FILM

Naked Lunch
Directed by David Cronenberg
(Criterion Collection)

It is a common critical observation that certain novels are "unfilmable." This description, meant to render some aspect of the book’s complex language, tangled narrative or lack of storytelling drive, is often applied to modernist masterpieces like Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Yet, again and again, filmmakers tackle these unfilmable books, sometimes with miraculous results (Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained), sometimes less miraculously (Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Falling mostly in the former category is David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, reissued as a typically faultless two-disc set by Criterion, the unrivaled masters of high-end DVD reissues. Cronenberg, clearly the ideal director to bring Burroughs’ vision to the screen, takes only bits and pieces of his source material, tossing in elements of Burroughs’ Exterminator and Queer and events from the author’s life.

Bill Lee (Peter Weller), the authorial stand-in, is a bug exterminator living in 1950s New York. His work has been suffering, because his wife Joan (Judy Davis) has been getting high on his supply of bug powder. Playing a stoned game of William Tell one night, Bill accidentally shoots his wife and takes flight for Interzone, a Tangier-like North African port city. The gap between reality and Bill’s drug-fueled hallucinations narrows as his bug-like, talking typewriter commands him to write "reports" on recent events in his life, keeping an eye out for enemy bug agents who may be seeking to take control of Bill’s psyche. Cronenberg deftly manages the task of crafting a functional narrative for Naked Lunch, but one whose particulars are secondary to the aura of homoeroticism, exotic drugs and free-floating Cold War paranoia.

Purists will be annoyed with the extent to which Naked Lunch takes liberties with Burroughs’ work, but Cronenberg’s ability to translate Burroughs’ sensibility to the screen is remarkable. What remains astonishing is the exceptional cool of Cronenberg’s film. One might expect an adaptation of an author like Burroughs to be drawn to extremes, but Naked Lunch lays out its sequence of events matter-of-factly, with no particular emphasis placed on giant talking bugs.

Naked Lunch is the metaphorical story of a trial by fire, the hell lived through by one writer looking for the story he was meant to tell. In the film’s closing scene, Soviet-looking border guards stop Bill and demand proof of "writer" as his profession. Bill responds by reenacting the most painful moment of his life, the death of his wife, upon which the guards solemnly nod and let him through. Bill’s dark journey has ended at the point at which he was capable of recreating its beginning; he has proven he is a writer by virtue of mining his past. In that sense, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch ends where Burroughs’ begins.

–Saul Austerlitz

Corrupt
Directed by Roberto Faenza
(Brentwood)

John Lydon–despite his short-lived talk show, appearances in countless documentaries and all that archival footage–has only acted in one feature film. As it happens, lord knows why, it was one of those cheap Italian jobs Harvey Keitel was making in the 80s.

Roberto Faenza’s 1983 film Corrupt (aka Copkiller, Cop Killers, Corrupt Lieutenant or Order of Death) isn’t what you’d call a tremendous or groundbreaking film. But it is odd, and in terms of its cultural-detritus value, worth taking a look at.

The plot’s fairly typical for Italian psychological thrillers of the time. Someone is bumping off "New York" cops, right there on the streets of "New York," and Lt. Fred O’Connor (Keitel) is working on the case.

We quickly learn that Keitel is leading a double life. He has a small apartment in Brooklyn, but also secretly keeps an enormous, unfurnished Central Park West apartment with his gay lover, a cop married to Keitel’s ex-girlfriend. We learn that Keitel is crooked, and paid for the apartment with dirty money. Furthermore, he’s got a stalker: Johnny Rotten (called "Leo Smith" in the film, but we know better), a rich kid from upstate with a history of psychological problems. One day Rotten shows up at Keitel’s secret gay apartment and confesses to the cop-killings. The protocol-minded Keitel binds and gags Rotten, then locks him in the bathroom–even though he’s not convinced for a second that Rotten’s really the killer.

This all happens in the film’s first 20 minutes. After that, the sadomasochistic mind games begin, with a few role reversals and increasingly unstable behavior on the part of both men.

There’s enough arthouse psychodrama and grindhouse violence here for the film to play like a prequel to Bad Lieutenant. Better than that, there’s even some Sylvia Sidney. There are big logical gaps, continuity errors and hilarious non sequiturs, but the film is worth seeing for John Lydon’s performance. He’s pretty much playing himself, and you can tell early on how bored he is reading some of this dialogue, but he’s always had an undeniable, snotty charisma which isn’t lost here. As the film rolls on, even as he and Keitel snipe at each other like a couple of aging queens, you can see his interest in the goings-on increasing. It’s a pity he didn’t do any more acting after this.

The print I have (a tv edit) is not the best. The sound is muddy, and the naughty words have even been bleeped out, but Corrupt has never been an easy film to track down. Here it’s part of Cops, a Brentwood four-pack, together with another Italian cop film and two pointless shot-on-video numbers–but you take what you can get.

–Jim Knipfel

Sympathy for the Devil
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
(ABKCO)

According to James Monaco’s seminal study The New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard punched Iain Quarrier, the producer of Sympathy for the Devil, for distorting the rhythm of the film’s final images (stretching them out to accommodate the full-length version of the Rolling Stones’ title song on the soundtrack). Quarrier also changed the title from Godard’s preferred One Plus One, just to capitalize on the Stones. Rock fans have been misled (and often disappointed) ever since, because this film–part music documentary, part political vaudeville–is almost pure Godard.

Recording the Stones’ process of making the "Sympathy" track, Godard also scrutinizes 60s revolutionaries. He risked alienating his supposedly hip audience, first by demystifying the Stones, then by querying the romance of dissent and rebellion. Following his 1967 Maoist satire La Chinoise, Godard understood the fickleness of youth’s political activism. He saw the emotional and dialectical mathematics of rebellion even more clearly than did Mick Jagger (whose song is a threatening litany of social unrest throughout Western history). The proper title One Plus One refers to matching sound to image, thought to action, politics to culture. Godard doesn’t proselytize anarchy or revolt; he’s simply fascinated. Although his bemusement isn’t quite sympathy, it is amazingly perceptive: He shows the devilish Stones as, essentially, jesters (political antecedents to the Sex Pistols). The non-studio scenes depict black and white radicals in the outside world as pranksters.

The DVD restores Godard’s 60s palette of intense primary colors. Studio partitions isolate each band member in harlequinade cubicles; outdoors, the woods where Eve Democracy (Anne Wiazemsky) is interviewed is a sylvan wonder, and the auto graveyard where assorted black militants recite Eldridge Cleaver turns the key metaphor of Godard’s Weekend into a Calder landscape of absurdist/capitalist hanging mobiles. Godard’s perfect visual sense was never more amusing. Sympathy peaks in a bookstore sequence featuring several continuous panning shots of lurid political and porno magazine covers. The pop-art parallelism recalls an animated James Rosenquist canvas. It is triumphant cinema.

Made during the same period as Sweet Sweetback and Hi, Mom!, critics often cite Sympathy as a unique rock documentary. Yeah, but its sociological analysis also deserves consideration as a blaxploitation movie–perhaps the greatest.

–Armond White