MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Naked Lunch’: Full of Bugs

David Cronenberg may have seemed like the perfect director to adapt William Burroughs’ pop phantasmagoria “Naked Lunch,” which was published in 1959. The book presages much of what Cronenberg has done in the movies; it’s clearly as much of an influence on him as it has been for such directors as Nicolas Roeg or Ridley Scott. Its dope-drenched, bug-house atmosphere, with the dream-like narrative spliced into glittery shards, is tailor-made for a director as attuned to the gloppiness of interior states as Cronenberg.

But how do you make a movie out of Burroughs’ carnal psychedelia? Cronenberg himself has been quoted as saying, “It’s impossible to make a movie out of ‘Naked Lunch.’ A literal translation just wouldn’t work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country in the world.”

Now that’s the movie some of us still want to see!

What Cronenberg has done instead is to concoct a hallucinatory jag about the tortuous process Burroughs went through in creating “Naked Lunch.” (It’s at the AMC Century 14). There are enough references to the novel, enough episodes and characters, to provide a glancing resemblance to the original. But mostly, Cronenberg jacks up his own career-long obsessions with glop and grunge and decay to fever pitch. It’s a movie for people who really dig Cronenberg’s mulchy fixations--and probably for no one else. (The R rating is for heavy drug content, bizarre eroticism and language.)

Except perhaps entomologists. There are enough bugs in this film to stock a rain forest: black centipedes, ejaculating six-foot reptiles called Mugwumps, skittery roaches. The central character, William Lee (Peter Weller), is an exterminator in a wintry New York City circa 1953. When his wife (Judy Davis) gets hooked on bug powder, his own downward spiral takes him past a giant talking beetle who is some kind of insidious spymaster, a Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who prescribes drugs ground from the flesh of Brazilian centipedes, typewriters that mutate into insects--no, talking insects. William descends into the Interzone, a kind of Tangiers of the mind, where he composes what becomes the manuscript for “Naked Lunch” amid a welter of polymorphously perverse coupling, which includes references to Paul and Jane Bowles (played by Ian Holm and, in a double role, Judy Davis); a witchy woman named Fadela (Monique Mercure), who is sort of like the Vampirella of Interzone, and assorted other nasties. The ambi-sexual atmosphere carries a demonic charge that approximates Burroughs but, for the most part, Cronenberg was a lot closer to the Burroughs ethos in a film like “Videodrome” than he is here.

Cronenberg does have an eye for more than insects; he tends to cast his people primarily for their physical qualities, as if they, too, were specimens. Peter Weller, with his gaunt ghostliness and gray fedora, is an apt Burroughs stand-in; Scheider, who has a somewhat reptilian glaze anyway, scores as the bug-poison doc; Davis preserves her hawk-like intensity in the midst of the splattery rumpus, and Julian Sands, playing a Swiss lech, has an avidity for depravity that makes him the natural hero of his scenes. He’s a true sci-fi protagonist: demented and impossibly obscene.

But even the best effects in this movie overstay their welcome. There’s a limit to how many suppurating orifices you can watch in a movie.

‘Naked Lunch’

Peter Weller: William Lee

Judy Davis: Joan Frost/Joan Lee

Ian Holm: Tom Frost

Julian Sands: Yves Cloquet

A 20th Century Fox release of a Jeremy Thomas production. Director David Cronenberg. Producer Jeremy Thomas. Screenplay Cronenberg. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky. Editor Ronald Sanders. Costumes Denise Cronenberg. Music Howard Shore. Production design Carol Spier. Art director James McAlteer. Set decorator Elinor Rose Galbraith. Sound Bryan Day. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (heavy drug content, bizarre eroticism and language).