Naked Lunch

Gus Van Sant once claimed that his work was influenced by William S. Burroughs. This is bullshit. The only filmmaker who can claim to be indebted to Bill is Cronenberg. He, more so than any other filmmaker, understands the complex relationship between sex and violence and his films, like Burroughs novels, draw heavily on pop culture. The only way to film this "unfilmable" book, which was written in the cut and paste style and reassembled in an arbitrary order, was to take an equally subjective approach. The surprising thing about the film (well the whole thing was surprising) was that Cronenberg made the protagonsist moslty heterosexual, which is about as strange as Achilles being straight in the Brad Pitt version of Troy. Burroughs saw no use for women and hoped that one day cloning would make their role in human reproduction obsolete. Cronenberg also referenced the true story about Burroughs accidentally shooting his wife in a William Tell related misadventure, which is all the more affecting if you know that that was the one topic Burroughs never could write about.