It uses Junky‘s Dashiell Hammett style to tell the story of Danny the Car Wiper, an addict who scrounges up a few dollars in an attempt to score on Christmas day. In the same genre is the early story “The Junky’s Christmas” from the Interzone collection.
Their straightforward, hard-boiled narrative lend themselves to a fine noir film. You can imagine, though, that these two early works would be the most easily filmable of any of Burroughs’ texts. In Last Words Burroughs mentions meeting the actor, but a decade later the project still has not come to fruition. (Can you imagine Soft Machine the Movie?) For years there’s been a project floating around for Steve Buscemi to create a film of Queer and/or Junkie.
In fact, few books by Burroughs would be easy to film. Certainly it’s not easy to film, which is why David Cronenberg’s movie - whatever its merits - is less a film of Naked Lunch than a mashup of the Burroughs myth. The book still might tell a good story, but if it’s easily filmable then you have to wonder if it tells its story in a truly literary way.īy this criterion Naked Lunch would be a masterpiece. Is it easy to transpose a given book into film? If so, it implies that the qualities that might distinguish the book as a text - a sense of verbal style, for example, or a unique perspective on inner reality such as stream of consciousness provides - are not particularly prominent. It is always difficult to establish objective criteria for determining the literary worth of a book, but one possibility would be to consider its filmability.
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