NAKED LUNCH
And some of us are on Different Kicks and that’s a thing out in the open the way I like to see what I eat and vice versa mutatis mutandis as the case may be. Bill’s Naked Lunch Room . . . Step right up. Good for young and old, man and bestial. Nothing like a little snake oil to grease the wheels and get a show on the track Jack. Which side are you on? Fro-Zen Hydraulic? Or you want to take a look around with Honest Bill?” –William S. Burroughs, introduction to Naked Lunch (1962)
These “natural” cut-ups allowed some passages to undergo mysterious sea changes of emphasis and focus in the midst of a monotone patter, and permitted certain similes and metaphors to sprout independent lives and narratives of their own in the course of seemingly logical arguments. Two examples from Naked Lunch, both from the “Atrophied Preface”: “Sooner or later The Vigilante, The Rube, Lee the Agent, A.J., Clem and Jody the Ergot Twins, Hassan O’Leary the After Birth Tycoon, The Sailor, The Exterminator, Andrew Keif, ‘Fats’ Terminal, Doc Benway, ‘Fingers’ Schafer are subject to say the same thing in the same words to occupy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time. Using a common vocal apparatus complete with all metabolic appliances that is to be the same person–a most inaccurate way of expressing Recognition: The junky naked in sunlight . . . ” “You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point. . . . I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her Afghan Hound . . . ”
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My acquaintance with Cronenberg is much spottier than my acquaintance with Burroughs, and it was made at a relatively late stage in his career. I was impressed but repelled by Scanners when it came out in 1981, but I walked out of a revival of They Came From Within (1975) a few years later, more repulsed than enlightened, and felt pretty neutral about The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986). It was only three or four years ago, when I caught up with Videodrome (1982) on video (I’ve seen it again at least twice), that I realized just how brilliant Cronenberg is. I didn’t exactly warm to Dead Ringers (1988), but it was such a tour de force that I couldn’t help but think Cronenberg’s craft was growing by leaps and bounds. A subsequent look at The Brood (1979) further persuaded me that his oeuvre has an overall coherence and complexity unmatched by any other contemporary horror director, including David Lynch and George Romero.
Perhaps the most transgressive aspect of Cronenberg’s adaptation is that it follows the general approach of some of the very worst movie versions of literary classics–for example, Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man and Mishima–by turning what was once fiction into ersatz biography of the author. The vulgar presumption of this approach is that the artist’s life counts for more than the art itself, which is regarded as little more than a symptom. In effect, whatever the artist has done to transform and transcend the banality of his or her own experience is undone by the filmmakers, who turn it back into raw material; by assuming that biography and art are coextensive and virtually interchangeable, they produce works that lack the integrity of either.
Significantly, Lee trades his gun for a portable typewriter at a pawnshop; he then travels to Interzone, a North African city like Tangier where most of the remainder of the film is set. Lee’s “ticket” to Interzone, however, which he shows to one of his writer friends, is the drug-filled syringe procured from Benway, so it’s highly questionable whether Lee or the film ever really leaves New York. (Enslaved by his addiction, he may not even leave his flat.) If one looks closely at certain scenes in Interzone, fragments of New York are plainly visible–a patch of Central Park seen from a window, even an Eighth Avenue subway entrance seen from a car–and at one point Lee remarks that a certain living room reminds him of a New York restaurant. Lee’s flats in New York and Interzone are nearly identical, and he even encounters Kiki (Joseph Scorsiani), who becomes his lover in Interzone, initially in a New York waterfront bar.
