Today marks the 12th time this site has covered David Cronenberg, who kids today might know from his chilling monologue on the latest Charli XCX album. Why do we feel the need to keep picking and prodding at the King of Body Horror and his many oozing orifices? One, because Canada’s favorite son has a whopping eight films in the Criterion Collection, and two, he makes a lot of creepy crawlies well suited for Shocktober every fall.
We’ve covered every ’80s Cronenberg film, his most popular period, but there’s a lot to say about the more experimental decade that followed. By the ’90s, Cronenberg could no longer be labeled just a body horror director. Yes, the horrors of the human flesh are still on display throughout his ’90s output, but none of his ’90s films were horror movies per se.
Cronenberg had gone through… a mutation.
Dead Ringers (1988) is the turning point in Cronenberg’s evolution. The film doesn’t contain any supernatural elements or much blood and guts. Of course, being a film about twin gynecologists, it contains more than enough fear and anxiety regarding the fleshy meat sacks we call our bodies. Where could Cronenberg venture next? How about the twisted mind of William S. Burroughs?
Maybe it’s not right to call Burroughs “twisted” in the same way a studio would try to sell an Eli Roth movie, but even a passing glance at Burroughs’ body of work, and the life he lived, paints quite the bloody picture. A figurehead of the Beat Generation, Burroughs wrote about drugs, violence, pedophilia, and misogyny. He was a hardcore junkie who killed his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, in a 1951 game of William Tell gone wrong.
I tried to read Burroughs’ most famous work, Naked Lunch (1959), and failed after a few pages. I couldn’t get a grasp on the characters or the story’s nonlinear structure. I use the word “story” lightly. Then again, it’s this same chaotic structure that has made the book a cult classic. Burroughs has been celebrated over the years for his honest, if not deranged, writings about drugs and addiction, along with his exploration of sexuality. Burroughs, who married women twice and had many relationships with men, refused to label himself as anything other than “queer.”
The plot of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, to the best of Wikipedia’s understanding, follows William Lee, a junkie writer on the run from a narcotics agent who flees New York City for a foreign city called Interzone. There, William finds a black market of drugs and giant centipede meat, along with monstrous residents known as Mugwumps, who have no livers, subsist on sugary syrups, and secrete an addictive fluid from their penises that prolongs life.
Deemed unfilmable, and with good reason, multiple directors entertained the challenge of adapting Burroughs’ nightmarish work, from Anthony Balch to Stanley Kubrick. But it wasn’t until producer Jeremy Thomas approached Cronenberg in 1984 that the wheels started turning. Cronenberg met Burroughs in 1985, and after watching some of Cronenberg’s films, Burroughs felt he was the one person who could adapt Naked Lunch.
When it came to adapting the book for the screen, Cronenberg took more than his share of liberties with the material. Less an adaptation of the book than a film about William S. Burroughs himself, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch even includes a scene in which William “Bill” Lee (Peter Weller) kills his wife, Joan (Judy Davis), in a game of William Tell gone wrong.
Cronenberg adds shape to Burroughs’ nonlinear series of surreal routines. Bill begins the story as an exterminator in 1950s New York. He notices his roach powder is going missing and discovers his wife, Joan, has been shooting it up like heroin. Bill is taken in by the authorities under the pretense of using the roach powder as a drug, only to discover it was all a ruse to get him to talk to a giant talking beetle (Peter Boretski) that speaks through what appears to be a butthole. The bug tells Bill he is a secret agent who must kill his wife because she is an agent of “Interzone Incorporated.”
Bill kills his wife and flees. While being pursued by the authorities, he trades his gun for a typewriter, which is also a talking bug-like creature voiced by Peter Boretski, and begins writing reports. He finds himself in Interzone, somewhere in North Africa, where he is tasked with seducing a doppelgänger of his wife and finding Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who is running a black-market drug operation involving giant centipede meat.
The film isn’t always easy to follow, but there’s so much eye candy on the screen that I didn’t even care. The sheer number of creatures, prosthetics, and makeup effects is astounding, and they all hold up. I talk from time to time about “background movies.” I don’t mean movies you’re not invested in, so you don’t watch them. I’m talking about movies you could see projected on the wall of an art gallery or a hip bar and be captivated by the sounds and images alone.
One of those sounds is the dulcet tones of Peter Weller. I never realized how much Peter Weller sounds like comedian Steven Wright, but he does, and for a surreal noir fantasy, his droll delivery is perfect. He can play cool, haunted, even sensitive when he is told to go undercover as queer so that no one will suspect he is an agent. Props to Weller for wanting to do something so weird. I heard he became interested in the project while making RoboCop 2 and then read the book ten times. There’s something hilarious about that.
Naked Lunch is overstuffed with intrigue, symbolism, and grotesque details. I didn’t even get into the incredible design of the Mugwumps. I don’t know what all of it means but I do get and appreciate how Cronenberg uses all of these insane set-pieces to show us Bill’s evolution as a writer, and all the creatures as visual personifications of drugs. It’s not just weird shit. It’s deep shit. Cronenberg never disappoints. You know why?
Because Cronenberg IS brat