NAKED LUNCH

In David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s hallucinatory, once-thought-unfilmable novel NAKED LUNCH, a part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict named Bill Lee (Peter Weller) plunges into the nightmarish Interzone. The novel is a diary of drug use, offering a series of hypnotic visuals that exist in a rhythm with his vernacular language, but Cronenberg structures his film as a darkly humorous sci-fi saga: the story of a man who winds up in an intergalactic conspiracy after accidentally killing his wife. That the story also includes hallucinogenic drugs, giant bugs, and grotesque sexuality has as much to do with Cronenberg as it does Burroughs.

Alternately humorous and grotesque, NAKED LUNCH is an evocative paranoid fantasy and a self-reflexive investigation into the mysteries of the creative process. Unsurprisingly, it was a massive commercial failure when first released. Perhaps audiences in 1991 just weren’t ready to watch Peter Weller rub his fingers around the pulsating, talking anus of a prosthetic bug, but fortunately for the rest of us, Croneberg did it anyway.