The Beat Goes On

Where style meets substance

Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs, seemed to rank with Finnegans Wake as one of the novels least likely to become a mainstream film.

The subject of a watershed censorship battle, the book was a catalogue of violent perversions with a staunch disregard for conventional plot. "I'm shitting out my educated Middlewest background once and for all," he noted. Now there actually is Naked Lunch, the movie. Director-screenwriter David Cronenberg retains the novel's paranoid, hallucinogenic perspective (embodied by such special-effect creations as liv-

ing drug and sex machines), while imposing a mythic plot which takes its cues from Burroughs's biography—from his accidental killing of his wife Joan Vollmer to his drugand hustler-hustling days in Tangier with Paul and Jane Bowles and Allen Ginsberg. Homosexual, junkie, and expatriate, Burroughs has been the outsider's outsider to successive generations of Beats, acidheads, and punks. Cronenberg's dazzling, luridly literary film, with its conspirator's sense of the world as a relentlessly dangerous place, suggests that Burroughs's austere decadence also has a place in the decadently austere nineties.

BEN BRANTLEY