Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Naked Lunch (1991)

Today's movie is Naked Lunch.  I often have that on the weekends.  Let's talk about this film. It is bizarre but it is awesome.

It starts with Bill, who is an exterminator.  His friends and wife have been using his bug powder as drugs.  Bill is called in by the cops and a bug, which talks out of his butthole, tells him to kill his wife.  It only gets weirder from here.

Bill does end up killing his wife, Joan, but by accident.  He tries the bug powder drug and decides to play William Tell with her and shoots her in the head.  This seems kind of out of the left field, but there's a reason from this.  The author of the book, William S. Burroughs, accidentally shot his wife playing the same game.  So this event actually happened.


Bill leaves home and goes to the "Interzone" - Morocco, which he also does in real life.  This film was made during the Gulf War so it was actually filmed in Toronto. Just fyi.  Also fyi- Jaime from Mythbusters worked on the props in the movie! He built the mugwumps!

Bill becomes a writer and writes lots of reports on his typewriter.  During his drug episodes, the typewriter turns into a beetle looking thing with a talking butthole.  We also learn a lot about Bill's thought process. The real William S. Burroughs was an openly bisexual drug enthusiast, and the film is a semi-biopic about him writing the book.  The real book is about... I don't know.  All of the people in the film are also based on real people.

Bill meets an American couple in the Interzone, Tom and Joan (the wife, Joan, looks exactly like his wife, Joan). She seems like an important character that we will look out for.

After Bill's typewriter eats Tom's typewriter (yes eats) Tom kidnaps Bill's typewriter for revenge and destroys it.  Bill and Joan use an Arabic typewriter to write some smut and it turns into a wily humpcrab and gets tossed off the balcony by some dominatrix looking lady.  What we don't know yet is that the dominatrix is actually Sheriff Brody in disguise and he is a drug lord.  (Random thought. He also played the Captain on Seaquest 2032 and I loved that show when I was little. Does anyone else remember that show?)

Crap I thought I could explain this film and I can't.  It's really easy to dismiss it as being about drugs.  Well it is about drugs, but it's also a lot more than that.  It's more about the difficulty of the creative process.

After Tom destroys the typewriter, Bill's adorable boy toy Kiki takes him to an elven kiln where they make him an oddly shaped typewriter with +5 writing power.  Look at it! It's like a doctor told it to open its mouth and say ahhhh.  This is so funny.


This thing is called a mugwump.  Wait, wasn't Dumbledore a mugwump? Yes, he was a Supreme Mugwump until the Ministry of Magic booted him. A mugwump is an amphibian like creature, like a murloc except it has no spines.  It also has tubes that drip out jizz, you know like a man has a tube, I'm just gonna stop here. The jizz gets you high.  The mugwump produces the jizz at a high rate in the midst of the creative/writing process.  It's like mana for writers!  It can also make jizz without it, but at a much slower rate.  Bill finds many of them chained up surrounded by junkies.

Can Bill stop the drug lord?  Well no he doesn't want to.  I will give this film a 9/10 because it is the most creative film I have seen in a long time.

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