Cronenberg said he knew that "Naked Lunch" was impossible to film, but he wanted to give it an anecdotal shot anyway. The book itself is an elaborate phantasmagoria of shape shifting stories (or "scenes", as Burroughs liked to call them), hilarious in parts, scatologic and vividly pornographic in others, with enough homoerotica to give religious fundamentalists nightmares, and deeply imbued with the hipster heroin drug scene of the 50's and 60's. In fact, readers of just portions of the starkly id based book said it DID cause them to have nightmares.
A 20 hour elaborate XXX rated animation might handle it. I liked the movie anyway, it included the Burroughs perennial conspiracy theory fave, Doc Benway, and the mugwumps were pretty cool. The movie basically showed his hallucinatory shadow stories following Bill's cycles of drug intoxication and withdrawal, possibly just to give things some tenuous coherence, which is not necessarily shared by the novel.
"Dry wings husking in the junk sick morning.", unforgettable dread poetry.
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