Naked Lunch

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

David Cronenberg has the weird distinction of being one of the only directors I love who has a large body of work that I am genuinely enthusiastic about, but doesn't have a single movie that I would say is a favorite of mine, or that I would define as "great." (Off the top of my head, Robert Altman is the only other director in similar standing). I think the guy is probably some kind of warped genius, and he consistantly makes movies I greatly enjoy, yet never any movies that I love or really want to watch very often.

Naked Lunch is definitely one of his strangest, but not one of my favoritres. Definitely not one of his rare bad movies, but not one of his typically really good movies. More unique and curious than effective or satisfying. About the same as I feel about Videodrome.

I think the problem is that Naked Lunch is too deadpan. Because, I mean, some profoundly strange shit goes down in this film. Typewriters that turn into giant beetles with talking assholes, weird alien beasts that secrete powerful narcotics from penises sticking out of their heads, shadowy spy organizations that brainwash people into doing their dirty work, people eating bug poison to get high. Or, at least, the main character thinks all this stuff is happening. Yet, he reacts to everything with the same lack of emotion, almost boredom. So all this wild, out-there stuff is going on, but it's told in a very straightforward, maybe even dispassionate way.

This is intentional, I would reckon, and it makes for an original, but also a numb, disconnected film.

You may have noticed that Cronenberg tends to get really strong performances out of his lead actors. Think Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone, Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, and especially Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. Some of the best work any of these actors have done. Naked Lunch is no exception. Peter Weller is great in the William S. Burroughs role. The thing is, the character is so emotionally dead that there is no entry point for our emotions as an audience. With these other films I just mentioned, Cronenberg and his actors work hard to build empathy, even in the most bizarre of scenes. In Naked Lunch, we see things through Weller's dispassionate eyes, and thus react dispassionately to the film.

This is somewhat similar to James Spader's character in Cronenberg's Crash, only much less effective. Crash is just so disgusting, and so single-minded in it's depiction of the disgusting subject mater, that Spader's seeming lack of emotion provides some extra-disturbing counterpoint. I'm not sure that's what Naked Lunch is going for. Early in the film, Weller's character (William Lee) accidentally shoots his wife in the head. His ensuing descent into drug addiction and paranoia stems from his guilt over this, and his seeming lack of emotion may just be a defense mechanism. Weller occassionally suggests this deep sadness underneath the surface, but I think he and Cronenberg are a little too interested in underplaying the emotion. The final scene, where certain tragic events are relived in a bizarre context, is meant to really rip your guts out and break your heart... but instead it comes off as sterile as the rest of the film.

Cronenberg's films usually have more heart than this one. His typically awesome sense of the bizarre and the grotesque is still enough for me to recommend Naked Lunch, but not until you've seen some of his better movies.