There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Bart and some friends get ahold of a fake ID, and think of ways to put it to good use. Someone has the tantalizing idea of going to an R rated movie. Cut from their wide-eyed excitement to the boys stumbling bewildered out of a screening of Naked Lunch. Nelson sums it up: “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.”

My own first viewing of Naked Lunch in 1991 left me similarly dazed, revulsed, and oddly fascinated. Knowing what to expect from filmmaker David Cronenberg usually doesn’t lessen the blow of experiencing his radical films, even if you realize that a title isn’t necessarily literal. In Naked Lunch, bizarre and repulsive creatures populate the tenuous reality of Bill Lee, a guilt-ridden man addicted to various dangerous substances as much as he is to writing. Peter Weller plays Bill with a stoic humor, muttering quips and rarely flinching as increasingly disturbing situations unfold before him. The amount of drug-induced, metaphorical surrealism in the film would leave even those familiar with the source material scratching their heads. Still, Cronenberg’s interpretation of William Burroughs’ “unfilmable” 1958 literary experiment seems like a perfect pairing. The approach is similar to the screen version of Adaptation. It’s a few steps removed from the novel; a film about the harrowing process of the writing of the book. Watching the DVD’s commentary and making-of feature gave me a much greater appreciation for the visual insanity. Cronenberg comments that filming the act of writing is a huge challenge, and goes in depth to explain his methods for bringing the internal pain of the creative process to gruesome life. His scene-by-scene revelations are extremely enlightening, but never risk ruining the experience of finding one’s own interpretation of the film.

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