anyone seen Naked Lunch?

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holy s*** man. and i thought eraserhead was a big head trip..

alien conspiracy, statement about homosexuality, bug powder hallucinations, or just plain ambiguity? the imagery sure is bizzare. maybe even disturbing, like my dad said...... i love when bill first sees the giant talking insect - and his exterior doesn't even crack by a millimeter. and then when he leans back to grab his shoe and commit violence upon the insect... something about the leaning back to grab the shoe....weird stuff for some reason, that's what stuck out in my mind. i enjoyed the whole thing too.

whoops wrong section. just asked TallyMan to move it to the correct location

one of my favorites. like all movies about alienation, i can read it more specifically about myself (e.g. Carnival of Souls) but not to limit it to that.
atmosphere, art direction, the performances & the wit of the dialogue all set it apart from even good art movies.
i would just cavil that it's not much like the book at all...

Of course! I owned Naked Lunch on VHS, but gave it away because I no longer had a VCR. But... that was so long ago, I've forgotten too much of it to comment on it.

Since you're talking about the movie, I think I'll put this in the TV and movies section.

I have never seen this film or know what it's about but in an episode of The Simpsons, Bart gets a fake I.D and he takes Nelson and Milhouse to see this film which is rated R. When they come out Nelson says "I can think of at least 2 things wrong with that sign".

I love that joke! It always cracks me up. The delivery is perfect.

Ahaha, that is the very first thing I thought of when I saw the title of this thread.

Same with me!
Well, I still have the movie on video, but I don't own a VCR anymore.
And yes the movie is indeed a head trip. I've also read the novel Naked Lunch, by the late William S. Burroughs. To say that the book was unfilmable is an understatement. Rather, the movie has more to do with the writing of the book, along with hallucinogenic reptile Mugwump aliens, talking typewriters, and giant insects thrown in for good measure. The central theme of the movie, where the protagonist William Lee shoots his wife accidentally on purpose, is based on the real life incident in which William Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan. Another more historically accurate film is Beat, which stars Kieffer Sutherland as Burroughs and Courtney Love as his wife Joan. My wife has ordered as a present for my upcoming birthday the documentary William S. Burroughs: The Man Within, in which the movie version of Naked Lunch's director David Cronnemberg discusses Burroughs, and his wife's homicide as the defining moment of both the movie, and Burroughs' life.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

hmm. never read the book... id definitely see more movies about alienation!

so burroughs probably wrote the book in prison, yeah? im not much of a reader, but im definitely curious now to see what the text is like.

Actually not. He shot his wife while they were in Mexico (not New York, as in the movie Naked Lunch), and then skipped across the border after his lawyer was arrested himself for shooting someone. Burroughs was tried in absentia, and was sentenced to just a few years, which he never served. He actually did a lot of writing in Algeria (the real Interzone), where he had gone for the male prostitutes and cheap heroin.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

yikes. from what you said, it seems to me like naked lunch was his rational/outlet/expression related to killing his wife. or something

Actually, he never touched the subject of Joan's death, till years later, when he wrote a forward for a new edition of Naked Lunch. In it, he said something to the effect of: "I must come to the appalling conclusion that I would not have become a writer had it not been for Joan's death (my paraphrase based on memory)."
When David Cronenberg had said that Burroughs had been writing himself out of Joan's death ever since, Burroughs replied that he was probably right.

By the way, even though Burroughs had never been diagnosed as such, I think a case for Asperger's can be made for him.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

If your interested in the book, there is a thread on it in another part of this site.
I didn'r totaly love the movie. It didn't measure up to the book (but how could it?).
The characters seem kind of flat (though Buroughs did come across that way.)
It played fast and loose with real history, most of which was not in the book at all.
Also, it did seem to exploit the shooting of Joan in a way that Buroughs himself didn't.
Still, it had some freaky and interesting images. The typerwriters turning into bugs and having sex, the mugmumps and so forth.
See it if you like, just know that it is a Cronenburg movie, not a Buroughs movie, and it dosn't stick closely to the book.

i might just do that sometime.