Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

One of the perks about working on RealityStudio is the opportunity to get in contact with some very interesting people. Johnny Strike, Gary-Lee Nova, Jim and Roy Pennington. All have amazing stories and fantastic tales to tell. And then there is Graham Rae — a polarizing figure for some as a look back at old forum posts proves. Yet all polarizing figures have one thing in common: energy. Graham has chutzpah in spades. I am firmly in Graham’s camp because I recognize and admire a follow obsessive. He wears his passions on his sleeve and his enthusiasm is contagious. In addition, he consistently brings interesting items to the Big Table, or RealityStudio, as the case may be.

As just one recent example, Graham posted on the forum about Xerox Ferox, a collection of interviews with publishers of and contributors to horror fanzines. This is an intimate, close-knit world full of larger-than-life figures and an ecosystem that Graham was a part of in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while writing for legendary horror zines like Deep Red. As Graham mentioned on the forum, he is interviewed in the book. Well, I finally got around to getting a copy and let me assure you it is full of hellraising tales. The book exceeded my wildest expectations and I highly recommend it. (BTW, buy this book directly from Headpress. The price of this book on Amazon and other online retailers is truly horrific. Last time I checked the only available copies were over $120. Granted, the book is over 800 pages but $100+ for a paperback with black and white photos is a form of exploitation itself, which is nothing new for online book resellers. While you are on the Headpress website check out the press’s other offerings as well. Some really interesting stuff.).

Before reading Xerox Ferox, I was totally unaware of almost all of the zines described therein, such as Gore Gazette, Deep Red, Sleazoid Express, and Trashola. To say nothing of the related world of grindhouses, drive-ins, independent bookstores, distributors, and mail-order businesses that inspired and supported horror zine culture. But unknowingly, I had trespassed into this all-hallowed underground. Merely as a tourist mind you. I just casually dipped my toes into the chilling waters of the Black Lagoon. I was never baptized. I was not as Chas. Balun, a horror zine legend, labelled horror fanatics, a true believer. I was never born again, or, should I say, was never undead.  

Yet around the time Bill Landis and Will McDonough documented the exotica of 42nd Street in the early 1980s within the pages of Sleazoid Express, I was doing my own walk on the wild side on a smaller and safer scale. See, my brother and I visited my father in Connecticut several times a year and we would get on the Bieber bus in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and meet up with him at Port Authority in New York City. In the days before the internet, cell phones and text messaging, it was something of an act of faith that when we got off the bus that my father would be there to greet us and whisk us away from the dangers of the bus station. If my father was late, we had to fend for ourselves, which meant fending off the local wildlife. As we got older, let’s say when I turned thirteen, my brother and I made the transfer at Port Authority ourselves and got on to another bus to take us up to Connecticut or back to Pennsylvania. That meant a layover.  

Now, I know nothing of the Deuce as Landis and McDonough as experienced it, but I can assure you that for a young teenager Port Authority in the mid-1980s was a horror show. Scary yet utterly fascinating. Zombies and vampires roamed wild throughout the dark passages of the station. My brother and I would cram together for safety in a bathroom stall and take turns doing our business. And to be sure, business was being conducted in the stall next door. I remember a young hustler with pinpricks for eyes frantically running up to a bored policeman screaming “He’s gonna kill me!” and then scurrying off terrified. Just minutes later, a hulking man shuffled by in pursuit, much like Frankenstein’s monster, mumbling curses to himself. The policeman merely laughed and directed the zombie toward his prey.  

Without a doubt, Port Authority made an impression on me. I have never forgotten the handful of hours I spent there. Do not get me wrong, there was no saison en enfer such as Landis describes; but it was a little taste (and smell) of what was cooking in Hell’s Kitchen. Years later in the post-Giuliani Era, I toured the bars around Port Authority with my future wife and brother-in-law. The glory days of the Deuce and its walking dead was fading into twilight but there were still flashes of local color. Siberia, Howard Johnson’s, Rudy’s, Holland Bar. At some point during the hours we spent in the Holland Bar, I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this woman. Amongst all that loneliness and despair a relationship dawned.

As a teenager back home in suburban Pennsylvania in the safe confines of the shopping mall and my parents’ furnished basement, I again edged the abyss described within the pages of Xerox Ferox. I spent hours browsing within Waldenbooks, looking, but never buying. I was incredibly tight with a dollar and a good portion of my money was pumped into the slots of Rampage and Xenophobe in the arcade on the second floor. But I was a dedicated flâneur of the mall bookstore and I camped out in the photography section hoping to catch a glimpse of some soft-focus softcore in the how-to photography books. In the magazine section, I loitered with the mainstream porno mags, hoping to get my hands on an issue of Penthouse with Vanessa Williams (as well as an underage Traci Lords). I also flipped through the mainstream gore mags, like Fangoria and Cinefantastique, and related periodicals, like Femme Fatale.  

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, I watched scores of horror movies. Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing were, and still are, favorites, but I also rummaged through the local video stores and got my hands on more ghastly and underground delicacies, like Bad Taste, Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive, Blood Feast, Blood Sucking Freaks, I Spit on Your Grave, Susperia, Demons, Zombie, and Cannibal Holocaust. Surrounded by wood paneling, I scoured the pay channels for anything left of the remote control. I watched all the Emmanuelle films and the occasional Mitchell Brothers film, like Insatiable; I saw quite a few Troma movies; I dug Spaghetti Westerns; I would thrill to B-movies, like Gator Bait, and was always on the lookout for femme fatales, like Playboy Playmate of the Year Claudia Jennings, who died in a car crash in 1979 on Highway One before reaching age 30. Nobody rocked a blue jean vest and daisy dukes like Claudia. God rest her soul. I loved Hollywood Shuffle and I’m Gonna Get You Sucka, which led to Shaft, Blacula and other Blaxploitation flix.  

Without a conscious plan of attack or goal in mind, I was rapidly immersing myself and getting an education in exploitation film. But I never really schooled myself on the subject. This was with one exception a largely solitary pursuit. It never occurred to me that there was a community of likeminded individuals out there sharing their discoveries and obsessions. The curiosity that ran wild with William Burroughs, and found room to roam at RealityStudio, had yet to fully develop. I was an intellectual loner, not because I was a rebel or outsider, but because I was too self-conscious to bring any attention to myself or my ideas. I was worried about looking stupid or making a mistake. It took years to realize that the only way you learn anything is by sharing your ideas with others and having those ideas put under scrutiny and challenge. Making mistakes is a crucial part of learning anything. This post is an attempt to learn more about horror zines so I hope all interested and knowledgeable parties hit the comment section hard with additions and corrections.  

Anyway, long story short, I never flipped through the back pages of Fangoria and ordered what was on offer there. Reading through Xerox Ferox two decades later, I realize this was clearly my loss. Horror fanzines were not something I grew out of, like many people, but something that I matured into much too late. In my forties, I now document and pursue my obsessions through self-publication in a way I never even considered in my youth. Like Burroughs and Bukowski, I was a late bloomer.

Even if it is in some ways too late to participate in any meaningful fashion in the world of horror fanzines, I am still ready for Xerox Ferox now. This is par for the course with me. I never fully appreciate anything in the heat of the moment. A happening does not happen until it has happened. I never take the opportunity to experience anything directly but choose to immerse myself in an experience after the fact. I feel comfortable as a historian but awkward as a participant or eyewitness. It is only after the passage of time and the application of a patina of history that I can appreciate anything. I hate this about myself but that is the way it is.

As such, Xerox Ferox is one of the most exciting books I have read in some time. As an obsessive compulsive with a touch of paranoia, Xerox Ferox plugs into what everything in my life relates to: William Burroughs and little magazines. Just as little mags provided an outlet for non-academic and, in some cases, outlaw writing, horror fanzines provided an outlet for commentary on outlaw cinema beyond the considerations of accepted taste and, in fact, glorying in bad taste. 

Underlying Xerox Ferox is a theme of community and technology. The book wonderfully documents the changes in film technology from 8mm, 16mm and 35mm film to VHS and beta to DVD to mpeg and how these technology shifts altered the nature of the horror fanzine community. Moving from the Video Revolution to the Mimeo Revolution, the various interviews also thoroughly cover how alternative communities were built through changing print and digital technologies: hectograph, mimeograph, offset, xerox, laser printers, desktop publishing. Xerox Ferox is a must-read for anybody seeking to learn more about the printing technologies that got the Mimeo Revolution spinning.  

For example, here are the thoughts of Steve Bissette on mimeography from the opening interview:

Now, I don’t know how many of the terms I’m about to use will make sense to your readers, but most of [the EC comic fanzines] were either done as carbon copies or with mimeographs. That was an early form of printing were you’d actually have to type onto these stencils. And if you wanted to draw on the stencils, you’d have to use cutting tools that were specifically designed for them. I used those in grade school and a little bit in high school. At the time, schools were still using mimeo for papers.

I did get to play with trying to do a comic on a mimeo. It was hard. You couldn’t draw the way you’d normally draw; you couldn’t use a pencil or paper. You had to draw on this opaque blue-black surface that was sort of like a messy sheet of carbon paper. You’d have to carve into that to leave an impression on the mimeo master. And that’s what you’d run your copies from. It had this specific smell to it – I can smell it right now, as we’re talking.

That kind of thing, seen today, is beyond archaic. You just can’t picture the process of what mimeography was about. But that’s how most of the early fanzines were done. The cost of printing was expensive. You didn’t have photocopiers; they didn’t exist yet. That kind of technology didn’t emerge until the late sixties. You certainly didn’t have the equivalent of a photocopy shop in every town the way you do today. And typesetting was still done the old way where you actually set the type in these large flatbeds. The type was metal slugs. All of that was beyond the reach of any kid. You’d have to be a really devoted adult fan to do something like that. So the first fanzines that I actually saw printed were in the late to mid-sixties.

Other interviews provide similar details about offset, xerox, and desktop publishing. Xerox Ferox tells the history of the changing landscape of printing technology and provides case studies of how that technology affected zine production and distribution as well as how it shaped the philosophy of horror zine culture.

The challenges facing horror zine and Mimeo Revolution publishers are in many cases eerily similar. Reading Xerox Ferox the general consensus is “If it is easy to do it is not worth doing.” Or more importantly, not as much fun. The horror zine scene reached its creative apex with limited financial means and technical materials at their disposal. The cut-and-paste aesthetic, a hallmark of the zines, came out of necessity as much as any attempt to make a design statement. Lack of cash and lack of access to high-end printing equipment required zine publishers to do more, and do more interesting things, with less. It was also a challenge in terms of time and effort. If you wanted to make a zine, you really had to want it. Michael Gingold of Scareaphanalia states:

Well, I always say that the great thing about the internet is that it gives everybody a voice, and the bad thing about the internet is that it gives everybody a voice. Back when we were doing fanzines, you really had to have the enthusiasm to make the effort to type them up and lay them out, copy them and send them. You really had to have a commitment to the genre and an interest in communicating. Nowadays, anyone can go on a message board and throw their comments up.

Furthermore, horror zines were labors of love, not money. They were never thought of as an investment towards some future pot of gold down the road. The zines were made because the publishers felt compelled to scream into the void and see if there was an echo.  

In my opinion this definitely holds true with best mimeo mags as well. One of the primary reasons little mags of the 1960s are superior to the 1970s is because self-publishing was more difficult to do a decade earlier. There was little to no organized support or distribution system. Little mag editors were on their own to find an audience and pay printing and distribution costs. This was before government grants and the development of a literary bureaucracy. Only after the perseverance and eventual success of the mimeo pioneers did such a structured environment develop.  

Surely the early days were difficult and frustrating but such barriers required the first responders to be supremely motivated, i.e. obsessed, and the limitations of the medium paradoxically allowed more freedom and ultimately more creativity in production and distribution. It is no surprise that when money, however minimal, seeped into the mimeo ecosystem, the publishers left the mimeograph behind for offset, which was easier and “more professional.” This is also to say that things became more routine (and boring), not just in terms of regular publishing schedules (such as printing monthly or quarterly), but also in terms of content.  

Xerox Ferox makes clear that the golden age of zine production was pre-Internet. Eventually the print zine declined with the ease of publishing online. Yet most zinesters agree that blogs lack the energy and attitude of the hardcopy originators. Zines exploded precisely because information was so difficult to come by. The ability to find any factoid on the internet made the creation and distribution of print zines unnecessary. But again ease came at the expense of fun and passion. Dennis Daniel states of zines like Deep Red:

It’s an era that’s gone, but that’s OK. Things are supposed to go. Things are supposed to evolve and change. And now, everything you’d ever want to know (right up to when Rick Baker’s taking a shit) can be found on the internet. . . . But that’s what makes those magazines so coveted today. That’s what makes them mean so much. And if you live long enough, you have the opportunity to look back and say, “Oh my God . . . it’s not like that anymore. But, boy am I glad to have been a part of it.”

If something is easy to do, lazy people, and thus, lazy minds, will be drawn to it. Pre-internet, to create a filmography or to document the history of a particular underground film took real skill and effort in terms of research. This difficulty meant that only the most persistent, dedicated and obsessed individuals would take the time and effort to attempt it. The result was a better, more spirited, more individualized publication.  

Similarly in the world of book collecting, there is much talk about the decline of the hobby in the information age. One primary reason for this is that the internet made book collecting easier to do. The search engines do all the legwork. Currently the driving force in book collecting is not the search or the quest, which can be accomplished in seconds, but economics. Can you afford the book? Unfortunately, the internet has also standardized prices so there is little to no difference in pricing on a particular book. The days of walking onto a bookstore and finding a rare, unusual, undervalued book are over. The internet has democratized knowledge and standardized pricing to the detriment of book collecting as a hobby.  

What is the extent of the crossover between little mags and horror zines in general? Xerox Ferox makes clear that punk culture was a major influence on horror zines, but what about the spirit of the Mimeo Revolution? For example, Stephen King early in his career published a poem entitled “Brooklyn August” in the Baseball Issue of Io Magazine, alongside Mimeo Revolution stalwarts such as Jack Spicer, Stan Persky, Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, and Charles Olson: “below, the old men and off duty taxi drivers/drinking big cups of Schlitz in the 75¢ seats,/this Flatbush as real as velvet Harlem streets.” A skeleton in King’s closet later exposed to the light of day in the odds and sods collection, Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Not surprisingly, horror zine publishers and contributors list Beat writers as major influences on their worldview if not their writing. In what other ways were the literary counterculture and the horror zinesters blood brothers?  

Tom Veitch jumps to mind. Veitch is a poet who got his start with Ted Berrigan’s C Press, which published Veitch’s Literary Days in 1964. C Press was also involved in issuing C Comics #1 & 2, which featured comic illustrations by Joe Brainard accompanying text supplied by various poets. Brainard took his cue from Pop artists, such as Warhol and Lichtenstein, who appropriated comic strip characters in their artwork. Brainard made a name for himself by co-opting Nancy. Siglio Press celebrated Brainard’s work in this regard in its popular The Nancy Book. Brainard merged comics, pornographic innuendo, and camp creating a more literary form of Tijuana Bible but Tom Veitch, post-C Press, drew on the rich tradition of horror comics. Tom’s brother, Rick, is a well-known and well-regarded illustrator with credits including the legendary Swamp Thing, which he illustrated along with Steve Bissette, the mentor figure of Xerox Ferox. In the early 1970s, Tom and Rick collaborated on an EC Comic parody entitled Two-Fisted Zombies. In addition Tom and comic illustrator Greg Irons collaborated on horror inspired comics such as Deviant Slice #1, The Legion of Charlies, and Skull #6. The Veitch/Irons team also appeared in little mags, notably Bill Berkson’s Big Sky #1, which featured their eco-minded and horror inspired comic The Creature from the Bolinas Lagoon. Irons provided covers for various Big Sky publications including a cover for Big Sky #1 that enters the realm of the fantastic.  

As I have written before, Tom Veitch was obsessed with William Burroughs. El Hombre Invisible is a ghostly presence in Veitch’s horror comics, if not an overt one, as proven by The Legion of Charlies. The comic opens with a mock newspaper, The San Francisco Chiclet, which is identical in format to Veitch’s The Naked Express that appeared in Aram Saroyan’s Lines and as a standalone piece of ephemera. I have written about The Naked Express and its link to Burroughs. The San Francisco Chiclet slyly references Hassan I Sabbah and the back pages of Charlies contains an advertisement for a comic rendition of The Nova Formula, a “theory which shows that history will spiral into disaster” that also grapples with the “evolutionary goal [to] travel to the stars.” Veitch relies the Burroughsian routine in developing the Charlies storyline, which involves power hungry President Nixon and Vice President Agnew joining forces and eventually being consumed by zombie Manson family members along with convert Lt. William Calley of My Lai infamy. “The Conversion of President Nixnerk” that ends Charlies is pure routine in form and content. “Roosevelt After Inauguration” comes to mind. A routine that could be spun as a great horror comic by the way. Purple-assed baboons run amok craving the flesh of Supreme Court Justices!!

Does a taste for Burroughs make one predisposed for a fascination with horror? Burroughs was clearly an influence on science fiction and thus sci-fi zines. For example there was a sci-fi zine named Nova Express. This further suggests that after Naked Lunch, Burroughs’ most influential novel is probably Nova Express, at least in terms of influencing other writers. There has always been a horror element to Burroughs, who was no doubt a writer of shock and special effects. The Burroughsian universe is a horrific underworld and Burroughs graphically revels in its blood, guts and seminal fluid.  

Xerox Ferox makes clear that there is a close affinity between the avant garde and the exploitation genre. Both are created with limited means by highly motivated individuals pursuing an extremely personal and highly original, often unusual and transgressive, vision. Greg Goodsell states:

Independent filmmakers don’t have any money; they use their friends as actors, etcetera. It’s like when I was working at small newspapers and large newspapers – if you’re small, you can do what you please. You can bring neuroses, likes and dislikes to a project. You can bring your own quirk and personality to it and no one is in the front office saying “You can’t do that.” So yeah, that’s the appeal about no-budget independent filmmaking.  

Q: The art film and the down-and-dirty exploitation film don’t differ much, in that respect.

Goodsell: The bigger a project is, the more people you have with vested interests in it. They say, “You can’t do that, you can’t step on these toes, and you have to use this actor.” It’s just artistic freedom. The art film offers artistic freedom, and the low budget exploitation movie (which is ostensibly made to make money) offers the same sort of freedom.

Let not forget, what is for me, the most important lines Burroughs ever wrote:  

That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between the bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out gobs of that un-D.T. to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image.

Not surprisingly, Antony Balch, who directed Burroughs’ cut-up films, was an exploitation director. When you think of it, Towers Open Fire is a sci-fi exploitation flick. Burroughs is likewise an exploitation writer. Junkie is after all pulp fiction as is Naked Lunch. The late trilogy is genre fiction. Burroughs, the cut-up writer, is a crazed, i.e., obsessed, slasher, like Jason Voorhees, wielding a scissors or Stanley blade instead of a machete. Burroughs sought to rip all rational thought to shreds, not nubile co-eds. And think of Burroughs as Benway in Brookner’s documentary standing over a corpse in an operating room splattered with blood. Balch’s Horror Hospital indeed. In addition, Burroughs narrated Haxan, a documentary on witchcraft as well as Poe’s horror classic The Masque of the Read Death. The cut-up might be Burroughs’ greatest affinity with the horror zine. The cut-and-paste aesthetic of horror zines comes from many sources, such as Dada and Punk, but Burroughs fits in there prominently as well. Perhaps nowhere are Burroughs’ ties to horror and fantasy more evident than in his collaborations with Malcolm Mc Neill in Ah Puch Is Here and in Cyclops magazine in the 1970s. I wonder to what extent the publishers of the horror zine boom of the 1980s were aware of Burroughs’ work with Mc Neill. It is possible. After all, Screw published a glimpse of the full project in 1977, the dawn of the horror zine boom.  

Thinking of Nova Express, Bill Landis’ Sleazoid Express, by all accounts one of the highspots of the horror zine in terms of writing style and worldview, comes to mind. Is the “Express” a nod to Burroughs as well as a nod to tabloid journalism? In Landis’ case, the connection would be to Junkie more than Nova Express or Ah Puch. Landis walked the walk and talked the talk. His writing is gonzo in nature and, like Burroughs and Thompson, he was an outlaw writer. Heroin played a large role in the Landis aesthetic. In Sleazoid Express, Landis documented the dying culture of Times Square sleaze, funk and grit before it was washed away by Giuliani and turned into a Big Apple Disneyland. In Junkie, Burroughs captures a dying Times Square subculture that came under assault by post-WWII moralists. Likewise Burroughs cherished the lost worlds of rural and pre-WWI sleaze as captured by Jack Black in You Can’t Win. To what extent was Landis intimately familiar with that book as well as the work of Burroughs?  

The real common ground between Landis and Burroughs — and what makes their visions so unique and personal — was less their personal experiences with junk and junk culture, but the fact that they were awash with nostalgia: a longing for a bygone or rapidly dying era of decadence. The entire horror zine world is one of nostalgia. Few writers document the power and allure of nostalgia as well as Burroughs. Nostalgia is the opiate of the artist.

If Bill Landis was not directly influenced by Burroughs, horror auteur David Cronenberg most definitely was and is. Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly. These films and others are clearly Burroughsian. Cronenberg’s fascination with Burroughs is well documented, whether it be in Jack Sargent’s Naked Lens, Beat Cinema or freely discussed by Cronenberg himself in Cronenberg on Cronenberg as well as in numerous interviews. Cronenberg got his start in the horror/exploitation genre, which he injected with a Burroughsian worldview of viruses, paranoia, addiction, and information overload. His movies were hotly discussed in horror zines, and Naked Lunch with its special effect creatures, like the Mugwump, was no exception.  

I was studying abroad in London in early 1992 as the hype for Cronenberg’s adaptation hit a fever pitch. I distinctly remember picking up a copy of Cinefantastique along with a copy of Viz, and an issue of Club and Penthouse International in an underground newsstand. I still have the Club and the Penthouse, but seem to have misplaced the others. Priorities!!! Cinefantastique featured the latest Star Trek retread on the cover; a movie I thought was incredibly stupid and unnecessary. Yet I did not feel the same about the latest Hellraiser opus, which was splattered all over the horror zines of that Spring. I was in a Clive Barker phase at the time and had eagerly looked forward to Nightbreed, which starred Cronenberg in a decidedly nasty turn as Dr. Decker. Cronenberg wrote the script to Naked Lunch during his acting gig. Perhaps he channeled Dr. Benway.  

Much of the press about Naked Lunch centered on how Cronenberg managed to capture what for years had been considered impossible to memorialize on film. Cronenberg made a point not to rely on computer generated effects to re-create the look and characters of Interzone. Flipping through the pages of Fangoria, it is clear that the tide was changing and that Naked Lunch was the end of an era in filmmaking. The film version of The Lawnmower Man represented the future in more ways than one. The adaption of King’s short story was dominated by blue screens and generated by programs crunching a series of ones and zeros. Terminator 2 was yet another example that computers were the future of the horror and action movie and the puppet-based effects of the past were facing their Judgment Day. In this changing FX landscape, the Mugwumps and mutant typewriters of Naked Lunch were physical objects created by hand by the masters at CWI. The actors could touch them, hear them speak. They could violate the actors’ space or even violate the actors physically. Peter Weller states, “Naked Lunch was very easy to do as far as special effects were concerned, because most of them were done live on the set. When I was doing Of Unknown Origin, for example, I never saw a rat for the entire shooting! I was obliged to try and imagine it. For Naked Lunch, everything was before me, and I could talk to it as if it were another actor.” Cronenberg strove to give his creatures a sense of depth as well as a degree of humanity. They were mobile, speaking characters in the film. The Clark Nova and the Mugwump become Lee’s buddies.

Looking back on some of those articles now, I see a relationship between the special effects of Naked Lunch and the printing technologies of the Mimeograph Revolution and horror zines. Both are old school and time-consuming and require a degree of physical interaction with the materials. Manipulating a mimeograph forced one to get intimate with the machine and get one’s hands dirty. The cutting and pasting of copy for xeroxing is another example. Hands sticky with rubber cement and newsprint. The images of Lee frigging off his mutant typewriter come to mind. In addition, receiving a constructed object in the mail creates a physical and intellectual intimacy, a bond, which the internet and email cannot match. E-zines and blogging permit greater speed of production and ease of distribution but sacrifice the depth and humanity that Cronenberg and Weller speak so passionately of.  

All this reminds me that an interesting archive could be gathered by focusing on Burroughs and film. Just thinking off the top of my head, it could include Burroughs books, such as The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, or his script for Towers Open Fire in Film #35. Digging deeper and spending a bit more money would lead to the aborted scripts for Naked Lunch and Junkie from the 1970s. Also included would be reviews or advertisements dealing with the cut-up films, the Burroughs documentaries, or films such as Beat, Kill My Darlings, or On the Road. To say nothing of the movies Twister, Wax or Drugstore Cowboy in which Burroughs starred as an actor. Movie ephemera, like posters and press kits for all these films, fit in nicely as well. The coverage of Naked Lunch in horror fanzines would form a secret torture chamber within this larger, possibly limitless, library. For example in the spring of 1992, the Naked Lunch movie was featured at least four times in Fangoria and Cinefantastique. There are no doubt others. For example Wet Paint #34 presented an article on Naked Lunch along with an image of a Mugwump on its cover. I have been unable to locate a copy quickly. All this begs the question to what extent was Burroughs featured in horror zines both before and after Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch? Anybody out there know of any horror zines that mention William Burroughs? What horror zines can be called Burroughsian? Raw Virus? What else can be dug up from the grave? What Famous Monsters lurk in your attic, closet or basement? Let me hear you scream.

Horror Zine Reviews of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch

Cinefantastique
April 1992

Download the Review

Fangoria
May 1992

Download the Review

Fangoria Horror Spectacular
1992

Download the Review

Fangoria
March 1993

Download the Review

Tom Veitch Horror Zines

Big Sky #1
Download “Creature from the Bolinas Lagoon”

Big Sky 2045

Legion of Charlies
Download “The Conversion of President Nixnerk”

Legion of Charlies

Legion of Charlies

Legion of Charlies

Legion of Charlies

Legion of Charlies

Legion of Charlies

Legion of Charlies

Tom Veitch Magazine

Tom Veitch Magazine

Tom Veitch Magazine

Tom Veitch Magazine

Two-Fisted Zombies

Two-Fisted Zombies

Two-Fisted Zombies

(Originally appeared in the Village Voice, December 31 1991)

This behind-the-scenes report, which includes interviews with William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg, on the making of the Naked Lunch film has never been reprinted until now. A few points from the report had stuck in RealityStudio’s mind all these years, and fortunately the yellowed pages torn from the Voice had remained in a file folder as well. Gary Indiana, author of Horse Crazy (which Burroughs compared to Genet), Rent Boy, and numerous other works of fiction and non-fiction, has kindly given permission to RealityStudio to reproduce his report.

Toronto. After an ugly episode at Immigration, the van from Naked Lunch Productions whisks us off to a factory building near an expressway ramp. Whenever you cross boundaries, it’s good to remember that the oafs who guard them are intoxicated by ugly delusions of omnipotence. Never put “writer” on your customs form. Take the attitude that you are a very small, insignificant insect. An aphid, perhaps, or a dung beetle. Toronto: dismal vistas of leafless maple trees and brown three-story houses. Zones of upscale Boutiqueville. Gothic-themed public buildings from the late 19th century, patches of melting snow, cars with real rust on the fenders. Lots of KMart winter wear on people in cars. Parts of Toronto look like they seeped out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, other parts like relics of the Industrial Revolution. Downtown fits the generic profile of a modern Western city, with emporiums of designer food and sports equipment and automatic-teller machines garnished with homeless people. Since this is Canada, there are fewer homeless, who ask for less money, and none of them looks especially deranged or desperate. Like all civilized countries, Canada has a national health service.

This unmarked factory is where David Cronenberg is shooting Naked Lunch. Ever since the money for this project came together, snippets of info have been circulating, most of them vague, couched in the protective language people use when they’re not at all sure how the final product will play. The movie stars Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Roy Scheider, and Julian Sands. Shooting was supposed to start in Tangier, then the gulf war broke out and insurance fell through. The producer, Jeremy Thomas, has a special interest in alternative American lit, having produced the Bertolucci version of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.

Now that Naked Lunch has become a studio film, it’s been rewritten to make it even more an innervision of its main character, William Lee (Burroughs’ alter ego), as he travels back and forth between hallucination and reality. The script (reportedly) is an amalgam of several Burroughs texts, not just Naked Lunch: there are parts of Exterminator!, Junky, and other things knocking around. As to how much of Burroughs’ biography has been folded in, the publicity people are equivocal. Yes, it does draw on certain real-life episodes, and no, it isn’t the story of Burroughs. All representation is fiction, but in this case the question is, what kind of fiction?

In most of Burroughs’ writing, details of his actual life are pretty thoroughly transmuted into dreams, fantasies, hallucinations. He’s said that fully half his work comes directly from dreams, and Burroughs is surely one of the few eminent American novelists to make extravagant use of his imagination, uninhibited by precepts of naturalism or classical narrative structure. Cronenberg, a filmmaker known for exactly this kind of oneric material, has supposedly run something like a linear plot through the kaleidoscopic imagery of the novel, boiling off a lot of its gorgeous but unfilmable excess.

Naked Lunch is expected to focus fresh attention on the book, and on Burroughs. It will be interesting to see how the schizoculture of the ’90s recasts Burroughs, whose influence on American arts and letters has been vast and incalculable, but whose iconoclasm seems ever more remote from the American mainstream in the Age of the Right Wing Dinosaurs. There is even less support for experimental writing today than there was in the early ’60s when Naked Lunch first appeared: Then, at least, college campuses were cauldrons of revolt, underground papers had a great vogue, and it was a mark of honor to despise the mediocrity of American society that Burroughs satirized, this roaring disease of a society that gets worse as it gets older. The climate has changed. Things have taken a cold, wiggy turn.

Naked Lunch was a breakthrough novel in a formal sense (Burroughs is, precisely, Matthew Arnold’s nightmare), but also for its infernal vision of politics, addiction, and sexuality. These were all hot buttons in the early ’60s and are even hotter now, in an environment where resurgent puritanism and popular obscenity cohabit a weirdly symbiotic cultural space. According to the loose buzz in Toronto, Cronenberg has substituted imaginary chemicals for hard, real drugs — bug powder, Mugwump juice, the black meat of the giant centipede — to make the addiction angle more metaphorical, less of a toreador’s cape for preacher-critics. As for the sexuality… well, it’s hard to imagine even doing Naked Lunch as a movie.

Burroughs’ work is saturated with gay sex, especially adolescent gay sex, and celebrates male bonding in graphic, apocalyptic terms. While it’s true that Burroughs has never been a merchant of “positive images,” of gays or anybody else, his writing is a monument to autonomy — political, sexual, spiritual. Certainly Burroughs never thought twice about the seemliness or acceptability of two boys fucking each other on the page, and if one of them turned into a devouring green ooze in the process, so much the better. Film is another country. You don’t get $20 million out of Fox or Paramount or any studio for two boys fucking and green ooze. This is sure to become an issue when the film opens — David Ehrenstein, a film writer for The Advocate, has already warned his readers not to expect much from “heterosexual Cronenberg” — and one very much in the air in Toronto among the press that’s been invited up.

At this juncture, it’s hard to know what to expect. We may or may not get a look at the script. We may or may not be allowed to watch some special-effects shooting. Judy Davis has either finished filming or won’t be filming for another week. Peter Weller is on the set. Peter Weller was on the set but he left. Peter Weller is coming back later.

The journalists are set loose inside the studio. We pick our way through a mazy, prop-shop replica of the Medina in Tangier, taking snapshots. In my own Burroughs movie, the intestinelike streets would teem with Arab youths, pulling their cocks out and jacking off for the camera. Or full of Wild Boys slaughtering white colonists with laser guns and steel boomerangs. It does look like the Petit Socco in Tangier, though a little glimpse of the “Arabs” later in the day suggests a costume party at an Ivy League fraternity. There’s a dust-coated ’50s sedan marooned in the middle of an alley, a relic of North America in the gray Eisenhower years. Visions of spectral junkies dunking pound cake in Nedicks, subway hustlers rolling a drunk on Christmas Eve in the Lexington IRT. What I would put here, in front of the car, is that depraved Salvation Army Santa Claus from Exterminator! “Fight tuberculosis, folks.” We come to a large white space where a bizarre translucent creature, maybe six foot three, stands leaning against a sawhorse, clutching a huge pink erection in a space-monster fist. “Don’t take any pictures of that.”

A large platform has been built on the main soundstage, above the traffic of tech crew and actors. From what we can see on the monitors below, the platform has a series of hallways and rooms, some seedy, some opulent, changing with the lowering of backdrops. The decors mirror the interior of Bill Lee’s consciousness, shifting with the ease of dreams and memories from New York to Tangier, or Interzone. On the set, and in the executive offices on the second floor, everything seems to hum along smoothly, myriad details are being tended to, yet a certain informality prevails, more like on a European set than an American one. (Even Fassbinder’s sets were less autocratic than those of most NYU student films.) I tell a British journalist who’s writing a book on Cronenberg that the Cronenberg people seem unusually sanguine, even relentlessly so. “Yes, well,” he says meaningfully. “David insists on it.”

The monitors are now picking up the grid of what looks like a large bird cage with a parrot inside. Behind the parrot, a fleshy tubular object begins a slow rotation. We can just make out… something, a bunch of claws or insect mandibles… closing over the torso of a naked youth. Out here near the coffee and danish table, the teleporter pod from The Fly stands open-mouthed and forlorn, gathering dust.

Burroughs has already toured the set, held court in a lounge upstairs at the studio, and been photographed with Cronenberg in the special effects shop, surrounded by translucent Mugwumps. (“Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism.” Cronenberg’s Mugwumps pretty much follow Burroughs’ description.) It’s been a long day, punctuated by many Senior Service cigarettes and foreign journalists, and now we’re in his suite at the Sutton Place Hotel. A friend has been sent out to see if he can find a joint.

At 77, Burroughs is disquietingly alert and energetic, though his back is slightly hunched and he sometimes uses a cane. That he is so well preserved must be one of life’s little ironies, given his biography; on the other hand, as he’s often written, there’s no evidence that heroin or other opiates in controlled doses do any damage to the human body, drug hysteria to the contrary. It’s the precarious, messy lifestyle of most junkies that does them in, and Burroughs, who cleaned up years ago, is nothing if not fastidious.

He likes to get up and perambulate around the room. As an interviewee, not a self-starter. Since the film is heavily veiled in secrecy, there isn’t much to talk about on that end, though Burroughs says he’s generally content with what he’s seen. “Of course, I didn’t write the script. That’s probably a good thing.” He fixes a vodka and Coke. I join him. Have I see the bug typewriters? he asks. I haven’t. In the movie, the typewriters Bill Lee uses metamorphose, when he’s on the nod, into large squishy insects that speak through sphincterlike holes in their backs.

The conversation drifts into other areas. Does he think there’s more censorship of movies than books because we’re a visual culture?

“I don’t know what you mean by a visual culture. We’re supposed to be a TV culture. Apparently, the TV hasn’t penetrated the carapace of ignorance and inattention. I’ve seen statistics that half the high school graduates couldn’t locate Vietnam on a map and didn’t know that we’d fought a war there.”

I mention another statistic claiming that one out of four high school students in New York carries a gun to school.

“I think that must be a little exaggerated,” Burroughs drawls. “Anyway, that’s okay with me. There’s too many of them anyway. Let them shoot each other.”

Earlier in the day, riding through Toronto in one of the company vans, I told Burroughs about a strange case of organ-snatching in New York: a man met a woman in a bar, left with her, and woke up four hours later in Central Park with one of his kidneys surgically removed. The incident so much resembled the medical fantasies of Burroughs’ novels that I thought he would recognize reality catching up with his fiction. Instead he said, “That’s the weirdest thing I ever heard.” And here is something about writers, about obsessive writers, that’s both touching and bewildering: as my friend Lynne said when I told her this, the source of a writer’s most recurrent and familiar fantasies will always seem new and shocking to the writer himself.

During the long period when Burroughs used his cut-up and fold-in methods to generate writing, he often claimed that the resulting texts could foretell future events. One such text accurately predicted a Getty heir’s lawsuit against his own father. More cosmically, all of Burroughs’ early novels describe a fatal, sexually transmitted virus that produces AIDS-like symptoms. If he can see into the future, I think, Burroughs should be able to see into the past, too: I ask him where he thinks the virus originated.

“It’s hard to say. A number of people have suggested that it was a laboratory product, and quite deliberate. It’s a simple variation on the Visna virus that occurs in sheep, and it’s always fatal. It would be a very simple job for a biochemist to make. So, it could have been deliberate. For example, the connection with Kaposi’s sarcoma. Why Kaposi’s? Before AIDS, Kaposi’s was regarded as a very rare form of cancer, rarely fatal; it was not usually malignant. Oncologists described it as an indolent tumor, a lazy tumor. Why that should be associated with AIDS is pretty much an enigma.” Burroughs pauses meaningfully. “One of many.”

Weller, Burroughs, and Cronenberg hold a press conference in front of a wall-size painted backdrop of Tangier harbor as seen from a window of, if I’m not mistaken, the Hotel Rembrandt. (Matisse had the same view, in 1913, from his room in the Hôtel Villa de France at the other end of the Avenue Pasteur.) The Canadian press has packed the room, and in the crossfire of Q&A, Cronenberg articulates his basic approach: “To move back from the page itself to include the writer and his writing machine.” Burroughs amiably allows that he “wouldn’t expect to see any more than a tiny fraction of [the book] on him.”

I am seated next to Ira Silverberg, a literary agent who handles some of Burroughs’ public relations. Ira murmurs in my ear: “The low point will be when somebody asks William why he lives in Lawrence, Kansas. Someone always does.”

“Do you regret the period in your life when you were addicted?” someone asks.

“The point is,” Burroughs tells the reporter, “a writer can profit by experiences which would not be advantageous or profitable to others. Because he’s a writer, he can write about it.”

An arm shoots up near the front of the room.

“Mr. Burroughs, why do you live in Lawrence, Kansas?”

At the press conference, Cronenberg indicated that his film was a merger of his own prodigious fantasy equipment with selected bits of Burroughs’ writings. A collaboration rather than an adaptation. Later, touring the special-effects department to look at numerous hacked-up giant centipedes and gashed-open beetles with typewriter keys growing out of them, I’m reminded of the scattered moments of lucidity recorded by the narrator of Naked Lunch, when the author is yanked back from his overcrowded reveries and realizes that he’s alone in a squalid room, staring at his shoe. It’s the merest thread of a motif, maybe the saddest note struck throughout, and the place where autobiography intersects fiction.

The movie’s apparent emphasis on the author, and on the demonic process that resulted in Naked Lunch, testifies to the force of the Burroughs legend. (“When I got to know him,” Paul Bowles wrote in 1959, “I realized the legend existed in spite of him and not because of him: he didn’t give a damn about it.”) The legend is a classical redemption narrative. A man who spent years in a drug twilight, outside the law, who accidentally shot his wife in a drunken William Tell stunt in Mexico, etc., saved his soul through the act of writing. From Villon to Genet, literary history is full of exemplary figures who brought back startling visions from the lower depths.

Of course, times have changed, and changed again, since the cultural revolution of the ’60s, when Burroughs’ road map of the abyss functioned equally well as trip guide or caveat. Even the avatars of the punk movement who owed so much to Burroughs have gotten older; in many ways, the Reagan revolution has effectively turned the clock back to a time when screaming “shame” at the neighbors was a popular blood sport. Coming back from hell isn’t what it used to be. Recovery (from anything) has become a tiresome religion, the main tenet of which is that nothing valuable emanates from nonconformity.

Burroughs’ cranky, pessimistic view of humanity is essentially conservative, but at the same time it’s a mystical, libertarian one. His work celebrates the individual’s freedom to fuck himself up however he chooses, hence his career-long railing against Control — drug control, sex control, even gun control. The heroes of Burroughs’ books are those unassuming souls, whether criminals or law-abiding citizens, capable of minding their own business. His positions are at odds with the current critical atmosphere, wherein every artistic statement is subject to attack from both the right and the left. Radical elements at either end of the spectrum are completely immersed in the mentality of the Inquisition — puritanical, censorious, obsessed with punitive utopianism. A politics of big, blocky stupidities thrives on reverse redemption and one-dimensional “truths.” In Toronto, I wondered if reviews of Naked Lunch, the film, would take the thing on its own terms or dance around the private history of William Burroughs. Instead of DRUG ADDICT WRITES GREAT BOOK, article heads would probably reveal, “GREAT” BOOK WAS WRITTEN BY DRUG ADDICT.

A few months later, in October, Fox screens the final cut, and a lot of nagging questions are settled by other questions. An executive from Fox calls the next day and asks what I think of the movie and I tell her, honestly, that I haven’t figured that out. The effect of this movie is unusually delayed.

I recognize the fact that I can only look at Naked Lunch through the scrim of Naked Lunch, since I’ve lived with the book as a literary model for at least 20 years. Maybe Cronenberg should’ve given the film a different title to avoid raising a certain kind of expectation. Film is always pillaging literature, making the active, private act of reading into the passive, public one of staring. And this is a special case, where one strong, even overbearing sensibility has been grafted onto another, as in one of Burroughs’ “third mind” experiments.

If you focus on what isn’t in the movie — the saturnalian side of Burroughs, the atmosphere of a demented sex carnival going up in flames — it’s easy to ignore what’s there. There will be plenty of people whose sudden, proprietary interest in Burroughs begins and ends with the fact that he’s gay, who’ll feel swindled by what one of my screening companions calls “this strange heterosexualized version of Burroughs.” Cronenberg has invited this sort of criticism by the hybrid nature of his project, which plays not only on the carnivalesque inventions of Naked Lunch, but with well-documented facts: the shooting of Joan Vollmer in Mexico, the relationship with Ginsberg and Kerouac, the friendships with Paul and Jane Bowles in Tangier.

It’s on this literal plane that things have been placed askew. Where the film appears to spill over into biography, the facts have been cropped, blurred, translated into something else. In the introduction to Queer, Burroughs states: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing… The death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

Cronenberg weaves this rationale into an elaborate design, in which the act of writing is not only expiative but is the restaging of primal trauma. The shooting — which really was an accident, however reprehensible the circumstances — can be read, in the film, as an act of sexual jealousy, an idea even Burroughs’ harshest detractors have never suggested. The hint of sexual estrangement and anger prior to the act sets the stage for another complicated involvement, ending in a hallucinatory reprise of the shooting with a character modeled (right up to the lipstick) on Jane Bowles. This movie is emphatically a fiction.

By its own logic, however, Naked Lunch makes emotional sense; it’s emotionally devastating, the kind of work that leaves an acrid, lingering taste of what it’s like to lose everything and then continue losing to the point where the self is practically obliterated. It’s deceptively faithful to Burroughs’ work in its treatment of all sexuality as a form of psychic vampirism or cannibalism. There is an unanticipated convergence between filmmaker and writer, quite aside from their shared predilection for science fiction. The film is surprisingly muted, with a note of quiet doom bleeding through it — you can hear the strangled wail of the outsider, trailing through the universe of cheap furnished rooms and desolate fixes in bus station toilets that Burroughs has always shown through a grimy window painted with arabesques. With some differences in surface geography, there is also the spiritual territory where Cronenberg has often joined the mystical with the irremediable: think of the endings of Scanners, The Brood, and Videodrome, where particular horrors find their solution in the revelation of a larger, universal horror, i.e. the horror of existence.

One ends up with a slightly divided view. In many ways, Cronenberg’s the best possible director to treat what’s formally and imaginatively special about Burroughs — the sense of continual displacement, the fracture of space and time, the vision of the soul hunted through landscapes of bottomless alienation. At the same time, the homosexual saturation of Burroughs’ work attracts and repels Cronenberg with equal intensity. To keep this polarity intact, he’s transposed it into a predominantly heterosexual schema, where he feels, not more comfortable, but correspondingly queasy — consider, for example, the diseased eroticism of Videodrome or Dead Ringers. In Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, apart from a general revulsion against the body, there’s an implicit salvational fantasy attached to the wife/mother figure, and a strong sense of threat coming from otherness, from homosexuality — it can’t really be called homophobia, but something more grandiose and complicit with Burroughs’ own misanthropic paranoia.

The only thing to be regretted about this is the virtual absence of movies this size, financially speaking, that deal with gay material undisguised and diluted. It’s that absence that makes each rare, tentative appearance of homosexuality in films problematical, a site of critical passion, much more than the appearances themselves. This is not Cronenberg’s problem, or Jonathan Demme’s, or Gus Van Sant’s, and criticism of their work based on the absence of many mainstream, vapid “gay movies” misses the point of what works of art are all about. Cronenberg has done so much to destroy the conventions of quotidian cinema in Naked Lunch (including romantic conventions) that overt political objections become moot: it’s not a film that operates on any obvious level, its pathology is rich enough to be read in opposite ways, the risks it takes are unexpected and upsetting.

I decided to ask Cronenberg what he thinks about the film, since my own reactions seemed, at first anyway, unduly colored by some dozen readings of Naked Lunch over the years. Here is an interview from early November 1991:

Gary Indiana: Mary McCarthy described Naked Lunch as the first novel of statelessness. The film is full of subtle displacements of the background; like the book it describes the shifting territory of the protagonist’s brain. How did you determine the look of the movie?

David Cronenberg: The idea was that in order to come to terms with a lot of things, the main character, William Lee, has to invent another country for himself to go to. He has to exile himself. But that Interzone is really a state of mind. What I’m really saying is that physically, he’s never left New York. And I give little hints and signs of that, so that he’s really put himself in a place that will — he hallucinates or imagines a place that will force him to come to terms with a lot of things about himself, which he’s not been able to come to terms with. One thing is his writing, that he has to write to save himself. Another is his homosexuality, that he must come to terms with it. He’s trying to be straight — what’s happening in the beginning is, as he said to the cops, “I was a troubled person, I’m straight now, got a good job, I’m married — ” He’s trying that trick, which a lot of artists have tried over the years, to become totally bourgeois and now allow themselves to be outsiders or aliens. They try to integrate with society, but of course it doesn’t work. And so the pressure of that impulse forces him to put himself into a situation, unconsciously, really, where he will transform into another version of himself, a more real version of himself, where he will be a homosexual, he will be a writer, he will be a man who functions well in a kind of hallucinatory territory. And that’s basically the structure of it.

Indiana: In dealing with the act of writing on his part, the process of making this book Naked Lunch is shown in almost an occult way, as something forced on him by his own demons. Lee’s somebody who doesn’t even really recognize his work as something that he’s done, when he’s presented with it. What happens to him is really different than what happens to a filmmaker working with dozens of people, but I wonder if some of that connects with your process of writing a script?

Cronenberg: It connects not only with the process of writing a script, but with shooting a movie. There’s no question. Even though writing is a very private, solitary affair, normally — although a lot of filmmakers have sessions with 10 writers all screaming at each other in a room, so it’s not quite the same — but for me it’s basically the way you would work as a novelist alone. And in the filmmaking process you’re suddenly collaborating and it’s a very social, communal kind of thing. But it’s also very hallucinatory, because you’re tired, you’re in a studio, often, and you literally don’t know if it’s day or night. You could be anywhere. When you’re on the set, the lights are on it’s daytime, when the lights are lit for night it’s nighttime, that sort of thing.

Indiana: A lot of your films show characters entering a kind of mystery or conspiracy that quite often leads them to their doom. This film, to some extent, shows somebody saving himself, but it’s equivocal, because in the end, this primal act of having killed his wife comes up again.

Cronenberg: In the sense that he’s driven and forced to become a writer because of the act of killing his wife, and to try to understand that and come to terms with that, and make order out of chaos, in that sense, I’m saying that as he continues to write through his life he’s continuing to kill his wife. He’s driven. It’s my sort of metaphor, I’m trying to establish that this is the act that continually drives him. You know, metaphor in cinema is a very problematical thing. It’s very well established and works very well in literature, but you can’t do it literally onscreen. There’s no literal equivalent of a metaphor. Eisenstein tried it, you know, he’d say “the crowd roared like a lion” and he would cut to a lion roaring. It was ludicrous. So, you have to find other means to express these things which are symbolical or metaphorical.

Indiana: The presiding metaphor of Naked Lunch the book, and I wonder how much do you agree with it, is that contemporary society is a pyramid of addiction, that everybody is addicted to something?

Cronenberg: Well, it’s a simplification of both the book and society, maybe. It’s not bad to say it to illuminate things, but I don’t think it would hold true on every page, or in every social instance. You’d have to get very specific what you mean by addiction. It’s true that the movie is stepping back one step from Burroughs’ writing, let’s say, and it’s discussing the act of writing, and maybe the addiction to writing, the need, the incredible need to write. In that sense it’s not a real replication of the book. I think what has really resulted is a third thing. It’s something that is a fusion of me and Burroughs and has resulted in a third thing that would not have been done by Burroughs by himself and would not have been done by me by myself. It discusses the book, let’s say, rather than actually being an attempt to portray the book.

Indiana: The film is demanding on a narrative level; it’s like Videodrome in a way, because it deals with overlapping hallucinated states. Are you worried that some viewers will lose their place in it?

Cronenberg: Well, Videodrome was different in that I was very rigorous in Videodrome about it being a first-person film, and when his reality changed the reality fo the film changed, and you had no outside references at all. This is different, because there are outside references. For example in the insect-typewriter’s death scene, after he drops the typewriter and walks away from it, I cut to a real typewriter with the paper in it. You should understand then, that perhaps what was really happening, if you had been there watching, a third person, you would’ve seen a man sitting there, drugged out, typing madly and mumbling to himself, that’s what you would’ve seen. There are more outside references to help you along.

Indiana: I had the problem that I’d seen the script, I was focusing on how you would carry of certain things in the script.

Cronenberg: I was ambivalent about letting people see the script, because the relationship between the script and the movie is such a strange, complex one, and most people never get a chance to plug into that. They don’t normally read the script and then see the movie. When you’re making a movie, so many things happen that later you look at the script and flip it aside. Before you shoot it is the Bible, and after you shoot it’s like toilet paper. It’s nothing. It’s amazing, it’s a totally different experience from writing a book, let’s say, because you know that the object of the script is to make the script completely obsolete by the making of the movie. And you become totally ruthless. Some things that worked very well on paper, or were even essential and crucial, become redundant by the way things are played on screen. Suddenly you say, “That’s obvious by this time in the movie, we don’t need that scene,” whereas on paper you needed it, because it wasn’t there yet.

Indiana: This film seems more like Dead Ringers than earlier films like Scanners. There’s a level of melancholy, and it seemed to me a very subdued film, in a way. You’re dealing with a very hallucinatory and strange reality, but it seems a much more interior and psychologically active film than on the level of some kind of incredible spectacle.

Cronenberg: It might simply have to do with my advanced years, but once you blow up a few cars, it starts to get boring, I have to tell you. And the things that interest you as you mature, obviously, and your sense of control, as well — it’s now a fine vibrato that I’m worried about here, rather than sweeping musical phrases, I guess is one way to make an analogy. I’m concerned with the delicacy and subtlety of things, despite the possibility for sensational stuff, with both Burroughs and the theme of my script.

Indiana: The feeling you get from Bill Lee’s adventure is one of incredible sadness.

Cronenberg: When I read Literary Outlaw, it’s such a tremendous book, there’s so much in it that’s funny and spectacular and wonderful, but my final feeling was sadness. Real sadness.

Indiana: The intersexuality of some of the characters to some extent seems to be mirroring Lee’s ambivalence, and a lot of other characters in the film. Since sexual identity has become so politicized, do you anticipate a lot of criticism for the way you’ve dealt with it?

Cronenberg: I really hope that it’s not criticism but discussion. One of the things I did with drugs in the film was invent my own drugs, to kind of cool off the political aspects of that, because I didn’t want people thinking of Nancy Reagan when they’re watching the movie. With the sexuality, there’s no way to cool it off, I just did what I wanted to do and what I felt was true to the film, and kind of let the chips fall where they may. If you write a political tract or a critical work, okay, you can work out of a political stance or juggle all those things that are happening culturally at the moment. But when you’re trying to create a fiction, I think you have to ignore all those things. You have to pretend they don’t exist. You assume they’re embedded in your sensibility so they will find expression that way. But I couldn’t worry about what radical wing of what movement would say about this moment in the film. If you do that, you paralyze yourself. Because of course I’ve been hammered from every side at times, and if I’d tried to avoid being hammered I would’ve done nothing.

Indiana: Realistically, do you expect to get mau-maued?

Cronenberg: I had a bit of that already with The Advocate. I was disturbed because of the quote: “Well, don’t expect too much, because the heterosexual Cronenberg has already gone on record as saying that Burroughs is not really gay.” That’s not what I said, and when I tried to call David Ehrenstein to discuss it, he wouldn’t talk to me. So I could see already, before the movie had been made, that I was in for trouble. It was the usual taking out of context for a political purpose. I would still talk to The Advocate or Ehrenstein again after he sees the film; I’m not going to back away from anything. James Grauerholz was quoted in The Advocate, and I appreciated what he said, which was basically, “Burroughs’ Naked Lunch does not belong to any particular sexual or political party, and it’s not their possession,” so they can’t claim that I’ve stolen something.

Indiana: Well, like I said, it’s hard for me as an American writer to see the film without reference to the book.

Cronenberg: Somewhere there’s got to be a critic or journalist who knows nothing about Burroughs. It would be great for someone to write from that stance.

Indiana: I only have one more question: the milieu of the film is an Interzone that partly recreates the milieu of legendary figures of American literature. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Jane Bowles… I know they’re not to be taken literally as representations of those people but people kind of inspired by them; this is just a question for you as Canadian filmmaker, I guess, but however accepted these people have become, they will remain in a curious way peripheral or alternative figures in the American mainstream. Which is very troubling in some way. How do you, as a Canadian, if you don’t mind me asking it that way, feel about the mainstream culture of the U.S. as it is now, especially as an independent filmmaker?

Cronenberg: Well, it’s interesting, because I suppose vis-à-vis the American cultural mainstream, Canadians also feel peripheral, and it would be logical for a Canadian feeling the effects of the huge American machine to the south of us to feel peripheral and to feel some kind of kinship to Americans who are also peripheral. Tangier as Toronto. And that was one of the things McLuhan always felt, that his position, here, not right in the middle of the stream, but in a backwater, allowed him to make some very objective comments on what was happening in America, precisely because he wasn’t an integrated part of it. I don’t have any sweeping thing to say — Canadians have a very perverse, ambiguous, ambivalent relationship with America, as maybe you know. We feel part of it and not part of it, inferior and superior to it at the same time, it just goes on and on in circles, but the main thing is, for me, when people here say — well, they don’t say it to me much anymore, but — why aren’t you making real Canadian films? And I say, To make a Canadian film that ignores America is impossible. It wouldn’t be a real Canadian film. There’s no way to isolate the uniquely Canadian thing — subject, look, whatever — and have no reference at all to America. If you ask a Canadian what he is, if you’re French, let’s say, the first thing you say is, “We’re not Americans, you know.” Where would we be without America? That’s the strange position we find ourselves in. To me, this is a Canadian movie despite the fact that Canada’s not mentioned in it. It’s perfect, if you see what I mean.

Around the same time I talked to Cronenberg, a print of Naked Lunch had made its way to Lawrence, Kansas, where Burroughs was much preoccupied with his cats, his guns, and editing The Granta Anthology of Deathless Prose.

“Now that you’ve had a chance to see the film,” I asked him on the phone, “what are your impressions?”

“Well, I like it very much. Of course, it’s a Cronenberg film. I think he’s done a great job. Nothing at all what I would’ve done, but that’s as it should be.”

“If a movie tried to picture the things described in Naked Lunch,” I said, “it could never be shown in a commercial theater.”

“Not only that, but even a novel written for film, like Jaws, you have to slice and cut and omit a great deal just as a sheer matter of time. As David pointed out, you could make two or three hundred movies from Naked Lunch.”

“The film seems more interested in exploring the creative process, specifically the writing of Naked Lunch. This seems to unavoidably invite critics to link events and people in the movie with events and people in your real life. How do you feel about that?”

“There was a question whether I should take any part in the film, and both Cronenberg and I independently decided absolutely not. The minute you get somebody in there that everybody knows, you destroy the whole structure, and it becomes real. Which is what David was trying to avoid.”

“David Cronenberg’s story is his interpretation. Other quite valid interpretations are possible. You take a very complex novel like Naked Lunch, a novel with a great deal of talk in it, and you’re going to have to select one line. I think the ending worked very well. The ending has the surprise of recognition, that is to say, something that is surprising, but appropriate.”

“William, you’ve written many books since Naked Lunch. Do you feel very distant from it?”

“No, I wouldn’t say so. I see the other books as just a continuation. I feel that the work I’ve written is really one long book.”

“I have a quote here from Genet. When he gave permission to Fassbinder to film Querelle, he sent a letter that said, ‘Tell Mr. Fassbinder that I wrote that book 40 years ago, and I no longer remember anything about it.'”

There’s a momentary pause.

“I think he’s kidding.”

by Lynn Snowden

Deep in Kansas, darkly dressed, William S. Burroughs, a man who shot his wife in the head and waged war against a lifetime of guilt, who has sucked up every drug imaginable and survived, and who has made a fine career out of depravity, can’t on this particular afternoon take another moment of a simple midwestern housefly buzzing around his head. “I can’t stand flies,” grumbles the seventy-seven-year-old author in that distinctively sepulchral voice, which retains a vestige of his St. Louis roots despite his many years on another planet. The fly swoops down onto Burroughs’s plate of cookies. “Terrible,” Burroughs exclaims, exasperated, attempting to backhand the fly into oblivion.

“William, that’s my pet fly!” cries David Cronenberg, a man who may love insects but not necessarily people, the director who is perhaps best known for turning Jeff Goldblum from scientist into bug in the 1986 remake of The Fly.

“Now, Julius, I told you not to bother people,” Cronenberg commands the fly. “Not everyone likes flies.”

Not everyone likes giant meat-eating Brazilian aquatic centipedes either, but they’re featured prominently in Cronenberg’s current film of Burroughs’s chilling masterpiece of a novel, Naked Lunch. Now that the movie is in the can and Burroughs is out of the hospital after having undergone triple-bypass heart surgery, Cronenberg has showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, Burroughs’s hometown of the last ten years, to pay his respects to the laconic sage. With two examples of evil incarnate wandering around town at the same time, Lawrence suddenly seems like a haven for drug-crazed refugees escaping the Interzone, the fictional horrorscape of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

In the Interzone, we are told, “nothing is true, and everything is permitted.” In Lawrence, however, not nearly so much is permitted, but if everything I’ve heard about William Burroughs and David Cronenberg is true, then the next couple of days will severely test my capacity for revulsion. Burroughs’s books, for example, are phantasmagorias of buggered boys, bloody syringes, talking assholes, and vaginal teeth. The old gun-toting geezer himself has been referred to as “a green-skinned reptilian” by no less an authority on manhood than Robert Bly.

“Well, I don’t think you’ll find him to be that bad,” said Cronenberg, the forty-eight-year-old Canadian director who has known Burroughs for seven years. Of course, this is David Cronenberg talking, the creator of such lyrical films as Scanners (exploding heads), Dead Ringers (gynecological horror), and Videodrome (sadomasochistic public-access TV), who last night giggled while telling me, “I would like it if you could say that I was the embodiment of absolute evil.”

But with both Cronenberg and Burroughs in the same town, let alone the same room, and with so many disgusting, revolting visions between them, how’s a woman to choose? No, perhaps it is better to simply enumerate their revulsions, because if William Burroughs and David Cronenberg are aghast at something, then the odds are the rest of us will be a little queasy, too.

Revulsion No. 1: Shooting Joan

In 1951 Burroughs was living in Mexico City with his wife, Joan, and young son, Billy Jr., after a heroin and marijuana possession charge against him back in the States had been dropped. One September afternoon, Burroughs and his wife dropped by to see an acquaintance and a few other friends who had gathered to enjoy some drinks. Burroughs was packing a Star .380 automatic. At one point in the festivities, he said to his wife, who was sitting in a chair across the room, “I guess it’s about time for our William Tell act.” They’d never performed a William Tell act in their lives, but Joan, who was drinking heavily and undergoing withdrawal from a heavy amphetamine habit, and who had lived with Burroughs for five years, was game. She placed a highball glass on top of her head. Burroughs, known to be a good shot, was sitting about six feet away. His explanation for missing was not that his aim was off, but that this gun shot low. The bullet struck Joan in the head. She died almost immediately.

The judge in Mexico believed the shooting to be accidental, as the other people present in the room asserted that this was the case. And so after paying a lawyer $2,000 and serving thirteen days in jail, Burroughs was allowed to post $2,312 and was freed.

Eight years later, Burroughs’s first novel, Naked Lunch, was published. One of the last books in America to be the cause of an obscenity trial, it is a biting, hallucinatory work that Norman Mailer described as having been composed by a genius. But Burroughs might never have written a word of it had he not shot his wife in the head. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death,” Burroughs has said, “and to the realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the ugly spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

This is exactly what the film Naked Lunch is about. It’s not so much a re-creation of the book itself, but a story of how William Lee, played by Peter Weller, came to kill his wife (Judy Davis) and write a novel called Naked Lunch. “It’s Joan’s death,” explains Cronenberg, “that first drives him to create his own environment, his own Interzone. And that keeps driving him. So in a sense, that death is occurring over and over again.” We both look at Burroughs, relaxing in his modest Kansas house, years away from the charged tropical dream of Mexico City. Although the home seems at first glance fit for a preacher, a quick look around reveals a human skull sitting stolidly in a bookcase and a drawing hanging on the wall of Burroughs throwing a knife. Burroughs considers Cronenberg’s theory. How many times has he gone over this same, excruciating terrain? He says only, “That seems quite valid.”

“What caliber of gun was it exactly?” I find myself asking. An abrupt transition, maybe even horrifying, but it’s practically a relief to bring up the grotesque particulars, and indeed, with these two such a query actually seems to lighten the mood.

“A three eighty,” Burroughs shouts out, speaking of the actual event. At the same time, Cronenberg blurts out “a thirty-two!” referring to the movie. It’s a confusion of real life and fiction, not unlike the film itself.

Revulsion No. 2: Cobras, Puffers, and Blue-Spotted Octopuses

Burroughs leads the way into his backyard, using his cane to rustle weeds, flip over likely rocks or boards while I stand poised to grab whatever might slither out. Earlier he’d displayed the cane as proudly as a schoolboy at show-and-tell. Inside it is hidden a sword. “I just had it sharpened,” he said. “Feel that edge!” He reinserted the blade into the cane. “Don’t want it to come apart in the supermarket,” he said.

Now he is stirring at something in the grass with the cane. I ask him what we are likely to turn up.

“Garter snakes,” he says.

At one point in the snake hunt, Cronenberg sees some sort of insect hovering over nearby tall grasses and cups his hands to try and gently catch it. Burroughs waves it away with his cane.

“William, are you interested in insects?” says Cronenberg, mostly for my benefit, a question that causes Burroughs to regard the two of us warily. “Not entirely,” he finally says. After a few minutes of completely addled discussion, Burroughs exclaims, “Oh, insects! I thought you said ‘incest.'”

“The most awful creature to me is the centipede,” he says. A number of them crawl slimily through the movie version of Naked Lunch. “I don’t go into hysterics or anything, but I look around for something to smash it with. I used to live out in the country when I first moved here, and there were a lot of centipedes in the house, and I set out to kill them all. A program of genocide. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d know there’s a centipede in this room. And there always was. And I couldn’t go to sleep until I killed it.” Although he never hunts mammals and is even somewhat of an animal activist, Burroughs is quite an expert on killing bugs, having once held a job as an exterminator.

“William’s use of insects as metaphors is generally negative,” Cronenberg points out. “When he says someone has insect eyes or an insect voice, it’s not a compliment. Now, in my movie, you can tell I’m a little more well-disposed toward insects, because the typewriters, which are insects, are almost like cats, really. They came about because when I write at night with the light on, insects come and land on the page.” This is clearly a fond memory. “They’re relating to you somehow. People are obsessed in a public way with life on other planets,” he says, a subtle reference to Burroughs, who is so interested in the idea of alien visitation that he has struck up a friendship with Communion author Whitley Strieber. “I’m saying that right here on earth we have the most alien life-forms we’ll find anywhere, and most of them are insects! How they survive and what their life cycles are like is incredible.”

Burroughs is unmoved by this aria for bugs. “Your insect typewriters are kind of fun,” he concedes. But touching bugs in general is not his thing at all. “I hate the touch of spiders,” Burroughs says. “A biology teacher at school had a tarantula, and I couldn’t touch the thing, even though tarantula bites are not dangerous. The most deadly spider is the funnel web spider of Australia.” This leads to the two trying to one-up each other on ghoulish facts of nature.

“There’s a spider in Virginia called a brown recluse,” says Cronenberg. “And when you’re bitten, the tissue just starts to deteriorate and spread. It’s very dangerous.”

“Brown recluse!” says Burroughs as we continue our stroll through the yard. “There are cases of people who have these huge lesions down to the bone. I’d much rather be bitten by a black widow. They make you desperately sick, but at least it’s not deadly for a healthy adult.” As long as we’re on the subject, I ask them to choose the best method of death in the animal kingdom.

“Well, you’d want it to be quick,” says Cronenberg, “and as painless as possible. So, what, a Gaboon viper?”

“I wouldn’t choose a viper at all. Any of the vipers are apt to be painful, they have both hemo- and neurotoxins. Cobras have neurotoxins.” Burroughs indicates that this is preferable. Cronenberg shakes his head.

“Cobras are not very good at getting it into your bloodstream,” he says. “They don’t have injector fangs.” His hand mimics a snake repeatedly biting his other arm. “They actually chew, and dribble it into the cut.”

“They have plenty to dribble, believe me,” says Burroughs. At this point, I’ve stopped looking for snakes. “With the blue-spotted octopus, people are usually unconscious.”

“That sounds good,” says Cronenberg, beaming.

“It’s a tiny little thing only about that big. No one’s ever survived it. DOA in one hour. Puffer fish have the same venom, and it’s also used to make zombies. The flesh of a puffer fish is supposed to be an aphrodisiac and a gourmet sensation, but one tiny part of the liver, one milligram… There are several accidents a year.”

“Well, that’s the obvious choice then,” says Cronenberg. “Strangely enough, we have puffer fish in our movie. Hanging there in one shot.”

As long as we have death by nature settled, I ask them by which weapon they would choose to die. “I don’t think about dying by a weapon,” Burroughs says as we walk back to the house. “I think about killing someone else with a weapon!”

“I guess that’s the difference between an optimist and a pessimist,” says Cronenberg with a giggle.

Revulsion No. 3: Sucking on Mugwumps

The film that would showcase addicts hooked on insecticide, lizardlike aliens known as mugwumps who suckle humans on mugwump jism, and Roy Scheider, had its genesis when the director and the writer met in 1984 at Burroughs’s seventieth birthday party in New York City. Cronenberg visited Burroughs a few times in Kansas, discussing how to approach their project. “I wanted William’s blessing, because basically, there was nothing he could do for me, I had to do it myself” Cronenberg finally wrote the script in 1989. “I sent it [to Burroughs] to see what his reaction would be. He hated it and threatened to sue.” Burroughs smiles indulgently. He actually liked the script, but a Japanese backer pulled out after reading a translation of the screenplay. “It could have been something as simple as talking assholes,” says Cronenberg with a shrug.

For years there have been other attempts to get Burroughs’s books, including the notorious Junky, to the screen. Among the people rumored to star in earlier incarnations of Naked Lunch were Mick Jagger, Dennis Hopper (who also wanted to direct), Jack Nicholson, and David Bowie. Chuck “The Gong Show” Barris wanted to produce; Terry Southern was supposed to write the screenplay. While these projects fell through, Naked Lunch had nevertheless penetrated the public consciousness in one way or another long before now.

“One of the problems I had when I said, ‘Okay, how am I going to do this movie,'” says Cronenberg, “was that a lot of the book, and Burroughs’s writing in general, has been absorbed into the culture.”

Indeed, he has revealed that when he wrote his first commercial horror film, They Came from Within, his favorite book was Naked Lunch.

Originally released in 1975 in Canada as Shivers, the film concerns a venereal parasite that infests an apartment complex, causing some rather grisly deaths. Burroughs has lately been credited for graphically predicting in Naked Lunch what is now known as AIDS, when he wrote of a venereal disease that would originate in Africa and afflict homosexuals. “Males,” he wrote, “who resign themselves up for passive intercourse to infected partners like weak and soon-to-be purple-assed baboons, may also nourish a little stranger.” Cronenberg in his own right earned the title of “King of Venereal Horror.”

“It’s a limited kingdom,” Cronenberg says with a proud smile, “but it’s mine. One of the reasons Burroughs excited me when I read him was that I recognized my own imagery in his work,” he says. “It sounds only defensive to say, ‘I was already thinking of a virus when I read that!’ But there is a recognition factor. That’s why I think you start to feel like you’re vibrating in harmony with someone else. It’s the recognition, not that they introduced you to something that was completely unthought of by you.

“Here’s my conceit,” says Cronenberg. “Burroughs and I have been fused in the same telepod together,” he says, referring to The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum and a housefly are fused at the molecular genetic level. “And what you’ve got now is the Brundlething, which is my and his version of Naked Lunch. It’s a fusion of the two of us, and it really is something that neither one of us would have done alone. Now I don’t know which of us is the fly and which is human.”

Revulsion No. 4: Jerry Lewis

There’s not much in this world left to horrify William Burroughs, but being told at the same meal that he, Cronenberg, and Jerry Lewis have each been elected members of the French order of Arts and Letter is nearly enough to send him on another heroin jag. “We need to vote him out, then!” shouts Burroughs.

“Yeah, we can all get together and expel him from the order,” says Cronenberg, “because everyone always says, ‘Yeah, but so is Jerry Lewis.’ It’s an embarrassment to the order. And what about this: Jerry Lewis’s movies are dubbed in France, and no one ever heard his real voice. When the guy who always dubbed his movies died, the next three movies of Jerry Lewis bombed in France because it was the wrong voice! So it isn’t even the real voice they’re responding to!” They both shake their heads.

“And,” Burroughs adds disdainfully, “they loooove Damon Runyon over there. Now, good God!”

Revulsion No. 5: Yage Till You Puke

It’s been half a day and no one has taken a hit of anything stronger than the vodka and Coke Burroughs is nursing. These days, at seventy-seven and post-triple bypass, Burroughs is taking a break from the opiates. The conversation, however, is free to range where Burroughs no longer does. It takes a brave man to try and trade drug stories toe-to-toe with William Burroughs, and Cronenberg makes only a perfunctory attempt. “I tried opium once, in Turkey, and there I felt like I had a hideous flu, you know? It was like I was sick.”

“You probably were! It can be very nauseating. You had just taken more than you could assimilate.”

“I did take LSD once,” Cronenberg responds. “It was a great trip. It was a very revealing experience to me, because I had intuited that what we consider to be reality, is just a construct of our senses. It shows you, in no uncertain terms, that there are any number of realities that you could live, and you could change them and control them. It’s very real, the effects it left.”

Burroughs nods patronizingly, although he was more of an opiate man. “Yes. I’ve taken LSD, psilocybin, mescaline. My experiences with yage were” — he thinks of the South American medicine-man drug mixture that caused him to puke violently, suffer seizures, and almost die — “mixed, but on the whole, good.”

Talk then shifts to over-the-counter drugs one could abuse, which included the availability of codeine in Canada, opium cold-and-flu tablets in France, and “in England,” says Burroughs, “they used to sell Dr. Brown’s Chlorodine. It was morphine, opium, and chloroform. I used to boil out the chloroform.”

“I was chloroformed once,” says Cronenberg, “as a kid, when they took out my tonsils. I still remember what happened when they put this mask over my face. I saw rockets shooting. Streamers of flame, rockets…. I can still see it. And that sickly smell.” He makes a face. After discussing insects, gunshot wounds, and snake bites all day, we’re finally onto something that can gross out Cronenberg.

“I hate general anesthesia,” says Burroughs. “Scares the hell out me. I had to have it when they did the bypass, but I knew where I was. I knew I was in the hospital having an operation, and there was this gas coming into my face like a gray fog. When I cracked my hip, they put a pin in with a local. A spinal. Of course, it ran out and I started screaming.”

“I was in a motorcycle accident where I separated my shoulder,” says Cronenberg. “They took me into the operating room and gave me a shot of Demerol.”

“Demerol,” says Burroughs, brightening a bit. “Did it help?”

“I loved it. It was wonderful.”

“It helps. I had a shot of morphine up here somewhere,” he says, pointing to the top of his shoulder near his neck, “from my bypass operation. She said, ‘This is morphine.’ And I said, ‘Fine!’ ” Burroughs drags out the word in a sigh of bliss. He closes his eyes in an expression of rapt anticipation. “Shoot it in, my dear, shoot it in.” I ask Burroughs if the doctors and nurses at the hospital knew who he was. “Certainly,” he drawls. “The doctor wrote on my chart ‘Give Mr. Burroughs as much morphine as he wants.’ ”

Revulsion No. 6: Possession by Demons

There’s no question that in one way or another both men are absolutely possessed, but only one of them believes in evil as an actual presence, in fact, in demons themselves. “I would have to say yes, evil exists, definitely,” says Burroughs. “I’m very interested in the whole matter of possession and exorcism.” He’s said in the past that he felt that the dark presence that possessed him on the day he shot his wife has never left him. “I asked myself,” he goes on, “why do these demons have such necessity to possess, and why are they so reluctant to leave? The answer is, that’s the only way they can get out of hell — it’s sort of like junk. They possess somebody and they want to hang onto it because that’s their ticket out of hell.”

“Do you believe in a literal hell” asks Cronenberg somewhat incredulously. He is, as he puts it, “not just an atheist, but a total nonbeliever.”

“Certainly,” says Burroughs, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. As to the existence of a literal heaven, Burroughs says “Heaven is the absence of hell.” Earlier in the day he had remarked that pleasure was the absence of pain and that pleasure in morphine lies in the absence of the pain of withdrawal.

Revulsion No. 7: The Horror of Female Genitalia

Mary McCarthy once wrote a review comparing Burroughs to Jonathan Swift because of, among other things, their shared “horror of female genitalia.” It was a phrase that naturally came to mind as I watched some of Cronenberg’s films. “I’m interested in the aesthetics of revulsion,” Cronenberg explains. “I’m showing not only female genitalia but the equivalence of male genitalia also, insects and diseases, gooey icky stuff, and I’m saying — or as I had Elliot Mantle [in Dead Ringers] say — We are so unintegrated, we have not yet developed an aesthetic for the insides of our bodies. It’s my attempt to say, What is ugly and what is repulsive?”

Burroughs is looking tired this evening. In this, his era of clean-living, it’s his habit to turn in early. He sees Cronenberg and me out and as we drive back to Cronenberg’s hotel, we see Burroughs, frail and courtly, waving from the front porch. In his suite, Cronenberg continues his defense. “I find the whole idea of revulsion quite strange, actually,” he says. “I could easily imagine a human species where revulsion was not a response to anything. It’s a specifically human thing. Does your dog have that response?” he asks.

And in which scene, Cronenberg wants to know, does he actually show a horror of female genitalia? I point to Videodrome when James Woods looks on in fear as he grows an enormous vaginalike slit in his abdomen. “He seems to like it!” Cronenberg laughs. “It’s almost like he’s proud of it and happy to have it!” Yeah, and then he loses a gun in it? Isn’t that highly symbolic of a well-known male fear? “Well, I’ve known some women who thought they lost their Tampax and were just as freaked out as anybody else.”

He tells a story from the making of Videodrome, when Woods is forced to spend days with rubber appliances glued to his chest to attain the previously mentioned orifice. “And he turns to Debbie Harry and says, ‘When I first got on this picture, I was an actor. Now I feel like I’m just the bearer of the slit.’ And she said, ‘Now you know what it feels like.’ So I’m forcing him to be the bearer of the slit! Reality is what he perceives it to be.”

Cronenberg is becoming increasingly unnerved by the topic. His rebuttals grow more animated. His chief concern is that his art might be seen to reflect his life. “If you buy into an autobiographical thing between the filmmaker and a character that he portrays, you then make it impossible for an artist to create characters that are literally not him,” pleads Cronenberg. “Martin Scorsese was terrified to meet me! He expected to meet a guy who was like Renfield from Dracula, a drooling maniac.” Scorsese, he points out, would be dismayed if anyone thought he was Travis Bickle. “I found it hard to believe that the guy who made Taxi Driver would be afraid to meet me. And that someone in the business himself could still fall prey to the same things that I’m ranting and raving about right now.

“What can I say! It’s not true that I have a fear of female genitalia! But how can I prove it without getting into very personal stuff? What level are we talking about, I mean… in the dark, with women…” He’s referring now not to his movies, it seems, but to himself. Here Cronenberg adopts the skeptical tone of a documentary film voice-over. “Does Cronenberg have this horror of female genitalia or doesn’t he?”

If my take on Cronenberg’s films is accurate, perhaps we’ve arrived at the last outrage: female genitalia. Oh, the horror!

But narrowing this particular revulsion to include only women may be too limiting. Given the progression of revulsions we’ve discussed, I realize that there’s something worse, something in Burroughs’s estimation that is even more horrible, the final atrocity: humanity. Just a few hours before, Cronenberg, trying to prompt Burroughs for my benefit, had said, “I once asked William about women. He said something that is in the script, about how it’s conceivable that men and women are different species, and they have different wills and purposes on earth. I think it’s a very interesting proposition.”

Burroughs sat silently on the couch as his theories were recounted, then nervously cleared his throat. “Valerie Solanis” — the woman who shot Andy Warhol — “in her manifesto, gets around to the position that females are almost as bad as males. And that’s much closer to my position, where it’s all a bad idea. Male and female. You know, let’s just call the whole thing off.” I looked at Cronenberg, whose intrigued expression seemed to indicate that he suspected Burroughs might be onto something.

And perhaps, in some perverse, exhilarating way, he may well be. It’s a character-building march, that icy trek from misogyny to misanthropy. After all, there’s something a little too parochial, too narrow-minded, about hating only one gender. How much better, really, to be disgusted by us all!