Quick, off the top of your head, tell me all you know
about this movie.
If you recalled fondly the line that Nelson said
in an episode of The Simpsons after Bart uses a fake ID to get into
this film ("I'll tell you two things wrong with that title"), then you're
like most of America. I knew a little bit more coming in: that it was
based on a novel by William S. Burroughs that is the quintessence of
non-linear narrative and that it was directed by David Cronenberg.
On the way out, I know precious little
more.
Naked Lunch is one of those films that is so mind
blowing that it is baffling. So intelligent that it feels idiotic, and so
strange that you wonder if you took something beforehand and forgot about
it. Yet it was one of those movies critics loved.
Screw
'em.
In the movie Contact,
James Woods asks "Why is it always the opinion of the egghead set that
aliens are friendly?" Although the answer Jodie Foster gave back was
sufficient, it should have been a more callous response: "Because we don't
fear what we don't understand." However, among the intellectual set,
things go one step further. Among the intellectual set, heresy is saying
"I don't get it", and thus hidden meanings that weren't there in the first
place are put into books and movies. The entire business is subjective, we
will not know the metaphors placed into them unless we know their makers,
and thus everyone is afraid to say "you're wrong" about what the meaning
is.
The unknown doesn't scare us. Admitting we don't know it scares
us.
Naked Lunch, like so many movies, has no real point to
it. However, because it is so weird and so out of our heads it is the
automatically taken position of the intellectual set that "if I don't
understand it, it must be good." Two things come out of this. The first is
the comedy when someone tries to give an idiotic explanation of what
something means in the midst of ignorance (i.e. the man who thought "The
Unbearable Lightness of Being" was an expose about Bill Clinton). The
second is the tragedy when people keep their mouths shut, not brave enough
to say what is on their mind.
What is on my mind, and the mind of
just about anyone who has seen the film, is "what the hell?" You have no
idea what is going on in the movie, and by the end you still have no idea
what is going on in the movie. Yeah, you've seen a lot of weird sights
(the transvestite drug dealer, the roach-centipede intelligence war, the
cannibalistic typewriters), but you're no closer to understanding what
went down than anyone else is.
There is a word for this,
intellectual elite: incomprehensible. I know that it is the "I" word and
that you're not supposed to say it in class or conversation, but that's
what Naked Lunch is.
But, you know what, it isn't just the
intellectuals who do this.
From filmcritic.com/
<
BACK