Netflix Instant Watch of the Week: Naked Lunch (1991)

David Cronenberg’s “adaptation” of Naked Lunch, the 1959 novel by William Burroughs, is less a cinematic retelling than a complete immersion in the mind and mythology of Burroughs himself. At its surface, the story follows author, wife–killer and drug addict William Lee as he traverses the fictional North African states of Interzone and Annexia. Most essentially a work of science fiction — though it’s as confusing and genre–bending as Burroughs’s original novel — the film takes the extraterrestrial conventions of commercial science fiction (notably Star Wars), and casts them in a strange new light, where everything has a homosexual undertone and typewriters can speak. It adds up, somehow, to an experience that is as compelling today as it must have been groundbreaking in 1991.