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Naked Lunch
National Review, March 2, 1992 by John Simon
I somehow survived without reading William S. Burroughs's pseudo-classic, Naked Lunch, and cannot tell you how faithful the movie David Cronenberg wrote and directed is to it. I can, however, assure you that if what you want is elegant creepiness, baroque monsters, drug fantasy crossed with facile romanticization of the artist's plight, you cannot do much better than this. Canada's David Cronenberg is much tidier with such things than our David Lynch, and here he has a talented cast blessedly unburdened by instant recognition that so easily undermines credibility.
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Peter Weller, as the harried, hallucinating writer-exterminator (bugs are his livelihood), Judy Davis as the two unsetting women he gets entangled with, and Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider, plus a variety of discreetly near-anonymous Canadian actors combine to create a plausibly nightmarish stew of horror and humor. The chief suppliers of that are the huge talking bugs, who, with the help of clever animators (or, to be exact, animatronics technicians), turn into advisors, inquisitors, co-conspirators, jailers, and executioners--not to mention typewriters--for the brief delectation and long torment of the addicted writer hero.
Naked Lunch can with equal justice be described both as ugly and pointless and as hypnotic and harrowing. It is also funny, obsence, and sui generis. But bugs talking from the anus and changing into typewriters are, ultimately, a rather specialized, solipsistic, drug addict's hell. How long can you listen to someone else's bad dream, however well told?
COPYRIGHT 1992 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
