Naked Lunch (1991) on Netflix
Exterminator Bill Lee's wife Joan has been getting high on the insecticide he uses at work. The powder sets off hallucinations in which a giant beetle orders him to kill her.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.9/1061,450 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1953, the exterminator William Lee has a wife, Joan, who has been stealing the insecticide that comes with his job and taking it as a drug. The police arrest him, and the insecticide he has breathed in brings on hallucinations in which Lee is a secret agent. His superior in that world is a giant beetle that tells him to kill Joan, claiming she works for Interzone Incorporated. Lee destroys the beetle instead. A game of William Tell with a glass on Joan's head leaves her shot dead, and Lee flees to Tangier, where he writes reports on his mission. There his typewriter becomes a talking insect that sends him after Dr. Benway by way of Joan Frost, who resembles his dead wife.
Cast
- Peter Boretskias Creature Voices / Exterminator #2
- Yuval Danielas Hafid
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Naked Lunch (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
In the film, Lee's shooting of his wife is drawn from the real 1951 death of Joan Vollmer, William Burroughs's common-law wife, whom Burroughs shot in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party in Mexico City.- The Gulf War stopped Cronenberg from shooting in Tangiers because insurance could not be obtained, so he massively rewrote the script days before filming, while also acting in Nightbreed.
- Cronenberg drew on Burroughs's other fiction and autobiographical writing too, saying he had to "Throw the book away" because a direct adaptation would be far too expensive and "would be banned in every country in the world".
SPOILER
Burroughs was convicted in absentia of homicide and received a suspended two-year sentence; in the introduction to his book Queer he called Joan's death the starting point of his literary career.- Peter Weller, then working on RoboCop 2, learned from cinematographer Mark Irwin that Cronenberg was adapting Naked Lunch; a fan of the novel since he read it at 18, he had read it 10 times and chased the lead role like "a Pac-Man".
- Ornette Coleman's "Midnight Sunrise", from his album Dancing in Your Head, is used in the film; William Burroughs had been present at the 1973 recording session. Music by the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar also features throughout.
- English electronic musician Bomb the Bass's 1994 single "Bug Powder Dust" opens and closes with lines of dialogue from the film and weaves other quotes, items and themes from it into the lyrics.
- In the 1996 Simpsons episode "Bart on the Road", Bart, Nelson and Milhouse use a fake driver's license to get into an adult film and pick Naked Lunch on the strength of its title and R rating; leaving, Nelson says, "I can think of at least two things wrong with that title."
