“ … Panorama of the city of Interzone … The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market … A place where the unknown past and emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum … ”

Thus writes William S. Burroughs in his highly radical and equally controversial novel Naked Lunch. Interzone: the kaleidoscopic playground where hipsters and insects shoot-up and fornicate side-by-side. A hellish landscape that David Cronenberg adopted for his ‘adaptation’ of Burroughs’s landmark novel.

Cronenberg regards himself somewhat as one of Burroughs’s many artistic successors:

“I think both Burroughs and I are very interested in metamorphosis or transformation, and that naturally leads us to attempt to have some understanding of the nature of disease and the relationship of the human condition and disease.”

Kindred spirits they are, both becoming the chief prophets of their craft. Burroughs’s novel has been thanked for the progressive transformation of the perception of drug addicts and homosexuals alike through his subversive depictions of the monstrous flesh; Cronenberg has been hailed as the founding father of modern mainstream body horror cinema.

Burroughs attempted to invent a new style of writing, a sort of anti-literary literature that broke down linguistic conventions to the point that it seemed his syntax would completely destabilise and deconstruct the very fabric of language itself. This now seems the only plausible way that Burroughs could have depicted his cosmic zoo of exotic and depraved decadence. Similarly, Cronenberg’s mainstream acceptance stemmed from his experimentation with ‘plastic realities’. The director used latex moulds and special effects technology pioneered in the horror genre, yet his work attempted to transcend the shock body-horror of gore cinema, and his conceptual scripts were given fleshy form. Take for instance James Woods’s character Max Renn becoming the slave of televisual imagery, and in inevitable Cronenbergian metamorphosis, developing an oozing VCR orifice. Both writer and filmmaker using their chosen form to give materiality and physicality to their metaphors and motifs.

Yet Cronenberg’s film is a creature of its own. Its almost as if three subjects — the novel, Burroughs’s life, and Cronenberg’s classic style — where thrown into the The Fly’s telepod and out the other side came the amalgamation that is this film. It’s a metatextual adaptation — a psychedelic homage to Burroughs and his work — fusing elements of the novel (Interzone, Mugwumps and heroin addiction) with much mythologised elements of Burroughs’s life (the accidental killing of his own wife, working as a bug exterminator, and heroin addiction).

Cronenberg chooses to respond to Burroughs’s work rather than simply recreate it for the camera. Because of this creative license, the film does more than any simple adaptation can hope to do. It is a film in spirit, that finds a soul in the union of Cronenberg and Burroughs’s perverse love of the grotesque. Perhaps it is this that has allowed the film to achieve a certain cult following in the same way that the novel and the writer has. It works as an introduction to Burroughs’s sprawling, convoluted and confusing non-linear novel, that relies on a montage of “routines” — the name that Burroughs gave to the ‘chapters’ of the novel — to completely destabilise the language systems that it operates within. Images of Mugwumps oozing fluid, and monstrous typewriters that talk out of an anus-like orifice prepare the viewer for the doped-up ravings and paedophilic fantasies that many critics have reduced the novel to.

The film is literary in its depiction of cryptic images that defy simple explanation — “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” — and Interzone is as much a playground for the filmmaker as it is for its characters, allowing candid exploration of twisted and grotesque fantasies. The film does not exist too far out of its own context. It is a film that speaks about itself as much as it speaks about the novel and writer. And it is perhaps because of this that the film becomes the perfect side-dish to a banquet you will never forget.