I: Introduction
Naked Lunch is a 1959 novel by William S Burroughs, adapted into a film by David Cronenberg in 1991, which starred Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. The film is hardly an adaptation at all, since it uses mostly odds and ends from the book, while also adding elements from other writing by Burroughs, as well as biographical elements of his. Indeed, the film is more to the spirit than to the letter of the book, since a faithful adaptation would have been impossible: it would have been far too expensive, its lack of a coherent, linear plot would have baffled audiences, and it would have been banned in many, if not most or all, countries for obscenity.
Indeed, as a seminal work of the Beat Generation, NL (originally The Naked Lunch) was notorious for its use of four-letter words, blatant expression of (particularly gay) sexuality, and candid descriptions of drug abuse. A Boston obscenity trial initially resulted in the banning of the book, though awareness of its obvious literary merits as having redeeming social value would soon overturn the banning. As a result, NL has become immeasurably influential.
I’ll first be looking at the film adaptation, since that will be easier, all the while making comparisons and contrasts with the novel. Then I’ll delve into the book, hitting on highlights of it and giving my interpretations of them, since a point-for-point analysis of every detail will be as impossible as making a film of it all.
Here‘s a link to the novel, and here‘s a link to the complete film.
II: The Film
The music we hear during the opening credits and throughout, composed by Howard Shore, is brooding strings, with fittingly free-jazz style saxophone soloing by Ornette Coleman. It gives off a film noir aura as well as a sense of the kind of music Beat Generation writers like Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg would have dug; the atonal, avant-garde nature of the sax playing also fits in with the surrealism of so much of what is seen in the film.
The notion of William Lee (Weller) as a pest exterminator is nowhere to be found in the book. Actually, Cronenberg got the idea from Burroughs’s short story, “Exterminator!” Furthermore, very little of that actual story is even used in the film, apart from Lee’s boss complaining, in a thick Yiddish accent, that maybe Lee would like him to spit in his face. The rest of this pest exterminator aspect of the first act of the film is more built around this short story than directly coming from it.
Lee, based on Burroughs, is in trouble at work because he ran out of bug powder when doing a job. It turns out that his wife, Joan (Davis), has been using the bug powder as a heroin-like drug to get high on.
Why does she like it? It gives her “a very literary high…It’s a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.” This of course is an allusion to The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect (commonly depicted as a cockroach, like most of the bugs Lee is to kill with his bug powder). Unable to go to work anymore, and causing his family nothing but revulsion, Samsa is eventually left to starve to death while others in the family have to provide for them financially. It’s a classic tale of modern alienation.
In this way, we can see how Samsa’s predicament fits in with that of the drug addicts in the film adaptation and the novel. They feel like bugs: useless, revolting pests that need to be got rid of. The bug powder itself is a toxin, of course, representative of how destructive narcotics are.
One “routine” (as Burroughs called the stories in his novel) called “The Exterminator Does a Good Job,” has a line or two suggesting this idea of using a yellow bug powder, “yellow pyretheum powder,” for the secondary purpose of a heroin-like drug: “He dipped into a square tin of yellow pyretheum powder and pulled out a flat package covered in red and gold Chinese paper.” Then: “At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyretheum powder (‘Hard to get now, lady … war on. Let you have a little.… Two dollars.’)”
Unlike the Lee of the novel, who starts off being chased by a cop for his drug abuse, leaving the US for Mexico and thence to Interzone, the Lee of the film comes off as a straight (in all senses), conservative man who likes his job, fears losing it and just wants to play by the rules. It’s his wife’s new bug powder habit that pulls him (back) into the marginalized life of the junkie, which in turn leads him to a life of generalized vice, including a sexual relationship with a gay teen boy named Kiki (played by Joseph Scorsiani) in Interzone. Lee has been transformed into a bug: unable to work, despised by society.
Apart from the bad influence of his slovenly wife, though, Lee’s reasons for his descent into the sordid world of drug addiction and pederasty are centred around his sense of alienation as a worker, and alienation from society in general. When his boss crabs at him about having run out of bug powder in the middle of a job, not yet knowing the lack of powder is his junkie housewife’s fault, Lee assumes that a Chinese coworker (whom everyone calls a “Chink”) gave him too little bug powder. In his and the other workers’ racism against the Chinese coworker, we can see one of many examples of worker alienation.
In another scene, Lee unsuccessfully tries to steal a container of bug powder from a coworker (whose voice will later be heard from the anus on the back of a large cockroach/typewriter) for his and Joan’s use. More antagonism and competition between workers for resources.
Lee earlier was tipped off about his wife’s new, peculiar habit by his two friends, Hank (played by Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (played by Michael Zelniker). Just as Lee represents Burroughs (and just as Joan Lee represents Joan Vollmer, Burroughs’s common-law wife, who was accidentally shot and killed by him in a drunken game of “William Tell” in Mexico City), so do Hank and Martin respectively represent Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Hank and Martin are introduced debating whether writing should flow spontaneously and without editing (Hank’s position), or if it should be thoroughly rewritten many times to consider every possible angle for it (Martin’s position). When Lee joins them and hears their reasoning, his choice of words is significant: “Exterminate all rational thought.” He also says he gave up on writing when he was ten.
These two points he makes give us insight into his mind. The strait-laced conservative we see in Lee is a façade hiding his repressed urge to be like Hank and Martin. (We never see this kind of conservative façade in the Lee of the novel.) He’s so preoccupied with his ‘good job’ that he uses the language of that job. He gave up his dreams of developing his literary creativity at an early age.
Of course, the greatest repression of all for Lee is his homosexuality. Marrying Joan is part of keeping himself in the closet, just as the extermination job is a conservative cover for the bohemian, radical things he’d like to do with Hank and Martin. As we learn from his having been apprehended by cops Hauser (played by John Frisen) and O’Brien (played by Sean McCann), Lee had a problem with drug abuse in the past, his current conservative façade being an attempt to put all of that behind him.
Now, Hauser and O’Brien do appear in the novel, towards the very end; but instead of finding a ‘reformed’ Lee, the cops find him in the act of shooting up in his home. He escapes their custody as he does in the film, but in the novel, he does so by shooting them, running off to find more dope with a friend; while in the film, Lee uses his shoe to crush a talking anus/cockroach in the police station.
His urge to put a (phallic) needle in his vein can be seen as a substitute for his unconscious gay wish to be anally penetrated by a man. Similarly, Joan’s shooting up of her husband’s bug powder represents her wish to be sexually penetrated by him, when he obviously isn’t doing it for her. No wonder we see Hank banging her when Lee comes home, Lee not caring at all. While this is happening, Martin is reciting something that sounds like it could be a passage from Ginsberg’s “Howl” (actually, it’s a passage right from NL).
The giant cockroach with the talking anus on its back, which later will also incorporate a typewriter keyboard on its face, is a fascinating image to psychoanalyze. Let’s start with all of the elements it incorporates and merges: a bug to be killed with Lee’s bug powder; a body part, typically sexualized by male homosexuals, elevated as a part-object to a kind of talking consciousness (connect this with the famous story of “The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk”), and speaking with the voice of one of Lee’s coworkers, Edward, the one he tried to steal the container of bug powder from (the voice being that of Peter Boretski); and the keyboard of what Lee would use to be an author.
In this creature we see a fusion of a number of Lee’s contradictory desires, a masterpiece of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment. There’s its existence as a reason for him to have ‘the best job he’s ever had’–accordingly, he crushes it with his shoe in the police station, and the typewriter version he has in Interzone is also taken from him and ‘tortured,’ rendered essentially unusable…though he’s more conflicted about the damage done to it, since as a writer and resident in Interzone, he is now dissociating from his pest exterminator job and more fully coming to accept his identity as a homosexual/junkie/writer.
Since the male anus is typically sexualized by gay men, it becomes fetishized as a part-object, the way the mother’s breast is for a baby (in the Kleinian sense), treated as a full object in its own right, as if a complete person–hence the talking anus that takes over the man’s body, as in the story (to be discussed in full below). Giving it Edward’s voice manages to merge the sexual wish fulfillment with the wish to remain employed by the extermination company.
The third part of the wish fulfillment, to be realized in Lee’s drug-hallucinations while in Interzone, is the incorporation of a typewriter keyboard on the giant cockroach’s face. Though Lee ‘gave up writing when he was ten,’ this was just a repression of something he deep-down needed to do. If he was truly not at all interested in writing literature, then why would Lee hang out with aspiring writers, Hank and Martin? Lee’s association with those two is the return of the repressed, in a form unrecognizable to his conscious mind, of his undying wish to be a writer.
Sprinkling the bug powder on the bug’s “lips”…later, on Joan’s lips…thus giving both of them the sensuous pleasure and the high of the drug, is again a fusion of wish fulfillments to give pleasure, sexual stimulation, and a high to both sexual objects (and satisfying Joan in a way Lee cannot do genitally), as well as killing them, since the bug powder is of course a toxin–he’s doing his ‘great job’ as pest exterminator, and he’s knocking off his wife (who feels like a Samsa-bug while high) so he can be free to be gay.
Killing Joan leads to the next important plot development. This ‘accidental’ shooting her in the head instead of the bullet hitting the glass on her head is a classic parapraxis, done shortly after Lee’s having seen Hank on top of her on the couch at home. The fact that the giant cockroach told him she is an enemy agent of Interzone, Inc., who must be killed, is another example of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment on Lee’s part. The cockroach suggesting that Joan isn’t even human is more wish fulfillment, making it easier for him to kill her.
Because of Lee’s newly-acquired habit of using bug powder as a narcotic, he has been given–by Edward–the name card of Dr. Benway (Scheider) to help him be rid of his addiction. Benway is seen only twice in the film: first, in his office and appearing as if a perfectly decent, normal man giving Lee something to end his addiction; then, towards the end of the film, in his Fadela disguise and more like the unscrupulous psychopath of the novel. Apart from these two appearances, Benway is only referred to a number of times in the film. In the novel, he appears on a number of occasions in person, demonstrating his sadism, among other things.
Just as Burroughs had to flee Mexico for having killed Joan Vollmer, so does Lee have to leave the US for killing Joan Lee. He’ll hop on a plane and go to Interzone, in North Africa.
In Interzone, where Lee will be free to indulge in drug use and gay sex, as well as to write what will eventually become the novel Naked Lunch (all in the guise of ‘reports,’ with him imagining himself to be an ‘agent’), he will finally be able to be his true self, no longer the false self of being an exterminator and a straight, married man. In this change of his character, we can see the meaning of Burroughs’s famous dictum from the section of NL that begins with “I can feel the heat closing in,” namely, this–“Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.” (This is also quoted at the beginning of the film.)
The hustler, being a con man or addict, can make a mark–the victim of a con game–of anyone, that is, a hustler can manipulate or take advantage of anyone else. The hustler cannot, however, succeed in fooling the mark inside himself. Lee tried to pretend to be a straight, conformist American with a normal job and a wife. He was like a hustler trying to deceive the mark inside himself with his false self, and as a result of that deception, he lacked spontaneity and felt dead and empty behind his façade, as DW Winnicott had observed of such people. This is why Weller’s acting in the film shows a Lee largely bereft of emotion in the first act of the film. Only later on, as he returns to a sense of his true self in Interzone, does he start showing true emotions.
“Interzone” is based on the Tangier International Zone, where Burroughs lived in the 1950s and wrote NL. He went there in 1954, just after the publication of Junkie, his first novel. The appeal of the place for him lay in the fact that it had a reputation for allowing drug use and homosexuality, so his intention there was to “steep [him]self in vice.” Accordingly, he became severely addicted to Eukodal there, eventually using the drug every two hours, and he had a sexual relationship with a teen boy named Kiki, this relationship being one of the biographical elements of the film.
Another biographical element of the film is Lee’s friendship with Hank and Martin, all three of them representing Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg respectively, as I mentioned above. So when we see the scene in the film of Hank and Martin visiting Lee in Interzone and encouraging him to finish writing NL, this represents Burroughs having mailed early drafts of his novel to his friends Kerouac and Ginsberg. Similarly, Hanks says that the book he’s working on is as “American as football,” so he has to go back to the US and finish it there; presumably, the book he’s talking about is Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road.
While in Tangier, Burroughs noted the political tensions between the Moroccan nationalists and the French authorities. He tried to be politically neutral about the situation, but he was a vocal critic of the brutality of European imperialism on the one hand, while also worrying about how Islamic rule might limit individual freedom on the other. The film’s references to ‘enemy agents,’ and the novel’s discussions of “Islam, Inc.”, as well as Interzone’s four rival political parties–Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists–all seem to be NL‘s way of representing the political conflicts in the Tangier International Zone. (I’ll be discussing the four rival parties in the third section of this post, The Novel, below.)
Though I am probably oversimplifying here, Burroughs’s political views can be described as libertarian socialist and individualist anarchist. He hated capitalism, yet he also hated the state in all of its forms, whether right or left-wing. Overall, he hated all forms of power and control over people, so drug abuse as it appears in the novel and film, as well as the machinations of such villains as Dr. Benway, all are reflective and/or metaphorical of such systems of social control.
To get back to the film, we note the switch from bug powder to that of the Brazilian giant aquatic black centipede…the Black Meat. It symbolizes the ultimate, most destructive nature of addiction (the powder is given to Lee in the film by none other than Benway as a ‘cure’ for the bug powder addiction), but in its length and size, the centipede is also phallic and therefore linked symbolically with Lee’s homosexuality.
When Benway mixes the black centipede powder in with the yellow bug powder so that the black is unseen within the yellow, he tells Lee that the new, mixed powder is like an agent who has come to believe his own cover story, hiding there, in a larval state, waiting for the right time “to hatch out.” Of course, Benway is in part speaking of himself, since the character will appear in Interzone as Fadela (played by Monique Mercure), whose name sounds like an ironic pun on Fidelio, for Benway is anything but trustworthy.
In Interzone, apart from Kiki, Lee will meet Tom Frost (Holm), a character based on writer Paul Bowles, and his wife, Joan Frost (Davis again…could this Joan also be based on Jane Bowles?), who is a dead [!] ringer for Joan Lee. The thing about ‘typing reports’ as an ‘agent,’ which in Lee’s hallucinatory drug state is a cover for the fact that he’s really writing NL, is that writing is a kind of therapy, something Lee needs to do to heal from the guilt and trauma over having killed his wife. Seeing her ‘clone,’ as it were, in Frost’s wife just reinforces the trauma, hence his helping her type something in the Frost apartment, then making love with her there.
Frost seems to find writing and typing to be therapeutic, too, for when without a typewriter, he feels “desperately insecure,” and so when he’s been without his Martinelli typewriter for too long after having lent it to Lee, Frost goes to Lee’s apartment and demands to have it back at gunpoint. (In many ways, Frost is a double of Lee: both have a version of Joan as a wife, whom they unconsciously want to kill [recall the scene with Frost’s confessions to Lee about this unconscious wish while his moving lips are saying something else], and both use writing as psychological therapy. Frost even has a male Arab companion, as Lee has with Kiki.) Lee will eventually give Frost a special, new typewriter in the form of a Mugwump head…which leads me to a discussion of our next topic.
The Mugwumps of the novel and those of the film are quite different–in appearance, manner, and symbolism. Those of the film have big blue eyes, bluish skin, and are more humanoid than those of the novel, while still slick and alien-looking. Those of the novel have beaks, white oily skin, no liver, and are monstrous and non-human.
Both kinds of Mugwump secrete an addictive drug, “Mugwump jism.” In the novel, the ‘jism’ comes from a Mugwump’s penis, naturally. This of course would have been too much to show onscreen without the film being banned, so instead, the jism spews out of phallic tubes in the Mugwumps’ heads.
In the novel, Mugwumps represent pure degradation, exploitation, and the body horror of addiction. In the film, they seem more benevolent and likable, in spite of how addictive their jism still is, because here they’re more linked to sexual ambivalence (as Kiki points out to Lee) and creativity (recall the Mugwump head/ typewriter above) than mere addiction. Significantly, the film’s Benway/Fadela is promoting Mugwump jism like a mafia drug lord.
Let’s skip ahead in the movie to the scene when Lee is in a car at night with Yves Cloquet (played by Julian Sands) and Kiki, and Lee is telling them the famous story of “the man who taught his asshole to talk.” (In the novel, it’s Dr. Benway, in the section called “Ordinary Men and Women,” who tells the story.) Frank Zappa, not normally a great reader of literature (he was far too obsessed with his music to make time for it), found Burroughs’s story so amusing that he even asked for and got permission to read it aloud publicly.
What’s particularly interesting about the talking anus story, apart from how obviously amusing it is, is how it attempts to place one of the lowest, dirtiest, and most animalistic parts of the human body up among the highest parts, the mouth, associated with speech, the expression of ideas, and therefore linked with the intellect. It sounds absurd to hear that the asshole wants “equal rights” with the mouth, and to be loved, but we should consider the implications of that from a symbolic standpoint.
The mouth represents the bourgeoisie and the anus represents the proletariat–dirty, despised, and down below. At first, the talking asshole acts as a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy in an amusing act to be performed before a laughing audience. The asshole starts to take over the body, causing the mouth at first to try to make the asshole shut up, but ultimately failing.
This conflict between the mouth and the anus is representative thus of class conflict. When the asshole tells the mouth that it’s the latter “who will shut up in the end,” this would represent a proletarian revolution.
Now, as I’ve said above, Burroughs did have socialist sympathies, but of course he was no tankie, so he wouldn’t have liked the state Soviet system of the USSR or the Eastern Bloc anymore than the CIA did. So when the asshole fully takes over the body, creating, in effect, the equivalent of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the story starts to take an Orwellian, Animal Farm-like quality, with the mouth “sealed over.”
The man would have lost his head completely, except that the asshole still needs the eyes. However, “nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more.” The brain is trapped in the skull, sealed off. Then the brain seems to have died, and the eyes go out. So our story has an unhappy ending, with the asshole being an Orwellian version of Stalin, or Napoleon from Orwell’s novella.
Burroughs mentioned that the story is meant to be an allegory of the insidious effects of the ever-expanding bureaucracy. One should note, though, that no one in politics likes the meddlesome bureaucracy; not even Lenin or Stalin were happy with it–the problem is that it’s so difficult to get rid of it.
Being in Cloquet’s place now, he also being gay, he wants to get his hands on Kiki. While he’s having the boy, Lee drinks up from a little jar of Mugwump jism, having already gotten information from Cloquet that he’ll find Benway through Fadela. Lee will find Cloquet aggressively sodomizing Kiki in his bird-filled bedroom, but Lee’s drug-based hallucination will make Cloquet look like a giant centipede (with his head) behind the boy.
Lee is horrified to see the sight, and he runs out of the room. What he’s seen, though, is just a reflection of what he himself has done with the boy, his own pederastic desires. Only members of NAMBLA would find this using of Kiki to be at all defensible.
Upon finding Benway ripped out of his Fadela getup, Lee asks him to let him take Joan, who has been with “Fadela” since shortly after her lovemaking with Lee. Benway asks what Lee wants with “that purulent little cunt” (purulent is used several times in Burroughs’s novel…so is cunt, for that matter). Lee says he can’t write without her, so Benway allows him to take her, sending them to Annexia so the Mugwump jism business can be expanded out there.
Though Burroughs had been writing before he killed Vollmer, it was this accidental shooting that, he insisted, pushed him to become a writer (as a form of therapy, as I mentioned above). This is the meaning we can glean from the ending of the film, when Lee drives with Joan Frost to the border of Annexia.
The two guards, played by the same actors as those who played Hauser and O’Brien, but now wearing Soviet-style uniforms (a reflection not only of Burroughs’s anti-state socialist leanings, but also of the usual Hollywood liberal denigrating of the USSR as ‘totalitarian’), want proof beyond Lee’s mere ownership of a pen that he really is a writer. He reluctantly does a repeat of the William Tell routine with Joan (a case of the compulsion to repeat), and shoots her in the head. Full of grief, he is nonetheless allowed by the guards to enter Annexia, because it’s understood that shooting her signals his transformation into a writer.
III: The Novel
Since I’ve already mentioned a number of events from the novel in my comparison of it with the film, and since there’s far too much material to go over from the novel, such that this analysis would be transformed from a blog post into a book, I will be limiting myself instead to a discussion of what I consider to be some of its most noteworthy highlights…excepting the talking anus story, which of course has already been dealt with.
I don’t mean to bad-mouth Burroughs or his classic work, but the–to be perfectly frank–chaotic mess of its organization and the almost unreadable nature of so much of it force me to be selective of what to analyze, too.
I’ll start with some general comments. The wild disorganization of the novel suggests than Burroughs, in his throwing at us of one ‘routine’ after another, was less interested in crafting any kind of coherent story than just engaging in writing as a kind of psychotherapy, to deal with his pain and guilt over having killed Vollmer, among other things I’ll go into soon enough. In all of the use of four-letter words (something that would have been far more shocking back in the late 1950s than today), sexually explicit scenes, drug use, and violence, he seems to be trying to get a lot of painful emotional baggage out of his system, just throwing it all down on paper.
On the other hand, there is a bit of structure to the novel in the A-B-A form of first, Lee being chased by the cops, then a kind of descent into the underworld, so to speak, of drugs, sex, and all-around decadence, and finally a return to being pursued by the cops (i.e., starting with Hauser and O’Brien), leading to the chase from the beginning of the novel, giving it an overall cyclical form.
Burroughs, in the 1950s especially, was a man on the margins of society as both gay and a drug abuser. He would have felt the contempt of all of those of ‘straight America’ every day without any relenting. It’s only natural that he would have wanted to lash out at those who’d rejected him, and so he did it through the rough language, frank homosexuality, and in-your-face depictions of drug use. People were shocked at it back then, but we shouldn’t at all be surprised at a book chock-full of images of castration, sodomy, pederasty, and sadomasochism, as well as horror at the excesses of abuse of authority.
Such abuse of authority is singularly personified in Dr. Benway. There’s a scene in the “Hospital” section of the novel in which he’s operating on a patient, though it reads far more like him indulging in torture. He clearly demonstrates his sociopathic tendencies in ways not at all touched on in the film. Tellingly, he and his medical team are operating in, of all places, a lavatory.
Benway means to massage the patient’s heart with the rubber vacuum cup end of a toilet plunger; he washes it in toilet bowl water instead of properly sterilizing it. After his assistant has made an incision, Benway works the cup up and down on it, making blood spurt in all directions. When the patient has clearly died, all Benway has to say is, “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.”
Now, that’s what I call a talking asshole.
Benway as personifying the medical profession’s abuse of authority, as seen in his Rehabilitation Center, is a parody of the kind of doctors Burroughs would have seen while treated for his opioid addiction in the Lexington Medical Center.
Another routine I find worthy of mention comes a little further down in the “Hospital” section, in which a man sings “The Star Spangled Banner” with a slight lisp. As the tenor begins singing, his voice breaks into a high falsetto. Hating how obviously, stereotypically homosexual he sounds, the Technician has him fired and replaced with a “sex-changed Liz athlete,” who is “a fulltime tenor at least.” The Lesbian belts out the national anthem with “a tremendous bellow.” Having stereotypical gays and lesbians sing the anthem is clearly meant as a ‘screw you’ to a country so hostile to them.
Another amusing routine, in the section titled, “A.J.’s Annual Party,” involves the watching of a porno film. A young woman named Mary tells her young lover, Johnny, to get naked. She wants to give him a rim job, so first she washes his ass clean.
After the rimming, she straps on a dildo called the “Steely Dan III from Yokohama.” (There were two Steely Dan dildos, briefly mentioned to have been previously used by her; of course, the American rock band from the 1970s was named after the dildo.) Mary fucks Johnny in the ass with the Steely Dan III.
After she’s done with him, a boy named Mark arrives, gets naked, and fucks Johnny in the ass on a bed. After their sex, the two boys and Mary go to a gallows, where Mark puts a noose around Johnny’s neck. As he’s hanged and dangling, he has a full erection, which she puts inside herself. She screams at Mark to cut the rope to let Johnny down, which Mark does. Then Mary starts biting off pieces of Johnny’s face: she sucks out his eyes, bites off his lips, nose, “great hunks of cheek,” and his prick.
After Mark aggressively fucks Mary, she wants to hang him, but he hangs her instead, having transformed into Johnny. Then they immolate themselves…etc, etc, etc.
Anyway, I find the fucking of Johnny with the Steely Dan by Mary, as well as her biting off of his face, to be allegorical of a feminist reversal of sex roles, a turning of the tables, rather like the “Happy International Women’s Day” scene in Deadpool. The hangings are rather like autoerotic asphyxia, only without the auto-. The immolation seems symbolic not only of the fiery passion of lust, but also of the destructive effects of pornography in general.
The reversal of sex roles is analogous to the reversal of roles of the anus and mouth in the talking anus story, as allegorical of the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, as I described above. Indeed, shortly after Benway’s telling of that story, there’s mention of an Arab boy in Timbuktu “who could play a flute with his ass.”
Next, we can deal with a section called “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone.” The notion of an “Islam, Incorporated,” for which Lee works in Interzone, is an interestingly paradoxical one. A corporation named after the Muslim faith? Corporations are what capitalism leads to if the businesses are successful…and they’re successful if they can do a lot of maximizing of profit…at the expense of their toiling workers.
Islam, on the other hand, is a religion ideally devoted to helping the poor and doing other good works, quite antithetical to capitalism. Also, capitalism, in the form of imperialism, has done more to cause misery, suffering, and oppression to Muslim-majority countries over the past hundred years or so (i.e., Zionism) than anything else.
Burroughs’s use of “Islam, Incorporated” seems meant as a critique of the authoritarianism of both religion and capitalism, as going against the individual rights that he so cared about protecting. The point is that he saw such restriction on individual liberties in the bourgeois government, religion in general, and bureaucracy.
He was once asked in an interview if he supported libertarianism and the Libertarian Party, which of course advocates the “free market.” Burroughs said he didn’t even know what ‘libertarianism’ is. The interviewer described the ideology merely in terms of having as few laws as possible, which Burroughs whole-heartedly agreed with. Had the interviewer mentioned the pro-capitalist aspect of the party, I rather doubt that Burroughs would have agreed with the ideology all that much; as with Rush in their early, naïve, pro-Ayn Rand years, advocating “small government” was about individualism, not giving a free pass to unaccountable corporate tyranny.
With that out of the way, let’s now look at the four political parties of Interzone: the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Divisionists, and the Factualists, this last one being the one Burroughs favored, for “The Factualists are anti-Liquidationist, anti-Divisionist, and above all anti-Sender.”
The Liquefactionists want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity. The Divisionists subdivide and replicate themselves, and the Senders want to control everyone through telepathy. In other words, all three of these parties act, in their own specific ways, to undermine, negate, and stifle individual freedom.
Scholars of NL have debated whether the references to drug abuse are meant to be taken literally, at face value, or meant to be taken as a metaphor for broader forms of social control. I’d say it’s both: certainly the metaphorical interpretation is implied when it says, towards the end of this section about Interzone’s political parties, that “sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like junk.” (Burroughs’s emphasis) Sending, as in what the Senders do, and junk, as in what junkies abuse.
Furthermore, Burroughs calls the Senders “The Human Virus,” and that “Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, [are] all symptoms of The Human Virus.” Note how all of these are also symptoms of capitalist government.
IV: Conclusion
The excesses of drug abuse and sex in NL should not be viewed as mere self-indulgence on Burroughs’s part, nor as mere shock-value for its own sake. They are a comment on a sick society in which people try to cope by escaping into a world of superficial, physical pleasure that is ultimately unsatisfying.
Consider how many people today try to escape their unhappy lives through drugs, pornography, OnlyFans, doomscrolling on social media, etc., among other addictions, instead of doing the difficult work of organizing and rising up against our oppressive, genocidal governments.
After all, people might fear that all that hard work could just lead to such dangers as are allegorized in the talking anus story or the violent goings-on in that porno film with Mary, Johnny, and Mark. All the same, we have our own versions of political parties that are, at best, mere variations on the same ideology: keep everyone under control, assimilated, and conforming, without an ounce of real individuality.
We need to build our own ‘Factualist’ party, if you will. If not, we’ll just keep on doping and letting the bourgeois government shove a Steely Dan III up our asses.
Infinite Ocean 
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