Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

14th Kill

I've never read Naked Lunch but I've been led to believe the plot is considerably less linear than David Cronenberg's adapted screenplay. In which case, I feel like Cronenberg's attempt ought to be applauded, because he did in fact manage to turn this into a great film. Even if it ultimately doesn't make a whole lot of obvious sense, I think he's come more than halfway in bringing this world of grotesque, paranoiac psychological dystopia to life in some recognisable filmic form, and that in itself feels a little miraculous.

I was pretty deeply seduced by the specific aesthetic and discourse of Naked Lunch - this deep dive into a sort of primal horror of the creative impulse itself. Much has been made of the lure of chemical dependency on creative personalities - the Beats themselves may embody this phenomenon more than any other artistic movement, at least up until this point - carrying the torch on from Byron and his contemporaries, perhaps. I feel like Naked Lunch may be the one film I have seen which most successfully thrusts its inquisitive fingers into the slimy, protozoan mess of our deepest psychological urges and fears to emerge with some kind of dripping, pulsating answer to the question of "Why?"

Cronenberg has always struck me as an unusually literate sort of film maker - not in the sense so much of being well read, but of having an approach to the art which feels as much literature as film. Of course, his flair in presenting shocking imagery is what he is known for, a particularly non-literate form of expression, but to me, the power of those images has always been exponentially enhanced by their grounding in some kind of literalist, verbally articulable meaning. Cronenberg films throw a lot of visual grotesquerie at us, but they also spend a lot of time explaining that grotesquerie with words.

Perhaps that was at the heart of the appeal of this source material to him. This whole movie is about the linkage between language - specifically written language - and biological horror (not just body horror in this case, but extending into non-human biology, particularly that most alien and disturbing to us, that of the insectile). The imagery of the typewriter is paramount to this idea. In the world of Naked Lunch, the typewriter is fetishised to an almost sexual degree, but it is also literally transformed into a monster. It is both things at the same time - our most coveted possession, a symbol of personal identity and self-worth; and a devious monster which manipulates us and threatens our existence, a literal bug sucking our creativity out of our bodies through our fingertips.

My only slight quibble with this film is in its requirement to wrap up its own narrative somehow. In its pursuit of some kind of resolution, it feels like the potency of the ideas and the symbology become a little muted in the final act, but maybe I was just being distracted by trying to follow what was going on - and being dissatisfied with that because the plot was fundamentally of secondary importance to me. Regardless, this is a film I will need to rewatch many times - it's ridiculous that it's taken me this long to see it, to be honest.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

It doesn't get much more horrific than Kiki's death. Next time Julian Sands creeps up behind you and presses his crotch against you while suggesting a temple massage, my advice is to politely decline. Centipedal cranial impalement with lashings of anal rape is not the way I would choose to leave this world. Thanks for yet another dose of nightmare fuel, there, David!