synopsis:

'naked lunch' starts with drug-addict will Lee working as an exterminator (which william s. burroughs did for a brief time). Characters representing Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (see "Moloch whose Soul is electricity...") tell Lee that his wife Joan has been shooting up his bug powder. Soon the real-life tragedy in which Burroughs accidentally shoots Joan takes place (though here in New York instead of Mexico), and Lee escapes to Tangier, morocco. There he confronts a universe of insect-filled nightmares, disgusting desires and secret plots. he plunges into the nightmarish netherworld of 'the Interzone', pursuing a mysterious project that leads him to confront sinister cabals and giant talking bugs.

many surrealist things happen. There's the running bit, for instance, about typewriters coming to life as weird orgasmic insect-creatures who get sexually aroused when written well on. Will Lee and a character representing Paul Bowles are very possessive about their respective typewriters. Lee uses a Clark-Nova, Bowles uses a Martinelli, and one day Lee's Clark-Nova violently dismembers Bowles' Martinelli in a fit of jealousy. Bowles then claims lee's Clark-Nova as his own, and when the Clark-Nova tries to run away it slams into a closed door with the sound of a carriage bar ringing.

about this movie:

There is a common misconception that this movie, starring Peter Weller and Judy Davis, is based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name. Actually it's a semi-fantasy based on Burroughs' life during the period that he was writing this novel, but not on the novel itself. Peter Weller plays a character named Will Lee, who represents Burroughs ('Lee' is Burroughs' mother's maiden name, and he used this pseudonym when Junky was published).

This film, like all of Cronenberg's films, is really messed up. Like the novel on which it's based, 'Naked Lunch' truly relies on the viewer's willingness to be sucked into the story without any guarantee that a sensible, perfect end will be reached. Cronenberg decided to do a movie very much like Soderbergh's Kafka, where the film's main character is the author himself thrown into his own literary creations.