Why ‘Naked Lunch’ is a Bad Movie

1. HEAD SHOTS

The best (funniest) moments in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch are in fact 'routines' transplanted whole from the book and delivered by Peter Weller in Burroughsian monotone - the famous talking arsehole riff, or the story of the man whose guts become entangled around the hack axle of a car and has his entire insides pulled out with a ghastly 'schlup'.

Cronenberg's movies have never been afraid of talking heads. Many of his protagonists talk incessantly - most notably the motormouth Seth Brundle in The Fly, a film which Cronenberg once modestly described as 'people in a room, talking'. As he told Rolling Stone recently, 'To me, the "talking head" is the essence of cinema.' Or, if that fails to excite, then exploding. Exploding heads are always a sign of gore for a thinking audience. It is, understandably, the worst fear of a clever person like Cronenberg.

2. SHOTS THROUGH THE HEAD

Perhaps in restitution for the fact that in Robocop we only got to see his jaw, in Naked Lunch we are treated to the full acreage of Weller's forehead. It is the most memorable pate in the movie, but not the only one. In a version of the 'William Tell routine' in which Burroughs shot his wife Joan (Cronenberg's lunch is a dog's dinner of Burroughs' biography as well as his work), Judy Davis gets shot in the forehead, not, as was the case in real life, between the eyes.

Weller is the latest in a long line of pale ectodermic leading men who bear an uncanny resemblance to Cronenberg himself: James Wood, Christopher Walken, Jeremy Irons, all of whom look as if their skin has been stretched too tight over their skull. This makes the borderline with prosthetic effect sequences easier to blur. At the climax of Naked Lunch a woman rips off an outer layer of rubber skin to reveal the no more convincingly real face of Roy Scheider beneath.

3. SEX

According to Cronenberg, we're all women beneath the skin whether we like it or not. In Crimes of the Future a mad dermatologist is happily reincarnated as a little girl. Unhappily, in Videodrome James Wood's stomach develops a vaginal orifice.

Cronenberg, unlike Burroughs, is not homosexual. Like Burroughs he shares a double-edged fascination with the biological differences of women which occasionally borders on revulsion ('women are different... or rather they're a different species'). During the shooting of Naked Lunch Burroughs was intrigued to be told by Cronenberg of a species of butterfly the male and female of which are so different it took scientists forty years to realise they were the same animal.

4. INSECTS

From the unmade comedy Six Legs to The Fly, Cronenberg is the Dr Doolittle of the bug world. He sits writing with his front door open so the insects can come in a perch on his word-processor. As he said of his film Rabid, 'I identify with the parasites, basically.' Not surprising then that his favourite writer was, at one point, Nabokov, an avid lepidopterist. His appreciation of Burroughs was slightly marred by the anti-insect bias of his work ('insect eyes', for example, is often used to imply dead eyes). But during the filming of Naked Lunch he reassured himself by asking Burroughs if there were any insects he did like. He, like Nabokov, likes butterflies best.

Bugs loom large in the film. In the opening scenes (loosely adapted from Burroughs' short story The Exterminator) Bill Lee is introduced as a bug exterminator doing the rounds of New York's most dilapidated hotels (the maroon interiors of which link it with that other bug-extermination movie, Blue Velvet). After he has obeyed the orders of a bug with a talking sphincter that he must kill his wife, Lee flees to Interzone (Tangiers) where he writes a series of epigrammatic reports on a typewriter-turned-bug.

5. EPIGRAMS

Cronenberg once made a drag-racing movie, Fast Company, his favourite scene of which was a glimpse of a T-shirt that read 'Suck My Pipes'. All Cronenberg movies have some sort of sloganised theory-byte at their centre. In The Brood the motto 'Sex is the invention of a clever venereal disease' adorns the study of Dr Brian O'Blivion. In Videodrome it is the religious mantra, 'The New Flesh'. My favourite in Naked Lunch: when confronted by the Brion Gysin figure, Hank, with pages of the reports he cannot remember writing, Bill Lee drawls laconically, 'I never saw these pages before. I truly do suspect some colossal con.'

6. INTERIORS

Favourite because it staunches the guff about the tortured imagination that fills the rest of the movie. For Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, it soon transpires, is yet another film about the interior life of the writer to join Steven Soderbergh's forthcoming Kafka and the Coen brothers's Barton Fink. In placing him in a dilapidated hotel it links arms with both the latter and Kubrick's The Shining.

Cronenberg has always harboured an attachment for his interiors. Only a handful of the scenes in Dead Ringers took place outside (and those that did revealed a bleached winter skyscape, Cronenberg's favourite seasonal setting since Canadian tax concessions made shooting during the winter cheaper). Shivers was such a low-budget affair he ended up knocking on doors of the high-rise building in which he was shooting, asking people if their flats wanted to be in a movie. Cronenberg ended up living on set with his leeches in the fridge.

Naked Lunch was due to be shot in Tangiers until the Gulf War made it impossible so they recreated Interzone on a Canadian film set. As Cronenberg rationalised, 'Interzone, is, of course, a state of mind' and exteriors never made good metaphorical stand-ins for that anyway. The cool aquamarine of Bill Lee's hotel room is a typical Cronenberg interior. These are invariably lit like an operating theatre or an aquarium (Crimes of the Future even had a soundtrack of dolphins and water).

7. MAD SCIENTISTS

Or, perhaps, a laboratory. For Cronenberg films often feature that old B-movie stand-by: the mad scientist with a silly name and a sinister gameplan. As his career has progressed, they have gradually become more sympathetic. Dr Luther Stringfellow (Stereo), Dr Dan Keloid (Rabid), and Professor Brian O'Blivion (Videodrome) were all bad; Dr Seth Brundle (The Fly), Drs Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Dead Ringers) only arguably so. At school Cronenberg almost studied biology instead of literature. He first learnt how to make movies by dissecting a camera.

8. SICK BUILDINGS

Cronenberg's mad scientist typically fronts some sort of committee or renegade group - the Canadian Academy of Erotic Inquiry, the Institute of Neo-veneral Disease, the House of Skin - within odd-sounding institutions such as the Keloid clinic (Rabid), The Somafree Institute (The Brood), Consec (Scanners), Spectacular Optical (Videodrome). In Naked Lunch, Bill is enlisted as an agent for the Mugwamps, tall creatures which ooze addictive jism, in concert against some unnamed alien force of which the sinister Dr Benway may be a part.

This fascination with conspiratorial corporations is little more than Cronenberg's interest in bodily infection writ large, conspiracies both corporate and corporeal repeatedly shading into one another. Then again, evils plots are the simplest plot device around.

9. PLOTS

Naked Lunch ends with a replay of the wife-killing scene with which it started. Cronenberg's plots are always self-circling, suggesting either that a) some cycle of regeneration is underway, or that b) the whole thing is going to happen all over again or c) some weird Cronenbergian mix of the two (the original ending of The Fly had Geena Davis giving birth to a beautiful butterfly).

This circularity is also evident in the number of his films that end in suicide: The Dead Zone ends with a foreseen suicide, Max Renn kills himself at end of Videodrome; Brundlefly asks for a mercy killing; The Mantle twins go for a double suicide (hence the tabloid headline, 'Dead Ringers,' that inspired the movie title).

But Cronenberg's climaxes can have a curious reticence about them, as if his hand has been forced. Too often the so-called conspiracy is resolved simply by a rather static tableau of two men facing off in a room (Scanners, Dead Ringers, Videodrome). Naked Lunch ends with two men facing off in a room.

10. WHY NAKED LUNCH IS A BAD MOVIE

Self-circling plots are a good idea as long as you don't let on too early. If you do, you are forced, wearyingly, to pile plot-twist upon plot-twist. Videodrome devolved into a series of ever more meaningless hallucinatory story-swivels. Naked Lunch, because it dips just as liberally into the hallucinations of its protagonist, suffers from the same complaint.

It is also a film without a subtext. Before, Cronenberg's concerns have lain just beneath the skin. Now, because he has met in the works of Burroughs an exact copy of his own sensibility, each metaphor or conceit, by reciprocal amplification, is pinioned on the slab for all to see. Some ideas are not meant to be fleshed out.

A CRONENBERG FILMOGRAPHY

Transfer 1966

From The Drain 1967

Stereo 1969

Crimes Of The Future 1970

Shivers 1975

Rabid 1976

Fast Company 1979

The Brood 1979

Scanners 1980

Videodrome 1982

The Dead Zone 1983

The Fly 1986

Dead Ringers 1988

Naked Lunch 1991