Naked Lunch (film)

Naked Lunch is a 1991 science fiction drama film co-written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. It is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel of the same name, and an international co-production of Canada, Britain and Japan.

Naked Lunch
Theatrical release poster
Directed byDavid Cronenberg
Produced by
Screenplay byDavid Cronenberg
Based onNaked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Starring
Music by
CinematographyPeter Suschitzky
Edited byRonald Sanders
Production
company
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release date
  • 27 December 1991 (1991-12-27) (United States)
  • 24 April 1992 (1992-04-24) (United Kingdom)
Running time
115 minutes[1]
Country
  • Canada
  • United Kingdom
  • Japan[2]
LanguageEnglish
Budget$17–18 million[3][4]
Box office$2.6 million[5]

The film was released on December 27, 1991 in the United States, and April 24, 1992 in the United Kingdom by 20th Century Fox. It received positive reviews from critics, but was a box office bomb, garnering only $2.6 million out of a $17–18 million budget due to a limited release. It won numerous honours, including the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director and seven Genie Awards, notably Best Motion Picture. Naked Lunch has since become a cult film.

Plot

William Lee is an exterminator who finds that his wife Joan is stealing his supply of insecticide to use as a recreational drug. Lee is arrested by the police, and he begins hallucinating as a result of exposure to the insecticide. Lee comes to believe that he is a secret agent, and his boss, a giant talking beetle, assigns him the mission of killing Joan, who is allegedly an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Lee dismisses the beetle's instructions and kills it. Lee returns home to find Joan having sex with Hank, one of his writer friends. Shortly afterwards, he accidentally kills her while attempting to shoot a drinking glass off her head in imitation of William Tell.

Having inadvertently accomplished his mission, Lee flees to Interzone, located in a city somewhere in North Africa. He spends his time writing reports concerning his mission; these documents, at the insistence of his visiting literary colleagues, are eventually compiled into the titular book. Whilst Lee is under the influence of assorted mind-altering substances, his replacement typewriter, a Clark Nova, becomes a talking insect which tells him to find Dr. Benway by seducing Joan Frost, a doppelgänger of his dead wife. There is a row at gunpoint with Joan's husband Tom, after Lee steals his typewriter, which is then destroyed by the Clark Nova insect. Lee also encounters a gay Swiss gentleman, Yves Cloquet, who appears to be a monstrous centipede in disguise.

After coming to the conclusion that Dr. Benway is, in fact, the secret mastermind of a narcotics operation for a drug called "black meat" which is supposedly derived from the guts of giant Brazilian centipedes, Lee encounters Tom's housekeeper Fadela, previously observed to be an agent of the narcotics operation. Fadela reveals herself to be Dr. Benway in disguise. After being recruited as a double agent for the black meat operation, Lee completes his report and flees Interzone to Annexia with Joan Frost. Stopped by the Annexian border patrol and instructed to prove that he is a writer as he claims, Lee produces a pen. When this proves insufficient for passage, Lee, now having realized that his accidental murder of Joan Lee is what has driven him to become a writer, demonstrates his William Tell routine using a glass atop Joan Frost's head. He again misses, and thus re-enacts the earlier killing of his wife. The border guards cheerfully bid him welcome to Annexia, and his new life as a writer. Lee is shown shedding a tear at this bittersweet accomplishment.

Cast

Production

Adaptation
The film is based on the works of William S. Burroughs and his biography.

The screenplay for Naked Lunch is based not only on Burroughs' novel, but also on other fiction by him, and autobiographical accounts of his life.[6] It can be seen as a metatextual adaptation, in that it depicts the writing of the novel itself. Several characters are loosely based on people that Burroughs knew: Hank and Martin are based on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (who assisted Burroughs in compiling the original novel), and Tom and Joan Frost on Paul and Jane Bowles whom Burroughs befriended in Tangier, Morocco in 1963.[7]

The shooting of Joan Lee is based on the 1951 death of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs’ common-law wife.[6] Burroughs shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party in Mexico City. He would later flee to the United States. Burroughs was convicted in absentia of homicide and sentenced to two years, which were suspended. Burroughs stated in the introduction to his book Queer that Joan's death was the starting point of his literary career, saying: "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death".[8]

Music

The film score is composed by Cronenberg's staple composer, Howard Shore, and features free jazz musician Ornette Coleman. The music of the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar is also featured throughout the film. The use of Coleman's composition "Midnight Sunrise", recorded for his Dancing in Your Head album, is relevant, as author William S. Burroughs was present during the 1973 recording session.[9]

Release

Box office

Naked Lunch was released on 27 December 1991 in a limited release of 5 theaters, grossing $64,491 on its opening weekend. It went on to make $2,641,357 in North America.[5]

Critical reception

Critical reaction was positive; it currently holds a 69% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 36 reviews.[10] Metacritic reported an average rating of 67 out of 100, based on 16 reviews.[11] Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy".[12] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "for the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway", but did praise Weller's performance: "The gaunt, unsmiling Mr. Weller looks exactly right and brings a perfect offhandedness to his disarming dialogue".[13] Richard Corliss of Time gave a lukewarm review, calling the film "tame compared with its source".[14] In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe criticized what he felt to be a "lack of conviction".[15]

Newsweek's David Ansen wrote, "Obviously this is not everybody's cup of weird tea: you must have a taste for the esthetics of disgust. For those up to the dare, it's one clammily compelling movie".[16] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" rating with Owen Gleiberman praising Weller's performance: "Peter Weller, the poker-faced star of RoboCop, greets all of the hallucinogenic weirdness with a doleful, matter-of-fact deadpan that grows more likable as the movie goes on. The actor's steely robostare has never been more compelling. By the end, he has turned Burroughs' stone-cold protagonist — a man with no feelings — into a mordantly touching hero".[17]

In his review for The Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, "Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer".[18] Jonathan Rosenbaum in his review for the Chicago Reader wrote, "David Cronenberg's highly transgressive and subjective film adaptation of Naked Lunch ... may well be the most troubling and ravishing head movie since Eraserhead. It is also fundamentally a film about writing — even the film about writing".[19]

Burroughs scholar Timothy S. Murphy found the film to be a muddled adaptation that reflects Cronenberg's mind more than the novel: he feels that Burroughs' subversive, allegorically political depiction of drugs and homosexuality becomes merely aesthetic. Murphy argues that Burroughs' social and politically situated literary techniques become in the film merely the hallucination of a junkie, and that by using the life of Burroughs himself as a framing narrative, Cronenberg turns a fragmented, unromantic, bitterly critical and satirical novel into a conventional bildungsroman.[20]

The film has been selected for a Criterion Collection release, an organization that releases high quality DVDs for important classic and contemporary films.

Accolades

At the 13th Genie Awards, Naked Lunch received 11 nominations and was perceived as being in an unusually tight competition with Jean-Claude Lauzon's Léolo.[21] The film also competed for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.[22]

Award Date of ceremony Category Recipient(s) Result Ref(s)
Boston Society of Film Critics 26 December 1991 Best Screenplay David Cronenberg Won [23]
Genie Awards 22 November 1992 Best Motion Picture Gabriella Martinelli and Jeremy Thomas Won [24]
Best Direction David Cronenberg Won
Best Adapted Screenplay Won
Best Actor Peter Weller Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Monique Mercure Won
Best Art Direction Carol Spier Won
Best Cinematography Peter Suschitzky Won
Best Costume Design Denise Cronenberg Nominated
Best Score Howard Shore Nominated
Best Sound Peter Maxwell, Bryan Day, David Appleby and Don White Won
Best Sound Editing Richard Cadger, Wayne Griffin, David Evans, Jane Tattersall, Andy Malcolm and Tony Currie Won
National Society of Film Critics 5 January 1992 Best Film Naked Lunch 2nd Place [25]
Best Director David Cronenberg Won
Best Screenplay Won
Best Supporting Actress Judy Davis 3rd Place
Best Cinematography Peter Suschitzky 2nd Place
New York Film Critics Circle 12 January 1992 Best Screenplay David Cronenberg Won [26]
Best Supporting Actress Judy Davis Won

Legacy

In 1994, Bomb the Bass released the single "Bug Powder Dust" which opens with the quote "I think it's time to discuss your, uh, philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavour" and closes with the quote "I think it's time for you boys to share my last taste of the true black meat: the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede." The song also includes various other quotes, items and themes from the film woven into the lyrics.[27]

In a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, "Bart on the Road", Bart, Nelson, and Milhouse use Bart's fake driver's license to get into the theatre to see an adult film. The film they choose, based on its rating, is Naked Lunch.[28] When they exit, Nelson looks up to the marquee and says, "I can think of at least two things wrong with that title."[29]

gollark: OreDictionary makes them all intercompatible.
gollark: It's not actually a *compatibility* thing, really.
gollark: Yes, I'm not trying to do that.
gollark: Yes, which *ought* to work on blocks at least...
gollark: Clearly it's not working.

See also

References
  1. "NAKED LUNCH (18)". First Independent Films. British Board of Film Classification. 27 January 1992. Retrieved 31 August 2013.
  2. Boyd, Susan C. (2009). Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. University of Toronto Press. p. 210. ISBN 1442610174.
  3. Naked Lunch – Special Edition Double Disc DVD, Disc Two: The Supplements, "Naked Making Lunch" (1991), interview with David Cronenberg, 2003, ISBN 1-55940-947-9
  4. Melnyk, George (2007). Great Canadian Film Directors. University of Alberta. p. 88. ISBN 0-88864-479-5.
  5. "Naked Lunch". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
  6. Seymour, Gene (5 January 1992). "MOVIES : Out to Lunch With the Guru of Gross-Out : David Cronenberg says the only way he could be faithful to William S. Burroughs' celebrated 'Naked Lunch' on film was to betray it". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
  7. "Galleries of Photographs, Robert Freson, Part One". paulbowles.org. Retrieved 23 August 2018.
  8. Schjeldahl, Peter. "The Outlaw: The extraordinary life of William S. Burroughs". The New Yorker. The New Yorker. Retrieved 24 May 2016.
  9. Ranaldo, Lee (2012). "Interview with William S. Burroughs". In Colin Fallows & Synne Genzmer (Eds.), Cut-ups, cut-ins, cut-outs, p. 48. Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien. ISBN 3869843152.
  10. Rotten Tomatoes. "Naked Lunch".
  11. Metacritic. "Naked Lunch". Retrieved 3 December 2007.
  12. Ebert, Roger (10 January 1992). "Naked Lunch". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
  13. Maslin, Janet (27 December 1991). "Drifting In and Out Of a Kafkaesque Reality". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
  14. Corliss, Richard (30 December 1991). "Santa Leaves a Six-Pack". Time. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
  15. Howe, Desson (10 January 1992). "Naked Lunch". Washington Post. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
  16. Ansen, David (13 January 1992). "A Man With A Bug Problem". Newsweek. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
  17. Gleiberman, Owen (17 January 1992). "Naked Lunch". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
  18. Hoberman, J (4 March 2008). "The Naked Truth". Village Voice. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
  19. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (17 January 1992). "Sex and Drugs and Death and Writing". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 25 November 2009.
  20. Murphy, Timothy S (1997). "Wising Up the Marks". University of California Press.
  21. Ayscough, Suzan (14 October 1992). "'Lunch,' 'Leolo' to battle for top '92 Genie honors". Variety. Retrieved 25 August 2016.
  22. "Berlinale: 1992 Programme". berlinale.de. Retrieved 28 May 2011.
  23. "Past Award Winners". Boston Society of Film Critics. Archived from the original on 8 October 2014. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
  24. Murray, Karen (22 November 1992). "'Lunch' eats up 8 Canadian Genies". Variety. Retrieved 26 August 2016.
  25. Fox, David J. (6 January 1992). "'Sweet' Takes Honors From Film Critics". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
  26. Maslin, Janet (18 December 1991). "Film Critics Honor 'Silence of Lambs'". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
  27. "Bomb The Bass - Clear review". Retrieved 6 January 2012.
  28. Martyn, Warren; Wood, Adrian. "Bart on the Road". BBC. Archived from the original on 11 April 2004. Retrieved 6 March 2008.
  29. "Bart on the Road episode capsule". The Simpsons Archive.
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