William S. Burroughs (1914 - 1997) has impeccable hipster credentials as a Godfather to the Beat Generation and an influence on popular culture that stretches on from films (ie: Drugstore Cowboy), to music (he worked with, and outlived, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain), and beyond. His seminal work, Naked Lunch (which played a pivotal role in a famous censorship trial back in 1965), was a title suggested by Jack Kerouac who, as the main actor Peter Weller observes in the commentary track, "is the title given by Kerouac to that frozen moment in time when each of us gets to see exactly what's on the end of our forks - because we don't look at what we eat, we just eat. Meaning that (because of) the things we're obsessed on - we rarely ever stop to see what it is we're doing day-to-day so obsessively." Naked Lunch remains a testament to both the extremes of deranged creativity and our most primal drive to survive for it is, after all, a work whose inception can be found in one person's desperate attempt to find redemption after he literally kills his own wife. Peter Weller not only plays the role of Bill Lee (an obvious stand-in for William Burroughs), he's also a fan of jazz and literature who has definitely done his research, as revealed in the dvd bonus material where he quotes a journalist who asked Burroughs: "is all of your writing only to free you from the sin of killing your wife by accident?" To which he responds: "Well, my God, of course. If you've killed someone you'll never get them out of your mind."
From the opening credits (influenced by Saul Bass) to the end scene (that brings to mind a serpent swallowing its own tail), Naked Lunch is not a literal adaptation of an impossible literary work, so much as an amalgamation of William Burroughs, the man and his work, as filtered by director David Cronenberg's unique sensibilities. Cronenberg himself noted that "When I spoke to Burroughs about fusing together many of his works and incidents from his life - in particular the shooting of his wife - he had not objections to it." With this in mind, it makes sense that Cronenberg's Naked Lunch would derive its template from a body of work, the zeitgeist in which it was made, and unique metaphors that tie it all together such as the typewriter-insects that featured talking sphincters. (Cronenberg notes how there were "a lot of talking assholes in Burrough's writing and I wanted to find a way to deliver that in a movie without being censored in every country in the world, so this was my solution to that problem.")
Whether you're a literary buff or a cinephile, the Criterion double-disc is beautifully packaged to meet your every need. The audio commentary features director David Cronenberg (whose insights are precise and constant) and star Peter Weller (who definitely did his homework for the role and, among other things, notes how Naked Lunch predicted aids, liposuction, and crack cocaine back in the '50's). Bonus materials include a gallery of photographs taken (and annotated) by Allen Ginsberg. There is also a "Making Naked Lunch" documentary shot for London television (which includes the actual clippings from the front page of the Mexico City newspaper that had pictures of Burroughs and his deceased wife), illustrated essays, a film stills gallery, excerpts from both the marketing campaign and the novel as read by author William S. Burroughs, and the film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1. All-in-all, this is an exceptional package that shows how two mediums (writing and cinema) can co-exist, much in the manner the director suggested to the writer that the end result was like the two of them entering a telepod (a reference to Cronenberg's 1986 film, The Fly) to create a third creature.
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by Pablo Kjolseth
