Al's Birthday Gift: Naked Lunch

It's Al's birthday once again, so it's time once again for me to review something that confuses even him!

Naked Lunch is a film by David Cronenberg which concerns an exterminator who gets addicted to his roach poisons, kills his wife, and goes more than a little loopy, ending up in the Interzone in North Africa writing reports and...serving as an agent in a war between sentient cockroach typewriters and giant caterpillars. Or something like that. This is another one of those cases where to be honest I'm not really sure what I watched.

So here's the basic outline. William Lee is an exterminator who is friends with two writers (and has written before himself). He runs short on his roach powder one day during a job and discovers that his wife, Joan, has been injecting herself with said powder. Owing to previous addictions, he's easily convinced to try the powder himself, which is when things start going more than a little sideways. One thing leads to another and he accidentally shoots his wife in a drugged out "William Tell" game, flees the country, and becomes convinced he's a pawn in a massive espionage plan on the part of sentient giant cockroaches. For the rest of the film he varies between writing reports and trying to find out the truth behind Interzone, Inc., a corporation the cockroaches want investigated, headed up by a strange cruel woman, Fadela, who is controlling a woman who resembles and shares a name with his dead wife.

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It's fairly likely that the majority of the last paragraph is utterly false, of course. This film's basically one long representation of a particularly wild drug trip. The main character is almost constantly doing some very exotic drugs, and the majority of events in the film very likely didn't happen anything remotely like they appear. I'll get to my thoughts on the film's overall plot and meanings and such, but first I want to do an actual bit of reviewing.

This is actually a pretty solid film, for a lot of reasons. The cast is one of them. Peter Weller's the focus, and has a lot of scenes that are effectively solo, just him and a CG character or two...and he's brilliant. He plays a very subdued part, a mix of 1950s reporter/detective and zoned-out drug addict, and he actually managed to pull me in to the film very well despite me having no clue what was going on a lot of the time. That's talent, right there. The various Supporting Characters are also strange and similarly have a subdued but emotionally affecting portrayal. Ian Holm does a nice job as William Lee's friend/enemy Tom Frost, Judy Davis portrays both the drug-addicted Joan Lee and the cultured- but controlled- Joan Frost excellently...everyone in the film really gives their all to their role, and that helps keep the viewer invested.

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You can tell a lot of thought has gone into the camerawork and lighting, too. This is a film where shots are generally interesting and carefully designed to set particular moods, not just to show the story but to influence it themselves. There's a lot of work done with lighting and camera angles to set unnerving or unnatural tones, and to give the viewer a feeling of discomfort. It's not pushed too heavily or in-your-face, but just a subtle thing that works well.

The Writing is...I'm going to call it good, but not for everyone. This is a very confusing and dense film, and it's frankly understandably not really one I'd expect a lot of people jump to watch. It's written well, but it can feel like it's written poorly, if that makes any sense. I definitely got a sense of who all the characters were and all, and there's a good feeling of plot progression...but at the same time, it's very difficult to understand just what's happening at any given time or what that plot really is. I don't really think I got it entirely, but in this case I honestly can't say that I think it's because this was written poorly--I think it's written well, just written strangely. It's simultaneously difficult to follow and easy to stay engrossed in. I actually wanted to dig through the layers and kind of figure out what was going on, and that's a major accomplishment for a film this confusing. Despite being so strange, it really did hook me.

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So...let's talk a bit about that strangeness, as that's the part that's going to put people off on this film, that makes it tough to watch, and...if we're being honest...that's why Al wanted me to review it. :-P

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There is a lot of crazy stuff in this film. I mentioned giant talking cockroach typewriters, and really, that undersells it. They're giant talking cockroach typewriters who talk out their asses. Not kidding, and that's extremely disgusting. And they speak very calmly and rationally, giving William advice and assignments as part of this bizarre shadow war between them and, presumably, the giant talking caterpillars who may or may not also be typewriters. Late in the film there's yet another type of typewriter, the mugwump, which secretes not one but two hallucinogenic substances if it likes what you type.

Oh, and the cockroach typewriters love having roach poison smeared around their "lips," which is to say their asshole. So basically they love you to give them finger-sex with drugs. Yeah, there were many things in this movie that did not exactly please me.

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Want more? How about a scene where William and Joan (Frost) team up to type on an Arabic typewriter, which transforms into some kind of human-assed caterpillar monstrosity while Joan's typing on it and starts humping them while they're having sex with each other because, evidently, typing in Arabic turns William on? Oh, and it basically has a penis growing out of its butt, too. Because I needed to see that.

And then there's the scene where a typewriter eats a typewriter.

More? There's a heck of a lot of talk of free sexual relations both hetero and homosexual, and just about everyone in the movie is somewhat of a mindless hedonist. There's a scene early on where William walks in on one of his writer buddies (Hank or Martin, I can't recall which is which) having sex with Joan (Lee), and just kind of walks into his bedroom and does some drugs, clearly not caring. He himself pretty much repeats the scene with Joan (Frost) later on, and Tom doesn't seem much to care about that, though he's right pissed about his typewriter being broken...and his other typewriter also being broken.

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There's also a scene where a young man is basically butt-raped by a giant sentient caterpillar. So yeah, that happened.

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This is, thus, a pretty tough film to watch, and that's what I would say is probably its biggest flaw. I don't mind it being confusing, because that's really kind of the point...I do mind it being pretty vile at times. There's a lot of stuff that seems to be disgusting mostly for disgust's sake, maybe to make some kind of point about grossing people out or something like that, but...it mostly feels like the film wants to be shocking and crude at times. It's still better than Tim and Eric, but it's uncomfortable to watch and I didn't feel like there was a justification for most of it.

Other than that...it's a confusing film, and it really isn't one I would have chosen to keep watching if I wasn't doing it for a review. I talked about it keeping me involved above, but, while it did do that enough that I was able to get through it in something resembling its actual running time (I believe it took me two and a half hours and it lasts about two, and to be frank I only really paused to get a drink or think about the film, not to go do something else entirely or be catatonic for a while like I've had to with other films), it wasn't keeping me in it so well that I would have kept on watching if I weren't aiming to review it for this site. I probably would have hit the first point with the cockroach ass-mouth and said, "Yeah, that's about enough." Even if I didn't stop there, I'd guess my breaking point would have been the point where he first reaches Interzone and starts writing reports, because that's when things just kind of totally become a sequence of events rather than the result of him clearly pursuing goals. At that point in the film, he's basically just following orders from this Cockroach Typewriter, and we can clearly tell that's not what's really happening, but because we can tell that we know we don't know why things are really happening or in fact what's happening, and...we can tell we've really lost most of our connection. It becomes harder and harder to keep feeling like watching when the movie almost never comes up for air.

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So...let's talk what I think this film is really going for. I think I should probably say that SPOILER warnings apply here, but it's kind of hard to figure out what to warn you about. :-P

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This is an allegory of sorts. It basically just outright stops showing you anything real pretty early on, and keeps up that concept almost constantly. The cockroaches, the shadow wars, all that stuff...that's just hallucinations, obviously. What's really going on here is a story about a writer struggling to write. William is not just an exterminator, he was previously a writer like his two buddies, and early on in the film they bug him to start writing again. He also discusses his strategy for writing: "Obliterate all rational thought." Thus, our movie. William has begun trying to write a novel, and is following his methodology by trying various mind-altering substances.

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The movie is actually kind enough to make this pretty much explicit midway through, in the one solitary time it comes up for air, when William is sleeping on Interzone's streets and is found by Hank and Martin, who came looking for him. They discover that he's written tons of pages of his novel (Naked Lunch itself), strewn all about his hotel. He also thinks a pile of trash he's stuffed in a bag and used as a pillow is his typewriter, but such is life, no? They help him put things together, but he goes back to his philosophy after they...actually, shortly before they leave. The escalating events with the cockroaches are a sign of the increasing drug use and the struggle to complete the novel. Rather than turning to his friends, William loses himself almost completely.

Now, what of the wife? Well, that's more difficult. I at first assumed the death of the wife was itself an illusion, but I think that it's actually one of the few real events shown. I think what happened is that William really did accidentally kill his wife in their strange "William Tell" game. He's forced as a result to leave his job as an Exterminator and flee the country. He's told to "write reports" by the bugs...I think that's just his inner consciousness realizing that now that he's out of the country and out of a job, he needs something new to do and maybe going back to his Writing is the right calling. So basically, the death of his wife leads him to write.

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This leads, therefore, into the ending, which I really do have to discuss.

William manages to win the hand of Joan Frost, the duplicate of his dead wife, by rescuing her in his hallucinations from a factory full of people drinking the hallucinogenic juices of the mugwumps in non-typewriter form. Turns out that Fadela is actually a disguised Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider--and believe me, seeing Captain Nathan Bridger rip himself out of a woman costume was pretty surreal), a psychiatrist who gave William some drugs based off of caterpillar parts to try to break him of his addiction to roach poison (or perhaps to enlist him in the bug army or some such, depending on what you believe).

William asks Benway for Joan because, quote, "I can't write without her." Benway gives in, and William and Joan travel to a foreign land, but are stopped at the border. William claims he's a writer, but the guards don't believe him and ask him to prove it. So he turns to Joan and wakes her up, and says its time for their William Tell game.

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And shoots her. Again.

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I was really confused by this at first, especially as that's where the film just stops, but I think I get it now. So basically, here's my thoughts, which may be wrong. Joan isn't real, obviously, under my theory, because Joan is dead in my theory. So what's going on here is basically that William subconsciously recognizes how his Writing career started: he killed his wife. Internally, he needs that sense of heartbreak. He needs something to drive him to extremes in order to write. So, mentally, he's recaptured his memory of Joan in the form of a hallucination of her double & successfully woos and forms a relationship with her. Thus, when he needs to write, he recreates that moment in his mind, "starting his career" once again by accidentally murdering her mental reflection.

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That's what I think, anyway.

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It's...hard to decide whether I like Naked Lunch or not. Honestly, it's far better than some of the other things I've watched for Al's birthday. It feels like it can be interpreted. I don't know if I did it quite right or not, but it feels like it can be. It feels kind of entertaining, so...it's doing things right. At the same time...it's still just not really that great of a story. I think it really depends what you want out of a movie. This was something I could appreciate, but...not really something I could like. The gross-out stuff didn't help, but really it's just kind of a confusing and dense maze of a film that doesn't quite end up making sense even if you think it through...it gets a bit overlost in its concept, in my opinion, though far less so than Inland Empire. It's definitely of clear quality and made very well, and I particularly have to praise the actors for just going ahead and utterly dedicating themselves here, but...I can't say I liked it, and I can't really say whether someone else would or not. It's very strange, and if you really like strange films that go about things in a very roundabout fashion, you might well enjoy this. If not...it's probably best to avoid it.

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All told, Al, this was weird but far from the worst thing I've had to watch for you, so...Happy Birthday, and no need to check your pillow for scorpions this year.

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Of note: Post-writing, I looked up more information on this film to just try to kind of see if there was anything I'd missed discussing. This actually differs quite a bit from the book plot-wise, though it's somewhat similar in general concept. The film is also somewhat biographical, using William Burroughs own life and really is effectively meant to portray the writing of the novel. Burroughs' wife did die under similar circumstances and the event was said to have started Burroughs' writing career, so...point to me, I guess?

Also looks like Roger Ebert had a similar reaction to this film: "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." So I'm in good company!