Naked Lunch (1991) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

When I started high school, Naked Lunch, a work of fiction by "beat generation" writer William Burroughs, was something that "good" people would only mention in the harshest, most condescending whispers. They might call it "trash, obscenity, and gibberish written by a gay junkie." More likely, they would not speak of it at all.

Needless to say, I made up my mind to read it, not because I find gay junkies fascinating, but simply because I'm the kind of person who has to read anything that has been forbidden to me. Finding a copy in Rochester, New York forty years ago was not an easy thing to do. In those days, we purchased most books at suburban stationary stores and from the book departments of refined and proper department stores. It was difficult to get these people to stock the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, so you can imagine that William Burroughs was way out of the realm of possibility. Our libraries, even the downtown library, were no help either.

The search ended when my friend Richard Pero introduced me to a place which would change my life as much as any single place ever has - the Clinton Book Store. This place was like Valhalla for kids seeking to learn about the adult world. Much of their product assortment consisted of tables full of used comic books and sleazy pulps and nudist magazines in helter-skelter arrangement, with prices marked on them in black magic marker. More to the point of this anecdote, the Clinton Book Store was also the town's sole repository for the complete output of a semi-underground publisher named Grove Press. Grove Press had a very singular raison d'etre - to publish everything forbidden by the guardians of mainstream culture. There was the anonymous Victorian diary My Secret Life. There were the novels of the Marquis de Sade and the plays of Jean Genet. There were the nihilistic works of the European theater. And there were the anti-establishment works of the American Beats - Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs.

Naked Lunch became one of my many Clinton Book Store acquisitions.

I found it utterly baffling.

I fought my way through to the end of its twisted narrative, but to this day, I don't have a goddamn idea what it is about. I know that Burroughs was a junkie, and a late-discovered homosexual, and wasn't very happy about being either one of those things, so he retreated into a bitter self-loathing world which was half consciousness and half dreams. He shot up so much junk that he more or less completely lost sight of the difference between his dreams and his drug-induced hallucinations, so he took those dreams which resembled his life, and he wrote them out into Naked Lunch. He just poured out all his sadness and craziness and self-loathing and self-delusion and angry humor into a surrealistic book, which was less stream-of-consciousness than stream-of-lunacy. Burroughs originally came from a rich family, but his state of drug-addled consciousness was not some idle rich man's posturing. This was his reality. He descended further and further into drugged-out dementia, the nadir of which resulted in his having blown out his wife's brains in a game of William Tell. Was he aiming for the glass on her head, or was he trying to kill her? Who knows? He himself was not sure. His ambivalence is reflected in this exchange in the film:

One of Burroughs's personalities: "I didn't murder her. It was an accident."

Another one: "There are no accidents."

If ever there was a case of a filmmaker and an author who were meant for one another, it is cerebral, weird David Cronenberg and cerebral, weird William Burroughs - two screwy guys who seem on the surface to be accountants or low-level civil servants. Cronenberg must be the only guy in history who actually "got" Burroughs, and the result of their psychic connection is this supremely odd, magnificently imagined, visually splendid, and totally fucked-up movie, a hybrid of Burroughs's book and Burroughs's life, in which the main character representing Burroughs has various masturbatory, drug-addled conversations with his own layers of consciousness, which are represented in the film as humans and insects. At various times and in various ways, Burroughs lives and relives the key incidents of his life, sometimes again and again.

Speaking of insects, the various drugs he takes are all insect-oriented, and there is an evil Moriarty character behind all his woes, and I don't know what else, because I don't get Burroughs at all.  If you care to know what it's about, you better just see it, because Cronenberg actually seems to understand it all.

Ol' Cronenberg seemed to be right up there in Burroughs's head, and that's the head of a man whose ruling principle was to "exterminate all rational thought" - which must make this a pretty good movie, if that's what you're looking for.