ICE-Vision: Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991)
Thursday, January 28 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.
“This David Cronenberg masterpiece breaks every rule in adapting a literary classic, but justifies every transgression with its artistry and audacity. Adapted not only from William S. Burroughs’s free-form novel but also from several other Burroughs works, the film is a complex and highly subjective portrait of Burroughs himself (expertly played by Peter Weller) as a tortured sensibility in flight from his own femininity, proceeding zombielike through an echo chamber of projections (insects, drugs, typewriters) and repudiations. According to the densely compacted metaphors that compose this dreamlike movie, writing equals drugs equals sex, and the pseudonymous William Lee, as politically incorrect as Burroughs himself, repeatedly disavows his involvement in all three. With Judy Davis and Ian Holm. R, 115 min.” -Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader