SOURCE: “The Wrong Body,” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 1, No. 11, March, 1992, pp. 8–10.

In the following review, Taubin argues that Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch does not sufficiently recreate the homoerotic elements presented in William Burroughs's novel.

Naked Lunch is less an adaption of William Burroughs’ novel than David Cronenberg’s fantasy about how it came to be written. The young Cronenberg wanted to be a writer: Burroughs and Nabokov were his models. He claims that he turned to film-making when he realised he’d never write as well as either of them.

Affronts to the ‘I married Joan’ sit-com consciousness of the Eisenhower era, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Nabokov’s Lolita each presented a radically different version of subversive male sexuality, modernist reflexivity and expatriate alienation, not to mention a fascination with insect life connected in part to a certain queasiness about the female body. The obscenity...