Exterminate All Rational Thought
Naked Lunch is the title of the film and many of the scenes and the monstrous Mugwumps—here, drug-producing, skeletal creatures who bear a marked resemblance to Burroughs—are lifted from the novel. But Cronenberg also mixes and matches from other Burroughs' works, notably Exterminator and Interzone, as well as from Burroughs own life, in constructing a hallucinatory tale set in the frontier of artistic life.

Burroughs' stand-in is Bill Lee (Peter Weller), an exterminator in '50s-era New York. His friends (stand-ins for Burroughs real-life friends Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), Martin (Michael Zelniker) and Hank (Nicholas Campbell), are writers haunting the Automat, but Bill laughs at their pretensions, telling them, "Exterminate all rational thought." He is content with his life, until he comes home to find his wife, Joan (Judy Davis), mainlining his bug powder. When he accidentally blows her brains out during a game of "William Tell" gone awry—as Burroughs did to his wife, Joan Vollmer, in real life—his life spirals out of control.

Escaping to the Tangiers-like Interzone, Bill buys a Clark-Nova typewriter and begins the writer's life—except his typewriter morphs into a cockroach-like being with a talking sphincter and a flair for dictation. Alternating highs from black centipede powder and Mugwump jissom tax Bill's hold on a reality in which everyone has an agenda—his new writer friends, Tom and Joan Frost (Ian Holm, Judy Davis), reptilian aristocrat Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands), and the mysterious Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) among them. When Martin and Hank arrive for a visit, they discover that Bill has somehow produced the novel that will become Naked Lunch, but Bill has no memory of writing it and suspects a conspiracy.

Burroughs admitted later in his life that the event that transformed him into a writer was the shooting of his wife. And, in a sense, the film that Cronenberg has made with its querulous, bug typewriters, bloodstained pages, and the bug-powder buzz that Joan Lee describes as a "Kafka" high, is nothing less than a drama about the creative process itself as Bill Lee metamorphoses into a writer. Weller is perfect in the role. Though he's too hale and hearty to physically resemble the gaunt, spectral Burroughs, he has the laconic, Midwestern speech down and he brings to the character an enormous amount of empathy. For a film that so often celebrates the grotesque, it is also an affectionate delineation of Burroughs world and Weller's performance is very much a part of that.

As a DVD, the delights of Naked Lunch begin on disc one with a perfect anamorphic transfer and audio commentary by Cronenberg and Weller. The commentary, recorded separately from the director's and actor's respective home bases in Toronto and L.A., could serve as a primer on how this so often abused special feature should be done. OK, Weller could mumble a little less, since it's sometimes hard to make out what he's saying, but he's also obviously rushing out the words in his enthusiasm for his subjects, which in addition to the film, includes Burroughs in particular and Beat literature in general. Cronenberg discusses the inspiration he found in the novel and in Burroughs' life, the difficulty in making a film about the creative process, the technical challenges involved in making the film, and the casting (Weller wrote himself into the picture with an impassioned letter to the director). This is a smart, witty, informative commentary—reason enough for even the non-Naked Lunch fan to check out the disc.

Disc two begins with Chris Rodley's 52-minute, 1992 documentary, "Naked Making Lunch" that limns both the history of Burroughs' novel and the making of the film with interviews from Burroughs, Cronenberg, producer Jeremy Thomas, and the cast. There are two photo galleries, one from the film and another of Allen Ginsberg's photos of Burroughs and contemporaries on the scene in Tangiers; there is a collection of promo materials, including a featurette and better-than-average trailers; and there is an extensive audio section of Burroughs reading excerpts from the novel.

Rounding out the Naked Lunch DVD is a 32-page booklet with photos from the film and a collection of essays culled from the now out-of-print book Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch, including one by Burroughs on the making of the film.

Among Cronenberg and Burroughs' fans, this DVD has been long anticipated. For once, the wait has been worth it. It is the perfect evocation of a perfect film—and that's no hallucination.