Naked Lunch

Release date:1991

Directed by:David Cronenberg

Rated:

Runtime:115 minutes

Naked Lunch is the 1991 Canadian/British/Japanese film adaptation, directed by David Cronenberg, of William S. Burroughs' novel of the same name. Featuring Peter Weller, Ian Holm, Judy Davis, and Roy Scheider, the film is a co-production by film companies of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan.... William Lee is an exterminator who finds that his wife Joan is stealing his insecticide for recreational purposes. When Lee is arrested by the police, he believes he is hallucinating because of "bug powder" exposure. He believes he is a secret agent whose controller assigns him the mission of killing his wife Joan , who is an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Dismissing the bug and its instructions, Lee returns home to find Joan sleeping with Hank , one of his writer friends. Shortly afterwards, he accidentally kills her while attempting to shoot a drinking glass off of her head in a demented kind of William Tell routine. Having inadvertently accomplished his "mission", Lee flees to Interzone.
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A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and... in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The individualism of the presentation makes the personal memoir and the autobiography the two closest relatives among the genres of modern histories. The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements , a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western market of fiction.
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