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Rating: Create and destroy as a UNICUM, the ultimate end of existence itself. Psychedelia, addiction, flesh, literature, darkness, creation, repulsion, drugs, illusion: everything and nothing together. The act of writing or filming a book is always an intrinsically fertilizing act: it presupposes a union, an embrace, a fusion between signifier and signified, an act of conjoining intentions and stimuli. Stimuli can come from a memory, a scent, a color, from an atmosphere, from a chemical hallucination, or from a strange perception of reality, cohesive and brought to life in that particular moment. The reaction can materialize in ink, in brushstrokes of color, in nocturnal sax notes, in Arabic characters written from right to left on an old typewriter, or in perceptual visions applicable to anything reproducible by images. Finally, on the purely physical, tangible, concrete level: writing always has a certain dimension of physicality, whether leaving traces of ink on a sheet with a pen or forcefully striking the keys of a typewriter, or perceiving the BEEPS on a computer keyboard.
It is the famous fusion of loving senses between the writer and the machine.
Cronenberg in his “Naked Lunch” (the film) has poured all the dense latex of Burroughs’ narrative psychedelia (the book), mixing it together in a single test tube, essence of Kafkaesque black mood (cockroach mood, insect’s vital fluid) and shapeless traces of truly fascinating and hypnotic retro suggestions. New York in 1953 is the starting point for a dizzying introspection into the unconscious while the intermediate stop is Tangier, with its open-air markets and its opium dens. The final landing is, evidently, erasure, mental resetting, the amnesia necessary to create again.
DESTROY to be REBORN.
An exterminator-writer gets involved in an intricate mission (literary?): to generate words, draft a phantom report on a secret society, and lodge a bullet in the forehead of his drug-addicted wife (annoying connection to the reality of the facts that was...).
Under the effects of a formidable cloud of yellow pyrethrum (poison for insects, gold for men) the man-cockroach thus loses all connection with reality, to sink into a dreamlike universe populated by deformed characters with a polymorphic glandular apparatus. The secretions (living matter, amorphous fluid, precious exudate) indicate the way: food for the body and the psyche. A typewriter, an essential medium to perform the “sexual” act of writing, is the precious good to be stolen, smuggled in secret, a gateway to a longed-for tangle of otherness administered in increasing doses. Meanwhile, putrid scraps of decomposing existences mix with the anguished ghosts born from the dark womb of the human mind, and perish under a tentacular web woven by nonsense: destructuring.
Nonsense as the key word of the (non)narration in progress.
Cronenberg returns more forcefully than ever with his everlasting obsessions: the mutation of flesh, the phobia of the sexual act/castration (a phobia here significantly declined in the theme of the non-fertilizing homoerotic sexuality of the artist), the impossible dominance over certain deep spheres of the subconscious.
Great film.
Cryptic, fascinating, “sick,” ingenious in its murky (and largely obscure) allusions/illusions about the creative process of writing. Destructuring, emotionally unhinging, misleading on the right side of the brain, counter-contraceptive, deviant, disturbing, and mentally sick to a borderline point of “no return.” A film difficult to manage and almost impossible to review in purely narrative and rational terms.
Warning: watching this film causes disturbances and neurological alterations of reality. Prescribe under medical advice and/or in the presence of people capable of enduring the entire viewing. In that case: absolutely mistrust those people!!
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