naked lunch ( film )
title drop: naked lunch turns out to be a novel lee is writing throughout the film .
nippon film development and finance film trustees ltd. naked lunch productions recorded picture company (rpc) téléfilm canada ontario film development corporation pierson, heldring & pierson n. v .
the film is a remarkable homage to pulp fiction. the set décor, consumes and especially the music are all musings of a film noir, and that era of film. the film feels a lot like “chinatown” because it’s a merging of film and neo noir. as to where many feel that “chinatown” is a perfect film, i feel that “naked lunch” is a perfect film .
how loyal has cronenberg been to the william s. burroughs book naked lunch ?
2 thoughts on “deep cuts: “naked lunch” – 1991. dir. david cronenberg”
naked lunch, peter weller, 1991, tm & copyright (c) 20th century fox film corp. all rights reserved .
naked lunch, judy davis, 1991, tm & copyright (c) 20th century fox film corp. all rights reserved .
naked lunch, judy davis, peter weller, 1991, tm & copyright ©20th century fox film corp. all rights reserved .
naked lunch, peter weller, 1991, tm and copyright (c) 20th century fox film corp. all rights reserved .
her prescience has been fulfilled by the pairing of these two idiosyncratic figures under the eye of david cronenberg in his film naked lunch .
how composer howard shore brought the sounds of tangier to william s. burroughs' ‘naked lunch’
naked lunch, ian holm, peter weller, 1991, tm & copyright (c) 20th century fox film corp. all rights reserved .
naked lunch, peter weller (center), 1991, tm & copyright (c) 20th century fox film corp. all rights reserved .
if you wanna be cool you gotta read naked lunch. that' s a cool book .
something old, so... : may 2015 - naked lunch by william s. burroughs
naked lunch @ 50: anniversary essays, southern illinois university press, 2009. 293 pp .
naked lunch by william s. burroughs hardcover, 320 pages grove press list price: $ 24
labels: david cronenberg, judy davis, naked lunch, peter weller, william s. burroughs
hello naked lunch sound like a original movie i want to see it cause it looks spooky .
how composer howard shore brought the sounds of tangier to william s. burroughs' ‘naked lunch’ - noisey
an excerpt from william s. burroughs comic / noir / experimental masterpiece' naked - lunch' .
movies: out to lunch with the guru of gross - out: david cronenberg says the only way he could be faithful to william s. burroughs' celebrated' naked lunch' on film was to betray it
looking for movie tickets? enter your location to see which movie theaters are playing naked lunch near you .
not the answer you' re looking for? browse other questions tagged book - adaptation naked - lunch .
watch: david cronenberg & william s. burroughs discuss the making of ‘naked lunch’ in 40 - minute documentary
naked lunch by william s. burroughs hardcover, 320 pages grove press list price: $ 24. 00
comparison to “chinatown” is absolutely, absolutely spot on. where that film is suffocatingly pessimistic this film is joyously optimistic .
movies: out to lunch with the guru of gross - out: david cronenberg says the only way he could be faithful to william s. burroughs' celebrated' naked lunch' on film was to betray it - latimes
naked lunch, david cronenberg, william s. burroughs, peter weller, 1991, tm & copyright (c) 20th century fox film corp. all rights reserved .
how loyal has cronenberg been to the william s. burroughs book naked lunch? - movies & tv stack exchange
henry threadgill, denardo coleman and charnett moffett rehearsing for' naked lunch' in ornette coleman' s studio .
i love naked lunch the movie (haven' t read the book). great blog you have here .
* picture :
life is sweet .
runners - up :
naked lunch ,
bugsy .
“naked lunch” brought to social notice themes of drug use, homosexuality, hyperbolic violence, and anti - authoritarian paranoia .
on lincoln center' s ornette coleman festival, and the' naked lunch' event that kicks off the series .
watch: david cronenberg & william s. burroughs discuss the making of ‘naked lunch’ in 40 - minute documentary | indiewire
we’d love your help. let us know what’s wrong with this preview of naked lunch by william s. burroughs .
book and film will return in january 2015. have a suggestion for a book and film feature? leave it in the comments !
lost & found: howard shore and ornette coleman' s naked lunch - fact magazine: music news, new music .
one of the finest film journalist’s in the business… the acidemic film journal is a must for anyone who loves cinema ...
the howard shore / mondo collaborative editions of naked lunch, dead, ringers, and crash will be available through mondo’s website .
even moreso than dead ringers, most of naked lunch ‘s toronto locations are long gone, save for cinespace studios, whose facilities were used to represent north african markets and a host of other weird locations. naked lunch is a film that, even for people used to cronenberg’s fondness for icky things, really ups the ante .
author avatar: william lee is the avatar of william s. burroughs. throughout the movie he' s actually writing naked lunch .
naked lunch
: music from the original soundtrack; by howard shore, ornette coleman and
the london philharmonic orchesta
.
take a deep dive into the creation process of the film score for david cronenberg’s groundbreaking 1991 film naked lunch. in conversation with denardo coleman, composer howard shore recalls how he incorporated ornette coleman’s unique voice into the film’s soundscape in order to create an alternate, interzone universe. lincoln center festival 2017 will include a screening of naked lunch with live accompaniment performed by ensemble signal and featuring ravi coltrane, henry threadgill, charnett moffett, and denardo coleman. for more information, visit lincolncenterfestival. org .
all month, i have been looking at the life and works of william s. burroughs. this month concludes with the regular “book and film” feature focusing on his seminal work naked lunch and its 1991 adaptation .
i want to know which parts and concepts in the movie naked lunch are based on the book and which parts are added by cronenberg .
in 1966 burroughs and gysin worked together to create the short film, the cut ups. whilst filmed before they began plotting a movie of naked lunch, the cut ups nonetheless came from their collaboration in the aftermath of the publication of naked lunch and thus may be able to tell us a little about what we could have expected from the doomed project .
david cronenberg released a 1991 film adaptation of naked lunch that used very little of the book' s material, claiming a literal adaption would be not only impossible, but
banned in every country in the world
.
theme crafted by george e. frog. film music reporter wordpress theme by :
this summer, howard shore’s teamed up with mondo to release vinyl editions of three of his scores from cronenberg films: naked lunch, 1988’s dead ringers, and crash (1996). we spoke with shore about his work on naked lunch, including how he used the music of morocco and the jazz of famous ornette coleman to transport the film’s audience into the “interzone. ”
i can think of at least two things wrong with that title. - - nelson after watching
naked lunch
,
bart on the road
while naked lunch wasn’t likely to redirect the course of soundtracks, it did allow coleman’s distinctive saxophone and compositional styles to be heard by yet another audience .
to date, naked lunch has sold more than 1 million copies; a 50th anniversary edition of the novel is due out next month from grove press .
some might find cronenberg’s approach both a butchery and a concession to homophobia. in truth, his refusal to make naked lunch a “gay film” (whatever that is) fits well with burroughs and the beats conception of sexuality and its meaning .
i feel like this was false advertising. i was expecting naked ladies. instead it' s all weird. love me some peter weller. i have watched some bad movies that had him. he seems enigmatic. since you can' t really film' naked lunch', this is a pretty good substitute .
peter weller, who portrays burroughs, describes cronenberg’s effort as being a film about the subtext of naked lunch rather than the novel itself. at its heart, he says, pulses the sadness that created the art. as cronenberg notes, burroughs often described his art as a way to defeat “the ugly spirit”, the shadows of a strange and violent night in 1951 that never left him. naked lunch the film probes these dark places and lets the ugly spirits come out to play .
* cinematography: roger deakins ,
barton fink .
runners - up: peter suschitzky ,
naked lunch
; allen daviau ,
bugsy .
naked lunch copyright 1959 by william s. burroughs, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, grove press, an imprint of grove / atlantic, inc .
furthermore, naked lunch isn’t comprised of a traditional narrative that would adapt well to the screen. the story jumps around wildly through time and space, with characters rarely developing, if at all. its fragmentary composition would surely baffle film - goers .
denardo was speaking in his father’s loft, in the garment district of manhattan, during a recent rehearsal for the naked lunch performance. against one wall, a large flatscreen monitor had the film playing on mute, with a time code in the corner .
with the headline: review / film; drifting in and out of a kafkaesque reality .
naked lunch - together with the rare prospectus, william s. (novel); southern burroughs, terry; seldon, e. s. (essays) - captain ahab' s rare books - specializing in first editions of modern literature and books into film
pragmatic adaptation: cronenberg' s adaptation of the unfilmable naked lunch took story elements from the book and melded them together with parts of william s. burroughs' biography .
movie director david cronenberg was a gutsy guy, asking ornette coleman to play on the soundtrack for his inspired but ultimately flawed realisation of crusty old bill burroughs’ naked lunch .
homer and lisa get lunch, courtesy of one of snpp' s vending machines .
the film of the book: naked lunch is un - adaptable, for a variety of reasons. (chief among them; semi - obscene, no coherent plot .) cronenberg' s solution when doing the film adaptation was to graft a few scenes and ideas from the novels onto a roman à clef version of author william s. burroughs' life .
it seemed unlikely, then, that naked lunch would one day become a feature film. yet, not long after the obscenity trial that declared the book of enough social value to be unleashed upon the public, william s. burroughs was plotting its way into cinema .
* supporting actress: jane horrocks ,
life is sweet .
runners - up: juliette lewis ,
cape fear
; judy davis ,
naked lunch .
* director: david cronenberg ,
naked lunch .
runners - up: mike leigh ,
life is sweet
; jonathan demme ,
silence of the lambs .
this film is not currently playing on mubi but 30 other great films are. see what’s now showing
it would appear that the film that resulted from this too - perfect match of sensibilities has fulfilled even its grander expectations .
naked lunch ,
which opened last month in manhattan and los angeles, the film that even burroughs believed could never be made, is about to appear in the nation' s multiplexes on friday - - whether the nation is ready for it or not .
the movie naked lunch is not only an adaption of the book (which is already considered highly autobiographical), but also about what drove burroughs to write it in the first place .
in 1963 burroughs, gysin and balch collaborated on the short film towers open fire. directed by balch, the film featured moroccan music performed by gysin, and voice - overs by the unmistakable sardonic burroughs .
naked lunch’s music takes the viewer into a jazzy - beat - poet - headspace. what was your approach for this film? naked lunch is set in a world called “interzone, ” and from william s. burroughs novel, i knew it was somewhere in north africa. the score’s a combination of north african music by the master musicians of jajouka, and ornette coleman—who was a contemporary of burroughs. i tried to put the idea of new york bebop and moroccan music together .
of the published primary sources, naked lunch will, of course, be the central text used in this thesis. naked lunch originated as a series of “routines”, the seeds and early versions of which can often be found in burroughs’ letters in the 1940s and 50s, written mainly to allen ginsberg from tangier, and now published in viking penguin. this is an invaluable source in clarifying and contextualising many of the ideas put forward in naked lunch. some of burroughs’ previously unpublished “routines” from the naked lunch period can be found in the interzone collection, which is also of use. excerpts from burroughs’ body of work, some previously unpublished, are collected in word virus: the william burroughs reader, which contains perceptive essays by ann douglas and james grauerholz .
1991 saw the release of naked lunch, cronenberg’s long - gestating adaptation of william s. burroughs’ supposedly unfilmable novel (an irritating epithet: nothing is unfilmable). the film, though far from perfect, succeeds as a love - letter to burroughs – cronenberg interprets his textual source material as loosely as wild bill interpreted life, and seeks to further blur the distinction between the author and his protagonist, william lee (played by peter weller). the resulting film is, of course, crazy – no adaptation of naked lunch could fail to be, even if richard curtis were in the director’s chair – but this craziness is tempered by cronenberg’s gift for suspense and storytelling. though it has numerous experimental flourishes, naked lunch is not an experimental film. like all cronenberg’s mature work, it’s bound by hollywood conventions, which only serves to make its underlying subversiveness more potent .
the three men formed a production company in 1970, called friendly films limited. they reviewed screenplays, treatments and ran through ideas together on how to make naked lunch work as a movie .
naked lunch was not a box office success — despite wide theatrical release, it only grossed about $ 2. 6 million, a fraction of its roughly $ 17 million budget — but it has acquired the aura of a cult classic. still, even by the standards of cronenberg, the unrivaled auteur of body horror, the film retains its potential to shock. (try an image search for “mugwump, ” or “ naked lunch typewriter, ” and you’ll get the idea. )
i am a big fan of david cronenberg, and due to the fact that barnes and noble was doing their 50% off criterion collection sale, i picked up “naked lunch” and watched last night. as a body of work, i think that cronenberg has made very good films, and i think he’s a very good auteur – but as for “naked lunch”, it’s cronenberg’s masterpiece .
last edited: 19 may 2006 13: 11: 20 © new line cinema / cannes film festival .
.. one of the most talented and creative writers on film working in the world today .
william s. burroughs’ naked lunch is his most well - known work and a key work in the counter - culture moment. its then controversial elements make for great satire, holding up a mirror to 1950’s american society. the novel’s graphic sexuality, explicit violence, and the non - linear, cut - up method used makes it difficult for a film adaptation. but david croneberg smartly opted not to aim for a straight - forward adaptation of naked lunch for his 1991 film. rather, he took key themes from burroughs’ novel and incorporates them with important aspects of burroughs’ life, namely the development of naked lunch and his motivations for becoming a writer. in this regard, naked lunch is an excellent take on this hard to film novel. the cast is game for the weirdness cronenberg is aiming for, and his experience on his previous films (especially scanners, videodrome, and the fly) helps in developing the surrealistic atmosphere burroughs achieved in the novel. fans of burroughs’ work will appreciate the elements from burroughs’ life and will surely appreciate cronenberg’s audacity and enthusiasm in taking on this great novel .
the first of many startling reveals in naked lunch, the 1991 david cronenberg film, occurs five seconds into the opening title sequence. an orchestra has just struck its first chords, foreboding and tremulous, when ornette coleman’s alto saxophone goes skittering into action, like an errant flashlight beam across a velvet curtain .
shore is a highly prolific film composer: in addition to his close association with cronenberg, he is known for his work on the lord of the rings movies, and on several martin scorsese epics (including the departed and gangs of new york). but naked lunch represents a special convergence for him .
i’m thinking about the book both because burroughs is a character in my novel - in - progress turing & burroughs, and because i watched david cronenberg’s naked lunch via netflix instant - watch last night .
g - rated drug: the drug - fueled, hallucination - laden madness that is naked lunch (the film, at least) revolves around lee' s addiction to... extermination powder? granted, it was meant as an indirect adaptation of the original novel, in which heroin was the culprit .
in 1991 naked lunch was finally committed to film by the director david cronenberg, and with burroughs’ permission. cronenberg acknowledged the book’s label of being “unfilmable”, saying that a straight forward adaptation would “cost 100 million dollars and be banned in every country in the world. ” indeed, that’s not hard to imagine .
best film editing (awarded in memory of karen schmeer) - daniel p. hanley and mike hill for rush
provocative, but never as clever as it thinks it is, cronenberg' s film is ultimately a misfire .
* screenplay: david cronenberg ,
naked lunch .
runners - up: james toback ,
bugsy
; agnieszka holland ,
europa, europa
; calder willingham ,
rambling rose .
if you look carefully at these words, you' ll realize that i' m actually saying something else. i' m not actually telling you about the several reasons why i enjoyed watching naked lunch - about the impeccable writing, the film' s strange sense of humor; about the metaphors, the social commentary .
and it' s our ticket to the best spring break of our lives !
, bart announces. and it begins with a ticket to an r - rated movie - -
naked lunch
.
first published 50 years ago, william s. burroughs' novel naked lunch is a dark, wild ride through the terror of heroin addiction and withdrawal, filled with paranoia, erotica and drug - fueled hallucinations .
bookstores in film: a list of movies with at least one scene set in a bookstore. books and bibliophiles .
by time burroughs was actually living in tangier, he was well past the transition, constantly writing about boys in his letters, so in that sense the film is historically inaccurate. but we’re not talking about true history in the movie naked lunch. we’re talking about attaching the images and dialog of an author’s fantastic novel to a mythologized version of the author’s life. and in some ways the transitional state is a good choice to use for the film. in any case the character is, as burroughs remarked to cronenberg re. the film, “queer enough. ”
there is something about noir that begs genre - blending, i am convinced. whether it' s sci - fi in blade runner, comedy in who framed roger rabbit? , or surrealism here in naked lunch, there is just something about noir and neo - noir that make it so much the chameleon of genres, working with and for so many other types of films. for me, it worked perfectly in naked lunch .
in fact, one could view the movie less as an adaptation of the book than as a biopic with elements of naked lunch thrown in to represent the perpetual junk haze in which burroughs spent most of his life .
this week lincoln center is honoring coleman, who died in 2015, with a festival of music and film organized by his son, the drummer denardo coleman. the kickoff event, on tuesday night, is a screening of naked lunch with live orchestral accompaniment and not one but two eminent soloists, the saxophonists henry threadgill and ravi coltrane .
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as an important text in the counter - culture movement, naked lunch puts american culture under a microscope and points out flaws in a harsh, blunt way. its groundbreaking style, smart style, and infamous graphicness are part of the reasons why it became as popular as it was notorious. the draw towards adapting it for film is certainly tantalizing. burroughs himself attempted to try to adapt it into a film, but funding fell through. it would take thirty - two years after its publication before someone would have the wherewithal and vision to take on the novel and turn it into a film .
the tomatometer score — based on the opinions of hundreds of film and television critics — is a trusted measurement of critical recommendation for millions of fans. it represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show .
this essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic gary indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book everything is permitted: the making of “naked lunch. ” burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a rorschach test. it separates cultural …
othing is true; everything is permitted. ” welcome to interzone, the hellish playground of william burroughs’ ‘naked lunch’. along with jack kerouac and allen ginsberg, burroughs was among the central figures of the beat generation. over a frenzied decade bridging the 1950s and ’60s they were instrumental in reshaping america’s cultural landscape, tearing up their elders’ starchy doctrine and blazing the trail for the counterculture that followed. as dynamic, brilliant young things they seemingly make for ideal cinematic subjects, but only one film managed to capture something of the essence of its author and the beat generation at large: david cronenberg’s naked lunch .
with the release of cronenberg’s naked lunch, burroughs distanced himself somewhat from previous attempts to film the “unfilmable. ” he said that “the late brion gysin and antony balch, set out to adapt it for film, ” failing to mention his own input. also, gysin’s screenplay had been “long on burlesque... a series of music - hall comedy songs that he composed. ” he appeared content with the result of a twenty year pursuit for a silver - screen version of his literary classic .
story: with little in the way of coherent narrative, naked lunch takes the form of disconnected episodes describing the activities of bizarrely imagined figures - junkies, agents ,
faggots
- who inhabit interzone, a fantastical urban melting pot. certain characters recur - bill lee, dr benway, the mugwumps - in convoluted, often gruesomely obscene scenarios. the author described naked lunch as
a matter of catharsis, where i say the most horrible things i can think of
.
by 1991, burroughs had been involved in a few films, mainly as cameos. his most significant role prior to his involvement in naked lunch was a role as tom the junkie priest in gus van sant’s drugstore cowboy. as well, none of his works had really been adapted for the screen, mainly because they were thought to be unfilmable. but david cronenberg, an admirer of burroughs’, decided to take on the herculean task of adapting his most famous work naked lunch. having already directed films such as scanners, videodrome, the fly, and dead ringers, cronenberg had made a name for himself as a director with an eye for the strange and surreal, and a master of “venereal horror. ” with burroughs’ blessing, cronenberg set out to film what is more an adaptation of burroughs’ life and novels than it is an adaptation of naked lunch .
how book and film compare: burroughs' s book is merely the starting point for cronenberg' s film, which operates more as a profile of burroughs' s perverse imagination. the real life shooting of joan is the film' s opening scene (though cronenberg shifts its location to new york) and merges burroughs' s character with interzone agent bill lee and another briefly glimpsed figure, the exterminator .
* foreign film :
double life of veronique .
runners - up :
the vanishing
;
europa, europa .
for the purposes of the film, cronenberg created what wikipedia terms a “ metatexual adaptation. ” that is, he blended elements of the novel with the by - now - legendary story of burroughs’s life—the shooting of his wife, the expatriate years in tangier, typing the pages of naked lunch high in his tangier room, jack kerouac and allen ginsberg helping him assemble the manuscript. all of this material is outlined in burroughs’s letters, and in the reminiscences of his beat friends—the transreal oeuvre is blended together to produce the transreal film .
film - makers: david cronenberg (b1943) emerged in the mid - 1970s with a string of perverse low - budget horror films, in which disease and mutation figured strongly. he made the switch to the mainstream with the stephen king adaptation the dead zone (1983). his subsequent hit, the fly (1986), gave him the clout to make the supposedly unfilmable naked lunch .
so bill and joan perform their
william tell act ,
just as mr. burroughs and his wife, joan vollmer burroughs, did on one drunken evening in mexico city in 1951. as bill shoots and kills joan, the film makes one of its many allusions to the real events of mr. burroughs' s life. soon afterward, he either physically or psychically flees new york for interzone, a tangier - like exotic setting in which the film' s nightmarishness escalates to new levels (although
naked lunch
is so thoroughly hallucinatory that it' s difficult to know exactly where its characters are, literally or figuratively). in interzone, the suffering gets worse and the bugs get bigger as bill attempts to write what will be
naked lunch ,
the novel .
”the title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch - - a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of the fork. ” the book title was suggested by jack kerouac. if not for the intervention of william s. burroughs friends, naked lunch would have never seen the light of day. peter orlovsky, allen ginsberg, and jack kerouac decided to visit burroughs in tangiers and see if they could salvage any of the fragmented writing that had been dripping from the mind of burroughs while he was nurs
i sort of resisted the idea of being a writer... . but jack [ kerouac ] definitely did encourage me. and he said that i would write a novel called...' naked lunch.' that' s his title, kerouac .
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 .
coleman is more than a featured soloist in howard shore’s original score for naked lunch: his quizzical, bracing cry also provides something like a point of view in the film, which was adapted from the landmark novel by william s. burroughs. the chiming polytonality of the music shows an affinity with coleman’s language, and he takes to the orchestrations as naturally as he does to the odd interlude with his trio .
so cronenberg, with burroughs' blessing, avoided literal adaptation, fashioning, instead, a story about a heroin - addicted writer named william lee (a name burroughs frequently uses for a fictitious alter ego) who accidentally shoots his wife to death and expatriates himself to tangier, where he fights through his many demons to write a book called
naked lunch .
aspects of burroughs' own life, including the accidental murder of his wife joan, are mixed together with pieces from
naked lunch
and burroughs' other novels .
burroughs'' naked lunch,' still fresh at 50 once the center of an obscenity trial, william s. burroughs' novel is a dark, wild ride through the terror of heroin addiction and withdrawal, filled with paranoia, erotica and drug - fueled hallucinations .
burroughs described the novel as
a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork .
poet anne waldman says that at the time it was published, naked lunch offered a stark contrast to the prevailing vision of reality during the eisenhower years :
the single disc included in this set contains the same special features as criterion’s previous dvd release. but these are an outstanding set of features, a treat for burroughs and beats fans as well as cronenberg aficionados. the “making of” feature includes interviews and readings by burroughs. the disc also includes burroughs reading selected passages from naked lunch (especially the segments dealing with the film’s philosophical themes of social discipline and punishment) .
note: this year' s awards are dedicated to the memory of robin dougherty, a former boston phoenix film critic who passed away this summer .
anyway, they seems to be good releases, and an oportunity for all film score fans discover the music that howard shore has composed for cronenberg .
more than a film about hallucinations, is a film that hallucinates, incorporating in its filmic matter the forms of unreality, that, by a magic trick - in a film that uses the studio like the two versions of
the thief of bagdad
- is transmuted into a hyperrealism of the senses. writing is an act that follows the sacrifice and mingles with the loss, while shooting is the figurative fulfillment of this
petite morte
.
naked lunch represents that most unfilmable of all unfilmable projects. salinger may have been right that the catcher in the rye could not be captured on celluloid. he probably meant by this that the book conveys a level of angst and yearning that likely couldn’t be matched on screen .
i sort of resisted the idea of being a writer ,
he said .
but jack [ kerouac ] definitely did encourage me. and he said that i would write a novel called... naked lunch. that' s his title, kerouac .
it' s not the woman with her kelvinator refrigerator, opening the door to show you how crisp the lettuce stays ,
says waldman .
it' s the' naked lunch'... where you see reality clearly, you see the lettuce decomposing .
william burroughs’s novel naked lunch has been rattling literary cages since it was published at the end of the repressive fifties. though nothing in david cronenberg’s free - form, $ 15 million film is as jolting as the poetically eroticized violence of the book, there’s plenty to scare off the uninitiated, including a giant centipede that rapes and devours a gay boy in a bird cage. a crash course in the pertinent works of burroughs (exterminator! , junky, queer) and cronenberg (the brood, scanners, the fly) couldn’t hurt, but the film stands on its own metaphors .
the ballad of narayama
is a japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. what a space it opens…
this film is built around paranoia and mystery, it’s very incoherent with its flow and intention and the film is the perfect metaphor about the writing process. as lee dives further into the underground world of drugs and being a secret agent cronenberg builds the paranoia which at times feel sort of polanski - esq .
the group' s best screenplay award went to
naked lunch ,
david cronenberg' s freewheeling adaptation of william s. burroughs' s novel, a film that will not open until next week. the cinematography prize went to roger deakins for his work on
barton fink ,
joel and ethan coen' s droll, nightmarish look at hollywood in the 1940' s. judy davis was named best supporting actress for a total of three performances in these two films. she plays two different women in the hallucinatory
naked lunch .
samuel l. jackson was voted best supporting actor for his performance as a drug addict in spike lee' s
jungle fever .
' europa, europa' a winner
naked lunch is a symphony of smut; a fever - dream of filth; a hallucination; a work of art. this is not a novel that charts an easy course. it is wild, erratic, crude to the extreme, and largely incomprehensible but for occasional moments of clarity. there is genius in these naked pages, a raw and fractured genius, the voice of the depraved and drug - addled, mainlined, unfiltered, directly into the vein. this lunch is opulent, sumptuous, but excessive, tainted, vomit - inducing. burroughs' s masterpi
that aspect of burroughs is celebrated at feature length in “naked lunch, ” the new david cronenberg film in which peter weller gives a performance as evocative as it is depressing, as a fictional character obviously meant to be taken as the author. the film opens with “ william lee ” making one of his periodic attempts to go straight. he has kicked drugs, he claims, and is gainfully employed as an insect exterminator. but his wife (judy davis) is addicted to the bug powder, and so is bill, to such an extent that millions of cockroaches owe him their lives .
but the key to the film’s longevity is the union at its rotten core: cronenberg and burroughs. they share a flair for the grotesque, met with perfect nonchalance and bone - dry wit. in naked lunch, cronenberg invites the audience to dine in hell. the intense imagery of his body - horror – nightmares of flesh and metal, lust and infection – finds an equal in burroughs’ prose. but crucially cronenberg’s adaptation is a fusion of the two artists’ minds, as if they crossed in the fly’s telepods. keeping the title was key, though. as burroughs put it, “the title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. ”
special commendation to george mansour - the
repo man award
to the film booker for the nickelodeon cinema, for repossessing repo man from consignment to television .
ruritania: in the brief bit of it we see in the film, annexia' s border guards are wearing little fur hats and speak in russian accents .
like many of the best comedies and tragedies, this weimar - era silent film understands how each mode is often a hair' s breadth from the other .
the criterion release of david cronenberg’s naked lunch offers the closest to this experience we are likely to ever get. burroughs’ himself says in the disc’s “making of” feature that he never expected more than a fraction of the book to make it into the film. in fact, this is something other than a filming of a book, an adaptation. in fact, it’s not really an adaptation at all. it’s a collaborative project, something entirely new .
),' and now they try to swallow 'naked lunch.' this movie was, from what i heard, a highly surreal trip into the mind of a junkie - - or something like that. certainly, it' s not as much fun as the title suggests .
but it’s a least possible to imagine holden caulfield slumming around manhattan. how do you picture the flumes of bodily excrescence that explode in naked lunch, its alien interrogators and masters of control hovering over bodies in pain and pleasure, the inward ecstasies and torment of bodies on a perpetual high ?
this book is beautiful in a sick - grotesque - wild - hilarious - creative - mind - bending - outlandish - drug - filled - dirty - brave kind of way. if i could use one word to describe it, it would be “bizarre”; although “hilarious” and “important” could work, too. in naked lunch you are taken into the mind of william s. burroughs - - a twisted, drug addicted man, who also happens to be genius. when considering its content, it’s no wonder naked lunch was banned and railed against when it was first released; it’s also
part of cronenberg' s successful strategy is looking beyond the single book at the whole of burroughs' work and also his biography. he drapes the entire film in literary fabric, with the reference to kafka in regards to the narcotic high the film' s characters get from bug powder dust being a fairly telling allusion. the plot of the movie is kafakesque with interwoven lines of paranoia, labyrinthine bureaucracies, and the self - replicating puzzle that the film' s hero finds himself in .
the flaw of the 5 - star rating system is in trying figure out whether you should award stars based on how much you liked a book, or based on how
good
you think a book is. these two criteria are often distinct from each other, and naked lunch, at least for me, is a perfect example of this. i think that naked lunch is a brilliant book, an that burroughs is one of our century' s great literary geniuses. so, that makes it a five star book. but did i enjoy reading it? sometimes very much, sometimes n
found this file i started on my computer june 9, 2007: hypertext reading of naked lunch reading naked lunch as it was intended: open the book at any page and just read what is there. keeping track of pages read, so that there is no duplication and each page is given its consideration. am a bit anal about these things, so i' m not going to cut in the middle of a chapter... going to read nearest chapter from where i pry open the book. the book is never meant to end, because it' s an immortal junky' s ni
these elements, plus a lot of attention to the addictive powers of the black meat of the giant brazilian centipede, insure that mr. cronenberg' s version of
naked lunch
is no more suitable to the fainthearted than mr. burroughs' s was. and the film, while very different from the book, is every bit as impenetrable in its own way. by the time it reaches a repellent fever pitch, with one character literally tearing its body open to reveal someone of a different sex inside (a simple yet extravagantly weird evocation of the author' s thoughts on sexual identity) ,
naked lunch
has become too stomach - turning and gone too far over the top to regain its initial aplomb. yet 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 .
: burroughs always said that he would never have become a writer if not for joan' s death. this is portrayed in the film... sort of .
no celebrities were harmed: lee is an obvious stand - in for burroughs himself. the film also includes two characters who are pretty clearly jack kerouac and allen ginsberg .
naked lunch is a symphony of smut; a fever - dream of filth; a hallucination; a work of art. this is not a novel that charts an easy course. it is wild, erratic, crude to the extreme, and largely incomprehensible but for occasional moments of clarity. there is genius in these naked pages, a raw and fractured genius, the voice of the depraved and drug - addled, mainlined, unfiltered, directly into the vein. this lunch is opulent, sumptuous, but excessive, tainted, vomit - inducing. burroughs' s masterpiece is certainly an experience, though not a pleasant one .
stay until you finish the book, but then come back to us ,
bill' s friends say about his sojourn in interzone. but if the terror so slyly and sickeningly rendered in
naked lunch
is representative, it' s a miracle that artists ever survive the creative process to come home .
but then this is true to the spirit of burroughs, whose naked lunch was first published in paris in 1959, and sparked an american obscenity trial several years later. a hallucinogenic novel steeped in drug addiction, exaggerated violence and sexual depravity, it inhabits a kind of post - beatnik paranoia, sharp and curdled .
naked lunch ,
adapted by the dauntless david cronenberg from william s. burroughs' s 1959 landmark novel, represents a remarkable meeting of the minds. it' s hard to imagine another film maker who could delve so deeply into the monstrousness of mr. burroughs' s vision, in the end coming up with a bona fide monster movie of his own. yet while mr. cronenberg' s ingenious approach to his material matches mr. burroughs' s flair for the grotesque, it also shares the author' s perfect nonchalance and his ice - cold wit. seldom has a film maker offered his audience a more debonair invitation to go to hell .
in 1962, grove press issued a promotional booklet to accompany the november 20, 1962 american publication of' naked lunch,' a scarce and desirable piece of ephemera. publisher barney rosset printed the prospectus with an obscenity trial in mind, with the entire document reading like a legal argument to establish' naked lunch' s' literary merit before a courtroom. the pamphlet opens with a short essay by terry southern, followed by a critical piece by e. s. seldon. the remainder of the pamphlet contains an eight page selection from the novel. a terrific piece of ephemera that is rarely offered together with the novel, and one that is essential to understanding the early publication history of' naked lunch,' the establishment of the book' s critical reception, and the novel' s many court battles over the years. to the best of our knowledge, the two essays contained within have not been printed in any other format. a superior copy of this beat generation cornerstone, and basis for the bizarre 1991 david cronenberg film starring peter weller, judy davis, and ian holm. maynard & miles a2. b .
documents still exist in the archive of terry wilson – a friend of burroughs, gysin and balch – that let us see what the three men had in mind for filming the “unfilmable” project. through letters, screenplays and storyboards it is possible to examine the vision they had in attempting to bring naked lunch to the screen .
i personally favor the interpretation that the pages that the william lee of the movie writes on his typewriter are the pages of the real - world book naked lunch. just as burroughs was lost in a state of drug - induced hallucination, paranoia and guilt when writing the book, so is the william lee of the movie .
that shocking reality caused a furor when excerpts were published in the university of chicago' s literary magazine in 1958. a paris pornographer took note and published naked lunch in france the following year. then in 1962, grove press issued the first american edition. a year later, a boston bookstore owner was arrested for selling it .
critical reception to burroughs has been varied. herbert gold, in an early assessment of naked lunch, wrote “many will be disgusted, snobs will says it’s a masterpiece, but they miss the relevance to our times. ” 2 this concisely sums up many of the problems associated with the critical reception and studies of naked lunch since — and even before — its publication, and also points towards the aims of this study: to establish the relevance of naked lunch. early objections focused on the obscenities, and the graphic sexual descriptions within the book, and the publication of the book in america prompted an obscenity trial in 1965. 3 one of the most famous hostile responses to naked lunch was the review which appeared in the times literary supplement in 1983. entitled “ugh…” it captured the disgust with which many greeted the work, and the reluctance to look beyond this initial first impression with impeded its reception. some have attacked it because they find the character of william burroughs himself difficult to come to terms with: being addicted to heroin for most of his life, never conforming to any normal codes of sexual conduct and the fact that he shot his common law wife perhaps make it difficult for many to consider him as a social philosopher. he is seen as representative of decadence, and therefore not an appropriate character to criticise western society .
i found this post through io9–and i was thinking, it must be st. williams burroughs week. or month. i’ve found myself obsessing over naked lunch (and other burroughs material–like ‘the job’), over the past few weeks and specifically how cronenberg deftly handles burroughs material. i’ve streamed the film several times in the past fortnight and it is standout science fiction. so is the rest of burroughs life–his tussles with scientology, cut - up methodologies, obsession with reich / orgone… what other genre could this life be ?
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).
naked lunch is a 1991 science fiction drama film co-written and directed by david cronenberg and starring peter weller , judy davis , ian holm , and roy scheider . it is an adaptation of william s. burroughs ' 1959 novel of the same name , and an international co-production of canada , britain and japan . the film was released on december 27 , 1991 in the united states and april 24 , 1992 in the united kingdom by 20th century fox . it received positive reviews from critics , but was a box office bomb , garnering only $ 2.6 million out of a $ 17 – 18 million budget due to a limited release . it won numerous honours , including the national society of film critics award for best director and seven genie awards , notably best motion picture . naked lunch has since become a cult film . 
naked lunch is a 1991 science fiction drama film co-written and directed by david cronenberg and starring peter weller, judy davis, ian holm, and roy scheider. it is an adaptation of william s. burroughs' 1959 novel of the same name, and an international co-production of canada, britain and japan. the film was released on december 27, 1991 in the united states and april 24, 1992 in the united kingdom by 20th century fox. it received positive reviews from critics, but was a box office bomb, garnering only $ 2.6 million out of a $ 17 – 18 million budget due to a limited release. it won numerous honours, including the national society of film critics award for best director and seven genie awards, notably best motion picture. naked lunch has since become a cult film.
naked lunch is a 1991 science fiction drama film co-written and directed by david cronenberg and starring peter weller, judy davis, ian holm, and roy scheider. it is an adaptation of william s. burroughs' 1959 novel of the same name, and an international co-production of canada, britain and japan. the film was released on december 27, 1991 in the united states and april 24, 1992 in the united kingdom by 20th century fox. it received positive reviews from critics, but was a box office bomb, garnering only $ 2.6 million out of a $ 17 – 18 million budget due to a limited release. it won numerous honours, including the national society of film critics award for best director and seven genie awards, notably best motion picture. naked lunch has since become a cult film.