Naked Lunch: The Monstrous Adaptation made by Monsters, for Monsters

Artikkel - Matei Norbert Balan

Not only does darkness shroud the world we live in, but copies its form too. Darkness is a great imitator. As we well know, if we stare at it, it will stare back. If we scream at darkness, darkness will also scream back. But if we are afraid, darkness will eat us. Because monsters inhabit this darkness. 

Copyright: Recorded Picture Company (RPC) & Naked Lunch Production / Foto: IMDb

These monsters can take many forms. They can be vampires, serial killers sporting machetes and hockey masks, loved ones who have returned from the grave to haunt us, or giant mutant bugs with human anuses on their backs. Monsters can also shapeshift into things that are perhaps too familiar: drug addiction, childhood trauma, domestic abuse, misogyny, homophobia, murder, and countless others. Monsters, as tradition dictates, make for great scary stories. And this frightening story begins with a bullet hole in a woman's head. The man who shot her is her beloved husband, and for this deed he will go down in history. He will not be punished for it, not by law and certainly not by society, although he will claim to punish himself by becoming a writer. 

The woman's name is Joan Vollmer. Mother, wife, junkie, and a muse of the beat generation. Her husband's name is William S. Burroughs, heir of a wealthy American family, stepfather, heroin aficionado, homosexual, and one of the tormented geniuses of the 50s literary movement known as beat generation. After Burroughs shot his wife in 1951, in Mexico, he went on to write three of the greatest novels of his time: Junkie, Queer, and Naked Lunch. The adaptation for the big screen of the latter, by the acclaimed horror director David Cronenberg, will allow Burroughs to consolidate his place in the history of pop-culture in a way that his fellow beatniks, Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, will never be able to.

Copyright: Daily News / Foto: Bitch Media

But before a great novel got turned into a great movie, there was something else that gave William S Burroughs the allure of a bad-boy legend, and that is precisely the shooting of his wife. The shooting of Joan was, by Burroughs' own account, accidental. The witnesses confirmed. The event has been described in such detail by the media over the years that to some of us, it might seem like a genuine piece of organic memory. William and Joan are at a party, drinking, laughing, surrounded by friends, and at one point William says to his wife, who sits in a chair across the room, "I guess it's about time for our William Tell routine." They had never done a William Tell routine before. But William is drunk, and Joan is drunk, and also undergoing withdrawal from a heavy amphetamine habit. So they're both game. Joan places a highball glass on the top of her head and Burroughs, known to be a good shot, sitting about two meters away, raises his gun, a Star. 380, shoots, and hits Joan in the head. For this, Burroughs spends 13 days in jail until his brother arrives in Mexico City and bribes officials and lawyers for William to be released until the trial. The killing is then ruled culpable homicide, and later, after a few witnesses are paid to testify that the gun had misfired on its own, Burroughs flees to the United States and is convicted in absentia of homicide, and is given a two year suspended sentence.

Eight years after this horrific event, Naked Lunch was published. It was one of the last books in America to be the cause of an obscenity trial, and it brought Burroughs great recognition from his peers, Norman Mailer referring to the book as having been written by a genius. But Burroughs might never have put a word on the page if had he not shot Joan. "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death," Burroughs has said, "and to the realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the ugly spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice except to write my way out." The very ending of the movie pushes this button explicitly. After escaping the Interzone, Bill Lee - a Burroughs-like protagonist, played by Peter Weller, and Joan - a Vollmer-like character played by Judy Davis, are both trying to get into the fictional land of Annexia. When the border guards ask Bill to prove that he's a writer, Bill repeats the William Tell routine with Joan and shoots her in the head. The guards accept this as being proof that he is a writer and allow him to pass.

Every time we talk about William S Burroughs we latch onto this terrible thing. The killing of his wife. Every conversation about Burroughs starts or ends with this, sometimes both, as if this is the greatest thing he has ever done. As if it were some act of bravery. But this is not only true of us, but this is also, by all means, true of Burroughs as well. He was an author who began and ended his myth with the killing of Joan Vollmer. The event that made him what he was to himself, and also revealed him to us, his public, is central to the Naked Lunch story. 

Copyright: Recorded Picture Company (RPC) & Naked Lunch Productions / Foto: IMDb

But David Cronenberg, who, in the late 80s, set out to turn Naked Lunch into a movie, felt that there was more to this story. In a book published in 1992, called Cronenberg on Cronenberg, in which David Cronenberg mostly rants to himself about his work, he went on to say that "I understood the metaphorical side. That's what I responded to.". The result, as seen on screen and, by all means, felt in the gut, is a very strange horror biopic that fuses little of the source material with Burroughs' own life. "I was forced to do something else: to fuse my own sensibility with Burroughs and create a third thing that neither he nor I would have done on his own." he explained further, also referencing one of his favorite tropes; bodies merging, fusing, metamorphosing, and becoming something that, in the best-case scenario, is unsettling.

We might consider the movie Naked Lunch an adaptation of the complex mental state in which Burroughs found himself in during the 50s and most of the 60s. This complex mental state was, by all accounts, pitch-black darkness, and in it monsters were born, heroin addiction and the killing of his wife being only one of them. And because David Cronenberg is such a talented monster whisperer, he told the story of William S. Burroughs, or rather the myth, in such a way that it still seems unbelievable, and tends to upset the most of us while turning our stomachs inside out.

But what exactly is a monster? There's an old rule of thumb for writers (that frankly Cronenberg enjoys abusing), which states that a good, effective monster is one that challenges the status quo. The philosopher and film theorist Noël Carroll touches on this as well. To him monsters are "beings or creatures which specialize in formlessness, incompleteness, categorical interstitiality and categorical contradictoriness". As explained by Adam Charles Hart, in his article "I, Mugwump: projection, abjection, and Cronenbergian monstrosity in Naked Lunch", monsters completely blur the lines between the living and the dead, humans and beasts, real and unreal or they simply fail to fully inhabit any of these categories. According to Hart, "Vampires or ghosts, for example, are both living and dead – or, perhaps, they question the validity of those most basic categories through which we understand and order the universe. We instinctively recognize these category violations as not just troubling, but unnatural, and we respond with both fear and disgust."

Cronenberg excels at blurring these lines, but he doesn't do it for the sake of squeezing the cold sweat out of his viewers. Cronenberg didn't cherry-pick the most extreme elements of the novel and mixed them with Burroughs' own life because he wanted to have fun. He did it because he understood Burroughs himself failed to inhabit any of the categories in which the white conservative American society of his time was forcing him into, and so did his work. Burroughs was a homosexual at a time when you could still do prison time for sodomy. He was a junkie at a time when you could also go to prison for just being an addict. Burroughs was a writer telling the dark story of his generation at a time when books could be banned on accounts of indecency (Naked Lunch was banned in Boston and Los Angeles until the mid-60s). Burroughs was a monster for the society he so spectacularly failed to live in, and that society was monstrous to him. Burroughs was even a monster to himself. In a letter he wrote to Allan Ginsberg, Burroughs confessed that he believed that writing Naked Lunch had cured him of being gay and that he was glad that this had finally happened. Allan Ginsberg was, at the time, undergoing therapy, in an attempt to also cure himself of his homosexuality. 

Carroll's way of approaching monsters is used to great effect in Naked Lunch by Cronenberg. And it is not only the monsters who blur the lines. "Burroughs and I have been fused in the same telepod together," he said in interview for Esquire, in 1992, referring to The Fly, his previous movie, where Jeff Goldblum fuses himself with a housefly at the molecular genetic level "And what you've got now is the Brundlething, which is my and his version of Naked Lunch. It's a fusion of the two of us, and it really is something that neither one of us would have done alone. Now I don't know which of us is the fly and which is human.". 

 But in The Fly this blurring worked differently. It talked about a scientist being consumed by work up to the point where that work completely takes over and destroys him, so it expressed the movie's central theme. But in Naked Lunch Cronberg uses this technique to do something else. The Mugwumps, the monstrous sex-crazed bugs in the movie, are an incarnation of Bill Lee's repressed sexuality. These creatures first tell him to kill his wife and then force him to be a homosexual because it would be a good cover for him. The protagonist doesn't want to be gay, and he doesn't intend to kill his wife. He does it because these monsters actively direct him to do so.

Interestingly enough, the movie's monsters also function as typewriters. These monsters control bill Lee, but he also creates them, or he creates with their help. Furthermore, Cronenberg puts together characters who talk, behave, and look just like the real-life people who inspired them. Besides Bill Lee, who is obviously a version of William S. Burroughs, but actually isn't - and by being so it becomes a third thing, which neither Burroughs or Cronenberg could have done on their own, there are Joan Frost/Joan Lee who are both Joan Vollmer - but at the same time not quite, and also Martin, who is a Cronenbergian version of Allen Ginsberg, and Hank, a version of Jack Kerouac. All these elements work together to weave a complex and odd story which has the sole purpose of telling us one thing: there's no point in trying to make sense of William S. Burroughs' life, the man could barely do that himself. 

We like to believe that we can understand monsters and what produces them. We point to a theory like the one provided by Carroll, and we think we understand. But what we usually fail to see is that monsters are more than their monstrous appearance. Monsters are everywhere. Not in the way that they wait around every corner to bite our heads off and take our limbs for trophies. Monsters are both as simple and as complex as a movie adaptation that immortalizes a troubled genius in a problematic way. A monster can very well be perpetuating the highly toxic myth of the tormented bright mind which draws its creativity from pure anguish. So what kind of monster is Naked Lunch? Is it a confession on Joan's murder or some complex excuse? Is it a detailed account of what living was like as an addict, a writer, and a homosexual in the 1905s? Is it a critique addressed to a society that at its core hasn't changed that much since then? And what kind of monsters do we produce while viewing such a movie? That is for every one of us to decide.