The Thousands

Biopics are perhaps the suckiest genre in all of cinema. Interesting lives almost never translate to interesting cinema, and their main appeal is showing one famous person pretend to be another famous person, like a celebrity drag-show. So why is the hallucinatory biopic of cult author William Burroughs, NAKED LUNCH, so good?

Director David Cronenberg takes Burroughs’ life and runs it through the filter of Burroughs’ fiction. His alter-ego, Bill Lee, is an exterminator whose wife introduces him to the “Kafka high” of injecting his own bug-powder. After an accident – mirroring Burroughs’ own infamous WILLIAM TELL tragedy – Bill retreats to a legally and sexually foreign no man’s land called ‘Interzone’… and that’s when this plot synopsis becomes pointless.**There’s a special look you need if you want to star in a David Cronenberg movie, and here Peter Weller masters it: a kind of middle-distance stare that suggests you’re looking at something truly horrific, and it bores you. (Or arouses you, if you’re James Spader in CRASH.) NAKED LUNCH has just appeared on DVD so buy it, watch it, and practice your Cronenberg-stare at its giant bugs, talking typewriters, and bodily fluids.