NAKED LUNCH @ 35

Bill Lee stopped writing early and got a gig as a bug exterminator. He calls it the best job he's ever had but he keeps running out of spray powder. Taking a lead from his beatnik pals, he catches his wife Joan injecting it into her breast. It's a literary high, she says, kind of a Kafka jag. Then, after a series of strange encounters with cops and talking oversized beetles, market stalls selling dried centipedes, he reminds his wife that it's time they did their old William Tell routine. She balances a glass on her head and he takes a shot at it with a .38. The glass rolls over the floor intact and Joan lies on the carpet with a bullet hole in her forehead. When a monstrous figure in a bar tells him to get a ticket to Interzone and send back reports from there, he goes.

Naked Lunch was always almost a movie from its publication onward but there are problems in the book that, depending on when the scripts were attempted, made it unfilmable. It could be seen variously as pornographic, ultraviolent, thickly surrealistic and dense. Burroughs' novel moves between lucid muscular narrative and arcane weirdness that continues and will continue to daunt the casual reader. What Cronenberg did was make a companion text.

This is a quilt formed from selected passages in the novel, biographical details of Burroughs' life in Tangier and in New York among the beats, as well as anything he could cull from other works like Junkie, Exterminator and Queer. Through this, Cronenberg threads a loose narrative centred on Burroughs' guilt over the killing of his wife and this forms a number of loops in which the act and its consequences repeat for a person who could never quite outrun them. Add the figure from the novel of Dr Benway, both sympathetic to and contemptous of the addicts in its world. Fascimiles of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg appear as sympathetic companions. Bill Lee moves through this, observing wryly, sharing blackly comic anecdotes, receiving overloads of psychic and sexual information.

This never quite fulfils the brief of a movie version of the book but it works best if you already know the book and would be effective as a spur to attempt a read. As a filmmaker Cronenberg had to clear the things that were literature and render unto cinema audiences the things that created a character to follow. Peter Weller plays Bill Lee as a taciturn wanderer, unfazed by the worst his life can deliver, delivering his lines as though he were spinning them from corroded copper, not quite caring if everyone hears them. It's the speech of the literate junkie, from the only imaginable centre of the universe. Weller pulls this off enough to keep screen centre with enough substance for us to try to make sense of everything around him. The great grace of his performance, though, is his evident refusal or agreement with Cronenberg, not to do the Burroughs voice. This party trick of everyone who ever went through a beat phase was a craw-sticking feature of the Kill Your Darlings biopic of Ginsberg a few years back, making the thirty year old Burroughs sound like he was eighty. Weller just finds Bill Lee, bowing to Bill Burroughs as the creator, not the entirety.

Judy Davis gives us a female counterpoint to Bill Lee, her New York version weary and in search of kicks, and her Interzone version more guarded, more worldly with an understanding of the dangers of Lee's influence. Both are nuanced and sexy as well as unsettling. Ian Holm's Paul Bowle's facsimile is solid but more a presence than a player. Michael Zelniker and Nicholas Campbell as the Ginsberg and Kerouac stand-ins are fun. It is Roy Scheider, though, who steals his every scene as the forbidding and funny Dr Benway. You'll remember him as much as Weller and Davis for his few minutes of screen time.

Because Cronenberg was prevented from shooting in Tangier by the first Gulf War, he improvised and went to the opposite end of the spectrum and made everything look like a set. The wall to wall magic hour golds and reds are pure tungsten lights and give the scenes an extra sting of oppressive delerium. 

Naked Lunch is a film about writing the same way that the book is a novel about literature. Writing is an art of the mind, constructed from thoughts that form and take life while walking dogs or doing dishes, the act of writing when that's done, has none of the physical theatre of music or painting. Cornenberg's brief was a tough one. I don't think it works entirely but I also admit that it wasn't made to be witnessed in isolation.

I failed to finish Naked Lunch three times before I stumbled on the solution: read it among noise. Just after I moved to Melbourne, I would go on tram trips to anywhere to familiarise myself with the system but also the speech and mood of the locals. I packed my Fontana paperback into a jacket pocket and took it out on a particularly long journey and found, finally, between shutting out the noise and letting it blast, that the strange prose on the pages started to have cadence and flow. A similar thing happened a few years earlier when I heard the Birthday Party single Release the Bats just enough times, having gleefully celebrated and ridiculed its chaos, to realise it was a tightly constructed rock song. A few more trams to wherever and I finished the book.

In case that puts you off there is a very good documentary that could bridge Cronenberg's film and Burroughs' novel. Burroughs: the Movie from 1983 is a terrific warts 'n' all account, narrated by Burroughs himself of his life and work with a wealth of footage from his younger life and various collaborations. Criterion have released this at one time which might point to it being trackable by several means.

Until then or you find a copy of the book, you can see this film. Take Bill Lee's advice and exterminate all rational thought and take this in