As students of Beat Literature know, William Burroughs killed his wife
in New Orleans or Mexico City when doing his William Tell routine. That he
shot her between the eyes is passed off as an accident, a sort of ultra
cool artistic act typical of the hip Mr. Burroughs, that agent
provocateur in the face of human decency and the profession of
writing. Central to the Burroughs mythology is that he's the most famous
American writer nobody reads. Or if they do read him, they never read to
the finish. His culture is drugs, a constituency that is mostly illiterate
-- after all, literature is by the bourgeois for the bourgeois.
"Homosexuality is a political crime in a matriarchy"
(Burroughs)
For years his autobiographical expressionism was considered
pornography, the fragmented narratives mere infantile codings for drug
abuse and bisexual depravity. Burroughs was his own experiment. While some
people use rats, he used himself, although on occasion others -- such as
his wife -- became part of the experiment. The drug experience is
intrinsically non-linear, its expression fragmentary, its morality tactile
("if it feels good, it must be good"), its politics paranoia, its method
dream, its result stasis. The novel Naked Lunch is all of this,
with a good deal of voyeurism concealed within its metaphors and
monologues.
There are some places in the Burroughs Interzone that Cronenberg
doesn't visit -- such as A.J.'s Annual Party where Mary and Mark
lynch their sex trophy Johnny and have intercourse with his dangling body
as it goes through its death spasms or the "snuff theatre" of Hassan's
Rumpus Room where the Mugwump snaps a boy's neck at the moment of
orgasm. He does attempt the latter incident by removing the anal
intercourse and making it an Outer Limits bug feast, so it becomes a
simile for a live meat sandwich. This sexual fascism has its literary
origins in the Marquis de Sade and in the homosexual underground, although
in recent times this imagery has been expropriated by the heterosexual
snuff-movie culture.
Can Burroughs' avant-garde witticism translate into film? Even on the
dawn of the Post-Gender Age, does anyone care?
While Cronenberg's film moves the mainstream feature into the taboo
territory of drug abuse and experimental sexuality, he conceals the
vicious nature of this world by cleverly using cinematic morphing to
create visual metaphors that soften the depravity while enhancing the
horror. Typewriters become bugs and alien entities, copulators slimy
foetal centipedes. His script is really created from the Burrough's myth
rather than the text of the Naked Lunch. You see fellow Beat
writers Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg appear as "Hank" and "Martin" while
"Tom Frost" looks suspiciously like a fictionalized version of that other
Tangier expatriate, Paul Bowles.
"William Lee" -- the name under which Burroughs published his first
autobiographical book, Junky -- is groomed to look like the old
shooter himself, just the way you'd see him around Tangier in the late
fifties and early sixties, a walking cadaver in a gray raincoat and
fedora, an American zombie stoned on his own voodoo. The complete urban
myth, who knows what to believe about this man who whose life-style was
his expression? Always part of his own publicity, Burroughs exists as
gossip, a reprobate whose confessions include beastiality and blasphemy,
and locking young Arab boys in a Reichian orgone generator in order to
suck up their fear bions when he takes shots at them with his pistol.
True? Who cares. Good theatre? Absolutely. And Cronenberg -- disciple of
Artaud that he is -- knows a good subject when he sees one. The
avant-garde of the fifties is ready for the mainstream of the nineties.
Bill Lee (Weller) is working as a bug exterminator in New York. His
wife Joan (Judy Davis) uses the yellow Bug Juice to shoot up, gets really
weird. "It's a very literary high," she says. "A Kafka high... I feel like
a bug." Two narcs visit Bill, tell him Joan is an agent of InterZone Inc,
and unveil a large bug which they use to test the pile of yellow roach
exterminator powder. When the bug suggests that Joan has to die, Bill
smashes it with his shoe. But when Bill finds Joan having sex on the couch
with Hank, he tells her it's time for their William Tell routine. She
willingly balances an empty glass on her head. Bill takes aim, shoots her
in the forehead... before the eyes of the stunned poet, Martin.
It's this homicide that drives the psychology of the film, more than
the drugs and the sexual politics. When Bill trades in his automatic for a
typewriter (a Martinelli) and escapes to the InterZone, a labyrinthine
Arab city where anything goes, he encounters Joan Frost, a dead ringer for
his deceased wife. On the instructions of the Mugwump, he seduces this
Joan in an act of ectoplasmic necrophilia which posits this coincidence of
identity between the polarities of guilt and dependency. Her arabic
typewriter opens like a bloody vagina, a maw of forbidden pleasure... but
she's caught by her bondage mistress, a German bitch with a riding crop...
who later turns out to be Fedela... who later turns out to be Dr. Benway,
the drug maestro who plays both sides of psychosis. Politics, games,
transmorgrifications -- all delivered in various mise en scenes of
hypnogogic imagery that dresses up the decadence and makes a joke out of
the profession of writing. Imagine, say, Alien crossed with
Solaris, and you have the tone and plot of Cronenberg's version of
Naked Lunch.
The similarities between this film and Tarkovsky's Solaris
are remarkable. Both deal with an altered reality in a symbolic world
where the protagonist encounters his dead wife. Both narratives are
circular, both are based on novels. Solaris starts as science
fiction, Naked Lunch ends as science fiction. But Solaris
has what Naked Lunch doesn't -- bonafide mysticism. Cronenberg
creates an ending that certainly moves in that direction when Bill tries
to escape into Anexia with Joan Frost and is forced to repeat the William
Tell routine in order to satisfy the border guards, but despite his best
intentions it remains a circularity rather than a closure.
"All is lost... all is lost -- it's all I've ever written" (Joan
Frost)
Burroughs is utterly secular, almost to the point of being inhuman.
Love is non-existent, eradicated by the politics of addiction. His
relationship with Joan remains just another bizarre encounter in a series
of bizarre encounters. You can see the familiar American political
paranoia which places institutions in a conspiracy against the individual.
His world-view is the classic junky view of the straight-world, a fear of
totalitarian conformity, pain without pleasure. Officials become aliens
while humans act as their sexual puppets in a bizarre Cold War game which
has no discernible purpose. You wonder how much Burroughs was influenced
by the America of Senator McCarthy and the concealed Godfather, J. Edgar
Hoover.
Cronenberg's artistic empathy is very accurate. The entire movie is
interior, even when it appears to be exterior. By removing the documentary
effect of location shooting, and using sets, he manages to create a
completely integrated atmosphere, where New York is no less hallucinatory
than the InterZone, that Tangier of the mind. The alleys of the Medina are
a natural zone of intrigue just as they were in the movies of past about
double-agents and their ideological masters.
A psychodrama... about a writer in search of his dead muse, searching
inner-space like an astronaut, who ends up on the Planet of Lost Souls an
unconscious agent for an alien entity. Emotion is replaced by phobia, a
metaphor for the sickness. Once marked, the sickness is forever.
From Fcourt
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