Naked Lunch (film)
| Naked Lunch | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | David Cronenberg |
| Produced by |
Jeremy Thomas Gabriella Martinelli |
| Screenplay by | David Cronenberg Bill Strait |
| Based on |
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs |
| Starring | |
| Music by |
Howard Shore Ornette Coleman |
| Cinematography | Peter Suschitzky |
| Edited by | Ronald Sanders |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
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Release date
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Running time
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115 minutes |
| Country | Canada United Kingdom United States Japan |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $17-18 million |
| Box office | $2.6 million |
Naked Lunch is a 1991 Canadian-British-American-Japanese science fiction drama film co-written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. It is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel of the same name.
The film was released on December 27, 1991 in the United States and April 24, 1992 in the United Kingdom by 20th Century Fox. It received positive reviews from critics, but was a box office bomb, garnering only $2.6 million out of a $17-18 million budget due to a limited release. The film has since become a cult film.
William Lee is an exterminator who finds that his wife Joan is stealing his insecticide (pyrethrum) to use as a drug to get high. When Lee is arrested by the police, he begins hallucinating because of "bug powder" exposure. He believes he is a secret agent with two handlers in the forms of a talking insectoid typewriter and an alien "Mugwump". The bug assigns him the mission of killing Joan. She is allegedly an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Lee dismisses the bug and its instructions and kills it. He returns home to find Joan having sex with Hank, one of his writer friends. Shortly afterwards, he accidentally kills her while attempting to shoot a drinking glass off her head in imitation of William Tell.
Having inadvertently accomplished his mission, Lee flees to Interzone, a city somewhere in North Africa. He spends his time writing reports for his imaginary handler, and it is these documents which, at the insistence of his literary colleagues who later visit him, eventually become the titular book. Whilst Lee is under the influence of assorted mind-altering substances, his replacement typewriter, a Clark Nova, becomes a talking insect which tells him to find Dr. Benway by seducing Joan Frost, who curiously is a doppelgänger of his dead wife. After coming to the conclusion that Dr. Benway is, in fact, the secret mastermind of a narcotics operation for a drug called "black meat" which is supposedly derived from the guts of , Lee completes his report and flees Interzone to Annexia with Joan Frost.
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Wikipedia