Nothing is True: ‘Naked Lunch’ and Film Noir

“Exterminate all rational thought.”

Bill Lee in Naked Lunch

“The stuff that dreams are made of.”

Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon

We can’t exactly pin down film noir. Or perhaps it’s better to say it isn’t desirable to pin down film noir. Paul Schrader suggests that noir is not “conventions of setting and conflict” but rather “more subtle qualities of tone and mood” (582), and that film noir is “first of all a style” (591). James Naremore asks if it is “a period, a genre, a cycle, a style, or simply a ‘phenomenon'” (9); he concludes (or rather, resists concluding) that “film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema; in other words, it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse—a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies” (11). 

Slavoj Žižek rather intriguingly suggests that noir might be a “logic”:

is the crime film only one of the possible fields of the application of the noir logic, that is, is ‘noir‘ a predicate that entertains towards the crime universe the same relationship as towards comedy or western, a kind of logical operator introducing the same anamorphic distortion in every genre it is applied to, so that the fact that it found its strongest application is ultimately a historical contingency?

It is this prospect, that noir is a logic — or, as I will show, an illogic — that finds its ultimate expression in David Cronenberg’s reality-imploding odyssey Naked Lunch (1991). My goal is not to place the film definitively in a film noir or neo-noir canon, but to examine what the film can tell us about film noir’s treatment of the intertwining ideas of subjectivity, reality, control, and the act of writing itself that ties it all together. Naked Lunch functions not so much as a commentary on film noir but instead, by taking a number of tropes to their (il)logical extremes, the film bursts film noir at the seams. In particular, Naked Lunch emphasizes its protagonist’s unreliable narration of the story, his lack of control over his own circumstances as a consequence of his loose grip on reality, and the role that writing plays in forming identity and the very unreliable subjectivity that structures the film. In Naked Lunch, though, it seems that “reliable” or truthful perspectives are a fiction, and that even behind the “unreliable narrator” of so much film noir there are only further levels of unreality.

Naked Lunch opens with two epigraphs, the first of which, attributed to Hassan I Sabbah, reads “Nothing is true; everything is permitted”. The phrase “nothing is true” is as good as any to describe film noir’s unmoored approach to reality (while the phrase “everything is permitted” is as good a phrase as any to described the moral code of noir’s heroes and villains). Film noir searches for truth and finds, at best, a hole where that truth should be. In The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston), for example, the search for the bejeweled bird leads only to emptiness. The ultimate meaninglessness of the lead falcon serves to counter the otherwise neat-and-tidy conclusion, in which we learn the step by step movements that have lead to this point. The false falcon is the hole in the core of the supposed truth, the incompleteness of knowing, the loose thread that will unravel the rest. When Sam Spade calls the bird “[t]he stuff that dreams are made of”, he’s not merely referring to dreams as aspirations: the falcon is literally the stuff of dreams, of elusive and constantly shifting realities that defy us to locate ourselves within them, let alone control them.

Film noir exists in a space of continuously altered or questionable reality. The funhouse sequences in the climax of Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai express noir’s unhinged reality, as the protagonist cascades through a menacing and confusing funhouse only to emerge in the house of mirrors, in which the true and the untrue become indistinguishable. In a film noir world of dutch angles and chiaroscuro lighting, reality falls away. “No character”, Paul Schrader writes, “can speak authoritatively from a space that is being continually cut into ribbons of light” (586); if film noir characters are unreliable, it is because they speak from just such a discontinuous and uncertain space.

Films like The Maltese Falcon and The Lady From Shanghai represent a noir-typical tension between perception and the real (Orr 67), exemplified for Stanley Orr by The Usual Suspects (1995, Bryan Singer). While Orr cites the film as representative of a newer postmodernist tendency within film noir, the film actually works within a modernist frame story that undermines the postmodernist tale that Verbal Kint invents for Dave Kujan and which provides the bulk of the film. The battle of wills and minds between Kujan and Kint represents Christina Gledhill’s description of film noir as “a struggle between different voices for control over the telling of the story” (79), and it is the way that struggle plays out — within a frame distinct from Kint’s story — that fixes the reality of the film. The frame story, alongside the unreliable narrator, implies a reliable reality outside of the questionable story, a reality emphasized by the disappearance of Kint’s visible deformity in the film’s final moments. Disability functions as a deviation from the abled norm, the casting off of which signifies the return of the real: the audience has emerged from Kint’s dreamworld alongside him, and the tension between real and perceived is resolved suddenly with the effect of a shock upon the viewer. The audience may never know what “really” happened, but rest assured something really did (as Rabin says in the film, “[i]t all makes sense when you look at it right”). The Usual Suspects, then, exemplifies the unreality of film noir but only by locating that unreality within a frame of objective truth.

The same can be said of David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), a maze-like film that puts the audience into the shoes of the noir hero, struggling to unwind a complicated series of narrative threads. Unlike Christopher Nolan’s Following (2000), in which a scrambled order of events can be somewhat easily assembled into a cogent (albeit unreliable) narrative, Mulholland Dr. offers no such resolution or possibility. The film is laid out as a conventional detective story, as the amnesiac Rita (Laura Elena Harring) searches for her identity after a car accident. Eventually, the roles scramble, and many of the same actors embody different characters. The film defies audience expectation of narrative progression, but ultimately, Mulholland Dr. reads like a puzzle for an audience to solve. Lynch’s tight construction creates a series of clues and interconnected logics which beg the film to be decoded or solved like a puzzle, suggesting a reality — albeit a surreal one — that can be grasped “when you look at it right”.

Naked Lunch, by contrast, offers no such puzzle; rather, the film rejects the idea that there is an underlying meaning to be found. If Mulholland Dr. suggests that the dream of the Maltese Falcon can be deciphered if examined carefully, Naked Lunch suggests not only that such a solution is out of our grasp, but that the hole in reality is bigger than we think. The film accomplishes this in part through the connection to the act of writing.

Composition is both central and peripheral throughout film noir, whether in the oral storytelling of films with subjective narration (i.e. Double Indemnity, Following, and The Usual Suspects), or in the artistic production of various characters: writing in Following and Basic Instinct (1992, Paul Verhoeven); screenwriting and/or filmmaking in Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder), The Player (1992, Robert Altman), and Mulholland Dr.; painting in Scarlett Street (1945, Fritz Lang); even the origami figures in Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott). This composition is often directly tied to subjectivity, identity, and reality. In Scarlett Street, Chris’ paintings are passed off as Kitty’s, and after Chris murders Kitty, it is Kitty’s supposed authorship of the paintings that exonerates Chris. Catherine’s novels in Basic Instinct play out in real life: the murder that opens the film follows the plot of one of her novels, while the plot she describes of her upcoming novel mirrors the film to come. Similarly, writing within the film lays out the plot of Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player. In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond’s script mirrors her mental state, and Joe Gillis’ attempts to edit the script into “coherence” (Gillis’ word) is a de facto attempt to make Norma Desmond sane. Norma is doomed to insanity by Gillis’ moonlighting on another script (“Untitled Love Story”) which has strong connections to the reality of the people writing it, who fall in love as they write their untitled love story. In short, composition in film noir is about identity as much as the works being produced, and Naked Lunch is an extreme example.

Naked Lunch centers around Bill Lee, a writer and exterminator living in New York in the 1950’s. After he kills his wife, who is addicted to the substance he uses to kill bugs, he takes the advice of an insectoid government operative and flees to Interzone in North Africa. Throughout Lee’s stay in Interzone, he writes “reports” from Interzone to some kind of agency, who appears to him in the form of talking insectoid typewriters. In contrast to the writing of Basic Instinct, which clearly telegraphs neatly to reality, the writing in Naked Lunch is fractured, disjointed, and sometimes lacks clear relationship to the events occurring or that have occurred on screen. Even so, when Lee’s friends visit him in Interzone, they rave about the book he’s been writing, “the one you’ve been calling Naked Lunch“, suggesting that Bill Lee is writing the film that we’re watching and that he is a character in his own work. But Naked Lunch exemplifies Robert McRuer’s observation of “the impossibility … of composing, or writing into existence, a coherent and individual self” (146), and as such, Bill Lee emerges as incoherent; not only is Bill Lee unreliable as a locus of the story, there is no suggestion of an external reality. Even when his friends claim he is not hallucinating, there’s little reason to believe him, since he claims his bag contains a writing instrument, while his friends see a bag full of drugs. The sequence functions not only as a reference to the use of drugs in the creative process but also serves to undermine the lack of truth. Do we believe our eyes, which have witnessed Bill put an insectoid typewriter (that was at one point an ordinary typewriter) into a bag, do we believe him when he claims the bag contains a writing tool, do we believe that his friends see the “true” contents of the bag? Do we believe his friends, who have spontaneously appeared in Interzone, when they tell him he’s not hallucinating? There’s no evidence that any of this is truer than anything else. Just as Cronenberg posited and expounded on the idea that “there is nothing real outside our perception of reality” in Videodrome, Naked Lunch similarly presents the diegesis as purely a construct of perception. In this sense, it is erroneous even to claim Bill Lee as an unreliable narrator, since the film suggests, as the epigraph indicates, that nothing is true.

This is the (il)logic of noir taken to its (il)logical extreme. This is the logic, that, as noted earlier, presents the Maltese Falcon as the hollow center of an agreed-upon mutual perception. When the Falcon is discovered to be fake, that is, to exist in a state that differs from their agreed-upon perception of the object, it becomes a black hole that threatens to destroy the fabric of agreed-upon reality. This is the function of the character in Crossfire who tells a series of different stories about the same scenario — a character described by James Naremore as “Kafkaesque” (119) — leaving a hole in a film that already struggles to find reality through flashback structure. Slavoj Žižek calls this “that crack in the half-open window that shakes our sense of reality”, a “gap in reality” (220), the logic that films with unreliable narrators often fail to take to their conclusion, hiding behind the safety of frame stories like that in The Usual Suspects or Double Indemnity, to reassure audiences that yes, “[i]t all makes sense when you look at it right”. Instead, Naked Lunch bursts those seams which always operated in film noir at subtle levels, those aspects that made it always just slightly out of grasp.

Sources

Gledhill, Christina. “Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism”. Feminism & Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print.

Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Updated and expanded ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Orr, Stanley. “Postmodernism, Noir, and The Usual Suspects“. Literature Film Quarterly 27.1 (1999): 65-73. Web. 17 March 2017.

Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir”. Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. “‘The Thing That Thinks’: The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject”. Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. London: Verso, 1993.