Whose Lunch Is This Anyway?
(Originally published In Critical Wave in 1992)
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 When news
broke that David Cronenberg was to make a film version of William Burroughs' 1959
classic novel, The Naked Lunch, long time Burroughs fans had their appetites whetted, and much speculation ensued about just how this difficult and delicate culinary
exercise would be handled.
Early reports told us Cronenberg hadn't gone for a straight
interpretation of the text, but instead had re-structured it incorporating elements from Burroughs's actual life (in particular the accidental shooting of his wife, Joan) in order to
give the piece greater narrative cohesion.
Okay, we thought, lets cut him a bit of slack.
But when the first clips were shown - the talking asshole typewriter and the bug powder addicted wife injecting into a breast - you could
almost hear the collective groan of indigestion.
The reviews were for the most part upbeat, and indeed there is
much about the film that is excellent. The atmosphere of
seedy, low rent 50's New York is just right, evoked wonderfully by Peter Suschitzky's noirish photography and lighting. The performances too are first class, with
Peter Weller capturing the essence of Lee/Burroughs' drugged spectral presence and sardonic
deadpan delivery to perfection. The problem with Cronenberg's Naked Lunch can be summed up in two words: the script.
In attempting to impose 'narrative' on the original,
Cronenberg serves up a veritable dogs dinner, consisting of Burroughs' biography, out-of-context fragments of his fiction, and
the
fruits of Cronenberg's own 'creative writing'. You can't tell the meat from the veg, and it ultimately
amounts to narrative nonsense. Cronenberg has gone simply too far in his zest to create a product, a recognizable cousin of The Fly and
Dead Ringers, and the source material has been dealt an injustice as a result. |
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arise almost immediately in the film because Cronenberg fails to distinguish between the naturalistic and the fantastical in Burroughs's world.
In the books, when Lee is grounded in the everyday world, everyday laws apply.
He takes real drugs - heroin, benzedrine, marijuana - occupies real locations - New York, Mexico City, Tangiers - and is subject to real law enforcement regimes, even though
he might attach paranoid constructions to what is going on.
All the fantasy comes in the form of 'routines', which are products of Lee's imagination, and it's in that world of druggy make-believe that Interzone, Doctor Benway,
Black Meat and Mugwumps are contained. Lee tells
us The Naked Lunch in the manner of telling a dream, invoking the literary tradition of far-fetched, disingenuous narration.
We no more expect it to be 'realistic' than we expect any tall tale to be.
But what Cronenberg does is to take the fantasy out of Lee's control and externalize it, making it subject to 'real life' cause-and-effect. It simply doesn't work.
At
the start of the film we are shown ostensible naturalism: the Greenwich Village Beat scene, a Kerouac character, a Ginsberg character and a Joan Vollmer character to play against
Lee. Then bug powder is introduced as a narcotic to which Joan is addicted, and the other characters are wise.
Already the film's logic is breaking down: are we watching naturalism or fantasy?
Imaginary drugs can work very well as a device in an imaginary setting - such as 'soma' in Brave New World - but here it just creates a confusion of expectations.
More
confusion follows. When Lee is taken in for
questioning by the two narcs Hauser and O'Brien, he sees a giant talking asshole insect materialize on a pile of bug powder.
Later he refers to this as an hallucination, so we take it that only he can see the insect (and presumably the subsequent insect typewriters).
So now a distinction has been drawn between two levels of fantasy: Lee's 'imaginary' world - giant talking insects - and Lee's 'actual' world - bug powder as a controlled
narcotic. Then Doctor Benway is introduced,
presumably as a 'actual' general practitioner, dispensing bug powder and Black Meat; and Interzone crops up as an 'actual' place you can book a passage to - somewhere in North
Africa. And what about the mugwump in the bar? -
as other people react to him, he must be 'actual' too and not Lee's 'hallucination'. |
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fantasy to be effective it must have rules, and those rules must be 'load bearing' or suspension of disbelief will not sustain.
When Cronenberg blends the natural and the fantastical willy nilly, he undermines Burroughs's original rules, and thus makes it very hard to sustain a consistent reading of
what is on the screen. We try, but all we
register is a limbo filmic world, which is not quite science fiction, not quite horror, not quite surrealism.
Similar
problems of reading occur because of another level of blending in the film - that of biography and fiction.
Burroughs' shooting of his wife is a real life event.
In the introduction to the novel Queer, he tells us how it prompted the manic sequence of events on which that book is based, and subsequently his whole oeuvre.
'I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death,' Burroughs says, and Cronenberg is clearly trying to get this across.
But by making the shooting and subsequent writing part of the fiction/fantasy fabric instead of its cause, their meaning as real events is all but lost.
In
Queer, we see Lee in his immediate pre-Lunch phase.
Hanging about in Mexican bars, often drunk, he launches into the 'routines' - wild improvised improbable stories - which form the etiological key to The Naked Lunch.
Some of the best moments in the film occur when Weller brilliantly delivers two of these routines for the entertainment of his companions.
One is the famous 'talking asshole' routine from The Naked Lunch, and hearing Weller do it we get his character properly in focus for the first time, and glimpse different
horizons of possibility. This scene might have
belonged in another - better - film, one in which Lee shoots his wife in the everyday world and escapes his torment by going into such routines, which develop into writing and
eventually become dramatized as the fantasy world of The Naked Lunch.
Natural and fantastical elements would intermingle, but would be formally distinguished from one another, as in, say, The Singing Detective.
In
this work we see the writer Philip Marlowe dreaming, hallucinating, re-living his childhood, composing a novel in his head, and various cross-combinations of these elements, but it's
all held in context by the basic reality of his predicament as a man in hospital with a disease.
What Cronenberg's Naked Lunch lacks is this kind of basic reality: a ground control point from which we orientate ourselves to the material.
One
of the criticisms leveled against the book as source material is it's 'unfilmable', or too difficult or too expensive to film.
Whilst this may be true of some of its more nebulous, introspective and pornographic sections, other sections are eminently filmable, and it's ironic that towards the end of
the film, as Cronenberg's re-writing exercise takes over completely, he sacrifices the possibility of some great cinematic moments.
Take the celebrated penultimate chapter, 'Hauser and O'Brien'.
In contrast to much of the rest of the book it's highly realistic and forms an unbroken sweep of linear narrative.
The two eponymous narcs call on Lee one morning as he is taking a shot of heroin.
He knows h
e mustn't let them take him in, and he manages to shoot them both dead and escape from the city.
All of this would have looked great on film, and not to include it beggars belief - especially as Hauser and O'Brien do appear in the film, in vapid scenes invented by
Cronenberg. It's like doing a film of Hamlet
leaving out the fight scene climax.
If
one looks one can find other instances of useful, filmable narrative in The Naked Lunch.
Its very start is in part an expanded re-write of an incident in Junkie, where Lee the paranoid heroin dealer is followed by a narc in a white trenchcoat and manages to shake
him off in the New York subway. Here we have an
access route to a reservoir of narrative about Lee's life as a junkie, which first and foremost is where all the material is coming from.
It could easily have been drawn upon selectively to add biographical substance to the film while still keeping in budget and at the same time doing better service to
Burroughs' art.
As
film is a director's medium, it's hardly surprising that David Cronenberg has sought a pathway which indulges his rubber fetishism and entomophilia.
Another director would have done it differently, but the fact remains that out of many possible film versions of The Naked Lunch we have only this one, and we'll just have to
learn to live with it. Interpreting the work of
another through film is not the same as creating from scratch; it requires a more measured approach and a certain degree of self-effacement.
Perhaps someone ought to tell David Cronenberg that he needn't tackle every project with the same vocabulary of images, and when it comes to secreting rubberized orifices,
bloodied viscera and the angst of half-human hybrids, enough is as good as a feast.
© Roger Keen 1991
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