to live your life –then I think art can do the same thing. But in a schematic way, in a much less rigid and absolute way –which is why it appeals to me and religion doesn’t.
You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language –and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible. We all have that disease of being finite. Death is the basis of all horror.”

He directed CRASH in 1996, with James Spader, Elias Koteas, and Holly Hunter –about a group of thirty-somethings who come together after car accidents to celebrate pain and sexuality, sexual liberation, and famous car crashes of the past, like James Dean’s and Jayne Mansfield’s. Next up he presented us with another “bug” movie, eXistenZ (1999), with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, and Ian Holm. In 2002, he directed SPIDER, with Ralph Fiennes. It was a very creepy film that didn’t do well at the box office. Then, once again, shifting gears to a complete change of pace he directed A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005) straight up, minus most of the Cronenberg oddisms. It starred Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, and William Hurt; a combo Wise Guy/Family drama. Yes, it did explore the darker side of man’s nature. It postulated that no matter how reformed we try to be, or think we are, given the right motivation we will embrace the darkness willingly –and blood will flow and people will die.

Cronenberg added,” I have no rules. For me, it is a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You’re looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance –and want it to be something you could see a second time –and then again ten years later, when it becomes a different movie, because you are then a different person. So it means I want it to be deep, but not in a pretentious way. But I guess I could say I am pretentious in that I do pretend. I have aspirations that the movie will trigger off a lot of complex responses.”


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For me, Cronenberg has always been an audacious, intelligent, and original director. When he spent the better part of seven years developing NAKED LUNCH from a project to a film, he definitely coupled his creative prowess to his respect for all that was William S. Burroughs –and all that was not.

Mary Kalin-Casey of REEL.COM wrote,” Director David Cronenberg is known for his visceral, unsettling examinations of addiction, duality, reality, and authority –and his fascinations with insects, amphibians, and deadly instruments [DEAD RINGERS & EXISTENZ]. Who better, then, to make a film based on the work of Beat icon and avante-garde author William S. Burroughs –whose life of addiction and ceaseless rebellion against the establishment served as a basis for some of the purist, unflinching, and influential writing of the 20th Century.
NAKED LUNCH is more than a literary adaptation of Burroughs’s 1959 breakthrough novel –it’s a compilation of themes and excerpts from several of the author’s early works intertwined with a sympathetic moving portrait of the author himself.”

Hal Hinson of THE WASHINGTON POST wrote,” NAKED LUNCH is not a literal transcription from the novel –it is more a fictional essay on Burroughs, and the anxious birth of the novel. Cronenberg borrowed from JUNKY, EXTERMINATOR, INTERZONE, and QUEER. LUNCH is a movie about a writer’s relationship to his work, and as such, perhaps one of the most penetrating examinations of a writer’s processes ever made. Certainly it is one of the strangest and most disturbing.
The way Cronenberg presents it, the story seems to slide out of some mental polyp of roach brain in William Lee’s skull. It is a movie full of perverse longings, oozing fluids, and a genuine revulsion for the body –where the simple sight of human flesh is nearly enough to turn your stomach. It is truly an excremental movie, in the purest Freudian sense.
There is a synergistic overlap between Cronenberg’s own particular brand of weirdness and Burroughs’s. They’re both twisted in ways that compliment each other nicely. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that the aspects of Burroughs’s work many believed unfilmable still resist visualization. What had seemed unthinkably subversive on the page seems slightly literal-minded, and somewhat tamer on the screen. Still, NAKED LUNCH is a dark, genuinely sick trip into the dark rancid basement of the writer’s mind –and a fitting homage to the labors of a true original.”

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Justin Helmer of FILMCRITIC.COM had quite a different point of view. He wrote,” A mixture of biographical material and incidences from the book come together to make NAKED LUNCH one of the most intellectually frustrating films this side of Peter Greenaway’s PROSPERO’S BOOKS (also released in 1991). What Cronenberg succeeds in doing is to match Burroughs’s remarkable sardonic tone. Nothing is ever played for laughs –rather it’s that queasy amusement you get from being pushed just outside your comfort zone [as happened for Roger Ebert]. This film is another one for the “Movies Nobody Thought Would Be Made” pile. David Cronenberg is a creepy old fucker –as anyone familiar with his catalog over the years will tell you. So perhaps it was kismet that he, of all people, would pick up this cult novel, written by one of the creepiest old fuckers around. While it is not a faithful adaptation of the novel –it is true to the imaginations. Nothing is real. Everything is permitted. Did I ever tell you the one about the guy who taught his asshole to talk?”

That memorable bit of caustic dialogue was a segment taken verbatim from the novel, JUNKY. Burroughs recited it often as part a spoken word performance.

Bill Lee: Did I ever tell you the one about the man who taught his ass to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. This ass talk had kind of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sort of cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could actually smell. This man worked for a Carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventri-liquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called THE BETTER OLE that was a scream, I tell you. I forgot most of it but it was clever. Like,” Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah”, it would reply,” I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass starting talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like, little raspy in-curving hooks, and it starting eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags because nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the
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time, night and day –you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him, It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk and eat AND shit. After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpoles tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-DT, Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneously –except for the EYES you dig. That’s one thing the asshole COULDN’T do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders no more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes WENT OUT, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

Cronenberg said further,” As a filmmaker, I ask questions, but don’t have answers. Moviemaking is a philosophical exploration. I invite the audience to come on the journey and discover what they think and feel. My movies are body conscious. The first fact of human existence is the human body. If you get away from physical reality, you’re fudging, out in fantasyland, and not coming to grips with what violence does.”

Cronenberg, like most “good” directors, like John Ford, Clint Eastwood, and Akira Kurosawa, builds relationships with his crew, and the crew as friends and compeers honestly feel that they all collaborate to bring his particular “vision” to fruition.

The composer for the film score of NAKED LUNCH was frequent collaborator, Howard Shore. He is a very talented composer, conductor, and writer. He has written 112 scores since the beginning of his career when he was the original musical director on the first year of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in 1975. Three short years later he bumped into David Cronenberg, and he scored THE BROOD (1979) for him. Since then Cronenberg has hired him to score every one of his succeeding films –all eleven of them.


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Besides the incredible scores he wrote for Cronenberg’s films, Shore was the musical genius and composing behemoth behind THE LORD OF THE RINGS symphony. He scored all three films, the 25 VG videos and documentaries about that several year span that he spent working with director Peter Jackson. Amazingly, in addition, Shore managed to score BIG (1988), for Penny Marshall, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), MRS. DOUBTFIRE (1993), PHILADELPHIA (1993), NOBODY’S FOOL (1994), ED WOOD (1994) for Tim Burton, SEVEN (19950, COPLAND (1997), with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, DOGMA (1999) for Kevin Smith, PANIC ROOM (2002), with Jodie Foster, and for Martin Scorsese both THE GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002), and THE AVIATOR (2004). Back in the late 70’s, he helped John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd put together the BLUES BROTHERS BAND. He was once described by actor James Woods as “The Bernard Herrmann of the synthesizer.”

But NAKED LUNCH, the movie, musically was a lot more complex than just the overall excellent Howard Shore score. It was liberally punctuated with hot licks of jazz, connecting all the loose ends of Burroughs and the Beat Age. Cronenberg used the legendary tenor saxophonist and jazz composer, Ornette Coleman –of the Ornette Coleman Trio. Coleman too seemed linked to the Burroughs fan club and Beat buddies. He appeared with Burroughs in the cult film, CHAPPAQUA (1966), playing a character called Peyote Eater. In his own career he has been called the “Prophet of Freedom”. He studied at the School of Jazz in Lennox, Mass. He is considered a leader in progressive jazz, and he has released many recordings, and he has performed in hundreds of concerts. He also plays the violin and the trumpet. Some of his better known jazz hits include LONELY WOMAN, SADNESS, RAMBLIN, and TURNAROUND. His music has only appeared in three films. The soundtrack from NAKED LUNCH is available in CD.

Jason Minnix of GUSTO.COM writes,” Howard Shore’s score, performed by the London Philharmonic, and supplemented by Ornette Coleman, fuses jazz, Middle Eastern sounds, and his own familiar minor key orchestral work into a cohesive whole.”

Another frequent collaborator is cinematographer, Peter Suschitsky. He has worked with Cronenberg on the director’s last seven films, from DEAD RINGERS (1988) forward. Suschitsky’s nickname is the “Prince of
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Darkness”. He is the son of legendary cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitsky. Peter has lensed 41 films since 1965. He worked on CHARLIE BUBBLES (1967), with Albert Finney, FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE (1970), with Robert Shaw (a lost film), then the cult favorite, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), with Susan Sarandon, followed by LISZTOMANIA (1975) and VALENTINO (1977), both for director Ken Russell –then scored big with STAR WARS V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and IMMORTAL BELOVED (1994), with Gary Oldman, MARS ATTACKS (1996), for Tim Burton, and good remake of THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (1998), with Jeremy Irons and Gerard Depardieu.

Jason Minnix wrote further,” Peter Suschitsky’s photography ranks with his best work for the director, working wonders with shadows that truly do enhance the characters rather than simply color them.”

NAKED LUNCH was originally going to be the first film that David Cronenberg made outside of Toronto. He even had the funding to be able to travel to Tangiers. But the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Operation Desert Storm scuttled his plans to film in Morocco. So the whole film ended up being shot in Toronto. In a way it is fortunate for the feel of the film. Those shots out the windows in the Interzone needed to look fake and painted and surreal. The desert scenes were created on a Toronto sound stage, and in an old munitions factory, where they poured 700 tons of clean sand for effect.

Some of the taglines on the movie posters and lobby cards were:
“David Cronenberg and William S. Burroughs invite you to lunch.”
“Exterminate all rational thought.”
“The book was banned. The film should never have been made. Too late.”

NAKED LUNCH opens up to a very 1950’s color scheme, all browns, dull yellows, and Kelly greens –earth hues. We meet Bill Lee (Peter Weller), toothpick-thin with his porkpie hat pulled low over one eye, dressed in a three-piece light brown suit, the color of dirty sand, spraying thick yellow powder on roaches in some one’s apartment. He wore no coveralls or a mask, which seemed odd immediately. He runs out of the yellow powder, his tank wheezing and spouting just air. The bugs seem to rejoice, leaping about in defiance. Burroughs had actually been an exterminator, and Cronenberg dipped into that book right out of the gate.

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Lee returned to his office, complaining of the shortage of yellow powder. His boss, far from sensitive, chides him, and warns him to do better. The exterminators all hang out at a local bar. Lee stopped off there for a snort. It’s there that we met his friends, Martin and Hank, thinly veiled characterizations representing Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. They are discussing writing.

Hank (Nicholas Campbell): See, you can’t rewrite ‘cause to rewrite is to deceive and lie, and you betray your own thoughts. To rethink the flow and the rhythm, the tumbling out of words, is a betrayal, and it’s a sin, Martin, it’s a sin.

Martin (Michael Zelniker), and I, disagreed. To blue pencil, to rewrite, is not only good writing, it is responsible writing. As ideas, images, similes, and phrases pour out onto the page, often they could use some redirecting, culling, augmentation and clarification.

Bill Lee: Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to.

The boys listened to Lee’s sad tale of the lost yellow powder, and smiling they tell him that perhaps he might check with his wife, Joan, to see where it went. Rushing home to his brown shabby apartment, lugging his empty powder tank, he found his wife, Joan (Judy Davis), sitting on the couch, high on bug powder, with a sticky syringe still dangling from her right breast, like a plastic mosquito still sucking blood. Lee chastised her, but she defended her addiction as she tried to explain the joys of injecting herself with the thick sunny powder insecticide.

Bill Lee: What do you mean,” It’s a literary high”?
Joan Lee: It’s a Kafka high. It makes you feel like a bug.

Without missing a beat or changing his deadpan _expression Bill joined her, and soon the powder was almost depleted completely, again. Later, on his way to work, on the subway, he tried to sneak up on a fellow exterminator who was napping, and jack some of his powder –but the fellow woke up and confronted him. Understanding Lee’s dilemma, he handed him a business card and recommended that Lee go to this person immediately. The card read Doctor Benway.

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Lee took his advice, and went to see Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider). The office looked dingy and unsterile –like those quack offices one can find in the darker corners of Chinatown.

Doctor Benway: We get a lot of you folks in the exterminator business. You better tell that friend of your to get off the bug powder –it’ll kill him.

Benway offered Lee the antidote, the Black Meat, the ground up bodies of the giant aquatic centipede. He gave him a large vial of it, and showed him how to mix it with the yellow bug powder.

Doctor Benway: You’ll see how elegantly this works. The black will disappear completely. There’ll be no smell, no discoloration. It’s like an agent who’s come to believe his own cover story –but who’s still in there, hiding, in a lawful state. Just waiting for the time to hatch out.

How elegantly Croneneberg sows the seed, that Lee would become, or already was –a very secret agent. With the Black Meat burning a hole in his pocket, Lee stopped at a bar on the way home. He drank a lot, every kind of alcohol. Next to him at the bar stood a handsome young man named Kiki (Joseph Scorsiani), who leaned over and in hushed tones informed Bill that he had a friend who wanted to meet him. Kiki was very gay, and it implied that he had picked up that kind of vibe from Lee, and we were going to meet some kind of faggot hustler and be thrust into something sordid –but as Kiki stepped back we saw that the “guy” seated on the far side was really a Mugwump, a 6 foot insectian amphibian alienish creature, colored white and pale as death, sitting there sipping a warm beer. Lee glanced at this creature, and conversed calmly with it, just as if he had met with hundreds of Mugwumps before. The creature seemed to know all about Lee and his wife and their problems and addictions. The Mugwump began to program Lee, instructing him that he would pretend to be a cross between a free lance journalist and a secret agent, that he was an agent already and had been for years. The Wump tonelessly explicated that his marriage to Joan Vollmer had been a shame, that it was only an illusion. She had tricked him. Women were not human after all. Lee was ordered to kill her as soon as it was convenient, before she could make her move on him. He needed to leave town. His vial of Black Meat was his ticket for traveling. He would be required to write “reports”, and to keep in touch with his “controllers”.

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He was told,” Now repeat after me –homosexuality is the best all-around cover an agent ever had.” This masked Lee’s actual homosexuality. As presented in the film, Lee was always hip deep in homosexuals, but he rarely responded to them. He seemed to have a flat sexual orientation, sometimes bisexual, sometimes asexual. Lee rushed home to pack his few belongings, and prepare for his big adventure, his traveling to the Interzone [a wonderful metaphor for the International Zone that Burroughs spent several years immersed in at Tangiers—drunk, stoned, screwed, abused, and writing.] Walking into his apartment he found Martin sitting stoned reciting free verse Beat poetry, and Hank having sex with Joan on the dining room table. Martin was not paying any attention to them. Joan paid little attention to Hank, even though he was attempting in his drugged state to bang her. Lee walked by them with no notice, not even a turn of his head. They could have been playing checkers. Joan explained that the incident was simply secondary to terminal boredom, and anyway Hank was a junkie and couldn’t ejaculate –so there was no point in being upset.

Lee told Joan that he could have cared less, and seemed to mean it. Hank and Martin had fled the scene out of embarrassment. Bill busied himself packing for his agent’s assignment. He came across a small pistol. He picked it up, pondered on it for a moment, and then said:
Bill Lee: I guess it’s about time for our William Tell routine.

Joan, in an addict’s fog, immediately placed an empty glass on her head. He took aim and drilled here square through the middle of her forehead, in the old brainpan. This, of course, paralleled the authentic accidental killing that happened similarly when Burroughs killed his wife in Mexico City. The scene shifted suddenly, and Lee was somewhere exotic, in some Middle Eastern or North African city, like Tangiers, and he had rooted out a bar where expatriates hung out. It was immediately apparent that in this place alcohol, drugs, and groups of gay men were readily available, almost inexhaustible, and cheap like running water with taps plugged in everywhere. Kiki reappears, having mysteriously followed Lee, or coincidently just also happened to be there –not—and he instantaneously fit right into the Interzone homosexual gaggle of wild beautiful boys.

Lee was approached by a character named Hans (Robert A. Silverman), who seemed to be a longtime denizen and inhabitant of the Interzone.
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Hans: Mr. Lee is curious about the Frost couple. He would like to meet them.
Kiki: I think the woman would have sex with you, Mr. Lee. The man, he only likes Interzone boys.
Bill Lee: I don’t want to fuck them. I just want to talk to them.
Hans: You know how Americans are, Kiki. They all love to travel, and then they only want to meet other Americans and talk about how hard it is to get a decent hamburger.

Hans was kind enough to hook him up with fellow “writer” Tom Frost (Ian Holm), and his wife, Joan (Judy Davis), who looked just like Joan Lee, and yet not –oozing sexual ambiguity and unfulfilled longings. The Frosts represented Burroughs literary friends, Paul and Jane Bowles.

Earlier, or later, while writing a “report”, Lee watched his Clark Nova typewriter morph into a large insect, very roach-like. It communicated, or seemed to talk through a large sphincter orifice on its backside, poking up between its coal black wings. The bugwriter was part of the whole deal, a controller, a fellow agent, a confidante –who had the low down on Lee and all the Interzone antics and intrigues.

Clark Nova: Just remember this. All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That is the sad truth, Bill. And a writer? A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it. Say, Bill, would you rub some of this powder on my lips?

Lee does as he is bid, and watching him rub the powder on the insect’s babbling anus was harder to stomach than any part of any scene in the whole of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005). Hans continued to stay in contact with Lee. He was under the impression that Lee worked for, or represented the notorious smuggler and master-mind, Dr. Benway. After a short time one began to realize that Bill Lee was one cool yet wounded customer, like his literary Daddy Burroughs. No matter how fantastic the situation, or bizarre the happenstance, Lee experienced it deadpan and calmly, like a man so high on heroin he didn’t seem high anymore, and nothing seemed to touch him –like the shell of a man ambulating in a semi-conscious coma.

Scenes that seemed macabre to we viewers did not faze him. Tom Frost loaned him a “Martinelli” typewriter, and it too morphed into a huge white
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insect, and it bullied, then beat and raped and destroyed Lee’s Clark Nova. Constantly the Interzone boys buzzed about him like Nelly bees. Everyone he met was some kind of a sexual deviant, into various forms of bizarre lust and recreation, but Lee accepted it all as commonplace, never seeming to really lose his reserve or detachment. Only a few times did we see Lee get a little cranky or anxious. Somehow this made him a sad character, terribly isolated, even pathetic.

Bill Lee: I understood writing could be dangerous. I didn’t realize, however, the danger could come from the machinery.

At another point, the vacant voice of Burroughs echoed through the dialogue:
Bill Lee: America is not a young land. It is old and dirty, evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians –waiting.

There is a scene where Lee is walking with the Frosts toward their apartment, talking about a party to happen that night.

Tom Frost: They say you murdered your wife. Is that true?
Bill Lee: Who told you that?
Tom Frost: Word gets around.
Bill Lee: It wasn’t murder. It was an accident.
Tom Frost: There are no accidents. For example, I’ve been killing my own wife slowly over a period of years.
Bill Lee: What?
Tom Frost: Well, not intentionally. I mean, on the level of conscious intention, it’s insane, monstrous.
Bill Lee: But you do consciously know it. You just said it. We’re discussing it.
Tom Frost: Not consciously. This is all happening telepathically, non-consciously.
Bill Lee: What do you mean?
Tom Frost: If you look carefully at my lips, you’ll realize that I’m actually saying something else. I’m not actually telling you about the several ways I’m gradually murdering Joan.

The next morning Lee awakened lying in the sand, next to a dingy. A well-dressed man addressed him, remarking that Lee had certainly let his hair
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down at the Frost’s party the evening before. The last thing we witnessed was Lee telling Tom Frost that he declined their invitation to the party. The fashion plate with the flashing white teeth was Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands). Lee returned to his filthy apartment, and he discovered that the Martinelli had broken the Clark Nova to bits, and it lay on the floor either as a bucket of bolts or gob on smashed up insect goo. Lee, actually showing some anger, tossed the Martinelli out a second story window, and it too was reduced to guts and bolts and springs and tendons and tentacles. But Tom Frost began to ask for the return of his beloved Martinelli, being unable to write without it. Kiki was happy to rise up out of Lee’s bed, illustrating that Lee was in fact, at least a bisexual, and direct Bill to the marketplace to an odd foundry, where the Martenelli was melted down, and reshaped into another kind of writing machine. It became a detached Mugwump head, with keys for teeth, so Lee could type in its mouth like he had in the bugwriters. Mugwumps had thick tentacles, numerous and conical. If the creature liked what was being typed, it would dip its thickest tentacle into a coffee mug, and dispense a cloudy-clear sticky jism. Lee liked drinking it, finding it to be yet another high –perhaps the best one yet, leagues beyond bug powder, and even better than the Black Meat.

Interspersed with this action, perhaps before the repair incident; the sequence didn’t seem to matter. Lee again wandered the Interzone streets and back alleys, drunken, high, and desolate –carrying a dirty gunny sack of broken typewriter parts that he must have scooped up from the floor and the street. In another dawn, Lee is passed out, partially covered in sand, using the sack for a pillow. This time he was awakened by his old pals, Martin and Hank. They had traveled to the Interzone to find Lee. They all returned to his apartment. Martin claimed that Lee had been sending him countless letters to New York referring to a novel, or novels he was working on. Lee had no idea what he was talking about. He could only remember typing up his “reports”.

Martin and Hank picked through the crusty residue on the floor and gathered up great piles of typed pages. With the “manuscript” in tow, Lee walked them to the bus station, to begin their trip back to New York. How are they going to make it clear to America on a bus, I thought? This absurd piece of plotting paralleled the actual trip that Kerouac and Ginsberg made to Tangiers, and the rough manuscript they took Burroughs that became NAKED LUNCH.

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Later on in the midst of the convoluted plot, Lee decided to seduce Cloquet, assuming his was connected somehow to the smuggling plot, the Black Meat caper, and Dr. Benway. He decided to contact Cloquet through his best boy, Kiki. Rising from Lee’s bed, Kiki was reticent to do it, but for old Bill the young man would make the sacrifice. They drove out of town in Cloquet’s fancy car, and to pass the time Lee recited the man who taught his asshole to talk routine. At Cloquet’s villa, the slick decided to come on to Kiki, who was petting a parrot and trying not to respond or notice.

Bill Lee: Kiki, go in the other room with him and look at his parrot cage while I take a piss, and then we’ll get the hell out of here.

A few minutes late Lee found himself wandering the villa alone. He could hear Kiki’s cries and protestations. He pushed the bedroom door open, and there in a huge 12’ tall parrot cage, Cloquet had morphed into a 7’ tall centipede, and he had impaled Kiki on several of his appendages. Lee fled, leaving the Interzone bum-boy to his fate. That scene burns in one’s mind as something deeply disturbing, horrible, deviant beyond measure, and shocking to its core. In 1991 I hadn’t realized that it was the kind of scene that Burroughs wrote dozens of in his novel, the kind of scene that could not be filmed secondary to its shock value and just flat out poor taste.

The Interzone programmer had instructed Lee to seduce Joan Frost. She and her husband had a domestic named Fadela (Monique Mercure), who looked a lot like the character Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) in REBECCA (1940). Fadela had some kind of strange hold on Joan, some kind of control. The domestic acted more the mistress than the housekeeper, and she paid very little attention to the fop husband. Lee did manage to seduce Joan Frost, who in his mind looked like his dead wife Joan Lee, only to watch her wander off in the marketplace, to kneel at the feet of Fadela, who had a booth there and was surrounded by lesbian love slaves in berkas.

Like a good secret agent, hot on the trail of Black Meat and Benway, Lee tailed the ladies to a deserted warehouse. Lee was hot to put the pieces of the puzzle together, to catch the bad guys, to expose the sham –or at least have more access to drugs. There in the many shadows of several arches built into the large open gallery he found the missing Hans and dozens of other Interzone residents, on their knees beneath the prostate bodies of captive
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Mugwumps that were hanging from cruel cables hooked to the ceiling. Men and women sat dazed and stoned, sucking on thick white Wump phallic tentacles, slurping down the spicy jism –enjoying the high of their lives.

Enter Fadela, long black hair flowing free, attired in high leather boots, carrying a riding crop. She came right up to Lee, and they talked. He asked her about Dr. Benway. In response she tore open her blouse, exposing her breasts, and then tore open her latex chest, literally tearing her head in half as well, and there beneath was the fine Doctor Benway. He had been wearing a Fadela suit.

Benway smiled and smirked and explained that Black Meat was history, and now Mugwump secretions were the drug of choice. He was the top dog drug czar, controlling all the drugs and all the action in the Interzone, proud to be in the vanguard of vulgarity, King Rat. Lee grabbed Joan Frost, pulling the penile slurpy from her lips, and they fled the insanity and depravity.

The final scene opened on a snow-covered landscape in a Balkan-like country, with Slav-like border guards, cuddling AK47’s, and wearing tall fur hats. A half-track stopped, and Bill Lee was driving it, wearing a spiffy little duster and sports car hat. When challenged for his travel papers, he produced a pistol, and simply said,” I guess it’s time for our William Tell routine.” Joan, in a drugged stupor, placed a water glass on her head, and he snapped off a shot, placing a bullet mid-forehead. Smiling, the guards welcomed Lee to their country, and he entered. The End.

Then the head scratching began, for in the midst of all this non-linear hallucinogenic set of scenes –was there any closure? Not really. Perhaps the death of Joan Frost, who to Bill Lee looked exactly like Joan Frost, who managed to die, to be murdered exactly as the wife had –was an attempt to bring the plot, the fevered drugged instances, to full-circle. It was a challenge to stay on top of the constantly shifting plot schemes.

Let’s see. Bill Lee was a homosexual, probably bisexual, who was a drug addict, whose wife was also an addict. He was informed by an Interzone operative that his marriage to Joan was an illusion, a trick, and that after all women have never been “human”. So Lee is a homosexual, who might be, or who became a secret agent, was forced to become a writer, who was programmed to play it heterosexually, to go straight and have a wife, but
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later is told to pretend to be gay in order to seduce information out of Nelly denizens of the Zone. But then he is also told, or ordered to be straight in order to successfully seduce Joan Frost, who although she was capable, and sometimes willing, to have sex with men, preferred lesbianism. So there it is. Bill Lee is a gay man, pretending to be straight, and then pretending to be a gay man who pretends to go straight –and that’s only the tip of the action.

As Clark Nova said,” The opposition will be thrown into total confusion,” as is some of the audience. Not me of course.

We know Burroughs really did spend years in Tangiers, but for purposes of the film structure, was Cronenberg implying that perhaps Bill Lee never made it to the Interzone –that he never left New York? He met Kiki, and the first Mugwump in a bar in Greenwich Village. How did Kiki and Doctor Benway make it to Africa? How did Lee make it to Morocco? And the Kiki who appeared in the Interzone was already an “established” bum boy, who ran with other homosexuals. How did he integrate himself so quickly and so completely? When Martin and Hank showed up in the Interzone, and so quickly found Lee, with his laundry bag of medicine bottles, how could they how found him so effortlessly? Weren’t they all still in New York? Kerouac and Ginsberg actually made it to Tangiers, but perhaps not Hank & Martin. Why did Lee’s Interzone apartment look so much like his old NYC apartment? Why did the Frost’s (Bowles) Interzone apartment remind him of a place in NYC? I think Lee made the trip while on a trip, traveled only in his mind.

Mary Calin-Casey of REEL.COM wrote further,” The Interzone, a quasi-Moroccan locale, imagined by Burroughs is made “flesh” by Cronenberg –and the director’s long time obsession with mutation makes all the difference, as excessive and surreal as this infested hopped-up hothouse is, it cultivates a crop of deformed beasties and doped-up beings who survive the junkie jungle on their own bizarre terms.
Most of Lee’s Interzone experiences could be pure hallucination. A bag of typewriter bug pieces is actually a pillow case full of pills –his initial ticket to the Interzone is just a vial of bug powder offering a different kind of trip. Typewriters like Lee’s Clark Nova murdering Frost’s Martinelli are also shown to be inanimate objects, shifting back and forth in imagery.
The accidental killing of his wife was blamed on the subconscious programming on the part of the Interzone commander. The ongoing
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Interzone secret agentry represents the subconscious machinations of Lee’s brain –trying to deal with Joan’s death and his own addiction. Then his own creative juices were served by having to “write reports”. Hank and Martin are his links to the real world. Tom Frost his link to the literary world. Shooting Joan a second time proved his worth as a writer, and allowed him an exit from the Interzone.”

Desson Howe of the WASHINGTON POST wrote,” Despite its outrageous scenes, including the ravishing of a gay youth by a monstrous centipedal Julian Sands, there’s still something muted about this film. It feels studiously surrealistic, like an excuse for cinematic buggery –and deep in its center there is a lack of conviction. It’s not an emotional movie. It’s hard to feel engaged. The movie feels like what it is –a Canadian eulogy to a Burroughs novel. But Burroughs cognoscenti should not search for too much of a fix. It is impossible to transmogrify the novelist’s extraordinary word play, his dry-ice irony, the beauty and frustration of his drug-muse inscrutability. It’s also hard to sum up the book’s rounded spectrum of cruelty, addiction, hypocrisy, lies and truth. Also gone, for obvious reasons, are the passages of very cruel homosexual rape fantasies.
It has been uttered more than once that David Cronenberg is the only director who could have done this movie. Adaptations have been attempted and abandoned before. But, if anything, his college try efforts prove that probably no on should do it.”

Peter Weller played Bill Lee. It is hands down one of his best performances. It is both audacious and understated –underplaying at times that bordered on catatonia. The film is tragic and funny because Weller plays it straight, without a wink or a twitch, or a look into the camera, waltzing through the most absurd scenarios like they were Tennessee Williams or William Inge scripts. As an excellent comedic actor, like the best of Robin Williams when he is on a tight director’s leash, Weller dryly plays each situation –and when that situation becomes bizarre or fantastic, he never even arches an eyebrow. Weller takes us through Bill Lee’s adventures like moving methodically through a waking nightmare, a drug-induced series of flashes, back and forward –with very little grounded in reality. NAKED LUNCH is a paean to William S. Bourroughs, to David Cronenberg, and to Weller’s passion for playing excellent impassion –and his considerable talent as an actor.


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Peter Weller grew up in a musical family. He plays the trumpet, and jazz is his overriding interest. He considers Miles Davis a god. Presently, Weller is in a jazz band with actor Jeff Goldblum, and they perform in local clubs in Los Angeles. They played band members in the film, BUCKAROO BANZI (1984). Later Goldblum made a seldom-seen fine television film about jazz musicians called, LUSH LIFE (1993), with Forest Whitaker.

Weller attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Two weeks after graduation, he snagged a Broadway debut in a David Rabe play, STICKS AND BONES. He studied with Uta Hagen. He went on to do a lot of live theatrical work, like William Inge’s SUMMER BRAVE, David Rabe’s REBEL WOMEN, and he was in the last play directed by Otto Preminger, FULL CIRCLE. He gained critical acclaim as Wilson in STREAMERS, directed by Mike Nichols. Then he ambitiously joined the Actor’s Studio, and further deepened his talents. Presently, Weller holds a Master’s Degree in Roman and Renaissance Art, and is working toward a PHD. He sometimes teaches literature and fine arts at Syracuse University –and is one of their most popular professors.

He has had 59 film appearances since 1973. His first feature film was BUTCH AND SUNDANCE: The Early Years (1979). He became a “leading man” in THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI (1984), with John Lithgow. I will always remember a character in that film called John Smallberries. ROBOCOP came into his life in 1987, and his officer Alex J. Murphy became the Iron Man of retribution for all the bad guys of the world.

Weller said,” ROBOCOP was my “contribution” to cinema. I was glad to do the first sequel, ROBOCOP 2 (1990), but when III came along, by that time I knew I was tired of it; plus David Cronenberg had asked me to do NAKED LUNCH with him, so I was happy to do it – was happy to be gone.”

Robert John Burke took over the role of Officer Murphy in ROBOCOP 3 (1993).

I liked Weller in both SHAKEDOWN (1988), with Sam Elliott, and LEVIATHON (1989), with Richard Crenna [a poor man’s copy of James Cameron’s THE ABYSS (1989)]. He was considered for the role of Nick Curran in BASIC INSTINCT (1992), but Michael Douglas was snagged for
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the part. [Douglas was completely disinterested in reprising his role, or having anything to do with the insipid teasing BASIC INSTINCT 2 (2006).] Weller did more stellar work in the sci-fi adventure, SCREAMERS (1995). I have always considered him an excellent actor who is underused and often miscast by the industry. He did have some success of late on television. He did a two-arc episode on STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE, as John Frederick Paxton, and presently is being the very villainous Christopher Henderson, wreaking havoc for Keifer Sutherland on the series, “24”; joining his pal, Julian Sands, to threaten the world.

Jason Minnix of GUSTO.COM wrote,” Weller certainly has the toughest job, and his performance as Bill Lee is exceptional. His performance and appearance manages to evoke William S. Burroughs without falling into simple impersonation. He conveys both the film’s sadness and humor as well. His recitation of the “talking asshole” routine in the film rivals Burroughs’s own.”

Roger Ebert wrote,” Peter Weller gives a performance as evocative as it is depressing, as a fictional character obviously meant to be taken as the author. Weller must have studied the film on Burroughs, and probably even met the man. He has the mannerisms down flat. The low, flat, graveled voice. The dead eyes. The anonymous suits and ties, worn as a disguise for the outlaw inside. The fedora pulled down on the forehead. The complete lack of any visible display of emotion. I did not like the character –who could? But I admire Weller’s artistry in creating this portrait of the living dead.”

Mary Kalin-Casey wrote,” Peter Weller is superb as the bone dry Burroughs clone, with the perfect lanky junkie look, and the characteristic monotone delivery. Weller perfectly captured the author’s dead pan sense of humor and mesmerizing drone. It is much more than a clever impersonation. Weller’s low-key portrayal keeps the character grounded in an oddly soothing state of acceptance, which encourages us to follow Bill Lee down his personal rabbit hole from hell.”

Hal Hinson wrote,” Dressed in his anti-hipster suits and ties, Weller gives a perfect approximation of Burroughs’s secret agent style. He’s an invisible man, without definite gender, or sexual inclination, and so bland that he fades instantly into the squalid woodwork –so suavely somatized that his
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reactions seem to register only after an eternity –as if they made their way to the surface in slow motion from the bottom of the sea. Weller’s portrayal is stocked with hilarious detail. It’s a wonderful deadpan piece of acting, tense, precise, and painfully still. And Cronenberg positions it beautifully in counterpoint to the outrageousness of the imagined world around him.”

Pam Grady of REEL.COM wrote,” Although Weller is too hale and hearty to physically resemble the gaunt spectral Burroughs, he has the laconic Midwestern speech down, and he brings the character an enormous amount of empathy. For a film that often celebrates the grotesque, it’s also an affectionate delineation of Burroughs’s world –and Weller’s performance is very much a part of that.”

The always intriguing Judy Davis played Joan Lee/Joan Frost. Her sad pair of Joans shared the ruby red lipstick, bedroom eyes, and the identical demise at the hands of Bill Lee –and both slept with him, while struggling with their addictions. Joan Lee seemed dopified and fried into a quasi-calmness, whereby nothing seemed to faze her —nothing that is but running out of drugs. She could have dozed during a hurricane. She seemed intelligent, and bored and ready for that “thrill” that would occupy her for a few moments –whether it is sex, drugs, or danger. She and Bill had probably performed the William Tell routine several times successfully. The routine made her wet, almost woke her up, dilated her sluggish pupils. She never saw her death coming. It came swiftly and unfairly, a calamitous shadow that had stood behind her for a long time, and wrapped its cold dark arms around her when she least expected it.

Joan Frost was disdainful, distant, and feigned disinterest, wearing her hair piled up tight on her head, and smart little skirts and tight blouses. She seemed pleased to show off her nice legs and a modest amount of cleavage. She too oozed intelligence, seemed bored and willing under the right circumstances to sleep with either sex when begged enough or “seduced” –but had learned to prefer lesbonics to the heterosexual rough ride and bitch slap. Her husband, Tom, was bisexual, but seemed to prefer only the Hershey Highway, and the company of beautiful available rump rangers. For Joan, Bill Lee represented a kind of excitement, a tantalizing “man” actually interested in her womanhood, as only a real man could, or at least she thought so at the time. Lee saw her only as a clone to his recently departed

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wife and an assignment from his Interzone commander. Regardless, Joan Frost let it happen.

Judy Davis was born in Perth, Australia in 1955. She became disenchanted with Catholicism while still a young teenager attending a convent school. She ran away from home, and school, and hooked up with a rock band as a singer. They toured Taiwan and Japan. Her “real” education, it seems, started with those rockers on that tour.

Later she attended NIDA, the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in the 1970’s. While there she had classes with Mel Gibson, and her future husband, Colin Friels. She and Friels portrayed ROMEO & JULIET while at NIDA. They married in 1984 and have two children. Ironically, Davis was forbidden to see movies as a child. You know I would have quit being a good Catholic for that reason alone.

She has appeared in 44 films since 1976. She gained some fame playing Sybylla in MY BRILLIANT CAREER (1979). She did all her own piano playing for the part. Oddly, despite all the accolades she received for the role, the part is one of her least favorites. She cannot stand to watch it today.

Davis said,” When I first started acting, and we would all sit down and talk about Shakespeare and how great it was –I thought well, I suppose it is if you get to play MacBeth or Hamlet. I mean who wants to play bloody Lady MacBeth or loony Ophelia? And it struck me that most women seemed to be required to pit themselves against men in traumatic situations, and the men got to pit themselves against ideas or God!”

She resides in Sydney, Australia, even though most of her employment is in American films. She often works with Woody Allen, who considers her,” One of the best actresses in the world.” She was nominated for an Oscar for her work on HUSBANDS & WIVES (1992). She described her character, Lillie, in HIGH TIDE (1987) as the one that “comes closest to my own persona.” It was this film that that stimulated my own interest in her career.

She has appeared several times on stage, in theater, with her husband, Colin Friels. In films they both appeared in HOODWINK (1981), KANGAROO (1986), HIGH TIDE (1987), and THE MAN WHO SUED GOD (2001). Fellow Australian actress, Cate Blanchett, has often said that Judy Davis is
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her role model. Davis has been known as an activist. She protested Australia’s involvement in the War in Iraq. It is said that she intensely dislikes being interviewed, and will only do so as a gesture of good will toward her directors. I wonder though if doing publicity for one of her films is not a bad personal idea, considering she probably has points in many of the productions as part of her pay. She has mentioned several times that she would like to work with actor Robin Williams. She was amongst the cast members on the movie, DARK BLOOD in 1993 –which was left unfinished following the “accidental death” of its young star, River Phoenix. She had famous shouting matches with director David Lean while filming PASSAGE TO INDIA (1984). She considered him a bully.

Davis said,” I have never worked just for the sake of working. I figure there is probably enough crap out there for me not to add to it.”

Davis has portrayed a lot of real women on film, like the young Golda Meir, to Ingrid Bergman’s older one, in A WOMAN CALLED GOLDA (1982), Georges Sand in IMPROMPTU (1991), Joan Vollmer in NAKED LUNCH (1991), Countess Mary Lindell in the Hallmark TV film, ONE AGAINST THE WIND (1991), with Sam Neill, Lillian Hellman in DASH AND LILY (1999), with Sam Shepard, the lead role of Ms. Garland in JUDY GARLAND: Me and my Shadows (2001), and our first female president, Nancy Reagan in THE REAGANS (2003), with James Brolin.

I really enjoyed her as Audrey in BARTON FINK (1991) for director Tim Burton, with John Turturro doing his William Faulkner routine. She was really a knockout as Sally in Woody Allen’s HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1992). She would have been “Buffy” in DARK BLOOD (1993), if 23 year old River Phoenix had not overdosed and died on the glittered sidewalk in front of Johnny Depp’s LA Nightclub –the Viper Room. She was also excellent working with Jack Nicholson & Michael Caine in BLOOD AND WINE (1996). She has now worked with Woody Allen in four films, ALICE (1990), HUSBANDS & WIVES (1992), DECONSTRUCTING HARRY (1997), and CELEBRITY (1998), with Leonardo Di Caprio doing his River Phoenix impersonation.

Mary Kalin-Casey wrote,” Complimenting Weller’s performance is Judy Davis as both the languid yellow powder fiend Joan Lee, and the vascillating victimized Joan Frost. Davis never fails at giving intelligent intense
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performances. If there ever was a film meant for her to inhabit –it’s this one. In most of her movies, her pallid face and sienna lips seem shocking and alien –but in NAKED LUNCH they belong. Commanding and as sharp as a tack, Davis expertly imparts both Joans with power, vulnerability, humor, and cool sexuality.”

Hal Hinson wrote further,” Davis shows a different side to her cyclonic talent here, she’s a burnout with world-weary sag to her features, and whenever she’s in front of the camera, a gaping wounded hole seems to open up on the screen. She’s not around much, but she leaves you wishing there was more screen time for her character(s).”

Ian Holm portrayed Tom Frost. At 5’6” tall, Ian Holm Cuthbert always finds a way to in vibe his characters with spirit and penetrating clarity. His Frost was perfection, all arrogance, smugness, selfishness, successful –and just fey enough to please a patrician and make a homophobe uneasy. He seems to have a volatile mercurial personal life. He has married four times. He was knighted in 1998. There is an odd story about him developing a severe case of stage fright in 1976, while performing in the play THE ICEMAN COMETH –that he had panicked and fled the theater. Regardless, the camera loves him, and he seems to prefer film as a working medium.

He has had 112 film appearances since 1965 –41 year career and still going strong. He played Flynn in THE BOFORS GUN (1968), with Nicol Williamson, was in THE FIXER (1968), with Alan Bates (sadly this excellent movie is a “lost” film), was Yakovlev in NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA (1971), was in YOUNG WINSTON (1972), with Robert Shaw, was King John in the fine ROBIN AND MARIAN (1976), with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, was memorable in Franco Zeffirelli’s TV epic mini-series, JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977), played Arab El Krim in MARCH OR DIE (1977), with Gene Hackman, was Himmler in the landmark mini-series, HOLOCAUST (1978), with John Gielgud and Meryl Streep, was Ash in the classic Ridley Scott sci-fi film, ALIEN (1979), with Sigourney Weaver, was the coach, Sam, in CHARIOTS OF FIRE (1981), Napoleon in Terry Gilliam’s TIME BANDITS (1981), with David Warner, played Goebbels in INSIDE THE THIRD REICH for television in 1982, was D’Arnot in GREYSTOKE (1984), played Lewis Carroll in the seldom-seen DREAMCHILD (1985), was in Kenneth Branagh’s HENRY V (1989), with Emma Thompson, was Polonius in Franco Zeffirelli’s HAMLET
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(1990), with Mel Gibson, played Doctor Murnau in Steven Soderbergh’s KAFKA (1991),with Jeremy Irons, just before he played Tom Frost in NAKED LUNCH (1991), was Mitchell in THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997), was the raving Lear in KING LEAR (1998), Joe in JOE GOULD’S SECRET (2000), with Stanley Tucci, was Bilbo Baggins in LORD OF THE RINGS; Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and recently played Simon Weist in LORD OF WAR (2005), with Nicolas Cage. This actor seldom disappoints.

Roy Scheider portrayed the nefarious Doctor Benway, a character Burroughs used several times in his other books as well. Scheider gave Benway’s two brief scenes a playfulness that belied his villainy. We found ourselves almost “liking” this drug czar, quack, criminal, and white slaver –and that was all thanks to Scheider with his quick smile, boundless energy, and crackling wit.

He had been an amateur boxer, and he broke his nose in a Golden Gloves competition. He studied drama at Rutgers, and made several appearances with the New York Shakespeare Festival. He won an “Obie” Award for his role in STEPHEN D. He has appeared in 84 films since 1964, another 40+ year career. His first feature role was a tiny one in CURSE OF THE LIVING CORPSE (1964). More small roles followed in PAPER LION (1968), STILETTO (1969), PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD (1970). Then 1971 was a banner year for him. He was Frank in KLUTE (1971), with Jane Fonda, and Buddy Russo, Gene Hackman’s cop partner in THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) –getting an Oscar nomination for that role. He was still hot in THE SEVEN-UPS (1973), and then he really hit the big time as Sheriff Martin Brody in Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975). He had a vibrant cameo in MARATHON MAN (1976), with Dustin Hoffman. He was offered the lead in THE OMEN (1976), but it finally went to Gregory Peck. He was reunited with director William Friedkin for SORCERER (1977), the limp remake of the French classic, THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953), with Yves Montand. Scheider was cast as Michael in Cimino’s THE DEER HUNTER (1978). It was to be the second film of a three movie deal with Universal. But Scheider did not believe in the character, or the script –did not believe that Michael would travel half way around the world just to find his old friend –so he quit the picture, and immensely enhanced Robert De Niro’s career. JAWS 2 (1978) was considered his penance. As a complete change of pace he played Joe Gideon in the Bob Fosse bio-pic ALL THAT JAZZ (1979), and he garnered another
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Oscar nomination. I liked him in 2010 (1984), the still-born sequel to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). Then a fateful thing happened –Steven Spielberg lured him to television to star in a series, playing Captain Nathan Bridger on SEAQUEST: DSV (1993). Scheider became very unhappy during the second season, and quit the series. Michael Ironside took over as Captain. But one does not “walk out” on Steven Spielberg. His actions, many people feel, cost Scheider any decent roles for the rest of his career. He should be pulling down senior lead roles like Eastwood and Hackman, but instead he has been relegated to cameos and minor roles ever since. He has done several “supporting” roles since 1994, but few of the films offered him a showcase for his talents. He showed a little spunk as Hal in THE MYTH OF FINGERPRINTS (1997), with Noah Wylie. I liked him in TNT’s KING OF TEXAS (2002), the Ted Turner television Western remake of “King Lear”, with Patrick Stewart. Roy Scheider beat cancer in 2005, but he appears even more gaunt than usual these days and that old fire is absent from his eyes.

Julian Sands played Yves Cloquet, the suave wealthy gay dude agent in NAKED LUNCH, who morphed into the most hideous centipede imaginable. Sands was born in England in 1958. He has had 71 film appearances since 1982. He studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where he met his first wife, Sarah. He has been married since 1990 to the Guinness heiress, Evgenia Citkowitz. He had been introduced to her by actor John Malkovich. Sands was novelist Ann Rice’s first choice to play Lestat in INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE (1994), but the role went to Tom Cruise.

Julian Sands first showed promise working with Anthony Hopkins in the BBC mini-series, A MARRIED MAN (1981). He played photographer Jon Swain in THE KILLING FIELDS (1984). His career got a boost after he played George Emerson in ROOM WITH A VIEW (1985). He was in Ken Russell’s GOTHIC (1986), with Natasha Richardson, was good in SIESTA (1987), with the very naked Ellen Barkin, played Franz Liszt in IMPROMPTU (1991), with Judy Davis –quite a shift for both of them to appear in NAKED LUNCH in 1991 as well. He attained success with the minor horror classic, WARLOCK (1991), and its sequel in 1993. He was in ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990), with Jeff Daniels, and was very freaky in BOXING HELENA (1993), was in LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995), with

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Nicolas Cage. Presently, like Peter Weller, he is playing a villain, Vladimir Bierko, on this season’s “24” television series.

Monique Mercure played the vamping Fedela. She is a quite well known French actress. She has appeared in 55 films since 1962, but she is not very well known to American audiences. Robert A. Silverman played the criminal, Hans. A Cronenberg regular, he also appeared in RABID, THE BROOD, SCANNERS, NAKED LUNCH, and eXistenZ (1999). I remember him as the strange character, Hydroholic in WATERWORLD (1995), one of Dennis Hopper’s henchmen. Nicholas Campbell played Hank, the Kerouac clone. He is a hard working Canadian actor who has enjoyed 97 film appearances since 1976, but 75% of them have been TV roles. He also worked with Cronenberg on THE BROOD. Michael Zelniker was Martin, the Ginsberg clone. He has had 35 film appearances since 1980. I remember him as Red Rodney in Clint Eastwood’s jazz film, BIRD (1988), with Forest Whitaker.

Roger Ebert wrote,” As much as I admired NAKED LUNCH in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death, and despair here, in a life spinning itself out without joy.”

Mary Kalin-Casey of REEL.COM wrote further,” As a meditation on addiction and artistry, NAKED LUNCH brilliantly succeeds at defining the author in terms of his work. It is a complex, surreal, funny and ultimately poignant portrait of a writer who is nothing if not utterly truthful. And David Cronenberg has never had a subject so perfectly matched to his freakish horrific “obscenities” As Joan describes her bug powder buzz, NAKED LUNCH is, indeed, “a literary high”.”

Joe Pettit, Jr., of IMAGESJOURNAL.COM wrote,” NAKED LUNCH is probably the hippest ride to Hell you will ever take. At its core the film stands as a metaphysical examination of the creative process –exploring the perils and the costs of writing truthfully. The bug typewriters and the talking anuses represent the dirty unseemly facets of Lee/Burroughs’s “self” –that he doesn’t want brought to light. Of course a writer, such as Burroughs, existing on the outskirts of society, couldn’t resist the metaphorical comparison of a writer to a secret agent –and in particular to a double agent. The film ultimately seems to say that truthful writing of any merit is a dangerous business, and demands sacrifice.”

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A fine example of this principle is how Truman Capote went about lying and cajoling during his research for his opus, IN COLD BLOOD. And these actions took their toll on the author. It became his last “finished” book. A good rendition of this author’s circumnavigation, crapping on the truth to gain the Port of Success –was done with the film, CAPOTE (2005), with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Chris Roberge wrote,” NAKED LUNCH is not a movie for everyone. Some of the scenes are extremely distasteful, and every action and line of dialogue can, and should be, read on three different levels. But for those of us that like our entertainment very twisted and intelligent –this is one of the best films of the year.”

James Brundage of FILMCRITICS.COM wrote,” NAKED LUNCH is one of those films that are so mind-blowing that it is baffling. So intelligent that it feels idiotic, and so strange that you wonder if you took something beforehand and forgot about it. Yet it was one of those movies that critics loved. Screw Em!!
The movie had no real point. However, because it is so weird, so outrageous, it is the automatically taken position of the intellectual set that,
“If I didn’t fully understand it, then it must be good.” I mean you never know what’s going on in this film. Yes, you have seen a lot of weird sights, but by the end you are no closer to understanding what went down than anyone else is. The movie is simply incomprehensible.” He then went on to rate it at 1.5 stars.

After NAKED LUNCH was published, William S. Burroughs said,” I am shitting out my educated Middle Western background once and for all. It’s a matter of catharsis, where I say the most horrible things I can think of –man, I mean the most horribly dirty awful niggardliest posture possible.”

Put simply, NAKED LUNCH, the novel represented the outrageous ravings of a junkie’s fevered hallucinations, a trip down a nightmare mind maze in the dark at a 100 miles an hour, caught somewhere between dimensions. Burroughs, it is said, was addicted to heroin, morphine, cocaine, marijuana, hashish and countless other drugs and substances. NAKED LUNCH, the film, borrowed heavily from the other four novels that emerged steaming out of THE WORD HOARD –all that stuff Burroughs scribbled down while in
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Tangiers, stoned weak in the knees, out of his mind and up to his elbows in various homosexual orifices –for several chaotic years.

In the movie, it seemed that one addiction kept overlapping and replacing the other. It started with the Kafkaish yellow bug powder, replaced next by the Black Meat, those crushed up remains of the giant aquatic centipede, and finally replaced again with the super octane high induced from ingesting Mugwump jism –with every kind of alcohol filling the gaps in between injections. As viewers we were never given any sort of compass to navigate the perilous pharmaceutical journeys, riding on the filthy coat tails of our protagonists. It was just laid out there boldly and nakedly for us, the critics, and great God almighty to experience, taste, and possibly judge.

I must say that in 1991, when I first viewed this film –it jolted me hard, and I really struggled to make something “logical” out of what I had seen. I had no idea that Cronenberg had mixed in biographical and literary incidents from several Burroughs sources –rather than taking a cinematic suicide attempt at filming the actual novel. As he himself put it, no one ever should actually illustrate the unfilmable premises and pages. With this viewing, and some research, I finally can connect the diverse dots, and can begin to more fully appreciate the scope of Cronenberg’s creativity, leaving me free to actually “enjoy” this very special and unique cinematic effort and achievement –and event. But on the downside of the equation, how many audience members will know enough about William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, or the Beat Generation, or even jazz –to respond fully to this film? So in 1991, out of my admitted confusion and confessed ignorance, I would have rated the movie at 2.5 stars for audacity and weirdness alone. Today, as a more “knowledgeable” viewer, I am pleased and proud to re-rate it at 4 pulsating stars.
Glenn A. Buttkus 2006