SOURCE: “Lubricating the Muse,” in Film Comment, Vol. 28, No. 1, January, 1992, pp. 14–16.

In the following review, Lyons examines the typewriter imagery in Naked Lunch.

The typewriter is a lonely place. The typewriter is also a doorway into a crowded theater of beings from the Id that, if the writer is not very careful, or especially if he is, will destroy him. The typewriter is a major fetish in some recent films. Why? From a materialist view, the typewriter is obsolescent, a talisman of late-bourgeois literariness now increasingly replaced by the instant, disembodied community of the modem. So these meditations on the dying implement are elegiac, like Ford on the cavalry. From a biographical viewpoint, many filmmakers now do their own writing and thus have a feel for the cavalry of verbal composition. They at least sense the metaphoric possibilities of typewriter-as-camera. Many of today’s auteurs, also, are products...