Review of Naked Lunch (1991) by Roy C — 21 Nov 2010

I think one has to evaluate films like this based on level of engagement; after all, the film sets out to violate all narrative conventions, and most of the other categories by which we judge films don't apply or the filmmakers intentionally ignore. So, I give this film two stars based on my purely subjective lack of engagement.

One obvious problem I had: the Arab world is once again portrayed as the place from which all strangeness comes. In a film that makes up various locales and has bug powder stand in for heroin, it is odd that one of the realities in the film is a narrow-minded conception of Arabia.

William S. Burroughs, the author of the novel upon which this film is based, didn't believe in revision, a lesson I contradict to my students. Burroughs believed that the first thought was always the best, the most true, the most expressive of author's intent. And by way of apology/explanation, this theory is advocated by the film's characters. Indeed, I see Naked Lunch as being more about writing than it is about a drug-addicted exterminator navigating a convoluted, noir plot. Lee falls accidentally into writing, much as Burroughs did, and he has a complex, adversarial relationship with the tools of his trade (the typewriters turn into talking bugs who tell him to seduce various other characters). It seems as though Naked Lunch is attempting to problematize the written word and the process by which it's produced.

Perhaps because I'm a writer and teacher of writing, this part of the plot spoke to me. The rest of it just climbed up various rungs on the fucked-up ladder.