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Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch. David Cronenberg. 1991.

It’s been a long long while since I read Naked Lunch… and I’ve seen this movie before, but can’t remember anything about it other than the typewriter.

But… all the autobiographical bits (Burroughs killing his wife, for instance) weren’t in the book? Were they?

This film is kinda restoring my faith in Cronenberg. Many of his 80s movies weren’t nearly as interesting as I thought they were, but he really leans into the material here. There’s a lot of straightening out (in all senses) of the source material, but otherwise it would have been an experimental movie, I guess. I mean, it’s a pretty straightforward film now, but one that retains a lot of the flavour of the novel, which is pretty impressive.

I kinda wonder how he convinced anybody to give him the money required for this pretty lavish movie after Dead Ringers had totally bombed a few years before.

This was another bomb, but not as bombey (that a word) as that movie.

I mean… I don’t think anybody could have imagined this doing as well as it even did, but perhaps there’s just some Burroughs fans at the studio that wanted to throw some money around?

The best bit in this movie is the scene in the car where they just read a Burroughs bit.

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