On the Road

For years, Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road had been considered unfilmable. That hasn’t stopped people from trying ever since it was published in 1957 with Kerouac himself sending a letter to Marlon Brando asking the actor to star opposite him in a film version. It isn’t the style or the structure that makes the novel difficult to adapt but rather its iconic status as one of the signature books of the 1950s. Even more daunting is its status as a book that millions of people grew up reading, like The Catcher in the Rye. As a result, it has become a much beloved and cherished book for generations of readers. Anyone attempting to adapt Kerouac’s novel into a film faces the intimidating task of living up to the impossible expectations of legions of fans, not to mention somehow making people forget the equally iconic people the characters are based on – Kerouac and his famous friends, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs.

The path to an On the Road film has been littered with failed attempts from the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Joel Schumacher, Brad Pitt, Billy Crudup, Colin Farrell, and Gus Van Sant, who were all attached at one time or another. Of all the people linked to the project, it was Coppola who has remained a constant over the years. He bought the rights in 1979 and has managed to steer it clear of Hollywood interference, finally picking Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) to direct. He saw it through a turbulent period where financing fell through and actors dropped out. He finally made and released the final product in 2012 with up-and-coming actors Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund, and, oh yeah, a young actress you might have heard of – Kristen Stewart. On the Road debuted to a lackluster reception at the Cannes Film Festival prompting Salles to cut 13 minutes from the film in an effort to tighten things up and focus more on the two main characters – Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund).

On the Road is a fictionalized account of Kerouac’s numerous journeys across the United States between 1947 and 1950 when he met Neal Cassady, who would become the mythical character Dean Moriarty in the book. The film begins, literally, on the road with a shot of Sal Paradise’s feet walking on several different roads both during the day and at night. Rather interestingly, Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera’s angle with their adaptation is the theme of absent fathers and Sal and Dean’s yearning for theirs. Sal’s father dies before he first meets Dean and Dean’s elusive father is a semi-famous hobo in Denver who abandoned his family when his son was very young. So, the two men bond over a common missing element in their lives. This is established early on with Sal’s opening voiceover narration that quotes Kerouac’s original scroll manuscript before it was edited into the book most of us know and love: “I first met Dean not long after my father died. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death, my awful feeling that everything was dead.” By choosing to quote the scroll instead of the novel, Salles and Rivera are letting fans know that they’ve done their homework and understand the source material.

Sal meets Dean and his beautiful young wife Marylou (Kristen Stewart) as the dynamic couple land in New York City to meet a mutual friend. Sal is captivated by Dean’s infectious energy and considerable charisma. Garrett Hedlund does a fantastic job of conveying Dean’s insatiable hunger for learning and for experience. He’s willing to try almost anything once if only for the experience. The actor captures the mischievous glint in Dean’s eye. You can see why he is so initially attractive to people with his dynamic and fascinating personality. However, there are hints early on that he may not be all he’s cracked up to be, like how he glosses over breaking up with Marylou, which was so bad that she called the cops on him.

I will admit that when I first heard of Hedlund being cast as Dean I wasn’t sold on the idea, but after seeing him in the wildly uneven Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Country Strong (2010), I could imagine him in the role. He was by and far the best thing in that film, bringing a natural charisma that made you want to watch him every time he came on screen. He brings that quality to Dean in On the Road.

Once I got past the fact that none of the actors in the film look like their real-life counterparts, I was able to settle in and enjoy the experience. Salles wisely did not try to go for people who resembled Kerouac and his friends (an impossible task) but rather actors that were able to capture the spirit of the characters in the book. Sam Riley, who was so good as Ian Curtis in Control (2007), is fine as Sal but plays him a little too passively than he comes across in the book. This is due in large part to the fact that Riley is often overshadowed by the more dynamic Hedlund.

For those worried about the presence of Twilight’s Kristen Stewart, you have nothing to fear. Given the strong material and an equally strong director guiding her, the actress sheds her trademark acting tics and affectations and disappears into her character. Freed from not having to carry a massive cinematic franchise, Stewart allows herself to have fun with the role. She is cast wonderfully against type as the sexually hungry Marylou. Despite her movie star status, Stewart only has a supporting role but she makes the most of it and one hopes that a part like this is a sign of things to come for the talented young actress.

While the film is mostly about Sal and Dean, a few of the supporting characters get their moments, chief among them is Carlo Marx a.k.a. Allen Ginsberg (Tom Sturridge) and a memorable extended cameo by Old Bull Lee a.k.a. William S. Burroughs (Viggo Mortensen). A perfectly cast Viggo Mortensen eerily channels Burroughs’ distinctive voice including his trademark drawl as he dispenses pearls of paranoid wisdom to Sal and Dean while Amy Adams grunges herself down as Bull Lee’s equally cryptic wife Jane. They play well off each other and leave us wanting to see more of this odd couple.

To say that On the Road plays like a collection of highlights from the book is not a criticism as the source material is episodic in nature. That being said, Salles’ film is made by and for fans of Kerouac’s novel, possibly alienating the uninitiated. For fans of the novel, your enjoyment of the film will probably be based on how many of your favorite passages made it into the final version as the ones that do are translated quite faithfully with significant chunks of Kerouac’s prose spoken verbatim in the frequent voiceover narration.

For me, it was great to see some of my favorite passages from Kerouac’s novel realized in the film, like Sal’s ride to Denver on a flatbed truck with a hobo by the name of Mississippi Gene and a hitchhiker named Montana Slim that is pretty much the way I imagined it, right down to Gene singing that great little blues song with everyone joining in all photographed during dusk by cinematographer Eric Gautier. None of these characters are identified in the film but fans of the book will recognize them immediately. This scene shows the camaraderie among fellow travelers. Another favorite bit is a brief scene that demonstrates Dean’s amazing ability to park cars on a dime while living in New York. Salles also manages to capture the energy and vitality of be-bop jazz in a sequence early on where Sal and Dean go see a jazz saxophone player in action (Terrence Howard) and we see Dean lost in the music, lost in the beat.

Salles’ film accurately depicts the initial rush of excitement that most of the characters experience with Dean and how this eventually gives way to anger and disappointment when he invariably lets them down in some way. For Sal, it’s disillusionment as Dean turns out not to be the mythic Western hero figure he had imagined but an irresponsible man who does what he wants, oblivious of how it might affect those around him and yet he still loves him like a brother because of the intense bond they developed on their adventures crisscrossing the country. Jose Rivera’s screenplay doesn’t shy away from showing Dean’s poor treatment of women, like how he neglects his wife Camille (Kirsten Dunst) and baby for trivial “kicks,” going out to a jazz club with Sal. The film also shows how he repeatedly cheats on her with Marylou and vice versa, eventually abandoning both. On his path for the ultimate thrill, he leaves a path of failed marriages and destroyed friendships. For Dean, nothing must get in the way of his voracious appetite – be it drink, drugs, women or the open road. He is the quintessential free spirit, a restless soul that burns like the roman candles Sal compares him to.

As far as films directly about the Beat Generation go, On the Road is best one to date. That’s not saying much when its competition consists mostly of failed efforts like Heart Beat (1980), The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997) and Neal Cassady (2008), which were made by people who understood little about the Beats. Sure, there have been the rare exceptions that got it right, like Naked Lunch (1991) and Howl (2010), but I’ve always felt that the two best unofficial Beat Generation films were Robert Rossen’s adaptation of The Hustler (1961) and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991). The former managed to capture the run down, “beat” feeling that is often conveyed in Kerouac’s novels, while the latter brilliantly captures the allure of the open road and the search for a missing parental figure, in this case a mother. At that point in their respective careers, Rossen and Van Sant would have been ideal directors to tackle On the Road.

The attention to period detail is fantastic, from recreating 1940s New York City to the famous ’49 Hudson that Sal and Dean drive across the country. Right from the get-go, Salles immerses us in this time period with the help of jazz music from the likes of Slim Gaillard, Dinah Washington, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. The sets, locations, outfits and music all work together to provide us with a glimpse of that time as seen through Kerouac’s eyes. Rather interestingly, Salles and Rivera don’t shy away from the sex in On the Road as we see Dean with a variety of sexual partners over the course of film as does Sal, which includes his brief relationship with Terry, (Alice Braga), a beautiful Mexican woman he meets in California. The Beat writers were very passionate people and this included their sex lives.

The care and detail applied to every scene clearly demonstrates that this was a passion project for everyone involved. On the Road is not some sterile, impersonal studio film, but rather one made by people with a real affinity for the source material. Salles’ film captures the energy and excitement of Kerouac and his friends who shared a passion for literature and jazz. They lived for the moment, giving into their wildest urges as one sometimes does at that young age where you have your whole life in front of you and feel indestructible. They are the “mad ones” as Kerouac calls them in his book. This is certainly not a film for everyone and rightly so. What it does is perfectly capture the essence and spirit of the novel. It does this so faithfully that it may alienate the uninitiated but so be it. At least Salles has the conviction to pick a specific angle and go for it, making definite choices along the way instead of playing it safe.

Fabulous Roman Candles: A Beat Generation Primer

BLOGGER'S NOTE: In anticipation of my upcoming review of On the Road, I have written a brief introduction to the key members of the Beat Generation.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night," - from "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

And with those words, poet Allen Ginsberg created a manifesto for a whole generation – a group of people who felt like they didn't belong anywhere in 1950s society. Not in the paranoid hype of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunts, not in President Eisenhower's military war machine, and not in the sterile sitcom suburbia of Leave It To Beaver. Ginsberg was speaking for the disenfranchised everywhere with his poem that celebrated everything that was taboo. The media soon picked up on this small movement, and built up its most charismatic members – Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs – to mythic proportions. The Beat Generation, as it came to be known, began to mutate into something different from its original intentions. Antiquated terms like "beatnik" and "hipster" became the watchwords of this new entity. It even acquired its own dress code: berets, turtlenecks, and goatees, all to the beat of the bongos. In short the Beat Generation became a parody of itself. But it didn't start out that way.

           

In 1943, a young Allen Ginsberg arrived at Columbia University in New York City with the intention of becoming a labor lawyer. Being the son of a poet, Ginsberg had some pretensions to the written word and with fellow undergraduate Lucien Carr they became interested in finding a "New Vision" in literature. This pursuit led them to form a friendship with two aspiring writers, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs in 1944. Kerouac was at Columbia on a football scholarship, but an injury had cut his career short and as a result he began to study literature. Burroughs met the other three men through an acquaintance of Kerouac's and impressed them with his vast knowledge of literature and the refined way in which he carried himself. Being older than the others, Burroughs became like a teacher to the young men, introducing them to all kinds of European authors and initiating them into drug culture. He subsequently presented the group to his drug contact, Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler who embodied what would later become the rather nebulous term, "beat."

           

The arrival of 1946 brought an important element to this ever-increasing group of writers. Neal Cassady, a friend of Ginsberg's from Denver, arrived in New York City on a Greyhound bus and became Ginsberg's lover and good friends with Kerouac. Cassady, with his charismatic manic energy, was an important catalyst to the group – particularly to Kerouac who transformed Cassady into the mythical central character of two of his novels, On the Road and Visions of Cody. Cassady also symbolized everything that was "beat" but on the opposite end of the spectrum to Huncke: he was wild, unpredictable, and, more importantly in Kerouac's eyes, the essence of spontaneity. Along with be-bop jazz, Cassady's frenetic lifestyle provided the inspiration for Kerouac's own literary style, which he later called, "Spontaneous Bop Prosody." In essence, it was Kerouac's attempt to emulate jazz in his prose. As he once explained, "by not revising what you've already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your mind during the writing itself." The musical cadences in Kerouac's work become readily apparent when you hear the man himself read his own prose and this gives a whole new perspective to the printed word.

"...because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles..." - from On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The group now had all the elements that they needed for their "New Vision" except a name for their group, which did not present itself until 1948 when Kerouac met another aspiring writer in New York named John Clellon Holmes. As Kerouac remembers they were "sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said 'You know this is really a beat generation.' And he leapt up and said "That's it, that's right!'" The "beat" for Kerouac and the others took on several meanings. It could be seen as being "beat" and "beaten down," as in being tired and worn out, or the "beat" could be interpreted as "beatitude," or a sincere belief in spirituality and God, or the third significant distinction of the word was applied to the rhythmic beat of jazz and the fast tempo of this musical form. Despite the many meanings of the word "beat," the core of this crew, according to Kerouac, was "a swinging group of new American men intent on joy," and not a group of hoodlums and criminals as the media later tried to label them.

However, Kerouac and the others were hardly angels either. More than anything they were a product of post-World War II malaise and out of this developed Ginsberg's fear of the atomic age: a fear of the bomb, a fear of contamination, and of radiation sickness or what he saw as a "disease of the age." To escape this fear, the group experimented with all kinds of drugs: marijuana, morphine, heroin, and Benzedrine which fueled their writing and aided in what Ginsberg termed, "some kind of opening of mind." It also pushed them outside of mainstream society so that they became a "community of outlaws," as Burroughs biographer, Ted Morgan later observed. Burroughs was known to forge stolen prescriptions for drugs and often robbed drunks on the subway for money. Kerouac even went to jail as a material witness for helping Lucien Carr destroy evidence after the latter had fatally stabbed David Kammerer, another member of their group while at Columbia. This incident also resulted in Ginsberg being sent to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute for a short duration. They were no strangers to the fringes of society, for they constantly lived on its edges.

"And always cops: smooth college-trained state cops, practiced, apologetic patter, electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face; snarling big city dicks, soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt...." - from Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

           

Despite this dangerous side of the Beats, they were really romantics who celebrated the little things in life that most people took for granted or failed to notice. For Kerouac and the others, they were on a spiritual journey that involved "walking talking poetry in the streets, walking talking God in the streets," as Kerouac so eloquently described it in an essay for Playboy magazine. Critics and the media tried to paint them into a corner as troublemakers who were against the world, but they refused to be pigeon-holed by this view. In most of his public appearances, most notably on The Steve Allen Show, Kerouac came across as gentle, sincerely religious soul who celebrated life, not condemning it. "This is Beat," he once said, "Live your lives out? Naw, love your lives out."

           

By the early to mid-fifties, the East Coast Beats began to disperse and Ginsberg headed out West where the scene developed in San Francisco with poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure amongst others. Kerouac and the others were going in their own directions but the friendships between them endured over the years. This small, initially tight-knit group had inadvertently created the blueprint for a bohemian community. They were what historian Alfred Kazin called a "family of friends." They fed off each other, inspired each other, and generally supported one another's interest in writing. The result was astounding. Some of the most exciting literature to appear in the 20th century came out of this community: Kerouac's ode to travel, On the Road, Ginsberg's epic poem, "Howl," and Burroughs' hallucinogenic satire, Naked Lunch. They inspired a subsequent generation and their works continue to inspire and fascinate today. Despite what critics of their day said, they were no fad, no flavor-of-the-month, but a strong new voice that showed a different perspective on life: living for the moment. Their philosophy didn't fit the modern, fast paced, 9-to-5 rat race, but rather celebrated shifting gears and enjoying life for the short time that we experience it.

"...and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty." - from On the Road by Jack Kerouac

David Cronenberg Blogathon: Naked Lunch

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared over at Tony Dayoub's blog Cinematic Viewfinder as part of his fantastic David Cronenberg Blogathon. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you check out all the wonderful submissions and links that he's posted.

Widely regarded as unfilmable because it defied normal narrative logic and for containing some of the most perverse, often disturbing passages of sex and violence ever committed to the page, William S. Burroughs' seminal novel Naked Lunch was the ideal project for filmmaker David Cronenberg. In many respects, the themes and subject matter the book explores parallel many of the preoccupations of his films: the merging of flesh with machines, human transformation, and secret societies. One only has to look at an early film like Videodrome (1983) to see Burroughs’ influence — the mix of pulpy exploitation with high concept ideas. The characters in Cronenberg’s films, like the characters in Burroughs’ fiction, are morally ambiguous. It is not as easy to identify with them as it is with characters in more mainstream entertainment.

As Cronenberg was the first to admit, a conventional adaptation of Naked Lunch is impossible as it would be banned in every country. So, he wisely merged key elements from the book along with bits and pieces from the author’s early novels, chief among them Junky and Exterminator!, with aspects of Burroughs’ life, tempered with black humor as we are taken to surreal places. The end result is a fascinating collaboration between two like-minded artists and a film that is ultimately about the writing process as it defines the film’s protagonists much as it did Burroughs – writing acts as a catharsis, a way of dealing with guilt.

Ornette Coleman’s freaky, free-form jazz complements Howard Shore’s ominous score to create a film noir vibe right from the start which is in keeping in tone with Burroughs’ early work that often parodied badly written pulp crime novels. When he’s not spraying for bugs at people’s homes to pay the bills, Bill Lee (Peter Weller) hangs out with his friends, and fellow writers, Martin (Michael Zelniker) and Hank (Nicholas Campbell) who are introduced arguing about the writing process. Hank (a thinly-veiled riff on Jack Kerouac) argues that to rewrite is to betray ones own thoughts as it disrupts the flow of words while Martin (a stand-in for Allen Ginsberg) counters by saying that one should rewrite so that they consider everything from every possible angle in order to produce the best work possible. Hank sees this as censorship and a betrayal of one’s own best, honest and most primitive thoughts. When asked for his opinion, Bill simply replies, “exterminate all rational thought.”

Bill is in danger of losing his job because he keeps running out of bug powder. It seems that his wife Joan (Judy Davis) is shooting it up. When he confronts her about it, she deadpans, “It’s a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.” Pretty soon she’s doing so much of it that all she has to do is breathe on a cockroach and it dies. Bill soon starts shooting up bug powder too and begins to imagine giant talking insects that tell him he’s actually a secret agent. He’s instructed to kill his wife who happens to be a rival agent for Interzone Incorporated, a shadowy organization. The boundaries between what are real and what are Bill’s elaborate hallucinations become blurred, leading him into the mysterious realm of Interzone where everyday objects, like his typewriter, transform into mechanized insects that talk to him. The line between what he is writing and what he is living becomes blurred beyond recognition, much like Max and his relationship to television in Videodrome.

In real life, Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in 1951 while they were living in Mexico City and it was this tragic incident that motivated him to become a writer as a way of dealing with the guilt over what he had done. He said, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.” Cronenberg understands what a pivotal part this played in Burroughs’ life and incorporates it into his film. In a nice touch, there is a scene where Bill goes to a pawnshop and trades in the gun he shot Joan with for a typewriter. It’s a symbolic transition from one phase of his life to another.

Bill uses drugs to escape the horror of what he has done and his mind creates an elaborate alternate reality known as Interzone where he is a secret agent that writes reports (a.k.a. his book) about his “mission” on a creepy bug/typewriter hybrid that gets aroused by his forceful typing. He travels through a shadowy world where he is reunited with Joan, this time around a femme fatale type, Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands), a suave businessman that sexually preys on young men, and the notorious Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who initially seems to want to help Bill but turns out to be the powerful puppetmaster of Interzone.

Thankfully, Cronenberg retains Burroughs’ dry, sardonic sense of humor as well as touching upon his self-loathing about being homosexual. He’s aided in these endeavors by Peter Weller’s excellent performance as Burroughs surrogate Bill Lee. No stranger to fantastical genre films (see RoboCop and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai), the actor nails Burroughs’ unique cadence – the lazy drawl and the dry wit. Hearing him recite several amusing stories right out of Naked Lunch, coupled with his tall, gaunt appearance, only reinforces how well cast he was in this role. Weller also does a good job conveying the lonely desperation of a strung-out junkie and the almost zombie-like state he achieves when zonked out of his head on junk. Along with her role in Barton Fink (1991), Judy Davis plays the doomed muse of a writer consumed by his obsessions. As Joan Lee, Davis is quite good as an almost vampiric drug addict complete with sallow complexion and haunted look. As Joan Frost, Bill’s Interzone version of his wife, she’s healthier and more confident but the end result is still the same.

In 1984, producer Jeremy Thomas met David Cronenberg at the Toronto Film Festival where he had bought the rights to Stephen Frears’ film The Hit (1984). Thomas had heard that Cronenberg wanted to do a film adaptation of Naked Lunch and he wanted to produce it. This wasn’t the first time someone expressed an interest in turning the book into a film. In 1971, long-time friend of William S. Burroughs and painter and writer, Brion Gysin wrote a screenplay. Antony Balch was going to direct and Mick Jagger was going to star in it but the project never got past the planning stages. Burroughs said of this version that the script was “long burlesque and includes a series of music-hall comedy songs.” In 1972, television producer Chuck Barris, of all people, gave it a go with writer Terry Southern as the proposed screenwriter but it too went nowhere (the mind boggles at what those two would’ve come up with!). In 1979, Frank Zappa approached Burroughs with the notion of doing Naked Lunch as an off-Broadway musical but again this never materialized.

After Cronenberg and Thomas met, the producer optioned Burroughs’ novel. That same year, Cronenberg met the legendary author at his 70th birthday party at the Limelight Night Club in New York City. He had seen and admired several of Cronenberg’s films and also had an affinity for many of the themes they explored. Burroughs said, “when I heard that David was interested in doing the film I thought … he’s the one that can do it if anyone can.” The next year, Cronenberg, Burroughs and Thomas traveled to Tangier, the city where the book was written, in order to retrace its creation.

Cronenberg and Thomas began the process of adapting the book into a film in 1985. Not surprisingly, they had a difficult time getting financing for the film because of the book’s notorious reputation of being unfilmable. Cronenberg said, “a literal translation just wouldn’t work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country in the world.” During the five years of the film’s development, Cronenberg kept in contact with Burroughs and explained that the film would be about the act of writing Naked Lunch. He finished the first draft of the script in 1989 while on location in England, acting in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (1990).

He gave the book’s fragmented collection of set pieces a more traditional narrative structure. While the Mugwump creatures are a Burroughs invention from the book, the insect typewriters were created by Cronenberg to bring to “the screen things that can’t be shown in a mainstream movie.” In addition to drawing from Naked Lunch, he also incorporated elements from other books by Burroughs, like Exterminator!, Queer and Letters to Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs read the script around the Christmas of 1989. He called Cronenberg and told him how much he liked it. The filmmaker finished the script in June 1990 and then scouted locations in Tangier with Thomas, production designer Carol Spier and director of photography Peter Suschitzky.

While working on the script, Cronenberg received a letter from actor Peter Weller. He had heard about the project while making RoboCop 2 (1990). Weller was a big fan of both Burroughs’ books and Cronenberg’s films. In his letter, he inquired about any involvement with the project. The two men met in New York City nine months later and the actor landed the lead role. To prepare for the film, Weller met Burroughs several times in the fall of 1990. When Judy Davis read the script she was so horrified by it that she threw it against the wall. She ended up reading it eight times and talked to Cronenberg on the phone before she agreed to do the film. She said, “I felt there was something I could learn as an actress through doing it, through facing my fears.” She did not read the novel but did read a lot about expatriate American writers and perfected an American accent.

One week before principal photography was to begin, the Persian Gulf War started and the three-week shoot in Tangier was canceled. Cronenberg rewrote the script over the weekend and decided to shoot the film entirely in Toronto over three months in 1991. According to the director, the film became “more internalized and hallucinatory, so that one understands by the end of the film that Lee never really leaves New York City.”

For the film’s special effects, Cronenberg reunited with Chris Walas and his company, responsible for the gruesome effects on the remake of The Fly (1986). Cronenberg met with Walas nine months before principal photography to discuss his ideas for the film. Three months later, Walas and his team submitted their designs to the director. When Peter Suschitzky first read the script, he felt that it should have an expressionistic look reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) but Cronenberg wanted his film to look normal because the “craziness is interior.” To reflect the film’s dark subject matter, Suschitzky suffused the film with shadows and gave it a “sense of romanticism … a slight sickness that you find in late Romanticism in German literature and art between 1900 and 1930.”

Before the film came out, Cronenberg was misquoted in The Advocate as saying that Burroughs was not a homosexual and the magazine told its readers not to expect much from the film. The director tried unsuccessfully to contact the article’s author. Naked Lunch received predictably mixed reviews from critics. Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Obviously this is not everybody's cup of weird tea: you must have a taste for the esthetics of disgust. For those up to the dare, it's one clammily compelling movie.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Peter Weller’s performance: “Peter Weller, the poker-faced star of Robocop, greets all of the hallucinogenic weirdness with a doleful, matter-of-fact deadpan that grows more likable as the movie goes on. The actor's steely robostare has never been more compelling. By the end, he has turned Burroughs' stone-cold protagonist — a man with no feelings — into a mordantly touching hero.” In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “David Cronenberg’s highly transgressive and subjective film adaptation of Naked Lunch ... may well be the most troubling and ravishing head movie since Eraserhead. It is also fundamentally a film about writing — even the film about writing.”

However, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “for the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway", but she did praise Peter Weller's performance: "The gaunt, unsmiling Mr. Weller looks exactly right and brings a perfect offhandedness to his disarming dialogue.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss called the film, “tame compared with its source.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe criticized what he felt to be a “lack of conviction.”

Burroughs saw the film and liked it, saying, “of course, it’s a Cronenberg film. I think he’s done a great job. Nothing at all what I would’ve done, but that’s as it should be.”

Ultimately, Naked Lunch is a hallucinatory nightmare with no escape for its protagonist. Try as he might, Bill cannot escape what he did to his wife as much as he can escape who he is – a junkie and a homosexual. There is some sense that by the film’s conclusion he has come to terms with what he’s done and who he is. Everything else – Interzone, etc. – is just window-dressing or, rather, Bill trying to work things out. Writing provides a way for him to come to terms with the guilt he feels. Think of it as writing as a form of catharsis and finishing Naked Lunch offered some kind of closure on a painful part of his life. Cronenberg’s film, along with Barton Fink, are two of the most fascinating films about writers and writing as they explore what motivates one to write. In those two cases it comes out of a great pain and an inner turmoil that, at least in Burroughs’ case, leads to some kind of redemption.

SOURCES

Indiana, Gary. “The Naked Lunch Report.” Village Voice. December 31, 1991.

Snowden, Lynn. “Which Is the Fly and Which is the Human?” Esquire. February 1992.

Weinrich, Regina. “Naked Lunch: Behind the Scenes.” Entertainment Weekly. January 17, 1992.