The new flesh in “Naked lunch” is a new word, a new language, a new search for meaning where there is no longer appearance of any sense. Cronenberg takes in his hands a deliberately illegible novel and therefore absolutely to be read, a work to be stripped page after page to end subjected to the same perversion of Burroughs, a work that Cronenberg recreates by setting up a plot in which he brings together events from the book, real events in Burroughs’ life (as well as the real circumstances in which Burroughs wrote his novel in Tangier, published first in France in 1959 and then in 1962 in the USA) and aspects taken from other works by the writer, a work that despite the admission of an infidelity to the literary text succeeds in concretizing a scene capable of reporting a total alterity to the surrounding panorama.
In a narration that cannot be narrated, the need for a mind that has voluntarily become obtuse in the addiction to an external agent, drugs, lurks. In the mind of William Lee, writer and exterminator who takes on the same substance he uses to kill cockroaches, the idea of state oppression, of larger and more monstrous organisms that can crush him and deflect him creeps. At the end of the narration, after all, he is the Kafkaesque who becomes both the cockroach and, at the same time, the armed hand who wants to finish the cockroaches.
In “Naked lunch”, Cronenberg does not fathom the mind of a madman, nor the rotten and pharaonic fruit, in which everything still has the right to find its own place. Reality like the Freudian dreamlike delirium, heroin addiction hallucination and erotic sublimation of which Ballard / Cronenberg tells us is concretized in a suspended and at the same time involving aesthetic and linguistic form, between grotesque and noir, gothic and science fiction, becoming and death.
In fact, from Burroughs Cronenberg’s pen he extracts the unpleasant adjective, composing perhaps his most surreal and least placeable film. An extraordinary work as it is completely detached from linguistic and narrative praxis. A work that symbolically ends the era of flesh in transformation, of horror as language, of deprivation of the word and which begins Cronenberg to a visionary abandonment, in which the work on the image is no longer regulated by any orthodoxy.