Former Bond actor Daniel Craig can currently be seen in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer in cinemas. The moving film about a middle-aged man who casts an obsessive eye on a younger man in 1950s Mexico is based on the semi-autobiographical novella by beat poet William S. Burroughs. His literary masterpiece Naked Lunch was made into a film over 30 years ago enriched with parts of his biography – and by, of all people, body horror master David Cronenberg.
Stream after Queer with Daniel Craig: In Naked Lunch the author sinks into a bizarre drug rush
Naked Lunch is also set in the 1950s and also revolves around the self-insert character William Lee (Peter Weller), who stands in for Borroughs. When the exterminator performs a Wilhelm Tell routine Drug intoxication When he accidentally shoots his wife Joan (Judy Davis), he flees to the Interzone of Tangier, where he becomes a secret agent on behalf of bizarre creatures and meets a doppelganger of his wife. His homosexuality is just part of his undercover identity, of course. This is also what his talking typewriter means.
A anti-novel written like jazz It would have been basically impossible to make a film like Naked Lunch. Cronenberg therefore enriched the text, which is based on hallucinations, half-remembered encounters and states of intoxication, with other works and true events from the life of William S. Burroughs. This also includes the said Wilhelm Tell incident based on Schiller’s model, in which his wife Joan Vollmer actually died. The act, which the film Queer also makes a passing reference to, was later classified as an accident.
Cronenberg is known for body horror nightmares like Videodrome, eXistenZ and later Crimes of the Future adapted Naked Lunch in the usual slimy way with dripping literary aliens, shape-shifting beetle creatures and a hypnotizing physicality that puts you in a state of intoxication even without substances.
Where can you stream Naked Lunch currently?
Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play and MagentaTV offer the film as a rental and purchase title. Within a streaming flat rate, Naked Lunch is available on the Amazon channels Arthaus+, Galactic Stream and Moviecult.