Production Companies Film Trustees Ltd., Naked Lunch Productions, Nippon Film Development and Finance, Recorded Picture Company (RPC), The Ontario Film Development Corporation, Téléfilm Canada
Other Titles • Naked Lunch (1991) • David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch • Le Festin nu • more
Synopses for Naked Lunch (1991)
1.
You are now entering Interzone, William S Burroughs' phantasmagorical land of junk, paranoia and crawly things. Best travel advice: "Exterminate all rational thought". In David Cronenberg's superbly shot, unnerving warp on the Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch, the novelist himself becomes a main character (played in an implacable monotone by Peter Weller), with elements from Burroughs' life--including the shooting of his wife during a "William Tell" game, and bohemian friends Kerouac and Ginsberg--added to frame the book's wild visions. This is, ironically, a somewhat rational approach to an unfilmable book (and it makes a hair-curling double bill with Barton Fink, another look at writerly madness, with both films sharing Judy Davis). Cronenberg is a natural for oozing mugwumps and typewriters that turn into giant bugs, of course. But in the end, this is really his own vision of the artistic process, rather than Burroughs' hallucinatory descent into hell. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com
(33 votes)
2.
The dry wit of William S. Burroughs transfers surprisingly well to the screen, where a pest-control man seeking escape from his troubled existence flees to Interzone, a hallucinatory version of Tangiers, where reality and fantasy have merged. Peter Weller does a dead-on Burroughs impression, and the film follows a bizarre logic and has a dark, rich look that help make it one of Cronenberg's more satisfying works. It's not exactly Burroughs, but it is a strange, surreal landscape inhabited by half-alien, half-insect creatures and bizarre humans. And, like all other Cronenberg films it's a bit squishy; it is full of the biological dread that pervades all his films. Make no mistake, this film is not exactly faithful to the novel, and Cronenberg provides it with a neat framework, beginning and ending with Benway accidentally(?) killing his wife during their William Tell routine, just as Burroughs did in real life.
(35 votes)
3.
Exterminate all rational thought.
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs' hallucinatory, "unfilmable" novel is finally realized on-screen by director David Cronenberg. Part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict Bill Lee (Peter Weller) plunges into the nightmarish netherworld of the Interzone, pursuing a mysterious project that leads him to confront sinister cabals and giant talking bugs. The fruit of an unholy union between two masters of the hilarious and the macabre, Naked Lunch mingles aspects of Burroughs' novel with incidents from his own life, resulting in a compendium of paranoid fantasies and a searching investigation into the mysteries of the writing process.
(33 votes)
4.
The dry wit of writer William S. Burroughs transfers surprisingly well to the screen. This partially biographical celluloid interpretation of his book shows Burroughs's daring and delirium as one of the experimental beat writers (with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg) who emerged in the late 1950s. In the lead role, Peter Weller does a dead-on Burroughs impression, and the film follows a bizarre logic and has a dark, rich look that makes it one of director David Cronenberg's more satisfying works. Bill Lee (Weller) is a pest-control man who would rather be a writer, and he is seeking escape from his troubled existence. After killing his wife, he flees to Interzone, a hallucinatory version of Tangiers (the location where Burroughs penned the book). There he finds that reality and fantasy have merged in a strange, surreal landscape inhabited by half-alien, half-insect creatures and odd humans. And finally, in this altered state, Lee can become a writer. Like other Cronenberg films, NAKED LUNCH is a bit squishy; it is full of pervasive biological dread. And this film is not exactly faithful to the novel. Instead, Cronenberg provides it with a neat framework that begins and ends with Lee shooting his wife Joan (Judy Davis) during a botched William Tell routine, just as Burroughs did in real life.
(33 votes)
5.
Not an adaptation of beat writer William S. Burrough's novel but a mix of biography and an interpretation of his drug- induced writing processes combined with elements of his work in this paranoid fantasy about Bill Lee, a writer who accidentally shoots his wife, whose typewriter transforms into a cockroach and who becomes involved in a mysterious plot in an Islamic port called Interzone. Wonderfully bizarre, not unlike Burrough's books.
(29 votes)
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