Naked Lunch | |
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Directed by | David Cronenberg |
Written by | David Cronenberg |
Based on | Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs |
Produced by | |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Peter Suschitzky |
Edited by | Ronald Sanders |
Music by | |
Production company | |
Distributed by |
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Release dates |
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Running time | 115 minutes [2] |
Countries |
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Language | English |
Budget | $16–18 million [5] [6] [7] |
Box office | $2.6 million [8] |
Naked Lunch is a 1991 surrealist science fiction drama film 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's 1959 novel Naked Lunch , and an international co-production of Canada, Britain, and Japan.
The film was released on 27 December 1991 in the United States by 20th Century Fox, and 24 April 1992 in the United Kingdom by First Independent Films. It received positive reviews from critics, but was a box office flop, grossing only $2.6 million against 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, acclaimed for its surrealistic visual and thematic elements.
In 1953, exterminator William Lee finds that his wife Joan is stealing his insecticide to use as a recreational drug. Lee is arrested by the police, and he begins hallucinating due to exposure to the insecticide.
Lee believes he is a secret agent, and his boss, a giant talking beetle, tasks him with killing Joan, who is an agent of "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 attempts to shoot a drinking glass off her head to emulate William Tell, and accidentally kills her.
Having inadvertently accomplished his "mission," Lee flees to Interzone in North Africa. He spends his time writing reports concerning his mission; these documents are eventually compiled into the titular book.
While Lee is addicted to assorted mind-altering substances, his replacement typewriter, a Clark Nova, becomes a talking insect. It 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 Yves Cloquet, who is apparently an attractive young gay Swiss gentleman. Lee later discovers that Yves is merely a human disguise, and that his true form is a huge shapeshifting centipede.
Lee concludes that Dr. Benway is secretly masterminding a narcotics operation for a drug called "black meat" supposedly derived from the guts of giant Brazilian centipedes. He encounters Tom's housekeeper Fadela, previously observed to be an agent of the narcotics operation. Fadela reveals herself as 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 his claim to be a writer, Lee produces a pen, but this proves insufficient for passage. Lee, having realized that accidentally murdering his wife has driven him to become a writer, demonstrates his William Tell routine using a glass atop Joan's head. He again misses and kills Joan. The border guards cheerfully welcome him to Annexia, and his new life as a writer. Lee sheds a tear at this bittersweet accomplishment.
Filmmakers, including Stanley Kubrick and Antony Balch, using a script from Brion Gysin, attempted to adapt William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch into a film, but were unsuccessful. [9] In 1981, Cronenberg was interviewed by Omni during the release of Scanners in the United States and stated that he was interested in making a film based on Burroughs's novel. [10] Producer Jeremy Thomas met Cronenberg at the 1984 Toronto Festival of Festivals and discussed making a film adaption of the novel. Burroughs, Cronenberg, Thomas, James Grauerholz, and Hercules Bellville met in Tangiers in 1985. [11] Grauerholz showed Cronenberg's films to Burroughs and Cronenberg stated that Burroughs felt he was the only one who could properly make the film. [9]
The screenplay for Naked Lunch is based not only on Burroughs's novel, but also on other fiction by him, and autobiographical accounts of his life. [12] Cronenberg said it was necessary to "Throw the book away" as a direct adaptation would have been far too expensive and "would be banned in every country in the world." [5]
Burroughs was uninvolved with the writing of the film's script and granted his blessing to the first draft in December 1989. This version opened the film with a short story from Burroughs's Exterminator! . [13]
The shooting of Joan Lee is based on the 1951 death of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs's common-law wife. [12] 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". [14]
The film was initially backed by Japanese investors, but they withdrew and Thomas replaced them with financing from Telefilm Canada and the Ontario Film Development Corporation. [15]
Peter Weller, who was working on RoboCop 2 , asked Mark Irwin, who worked as the cinematographer on multiple Cronenberg films, what Cronenberg was working on. Irwin told Weller that he was adapting Naked Lunch. [16] Weller was a fan of the novel since he first read it at age 18 and had read it ten times before learning of Cronenberg's adaption. He stated that he pursued the lead role like "a Pac-Man". [17]
Cronenberg intended the film to be shot in Tangiers, but the Gulf War prevented him from filming in North Africa [18] as they could not receive insurance. [15] Cronenberg massively rewrote the script a few days before filming due to being unable to shoot in Tangiers. [19] Cronenberg worked on the film while also starring in Nightbreed . [9] The film was shot on a budget of around US$17 million and shooting started on 21 January 1991 in Toronto. [15]
Chris Walas was hired to perform the special effects for the film. The film required fifty bug typewriters. [15]
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. [20]
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. [8] It was the second-highest grossing film in Canada for 1992, behind Léolo , having earned $600,000. [21]
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 70% rating based on 37 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. The consensus reads, "Strange, maddening, and at times incomprehensible, Naked Lunch is nonetheless an engrossing experience." [22] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 67 out of 100 based on reviews from 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [23]
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". [24] Janet Maslin of The New York Times 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". [25] Richard Corliss of Time gave a mixed review, calling it "way too colorful - cute, in a repulsive way, with its crawly special effects - and tame compared with its source." [26] In his review for the Washington Post , Desson Howe criticized what he felt to be a "lack of conviction". [27]
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". [28] 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's stone-cold protagonist – a man with no feelings – into a mordantly touching hero". [29]
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". [30] 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". [31]
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's subversive, allegorically political depiction of drugs and homosexuality becomes merely aesthetic. Murphy argues that Burroughs's 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. [32]
Naked Lunch received a Criterion Collection DVD release in 2003, the first film by Cronenberg to do so. [33]
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 . [34] The film also competed for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. [35]
In 1994, English electronic musician 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. [40]
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 title and R rating, is Naked Lunch. [41] When they silently exit the theatre, Nelson looks up to the marquee and says, "I can think of at least two things wrong with that title." [42]
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
David Paul Cronenberg is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is a principal originator of the body horror genre, with his films exploring visceral bodily transformation, infectious diseases, and the intertwining of the psychological, physical, and technological. Cronenberg is best known for exploring these themes through sci-fi horror films such as Shivers (1975), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), though he has also directed dramas, psychological thrillers and gangster films.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, and four collections of essays. Five books of his interviews and correspondences have also been published. He was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "shotgun art."
Naked Lunch is a 1959 antinovel by American author William S. Burroughs. The antinovel does not follow a clear linear plot, but is instead structured as a series of non-chronological "routines". Many of these routines follow William Lee, an opioid addict who travels to the surreal city of Interzone and begins working for the organization "Islam Inc."
Nova Express is a 1964 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. It was written using the 'fold-in' method, a version of the cut-up method, developed by Burroughs with Brion Gysin, of enfolding snippets of different texts into the novel. It is part of The Nova Trilogy, or "Cut-Up Trilogy', together with The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs considered the trilogy a "sequel" or "mathematical" continuation of Naked Lunch.
Scanners is a 1981 Canadian science fiction horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O'Neill, Michael Ironside, and Patrick McGoohan. In the film, "scanners" are psychics with unusual telepathic and telekinetic powers. ConSec, a purveyor of weaponry and security systems, searches out scanners to use them for its own purposes. The film's plot concerns the attempt by Darryl Revok (Ironside), a renegade scanner, to wage a war against ConSec. Another scanner, Cameron Vale (Lack), is dispatched by ConSec to stop Revok.
The Dead Zone is a 1983 American science-fiction thriller film directed by David Cronenberg. The screenplay, by Jeffrey Boam, is based on the 1979 novel of the same title by Stephen King. The film stars Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Martin Sheen, Anthony Zerbe, and Colleen Dewhurst. Walken plays a schoolteacher, Johnny Smith, who awakens from a coma to find he has psychic powers. The film received positive reviews. The novel also inspired a television series of the same name in the early 2000s, starring Anthony Michael Hall, the pilot episode of which borrowed some ideas and changes used in the 1983 film.
M. Butterfly is a 1993 American romantic drama film directed by David Cronenberg and written by David Henry Hwang based on his 1988 play. The film stars Jeremy Irons and John Lone, with Ian Richardson, Barbara Sukowa, and Annabel Leventon. The story is loosely based on true events which involved French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu.
Videodrome is a 1983 Canadian science fiction body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring James Woods, Sonja Smits, and Debbie Harry. Set in Toronto during the early 1980s, it follows the CEO of a small UHF television station who stumbles upon a broadcast signal of snuff films. Layers of deception and mind-control conspiracy unfold as he attempts to uncover the signal's source, complicated by increasingly intense hallucinations that cause him to lose his grasp on reality.
Dead Ringers is a 1988 psychological thriller film starring Jeremy Irons in a dual role as identical twin gynecologists. David Cronenberg directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Norman Snider. Their script was based on the lives of Stewart and Cyril Marcus and on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, a "highly fictionalized" version of the Marcuses' story.
Interzone may refer to:
Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, or Junky, is a 1953 novel by American Beat generation writer William S. Burroughs. The book follows "William Lee" as he struggles with his addiction to morphine and heroin. Burroughs based the story on his own experiences with drugs, and he published it under the pen name William Lee. Some critics view the character William Lee as simply Burroughs himself; in this reading, Junkie is a largely-autobiographical memoir. Others view Lee as a fictional character based on the author.
James Grauerholz is a writer and editor. He is the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs.
Crash is a 1996 Canadian erotic thriller film written, produced and directed by David Cronenberg, based on J. G. Ballard's 1973 novel of the same name. Starring James Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas, Holly Hunter and Rosanna Arquette, it follows a film producer who, after surviving a car crash, becomes involved with a group of symphorophiliacs who are aroused by car crashes and tries to rekindle his sexual relationship with his wife.
Léolo is a 1992 French Canadian coming-of-age fantasy comedy-drama film by director Jean-Claude Lauzon. The film tells the story of a young boy named Léo "Léolo" Lauzon, played by Maxime Collin, who engages in an active fantasy life while growing up with his Montreal family, and begins to have sexual fantasies about his neighbour Bianca, played by Giuditta del Vecchio. The film also stars Ginette Reno, Pierre Bourgault, Andrée Lachapelle, Denys Arcand, Julien Guiomar, and Germain Houde. Gilbert Sicotte narrates the film as the adult Léolo.
Interzone is a collection of short stories and other early works by William S. Burroughs from 1953 to 1958. The collection was first published by Viking Penguin in 1989, although several of the stories had already been printed elsewhere, including an earlier publication titled Early Routines. The title was inspired by the International Zone in Tangiers, Morocco, where Burroughs lived for a time and by which he was greatly influenced.
Exterminator! is a short story collection written by William S. Burroughs and first published in 1973. Early editions label the book a novel. It is not to be confused with The Exterminator, another collection of stories Burroughs published in 1960 in collaboration with Brion Gysin.
The 13th annual Genie Awards were held on November 22, 1992, to honour Canadian films released in late 1991 and 1992. They were dominated by David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Jean-Claude Lauzon's Léolo, and Jean Beaudin's Being at Home with Claude.
Beat is a 2000 American biographical drama film written and directed by Gary Walkow, and starring Courtney Love, Kiefer Sutherland, Norman Reedus, and Ron Livingston. The film focuses primarily on the last several weeks of writer Joan Vollmer's life in 1951 Mexico City, leading up to her accidental killing by her husband, the writer William S. Burroughs. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2000 and was entered into the 22nd Moscow International Film Festival.
David Cronenberg is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is known as a principal originator of the genre commonly known as body horror, with his films exploring visceral bodily transformation, infectious diseases, and the intertwining of the psychological, physical, and technological. Cronenberg is best known for exploring these themes through sci-fi horror films such as Shivers (1975), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), though he has also directed dramas, psychological thrillers and gangster films.
His adaptation came in at about $16 million, under budget and a modest sum for a film with lots of special effects.