The Business of Junk: Naked Lunch

Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession. The addict stands by while his junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse. Junk is quantitative and accurately measurable. The more junk you use the less you have and the more you have the more you use. All the hallucinogen drugs are considered sacred by those who use them - there are Peyote Cults and Bannisteria Cults, Hashish Cults and Mushroom Cults -`the Scared Mushrooms of Mexico enable a man to see God'' - but no on ever suggested that junk is sacred. There are no opium cults. Opium is profane and quantitative like money. I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India. It was called *soma* and is pictured as a beautiful blue tide. If *soma* ever existed the Pusher was there to bottle it and monopolize it and sell it and it turned into plain old time JUNK.

- William S. Burroughs,
"Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness"

David Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' junkie manifesto Naked Lunch surely ranks as one of the great film adaptations of all time - as much a biography of the novel's troubled author as an adaptation of his most well known work, which Cronenberg has cited as his favorite book of all time. Since the novel only barely has a plot, Cronenberg was forced to improvise much of the content of the picture, and the result is an often hilarious, occasionally tragic, perpetually surreal film - one that dramatizes Burroughs' psychological state at the time he wrote the famed novel. In spite of the numerous alterations to the text, this is a surprisingly faithful adaptation, as Cronenberg's film is a scathing satire that attacks Capitalism, drug culture, Corporate America, even the creative process - ultimately, it's as true to Burroughs' novel as any adaptation could possibly be, while also a new dimension to the text: an extremely moving portrait of its author.

I must confess that I did not care for Burroughs' novel, though I've had trouble deciding if I find it bad or simply disturbing, as Naked Lunch reflects a particularly tumultuous time in its authors life. Burroughs further wrote in "Deposition" that he had "no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch", which certainly explains the novel's lack of grammatical and narrative structure, as well as the often repulsive imagery that Burroughs employs (it's the only book I've ever read to make me physically ill). Cronenberg's aesthetic is a good match for Burroughs', creating similarly revolting depictions of flesh on the screen. By merging biography with fiction, Cronenberg dramatizes Burroughs' subjective reality; in spite of the numerous artistic liberties he takes with the book and Burroughs' life, Cronenberg beautifully dramatizes the state of mind of the author at the time of writing Naked Lunch, creating an extraordinarily rich and moving allegory for the creative process.

Peter Weller plays William Lee, an exterminator working in 1950s New York, and the film evokes the period before it properly begins with stunning opening credits in the style of the great Saul Bass. The film opens with Lee performing an extermination job and running out of bug spray in the middle of it, and he realizes that his wife has been lifting his bug powder for her personal use - the film uses bug spray as a representation of heroin - and the very beginning of the picture details her descent from user to all out junkie. Burroughs later states in "Deposition" that " [he] could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit - and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit - I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision - a grey screen always blanker and fainter - and not caring when he walked out of it. If he had died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn't you? Because I never had enough junk - no one ever does.", and we gradually see Lee's wife, Joan (Judy Davis), slipping into this barely cognizant state. When Lee walks in on one of his friends casually fucking his wife on his living room couch, she urges him not to be jealous - she assures him that his friend can't come, because of the spray, and she doesn't need to. Though the film never deals with Burroughs' actual drug use (the film only shows him drunk, in one scene), it nevertheless portrays the drug culture that Burroughs' art was a result of.

Naked Lunch also details the paranoid mind of a drug addict -though Lee is never depicted using drugs recreationally, he nevertheless confesses that he experiences "severe hallucinations", presumably a side effect of being in constant contact with the spray. After being apprehended by police for misappropriation of his insecticide, he has a vision of a large bug that speaks out of its asshole telling him that he must kill his wife because she works for "Interzone Inc.", and, moreover, isn't even human. He winds up inadvertently completing his 'mission' when he suggests that he and his wife do their William Tell routine, misses, and shoots her in the head. This is a key moment, both in Burroughs' life and in Cronenberg's film, an event that fueled Burroughs' writing. "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death", the author wrote, and the film examines the profound effect that him killing his wife had on his life and his work.

The inclusion of the death of Burroughs' wife is part of the genius of Cronenberg's film; Cronenberg sprinkles in details of Burroughs' personal life to at once make Naked Lunch a cohesive narrative and an expansion of the text upon which it is based. Rather than treating the man's work and his life like they are two separate entities, Cronenberg suggests that the two are intimately related - that understanding the man is key to understanding the art, and vice versa. After shooting his wife, Lee flees to Interzone to complete his mission, and it is here that that the picture details the writing of the novel, which it imagines as Lee's reports from Interzone.

Perhaps the most inspired detail in the picture is the way it transforms the character of Doctor Benway - a crazy, corrupt surgeon in the book - to a pharmaceutical doctor, a daring connection of illegal drugs to legal drugs. Lee visits him early in the film to receive a substance that will get his wife off the spray, called The Black Meat, though in fact it's a more dangerous drug than the drug spray; Benway is the most successful pusher of them all. Lee finds Benway's factory in Interzone at the end of the film and witnesses a few barely conscious human beings feasting on the insides of Centipedes, high out of their minds, highlighting that pharmaceuticals - abused as frequently, if not more frequently, than illegal substances - can produce the most strung out junkies of them all.

This discovery prompts Lee to leave Interzone for Annexia, accompanied by Joan Frost - also played by Judy Davis - and when he arrives at the border he is ordered to "prove" that he is the writer he claims be. He turns around to see his wife in the back of his car, and suggests that they do their William Tell routine. Once again, Lee shoots Joan dead, and this is the point when Cronenberg's approach towards translating the novel to the screen takes on truly tragic ramifications. As Burroughs wrote, he would not have become a writer were it not for the death of his wife, and the film pays homage to the fact that this event is part of Burroughs' artistic identity - there is no getting around it, he did a terrible thing, but it was an event that formulated his art (though it's worth noting that, while Burroughs expressed profound guilt over shooting his wife, he didn't feel bad enough to serve any kind of punishment for it). Cronenberg takes a senseless tragedy and ingrains in into the fabric of William Lee's very existence, and the implications of a never ending cycle of guilt and regret - yet Burroughs' necessity for it - are truly heartbreaking.

[This has been an entry in The Cronenberg Blogathon, hosted by Cinema Viewfinder, where this piece is cross-published. The blogathon runs from September 6-12]

Strained Seriousnes

After Andrew Sarris was 'fired' from his New York Observer position, many of my most favored blogs told me I absolutely had to get a copy of his The American Cinema, if I hadn't already read it. As long as I've been reading criticism on a week-to-week basis (though I do this less and less now that I'm reviewing new releases myself), Sarris had always been a personal touchstone--- especially with his reviews appearing alongside Rex 'Sexy Rexy' Reed's (does any other paper in America have a sharper contrast in the quality of its critics?). His review of A.I., in particular, stands as a favorite of mine--- not just because I agree with him on the film, but because he responded to the ideas and emotions that the work presented in an incredibly sensitive way, far moreso than many critics did at the time of its release. If you look at Sarris' Rotten Tomatoes page, you'll see the man hardly ever gives a negative review--- he always gives movies the benefit of a doubt, he always engages with the work on its own terms instead of on his terms, and I've never once seen the man pretend that his word was the final one. I won't deny that his critical benevolence is something I constantly aspire to, though never achieve (as a friend once said of me, "the lad is not one to form an opinion lightly" or, as another friend says, "you're out of your fucking mind").

So naturally, upon hearing that I wouldn't have his criticism to enjoy on a weekly basis, I hurriedly purchased my copy of the canonized The American Cinema. Of course, he was only fired from his staff position, not from the paper all together, although he hasn't published a review since the announcement. Reading The American Cinema, I am sorry to say that I am disappointed--- it's really quite weak as an academic approach to the first forty years of the sound era, and it's even weaker as criticism (and Sarris constantly goes back and forth on what he means for the book to be). Although he says in the beginning of the book that he doesn't want his view of the canon of American films to be the 'final word' on the matter, his prose suggests otherwise.

The chapters of the book are his method of establishing his canon. The first chapter, called "Pantheon Directors", represents "directors who have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world". It includes whom he consider to be the fourteen greatest film makers to have worked in America (or the English language, he is unclear about his criteria)--- they are, in chronological order: Charles Chaplin, Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D.W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchock, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir, Josef Von Sternberg, and Orson Welles (whom he considered at the time to be "the youngest indisputably great American director"). I don't really object to any of the names on his list--- though I've always found Lubitsch's detachment from his characters to counter the humor in his films--- what I object to is the way he organizes film makers in the following chapters. The next chapter is called "The Far Side of Paradise", which represents "directors who fall short of the Pantheon either because of a fragmentation of their personal vision or because of disruptive career problems"; notice the way The Pantheon is capitalized, suggesting an almost mythic stature of his most prized auteurs.


The first chapter, along with the essay that opens the book "Towards a Theory of Film History", is undoubtedly excellent--- filled with passion and ideas. But after the first chapter is where the book starts shooting itself in the foot, ideologically. Surely the careers of film makers such as Vincente Minnelli, Frank Borzage, Sam Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Preston Sturges, or King Vidor suffers from no more or less "fragmentation of personal vision" or "disruptive career problems" than the ineffable and mighty Pantheon--- and while I certainly don't think he means to, dividing film makers rung by rung in the manner he does can be kind of trivializing. He never really expounds on exactly why or how Minnelli's or Ray's career is more "fragmented" than Ford or Welles (the latter of whose career is notoriously, albeit gloriously fragmented). Surely if one is going to postulate that the aforementioned film makers aren't quite up to the quality of The Pantheon, then one could spend more than a page and a half of sweeping generalizations and vague connectives to prove this point, but Sarris is so busy establishing his canon that he doesn't have any time to actually develop his arguments (it's a relatively short book considering the vastness of its subject-- 393 pages, and almost a third of the book is the index). There is generally one essay length piece in the chapters after The Pantheon, but some are as short as a paragraph or two--- surely it wouldn't have killed Sarris to explain why so many directors fall short of his Pantheon criteria. Too busy coming up with cutesy titles for his chapters, perhaps?

What I think escapes Sarris is that his idol-worshiping concept of The Pantheon is more dubious than enlightening. He skirts around the issue that sometimes great directors make bad films, and sometimes bad directors make a good one. Saying that a small handful of film makers qualify as the Crème de la Crème, especially with a plethora of great films and film makers produced in the American system, trivializes the film makers who, for inexplicable (and unexplained) reasons don't qualify for The Pantheon. He says of Nicholas Ray (in an overall strongly favorable piece): "It must be remembered that They Live By Night, The Lusty Men, Rebel Without a Cause, and Bigger Than Life are socially conscious films by any standards, and that Knock on Any Door is particularly bad social consciousness on the Kramer-Cayatte level. His form is not that impeccable, and his content has generally involved social issues" All statements of truth, but when his criteria for induction into the Pantheocal Society is "directors who have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world", surely the exclusion of Ray, among others, sticks out considerably. Yes, Knock On Any Door is painfully overbearing, but if social consciousness is one's artistic calling, surely bad social consciousness is better than no social consciousness at all. He says in the John Ford piece that "Ford's failures tend to be objective rather than subjective in that he tends to be faithful to his own feelings at the expense of his material." Why is this quality a virtue in Ford's case and a weakness in Ray's?


I feel things only get more presumptuous from there. After this first chapter about The Pantheon, which is admittedly exciting critical analysis that feels both personal and objective, Sarris seems to feel that as he goes further and further down the directorial rungs of his cinematic ladder, the less he actually needs to elaborate on his arguments; which is odd, because the less the arguments are developed the more broad and shaky the claims become. In the chapter "Less Than Meets the Eye" (this category is for "directors with reputations in excess of inspirations", whatever that means), Sarris writes of Carol Reed that "The decline of Carol Reed since Outcast of the Islands is too obvious to be elaborated". Really, now, it's too obvious to be elaborated on? Which is genuinely funny, because it strikes me as being a bold enough statement (however true) to merit an elaboration. He follows up on his promise and proceeds to not elaborate on why Reed's career has declined. Poor Carol, forever confined to the sub-Pantheon--- it's so implicit that it's not even worth Sarris' time. Things get all the more confounding in that same chapter, when he writes of David Lean that "The sheer logistics of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai can not support the luxury of a directorial point of view." Does this not run counter the auteur theory that he was America's most vocal proponent of? Lean's epic films--- arguably the most idiosyncratic epic films of all time that thoughtfully and poignantly consider manhood, nationalism, and empathy--- are too large-scale to be the works of an artist and yet The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Faust, Metropolis, The General, The Searchers, Land of the Pharaohs, North by Northwest, and Rio Bravo (to name a few films from The Pantheon directors) are not?

An apex of hilarity is reached when Sarris arrives at the chapter called "Strained Seriousness". These ne'er-do-wells are "talented but uneven directors with the mortal sin of pretentiousness"--- the mortal sin of pretentiousness. The irony of that statement is self-evident, even judged apart from the context of the rest of the book. Who does Sarris think he's fooling? This declaration is coming from the man who has quoted himself ad nauseum throughout the text, and who uses these self-quotations to prove his own arguments! While we're talking about the mortal sin of pretentiousness, lumping in the careers of Jules Dassin and Stanley Kubrick with the man who made The Sound of Music would have to qualify.

I just find it difficult to believe that the Sarris I've been reading all these years is responsible for this book. It's full of the kind of generalizations and know-it-all authoritarianism that I have never once seen in his New York Observer reviews, and in fact that is what I found refreshing about his tone. In The American Cinema he avoids fleshing out his opinions by taking on an authoritative, scholarly tone. What is most upsetting about the book is how sharply the book declines after an exemplary opening chapter. The essays in "The Pantheon" are, on the whole, much longer than the pieces in the rest of the book; he fleshes out his views and puts the film makers in a unique context. I found the writing a little on the dry side but highly informative nonetheless. Though once I hit the next chapter, "The Far Side of Paradise", I knew something was up. After that, it becomes clear that Sarris is going to write film makers off more and more brazenly, all in the name of building up his Pantheon. I know he's gone back and changed his opinion on certain films and film makers (according to Johanthan Rosenbuam he revised his opinion on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he describes in the book as "... a science-fiction project so devoid of life and feeling as to render a computer called Hal the most sympathetic character in the humbled scenario", after a little 'herbal stimulation'), and this is perhaps more admirable than anything; no one is right all the time (no, not even me), and to acknowledge that is the sign of an adult thinker and an open-minded person. Unfortunately, in 278 pages of The American Cinema, he counters that noble image.

Should I bother reading more Sarris if I didn't care for this one? Are his other books better than this?

Books on Film

The memes are coming, the memes are coming! I've been tagged for this meme, started by MovieMan, three times; twice unofficially (Ed Howard and Glenn Kenny cheated by tagging everyone under the sun), and one officially, courtesy of Bill at The Kind of Face You Hate. Anyway, the meme states that those who take part in it discuss their favorite books about film--- the books that helped shape the way we see the medium. I confess to not reading nearly enough about my preferred medium; most of the writing about film I read comes from the internet, which has its benefits, for sure. But it's also not exactly a substitute.

But that certainly isn't to say that there haven't been some books that made a big impact on me, especially at a young age. The most essential would be, naturally, the above pictured The Great Movies, by a certain critic named Roger Ebert, a writer who has found limited success in print and on television. I remember picking this book up as a 12 year old burgeoning cinephile and having my eyes opened to the powers of film; not just the latest piece of marketing that topped the box office, but to film as an art form. I remember being particularly struck by a passage from the opening:

"We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds --- not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. Francois Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people"

If I could trace it to a point, I'd say the reading of this book from cover to cover (which included many movies I'd never heard of, let alone seen, along with some I had, too) I began to realize that films needed to be thought of in a more abstract way. Reducing films to their elements; story, character, dialogue, direction, etc... is dubious. It's how these elements work in tandem--- or clash--- with each other that counts when trying to appreciate a film. This rocked my 12 year old world.

And the list of films in that book is very diversified, which gave me a taste of how eclectic cinema can be; all the different kinds of stories it can tell, from fantasy to realist-drama . Everything from Casablanca to The Exterminaing Angel; from Citizen Kane to Star Wars. The first time I ever heard the names Welles, Kurosawa, Bunuel, Dreyer, Hawks, Reed--- all courtesy of Mr. Ebert. I made it my mission to see most, if not all of these films (I still haven't seen a few--- Detour and the Up documentaries), and around the time of what I can only describe as a cinematic explosion is when I remember refining my aesthetic sense.


Moving on, another book that has been of great importance to me is a guide-book called Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing From Concept to Screen by Steven D. Katz. Generally I dislike books of this ilk--- books that catalog 'formulas' for cinematic storytelling, but Katz's eloquence, knowledge of the subject matter, and lack of pretension is quite incredible. He breaks down what David Bordwell would call story-telling 'norms' into such simple, economic language that I'd say this book is almost essential for anyone looking to pick up a camera and make movies. He states over and over again that there isn't one way to make a film--- but he does make the (very true) point that a film maker needs to understand these principles, and why they are established principles, if they wish to break them. This is more than a book for aspiring film makers, it's a book that perfectly articulates how we tell stories visually.

It breaks down what Katz calls 'shot-flow'; how images relate to one another. It's not just a simple regurgitation of the dictionary definitions of "shot/reverse shot", "the 180 degree rule", or the like... though these concepts are included. Rather, through the use of storyboards (some from authentic films and some drawn up for illustrative purposes), Katz shows the readers how film can convey a sense of space, motion, and time. Quite incredible stuff.

Moving on to the last two books I have chosen for this here meme, two textbooks. But they're so much more than that--- highly encompassing accounts of film history and film form, written in a wonderfully personal style. The first, a book my school would never use because of its extraordinary quality--- the irreplaceable, essential Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, a mainstay of film academia for 30 years (my school uses a shitty book called Movies and Meaning for their basic cinema course).



This is just an astounding documentation of the different types of form modalities. A brief history of the medium (though a far more all encompassing account can be found in the duo's Film History) precedes an incredibly all-encompassing account of the basics of film-form--- as a starting point, one really couldn't do better than Film Art. And it's all written in Bordwell and Thompson's highly knowledgeable yet personable style; they break down such complex concepts to their raw essentials so beautifully that they deserve to be thought of as artists as much as scholars.

Plus, it's not rigid academia (which is probably why some in the academic community dislike Bordwell and Thompson), but a simultaneously personal and objective journey through the different aspects of film. For example, in the chapter about Cinematography (in the edition I have, at least), Bordwell uses examples as varied as The Crime of M. Lange, Wild Strawberries, Back to the Future, and Die Hard. In other film text-books I've read, this tends to come off as a trick the author uses to get the attention of the college age readers. "Look," the books cry "I'm talking about films you're actually familiar with in addition to these 'arty' ones!" The examples Bordwell and Thompson uses are both relevant and personal, as the examples in the text reflect Bordwell and Thompson's wonderfully eclectic taste in cinema. Plus, I just adore the two of them to pieces--- they're definitely the cutest Film Scholar couple I can think of.


I have taken exactly two courses in college that I can honestly say changed my life--- that is to say, these classes legitimately shaped my outlook on the world. The first would be the Astronomy class I took last fall, where every day I got a unique lesson in the workings of the Universe. The other class would be a History of Animation course I took to satisfy my Art requirement--- and the assigned book for the class, Cartoons: 100 Years of Animation by Giannalberto Bendazzi, is essential reading for any fan of animation and cinema.

Talk about an exhaustive account of the history of animation. Bendazzi goes by era AND by country, making connections between world animation and world cinema, going all the way back to the earliest days of both forms. Animation really does deserve more dues than it gets, as the history of cinema and the history of animation are so closely interwoven that they are almost one and the same. As a people, our first moving images were drawn ones.

And the class itself was just wonderful--- nothing like the Cinema 101 course I took my first semester at school, where my Professor pandered to the bad taste of my peers instead of attempting to enlighten them (not worth the effort, I guess). I expected similar things from my Animation class, but this Professor had a really acute aesthetic sense and an incredible knowledge of the history of the medium. We saw so much, from Disney to Chuck Jones to Miyazaki, to more obscure animation artists like Oskar Fichinger (whose abstract art-work inspired the Toccata and Fugue portion of Disney's Fantasia). He bored most of my peers to tears but I was enraptured by the films week in and week out--- I think it's the only class I've taken that I've never missed once, and it was early in the morning to boot. Not all of them were great, though some of them were, but they all had something noteworthy about them. He even showed some Méliès on the first day, which is certainly okay by me.

So these are my books, please do leave suggestions in the comment box for my illiterate ass.

I tag.... anyone who feels like doing it.