Naked Lunch Pin-up # 1 MATTED William Rice Burroughs meets Mugwump
$24.99
Description
This is a small pin-up with a white mat 10×8 frame. Very lightweight, pretty small…priced accordingly.
Naked Lunch is a 1991 Canadian-British-American-Japanese science fiction drama film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. It is a film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel of the same name.
William Lee is an exterminator who finds that his wife Joan is stealing his insecticide (pyrethrum) to use as a drug to get high. When Lee is arrested by the police, he begins hallucinating because of “bug powder” exposure. He believes he is a secret agent with two handlers or controllers in the forms of a talking insectoid typewriter and an alien “Mugwump”. The bug assigns him the mission of killing Joan. She is allegedly an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Lee dismisses the bug and its instructions and kills it. He returns home to find Joan having sex with Hank, one of his writer friends. Shortly afterwards, he accidentally kills her while attempting to shoot a drinking glass off her head in imitation of William Tell.
Having inadvertently accomplished his “mission”, Lee flees to Interzone, a city somewhere in North Africa. He spends his time writing reports for his imaginary handler, and it is these documents which, at the insistence of his literary colleagues who later visit him, eventually become the titular book. Whilst Lee is under the influence of assorted mind-altering substances, his replacement typewriter, a Clark Nova, becomes a talking insect which tells him to find Dr. Benway by seducing Joan Frost. Joan, curiously, is a doppelgänger of his dead wife.
After coming to the conclusion that Dr. Benway is, in fact, the secret mastermind of a narcotics operation for a drug called “black meat” which is supposedly derived from the guts of giant centipedes, Lee completes his report and flees Interzone to Annexia with Joan Frost.
Stopped by the Annexian border patrol and instructed to prove that he is a writer as he claims, Lee produces a pen. As this is insufficient proof for passage he inexplicably offers a demonstration of his William Tell routine using a glass atop Joan Frost’s head. He again misses badly and thus re-enacts the earlier killing of his wife. The border guard cheerfully bids him welcome to Annexia. Lee is shown shedding a tear at this bittersweet accomplishment.
The screenplay for Naked Lunch is based not only on Burroughs’ novel, but also on other fiction by him, and autobiographical accounts of his life. It can be seen as a metatextual adaptation, in that it depicts the writing of the novel itself. Several characters are loosely based on people that Burroughs knew: Hank and Martin are based on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (who assisted Burroughs in compiling the original novel), and Tom and Joan Frost on Paul and Jane Bowles whom Burroughs befriended in Tangier, Morocco.
The shooting of Joan Lee is based on the 1951 death of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs’ common-law wife. Burroughs shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of “William Tell” at a party in Mexico City. He would later flee to the United States. Burroughs was convicted in absentia of homicide and sentenced to two years, which were suspended. Burroughs stated in the introduction to his book “Queer” that Joan’s death was the starting point of his literary career, saying: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death”.
Author William S. Burroughs interacts with a mugwump on the set of Naked Lunch.
In his review for The Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn’t just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs’s terms, he’s made a portrait of an American writer”.
THE TWO FRAMED PHOTOS ARE NOT INCLUDED! Those photos are shown only to give you an idea of what your matted pin-up would look like with one of my in-stock frames. Contact me for price. They make a wonderful gift!
Pin-up will be glued to mat. Frame available, please inquire.
