#7
Post
by therewillbeblus » Sun May 07, 2023 1:13 am
Arrow’s UHD looks spectacular, and the packaging is really cool too. I’m not usually enticed by the various paraphernalia included in these LEs, but there are a bunch of fun trinkets embedded within the case itself that demonstrate a deep affection for this release on behalf of its contributors.
As for the film, well, it's taken me many cold revisits to finally come around and fall in love with it, though to my surprise my reasons have little to do with it being a reflexive work about artistry, creation, sacrifice, or Burroughs' style (which I loathe in print, particularly the titular "source"). Instead, I think this may be the ultimate postmodern-noir, where all the anxieties, disillusionment, and existential intrusions or misdirections stem from the internal psyche and are projected onto a fantasy world. That this surreal milieu incorporates so many noir motifs, only skewed to an absurd internal logic neither we nor Bill Lee are cued in on, just makes it funnier, scarier, sadder, and more tonally-synced with the sensation of living out a noir-life of fatalistic disconnect.
Lee is a stranger to himself, like a dreamer caught in a nightmare, an addict in a drug binge, a married man alienated from his spouse, a complacent employee with imposter syndrome, an artist confounded by his work.. but these are situations where the dysphoria is sourced from within. Sex and drugs and violence and jobs and roles and conflicts are all ruses of tangibility that offer nothing of substance to relieve internal dysregulation, or bring one closer to comprehend themself or motivated to discover Higher meaning. These real-life vehicles of stimulation that many of us rely upon aren’t even stimulating here. What is stimulating seems to be the punchline of the project: reflexively, helplessly witnessing the repeated failures of these typically arousing vehicles to cure the problem that is Lee, or by extension, us. It's essential that we are witnessing, and not participating in the events on screen; for the observance of our own activity from a segregated vantage point is the key to the film's achievement of deadpan impotence (I believe 'we' and 'he' are interchangeable in his film, since Lee is a non-character reflecting unwelcome reminders for the audience of our own acute dissociations from our 'selves', hence the back and forth of subject-use).
On an allegorical psychological level, Naked Lunch seems to be a commentary on how we interact with our own mind. We do what manifestations of our mind tell us to do, or we run from them, in a vicious cycle - because how else are we to react when we have no sense of who we are and what we’re doing, "dying of loneliness" as Lee types out in exasperated distress? Lee doesn’t even know his sexuality, but he is willing to accept and then reject whatever his internal ‘parts’ tell him to do about it, as he is with basically every other bit of instruction or feedback. As the film-as-Lee's spiraling breakdown progresses, various systems’ representatives (friends, lovers, strangers, spies, insects, typewriters, combinations of these!) feed us competing narratives, intended to clarify activity. But this flood of mutually exclusive lifelines, aimed at lucidly informing our directionality and self-diagnoses, only results in hopelessly obfuscating connotations in friction with our own skepticism, attention to denying impulses, and the layered history of alternative narratives contrasting with the new ones offered, thereby causing us to doubt our own reality. As a noir protagonist trapped in his own brain, his missions as an agent are pointlessly repetitive dead-ends to faux-self-discovery, rerouted by new prompts into similar corners. Femme fatales are memories, false ideals, markers of sexual repression and creative constraints, or enigmatic yet corporeal aspirations that we are deterministically drawn to but cannot fully overcome, triggering our failures.
I see Lee’s writing less as freedom for artistry and more as the only hope at liberating himself toward tangible expression, that might just serve as an outlet to grant reprieve from isolating anxiety; perhaps through communication with anybody (anyone at all, please god) to forge a connection with and arrive on a remotely-adjacent wavelength of commonality. Or as a gateway to "adventure," which seems to rouse Lee (as much as Weller's composed, understated but delicately 'expressive' performance will allow shades of arousal) as he provides himself with this reason in response to a quest from one alien agent - a sad moment of self-talk, applying false value to these random intrusive thoughts and impulses coded as important assignments. But the impermanence of this drive to 'express' -provoked by hilarious interruptions from all these organizations and noir antagonists- stamps out this last asset with emasculating symbolism; stealing back the only “healthy” tool just as soon as the “unhealthy” mechanisms of sex, drugs, violence are momentarily extinguished by the revitalizing mirage of an empowering purpose or secure coherence. The ubiquitous, overwhelming tokens operate as defense mechanisms, which force him to face and challenge and subsequently avoid markers of his own identity. And so he seems destined to revert here and then back, in a game of ping-pong between yearning for rational thought and surrendering to an ethos of “exterminating” it, as if to feel some control over that as a self-imposed ‘decision’ rather than externally-manipulated disorientation; but also rooted in fear. Writing/self-expression/breaking from complacent subconscious existence is “too dangerous” because there’s no concrete holds to be found when you do. "Writing fiction" is stigmatized because it's both the only method to elevate ourselves from the quicksand and the most pathetically fruitless intervention that will drain our energy quickest; the purest form of creation and self-destruction, imagination akin to heroin or sex or any other device for id-run-riot.
This revelation is exacerbated by the "plot" of the film, where every symbol he encounters - in the form of agents-as-instruments influencing his behavior - fails to lead him closer to knowing himself or attaining intimacy. Lee is in the same place by the end as he is at the beginning - destined to lose a second (or third or who knows what number) chance at love and happiness, trapped in the vague anti-identity of a lonely writer who half-wants to be one.. and what even is the value of "want" or "authentic desire" in this world? "Addictive drive" often seems preferable, because the choice is being made for you without your permission. In many ways, this is a film about addiction - not only to drugs, but to existential purpose - where Lee acts as an empty vessel pulled in all sorts of different directions to no cathartic end. For me, the film's thesis comes in Lee's monologue during the car ride in the last act, as he tells a story of an asshole who took over a person's body, decomposing their senses and bodily functions until there was just a brain rotting alone - only realizing too late that it needed eyes, but was unwilling or able to consider a compromise until self-destruction was irreparable. Lee delivers this story with a masked disposition that hints at ambiguity and ambivalence, which themselves defend against an emotional position. Is he extrapolating his introverted myopia onto the world, or is his own mind swallowing him up to create this worldview? Can he evade the magnetic pull of infected thought patterns without a support outside his own mind? Isn't he on a mission, an "adventure," and expressing himself as he concludes such horrid morals to the fables he spews.. But is he lamenting this 'truth', embracing it, or trying to fight it by saying it out loud - the good 'ol 'If I'm aware of it, it can't get me' intervention of the addict, attempting to resiliently defy the disease already in your veins.
I may not think highly of Burroughs' text, but his meandering, murky worldview filtered through Cronenberg's lurid, confident artistry is perfectly suited for this collaborative vision. All of these sprawling paradoxes are painfully unstoppable and incurable, leaning so metaphysically into the concept of fatalism that Cronenberg's tonal resonance reaches echoes of blended comedy and devastation, muffled and refracted back into cryptic daze, which is all the more staggering because the chaos follows a linear trajectory that should permit some semblance of 'order'; so rules are broken even within established rules (I have little memory of the source novel, but I recall it being deliberately nonlinear; the film seems to be imposing superficial structure creatively to demonstrate how little that matters when not shared or followed). The infinite Sisyphean cycle of confusion, as unhealthy fatalism contends with healthy resilience, still yields inherently tragic fatalism, even if containing periods of course-correcting. "All agents defect" is one hell of a final blow to a forlorn Lee begging for one more answer from his last 'trusted', inanimate resource. No wonder he's so vulnerable professing his "need" for Davis to "write," craving the comfort of camaraderie for inspiration on his voyage; just as he's doomed to sever that connection in order to continue through the maze of his anarchic journey, where his inspiration must be restricted to a powerless place of suffering, and derived from the lone, eroding soul therein. You know, like the asshole fable. If one needs to be alone in order to be granted safe passage across a metaphorical checkpoint, what does that say about the inevitability of locating pure safety only in seclusion? And how tragic, that our ensuing depression is of a lower utility than that self-protection barring affinity beyond the self?
I can't decide whether this is the conclusive thematic noir, or the most hostile refutation of noir- aggressively imploding all design or constitution to organize principles, implicitly laughing at the very idea of cogency. Of course the schematic compost of our mind is rotting like it's infested with bugs - even one's disillusionment has no signifier to cast its emotion onto and utilize to define itself by. The milieu is a phantasmagoric fusion of high and low brow vices igniting a literary apocalypse through a mental collapse, where every thing's destiny is to be lured into slurred cavities. Naked Lunch does not discriminate against its audience - it's a film for the agitated overthinker and the laconic ignorant who tries to avoid cognitive magnification.. the result is the same when we are forced to contend with ourselves, because there's no safety net. The spirit is a bit like Inside Llewyn Davis without the cheeky, profound irony - just wry truth emulated through the artifice of genre constructs in sci-fi, fantasy, noir, et al. The raw folly of these desperate attempts to make meaning supersedes satire, producing an unintelligible entertainment that can mirror as both Cronenberg's greatest comedy and most terrifying horror film, depending on how you choose to glance at it. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a primary influence for showing Charlie Kaufman how boldly he could access his own psyche through this medium.
