Naked Lunch (film)

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Naked Lunch

Directed by	David Cronenberg
Produced by	Jeremy Thomas, Gabriella Martinelli
Written by	David Cronenberg, Based on the novel by William S. Burroughs
Starring	Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm
Music by	Howard Shore
Cinematography	Peter Suschitzky
Distributed by	Twentieth Century Fox
Release date(s)	January 21, 1991
Running time	115 min.
Language	English
Budget	unknown
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Naked Lunch is a 1991 film by the Canadian director David Cronenberg.

1 Plot
2 Background
3 Reception
- 3.1 Criticism
- 3.2 Awards
4 Cast
5 Trivia
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

William Lee (a pen name of Burroughs) is an exterminator who finds that his bug powder is being stolen by his wife for recreational purposes. The police arrest Lee, at which point he believes he is hallucinating due to the bug powder exposure. Lee believes he is a secret agent, and Lee's controller (a giant bug) gives him the mission of killing his wife, Joan Lee, who is, according to the bug, an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Dismissing the bug and its instructions, Lee returns home to find his wife sleeping with Hank, one of his writer friends. He soon shoots her while performing a William Tell routine.

Having "accomplished" his "mission", Lee flees to Interzone, where the Interzone Incorporated organization is based, and spends his time writing reports on his mission, which become the book Naked Lunch. While in Interzone, the typewriters Lee uses are themselves living creatures, usually giving Lee advice on his mission. Clark Nova, one of Lee's typewriters, tells him to find Doctor Benway, by means of seducing Joan Frost who is a doppelgänger of his dead wife, Joan Lee.

After finding out that Doctor Benway is the head of a drug manufacturing ring, producing "the black meat", Lee completes his report and flees Interzone to Annexia with Joan Frost. Upon meeting the Annexian border patrol, to prove that he is a writer as he claims, he shoots Joan Frost in the head, in the same manner that he shot his late wife, Joan Lee. After seeing this, the border patrol welcomes Lee to Annexia.

[edit] Background

Based on the fiction and autobiographical accounts of William S. Burroughs (including, but by no means limited to, Naked Lunch itself), the plot follows a writer, William Lee (played by Peter Weller), who travels to Interzone, a place that can only be reached through the inhalation of bug powder. The film also stars Ian Holm, Judy Davis and Roy Scheider.

Interzone is from Burroughs' novel, a North-African B-Movie fantasy and a drug-induced dreamworld. The name is a reference to the "International Zone" created for Tangier after 1923, and still in effect in the 1940s and 1950s when Burroughs and other artists were living there.

Director David Cronenberg blends biographical details from Burrough's life with scenes and elements of his fiction to create a script for the "unfilmable" novel. It can be seen as a postmodern or metatextual adaptation of the book, in that it is about the creation of the fiction as much as the representation of it.

[edit] Reception

[edit] Criticism

The reception of Naked Lunch was somewhat mixed. Some critics felt it was an excellent example of Cronenberg's perennial themes: the intersection of the body and the machine, biological change, and infection. Others felt it was a muddled adaptation of Burroughs' novel that reflected Cronenberg's mind much more than the novel. Burroughs' subversive, allegorically political depiction of drugs and homosexuality becomes mere grist for horror or an aesthetic choice. His social and politically situated literary techniques (the "routines") become a hermetic hallucination of a junkie. In effect, by using the life of Burroughs himself (via William Lee) as a frame, Cronenberg has turned a fragmented, unromantic, bitterly critical and satirical novel into a conventional bildungsroman.^[1]

[edit] Awards

Genie Awards: 1992

Best Motion Picture
Best Director - David Cronenberg
Best Supporting Actress - Monique Mercure
Best Art Direction - Carol Spier
Best Cinematography - Peter Suschitzky
Best Overall Sound - Peter Maxwell, Brian Day, Don White, David Appleby
Best Sound Editing

[edit] Cast

Peter Weller as Bill Lee
Judy Davis as Joan Frost/Joan Lee
Ian Holm as Tom Frost
Julian Sands as Yves Cloquet
Roy Scheider as Doctor Benway
Monique Mercure as Fadela
Nicholas Campbell as Hank
Michael Zelniker as Martin
Robert A. Silverman as Hans
Joseph Scoren as Kiki (as Joseph Scorsiani)
Peter Boretski as Creature Voices/Exterminator #2
Yuval Daniel as Hafid
John Friesen as Hauser
Sean McCann as O'Brien
Howard Jerome as A.J. Cohen

[edit] Trivia

In an episode of The Simpsons, Bart, Milhouse and Nelson sneak into a theatre showing the film with the help of a fake I.D. card. They walk out afterwards looking very confused, and Nelson remarks, "I can think of at least two things wrong with that title."
Although the film takes great liberties with Burroughs' work, one segment, in which Lee recounts the story of "The Talking Asshole" is presented verbatim from the novel.
The character Tom Frost (Ian Holm)'s typewriter is a "Martinelli", apparently named after co-producer Gabriella Martinelli. When he lends the machine to Lee, Frost says of the typewriter, "Her inventiveness will surprise you."
The first track on Showbread's Age of Reptiles is called "Naked Lunch" and is themed around the ideas presented in both the film and novel.
The protagonist's name William Lee is the pseudonym Burroughs used for his first novel, Junky.
The film's score is composed by Cronenberg's staple go-to scorer: Howard Shore. Shore features free-jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman throughout the score.