Guide Note:

Naked Lunch is a 1991 David Cronenberg film based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name. In the film, Peter Weller plays Bill Lee, an exterminator, who discovers that his wife is using the insecticide he normally uses in his work as a recreational drug. When Lee later begins hallucinating from the insecticide, he begins to believe himself a secret agent assigned by an enormous bug to kill his unfaithful wife.

Fast Facts:

1. Starring: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, and Ian Holm
2. Director: David Cronenberg
3. Producers: Jeremy Thomas and Gabriella Martinelli
4. Released: December 27, 1991 (USA)
5. Run time: 115 mins

Voted by Time as one of the 100 Best English-Language Novels between 1923 and 2005, Burroughs's 1959 novel was written in a fragmented form that the author claimed made the chapters readable in any order. Such was the challenge director Cronenberg faced in bringing Naked Lunch to the screen. The film, in fact, is only partly based on the hallucinatory book, which has exterminator Bill Lee traveling across the world from the United States and Mexico on his way to the Moroccan city of Tangier. The film includes portions of Burroughs life and thinly veiled representations of his friends, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The film also includes a fictionalization of Burroughs's real-life accidental killing of his wife, a killing which occurred while Burroughs was attempting to imitate William Tell's famous shooting of an apple off of his son's head.