Naked Lunch · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The typewriter clears its throat. It has turned into a fat brown beetle, and it speaks through a small puckered orifice on its back, and Bill Lee, sitting in his undershirt, takes the dictation as if a colleague had wandered in with notes. He doesn't flinch. Nobody in this film flinches. That blankness — Peter Weller's clenched monotone, modeled on Burroughs' own dry Kansas drawl — is the key to the whole picture, and it's why Gilles Deleuze, who never saw a frame of it, turns out to be the right companion for watching it.

Begin with what you cannot do here: tell the real from the hallucinated. There is no jolt to warn you. Ronald Sanders cuts from a drained, monochrome New York into the sallow amber of Interzone on a quiet dissolve; Peter Suschitzky photographs a secreting Mugwump with the same grave, clinical lucidity he gives a human face. Deleuze had a name for an image built this way. He called it the crystal-image: a moment where the actual thing in front of the camera and its virtual double — memory, dream, reflection — become impossible to tell apart, like an object and its mirror-image when you've lost track of which is which. Most films keep a wall between the world and the fantasy. Cronenberg dissolves it on purpose, and the deadpan is the dissolving agent. Because everyone treats the talking bug as ordinary, you have no toehold from which to call it unreal.

The crystal here does something rarer still. The typewriter dictates a report; the report is the book; the book is Naked Lunch, the thing you're watching. Deleuze called this a crystalline-description: an image that composes its own object and then quietly replaces it, so the description becomes the only reality there is. The writing of Naked Lunch is the subject of Naked Lunch. There's no novel underneath being adapted — there's a man producing the pages, and the pages producing him.

Which is why the film runs on what Deleuze named the powers of the false. Classical cinema rested on a contract close to Bazin's faith: the image, whatever it showed, was true within its world. You could trust it. The modern image tears that contract up and discovers that undecidable truth is an engine, not a defect. Bill is told, flatly, that his hip friends have published a book he has no memory of writing. He files secret-agent "reports" he can't verify. He is, in Deleuze's exact term, a forger — a man producing truths he cannot stand behind, identity shifting report to report. And the forgery has two faces, literally: Judy Davis plays Joan Lee and Joan Frost, the dead wife doubled into a living temptation, the William Tell killing returning at the climax to be committed again. This is falsifying-narration — mutually exclusive versions held as equally true — and the film never resolves it, because resolving it would be a lie about how guilt actually works.

Don't let the crystal float free of the body, though, because the body is where Cronenberg always grounds it. Beneath Interzone runs a world of pure drives — addiction, appetite, compulsion — that Deleuze called the impulse-image, the naturalist underworld erupting through the social surface. Watch how the bug powder, the black meat, the fluid milked from a Mugwump's stalk are handled: as matter-of-fact domestic objects. That's the staging joke and the horror at once. They are fetishes in Deleuze's precise sense, part-objects charged with a force that pulls everything downward along a line of slope toward stupor and death. Interzone itself is the originary-world beneath ordinary New York, the savage place the drives come from. This is the through-line from The Brood, where Cronenberg first literalized psychic trauma as autonomous flesh, and from Videodrome, where hallucination and diegesis first collapsed with no transitional cue.

And notice that Bill never really acts. The sensory-motor link — perceive a situation, act to change it, the whole motor of classical movement-image cinema — has been dissolved by the drug. He watches. He endures. He drifts from assignment to assignment. Deleuze's word for such a protagonist is the seer, the one to whom things happen and who can only register them. Weller's narcotized calm isn't underacting; it's the performance of a man reduced to pure reception.

The production accident sharpened all of this. Cronenberg meant to shoot Interzone in Tangier; the Gulf War drove him onto Toronto soundstages, and the sealed, slightly-wrong stage city became, by necessity, an any-space-whatever — a space emptied of coordinates that no longer hosts action but only mood and dread. The constraint made the film more honestly mental than location work ever could have.

What Cronenberg invented, finally, is a way to film an "unfilmable" book by refusing to film it. He braids the author's life into his fiction — the method he borrowed from Schrader's Mishima — and makes the act of legending oneself the very subject. Burroughs said he became a writer through the killing of his wife. The film makes that fabulation its plot: a man metabolizing the unbearable into prose, watching himself become an author in the act. It descends from Buñuel's seamless fantasy-grammar in Belle de Jour and from Eraserhead's hermetic puppet-dream, and it stands as a near-valedictory case for hand-built creature craft on the eve of CGI. Watch it again and stop asking what's real. Ask instead what the writing is digesting. That's the better pair of eyes.