Naked Lunch (review)

Cronenberg's Naked Lunch is not sf, not even exactly fantasy, although the presence of various strange 'creatures' and non-natural events perhaps allows it to sneak into the latter category as a very atypical example. Its true genre, of course, is 'David Cronenberg film', a unique form whose relation to existing sf or horror genres was always idiosyncratic and since the mid-1980s has been getting more and more tenuous and even invisible.

Cronenberg's first important films, the hour-long productions Stereo (Canada 1969) and Crimes of the Future (Canada 1970), were art films full of avant-garde gestures, but they both had futuristic and scientific-experimental premises. Then his earliest commercial features, Shivers (Canada 1975), Rabid (Canada 1977) and The Brood (Canada 1979), for all their personal qualities, could be comfortably included in the horror genre, nested within the 1970s renaissance of the cheap horror movie, although Cronenberg's manifested a higher-than-usual sf component owing to the central role played in them by medical-science experimentation. His next films – Scanners (Canada 1981) and Videodrome (Canada 1983) – could be similarly labelled, though the commercial success of the former in the US was to have a transformative effect on the filmmaker's output, moving it upscale in terms of both budget and gravitas. Scanners is more sf than horror, though once again Cronenberg's fascination with bodily mutations is peripheral to the form. But Videodrome is so strange, disordered and hallucinatory that it strains any generic boundaries and signals how the habit of assigning genre labels to Cronenberg films always needs to be filled with caveats. The director was then discovered by Hollywood, briefly, and The Dead Zone (Canada/US 1983) and The Fly (UK/Canada/US 1986) look more like mainstream movies than anything of his before or since (except perhaps for the recent A History of Violence (US/Germany 2005), and Eastern Promises (UK/ Canada/US 2007)). The Dead Zone was adapted from a Stephen King novel and starred Christopher Walken, while The Fly was produced by Mel Brooks's company Brooksfilms, starred Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, and became Cronenberg's all-time box-office hit. But beginning with Dead Ringers (Canada/ US 1988), Cronenberg's films more and more overtly declare their intention to be, at least in some dimension, once more art movies, even as they still show residual traces of the generic sf or horror-genre markers that have been visible since the beginning of his career. Looking at films such as Crash (Canada/UK 1996) and Spider (France/Canada/UK 2002), one can clearly see that he made it all the way into that domain. Even eXistenZ (Canada/UK 1999), from one angle a return to sf territory, is more interested in Heidegger than in Philip K. Dick.

In a certain sense, no Cronenberg film is more 'arty' than Naked Lunch, if only because it is all about the process of artistic creation. Although William S. Burroughs' 1959 book (one hesitates to call it a novel) has elements of fantasy, they are all fundamentally hallucinations arising from heroin use, and the book as a whole is possibly best described as the stream-of-consciousness outpourings of a drug-saturated brain: incantatory, caustically mocking, crazily spieling, hardboiled, horrified and obscene. Attempts were floated almost from the beginning, some even including Burroughs, to make a film version – though I have never been able to figure out why, because if there is a less filmable book than Naked Lunch I cannot think of it. Cronenberg, who was talking as far back as the late 1970s about wanting to do a film version, might have tried something more literal if he had got to it then.

By the time he did get to it, it had changed completely from something that might have resembled a 'version' of the book to something else entirely – an attempt to stage the writing of the book by William Burroughs. Burroughs was one of Cronenberg's most potent cultural...