David Cronnenberg's Naked Lunch

You could say that Cronnenberg’s adaptation of Burroughs book is meta-textual – it is based on Naked Lunch, Burroughs other works of fiction, plus some incidents and people borrowed from Burroughs’s life (Hank and Martin are based on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg). But it also is about Cronnenberg – perhaps more so than it is about Burroughs. Cronnenberg turns Burroughs’s bitterly critical, semi-autobiographical fiction about society’s norms in the 1950’s regarding drug use and homosexuality into a unique nightmare that is more Cronnenberg than Burroughs.

So why is it here? What I like about Cronnenberg and Lynch is that they both reach so far – creatively speaking ( choosing Naked Lunch for a movie adaptation is truly courageous) that their movies are often flawed. But they both manage to turn those flaws into virtues. Yes, Naked Lunch is a flawed movie in so many ways, and this series has been about movies that are flawed, and yet they make the grade because they manage somehow to reach a place in our souls that cannot be reached by films and filmmakers that strive for perfection.

Caution the Clip contains scenes that may Either Make You Laugh or Offend you.