Naked Lunch (1991)

***The curious thing about David Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch is that it seems to have very little to actually do with the book Naked Lunch. Instead, it follows the general arch of its author, William S. Burroughs', life, and a few of his themes: addiction, possession by strange forces, and vast conspiracies to enslave mankind that may not even originate in the human world.

Alternately, it could all simply be a surrealistic, drug-induced nightmare.

Whitley Strieber, who was played by Christopher Walken in the film version of his bestselling alien abduction book Communion, once famously quipped, "I don't know who Walken was playing, but it certainly wasn't me." (You could say the same thing about Johnny Depp's bizarre "interpretation" of famed bad movie director Ed Wood in Tim Burton's 1994 biopic of the same name); here, Peter Weller is not really so much playing William S. Burroughs (who did, from time to time, evince actual human emotions, or seemed to), but is instead playing some sort of flat, affectless, schizoid "everyman," a Kafkaesque characterization that makes him seem as if he is on a steady diet of a lot of sedatives. Talking anus typewriters and "Mugwumps" leave him unfazed.

He accidentally shoots his wife (Judy Davis) trying, for obscure reasons, to shoot a glass off of the top of her head. The glass falls to the floor, unshattered. This occurred, and Burroughs' wife Joan Vollmer was killed, September 6th, 1951. Burroughs was never tried for this crime. He claimed it, for the rest of his life as "accidental," but also claimed a kind of demonic possession he referred to as being invaded by "the Ugly Spirit." And her death, the continual memory of it, he claimed, was why he wrote the things he wrote.

"William Lee" (the Burroughs characterization) has friends, at least two, Hank and Martin (played respectively by Nicholas Campbell and Michael Zelniker), cinematic stand-ins for Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, and works as an exterminator. He runs out of bug powder continually because his wife steals it to shoot it up; she is addicted to it. He goes to the infamous "Dr. Benway" (the late Roy Scheider) for a cure. Finally, he makes his way to North Africa, Tangiers (the place of romantic writers and literary outlaws), and then to "Interzone," which is a space apparently one inch back of his frontal lobe and is populated by talking anus-like typewriters that make him an "agent", tasked with writing a report about something the audience is left clueless about.

Here, he meets the reincarnation of his murdered wife, also played by Judy Davis, and her husband Tom Frost, played by the late Ian Holm. He meets a number of characters, including "Hans", a German who runs a drug factory manufacturing a drug made from the "flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede," (centipedes will be a central theme here), and becomes more and more addicted to the substance. He also meets Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands) a homosexual who traps a young man named Kiki in a giant parakeet cage, wherein he reveals he is actually a shape-shifting, parasitic creature, not unlike a centipede, who hooks powerful and sharp legs into Kiki's tormented face.

What can any of this mean?

Enter Fadela, who, in a twist, also turns out not to be what she appears, but is secretly "controlling Joanie" with poultices made of her public hair and fingernails. Her husband admitted earlier to Lee that he has also been "secretly murdering" Joanie. Everything is a level of deception, alien control by slimy, viscerally repellent creatures, who manipulate mankind through hallucinogenic, addictive substances. Or it is a dream.

Along the way, reptilian entities called "Mugwumps" (which, originally, was just a nickname for members of the "Know-Nothing" Party) enlist William Lee to penetrate the bowels of the Interzone Incorporated organization. Oh, and to kill his wife. Apparently, control by the Ugly Spirit is absolute and comes hidden as "plans within plans" (to quote the 1984 adaptation of Dune).

Hank and Martin visit Interzone and do drugs with Lee, organizing his reports into the book Naked Lunch, but the final scenes, with hanging Mugwumps, a battered Joan writing "all is lost, all is lost," repeatedly, and additional surprises and strange episodes, render the film a circular, recurring dream. Or rather nightmare, in which characters reappear, disappear, shift shape and reveal themselves to be agents of a controlling power that is as occult as the logic behind this story (or lack thereof).

The great failing of the film is that it is too dark and too humorless; Burroughs, whatever else he was, was one of the great satirists of the 20th Century's literary world. This material is somber, depressing, despairing, even; positing man as simply another link in a chain of control, the nucleus of which he can never understand. Or maybe it is all simply the schizoid imaginings of a drugged brain? Either way, it is an ugly, troubling, and often repulsive journey into the internal mindscape of a seriously tormented, disturbed individual. (I promise you: after seeing it, you won't soon forget it.)

What it ISN'T, to any great degree, is actually Naked Lunch.