I, Mugwump: projection, abjection, and Cronenbergian monstrosity in Naked Lunch

New Review of Film and Television Studies ISSN: 1740-0309 (Print) 1740-7923 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfts20 I, Mugwump: projection, abjection, and Cronenbergian monstrosity in Naked Lunch Adam Charles Hart To cite this article: Adam Charles Hart (2017) I, Mugwump: projection, abjection, and Cronenbergian monstrosity in Naked�Lunch, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 15:2, 162-171, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2017.1303233 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1303233 Published online: 05 May 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 190 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfts20 New Review of film aNd TelevisioN sTudies, 2017 vol. 15, No. 2, 162–171 https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1303233 I, Mugwump: projection, abjection, and Cronenbergian monstrosity in Naked Lunch Adam Charles Hart department of english, North Carolina state university, Raleigh, NC, usa ABSTRACT The art film Naked Lunch (1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Cronenberg, but it also features both monsters and monstrosity. Protagonist Bill Lee wanders passively through a surreal landscape populated with fantastical creatures feeding him orders that correspond to the impulses he does not recognize within himself. By Cronenberg’s own description, these monsters are projections, excusing and externalizing Lee’s internal, unacknowledged anxieties. Since these monsters are embodied outside himself, Lee never has to confront his internal conflicts as such. Engaging with writings on horror and monsters by Julia Kristeva, Noël Carroll, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, this essay uses Naked Lunch to develop a Cronenbergian theory of monstrosity. Monsters objectify the abject, but in doing so evade the sources of abjection. Cronenberg, a filmmaker constantly exploring abjection and monstrosity, for the first time in his filmography articulates this problematic relationship between them explicitly in Naked Lunch. KEYWORDS david Cronenberg; Julia Kristeva; Noël Carroll; william s. Burroughs; monstrosity; abjection; horror Although it was his first film since Fast Company (1979) not to be received or marketed as a horror film, David Cronenberg speaks of Naked Lunch (1991) in explicitly horrific terms: not merely a film of monsters – featuring some of Cronenberg and special effects maestro Chris Walas’ most inventive creations – but the film itself is monstrous. It is not a direct adaptation or translation of William S. Burroughs’ 1959 source novel – which Cronenberg points out would cost ‘$400–500 million if you were to film it literally’, not to mention that it would also be ‘banned in every country in the world’. Instead, Cronenberg claims that he was ‘forced to do something else: to fuse my own sensibility with Burroughs and create a third thing that neither he nor I would have done on his own … It’s like Burroughs and me fusing in the telepod of The Fly (1986)’ (Rodley 1997, 161). The film, as Cronenberg characterizes it, is a creature that CONTACT adam Charles Hart achart2@ncsu.edu © 2017 informa uK limited, trading as Taylor & francis Group NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 163 troubles categorical boundaries, splicing in other Burroughs stories as well as Burroughs’ own biography and fusing together authors, mediums, and modes. Fittingly, Naked Lunch is also a film about monsters and monstrosity. Through the fuzzy, fantastic reality of the protagonist Bill Lee’s (Peter Weller) Interzone, Cronenberg works through a series of ideas about the psychological (and esthetic) functions of monsters, ambivalently exploring their role as manifestations of internal anxieties. This article will analyze the role of monsters and monstrosity in Naked Lunch, and will use the film to develop a Cronenbergian theory of monstrosity that illuminates his engagement in other, more conventionally ‘horrific’ films. It will do so through my own monstrous fusion, of the philosopher and film theorist Noël Carroll’s monster-centric theory of horror and the philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva’s writings on abjection. From abjection to monstrosity Noël Carroll locates the horror genre in its monsters: horror requires a monster and our curiosity about monstrosity drives our interest in the genre. Building his monster theory on Mary Douglas’ classic anthropological study Purity and Danger, Carroll observes that monsters are ‘impure’ in the same way that Douglas describes cultural conceptions of impurity regarding animals like lobsters (which live in the sea but crawl like land animals) or winged insects (which have four legs like land animals, but fly like birds): ‘Things that are interstitial, that cross the boundaries of the deep categories of a culture’s conceptual scheme, are impure’ (Carroll 1990, 31, 32). Monsters, per Carroll, are ‘beings or creatures which specialize in formlessness, incompleteness, categorical interstitiality and categorical contradictoriness’(1990, 32). They blur the lines between living and dead, human and beast, organic and inorganic, singular and multiple, etc., or fail to fully inhabit a category. Vampires or ghosts, for example, are both living and dead – or, perhaps, they question the validity of those most basic categories through which we understand and order the universe. We instinctively recognize these category violations as not just troubling, but unnatural, Carroll argues, and we respond with both fear and disgust. Julia Kristeva, writing her own theory of horror, identifies the horrifying properties of abjection using the same anthropological source material, and in nearly identical terms. Kristeva associates abjection with ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva 1982, 5). In particular, the ambiguities of abjection threaten the very basic oppositions between ‘I/Other, Inside/Outside – an opposition that is vigorous but pervious, violent but uncertain’ (1982, 7). So, while Carroll provides an ‘entity-based’ theory of horror, in which he insists on monstrosity being an objectal state that requires a being to 164 A. C. HART embody and contain category violations, Kristeva is explicit: ‘there is nothing either objective or objectal to the abject’ (1982, 9). Abjection is an erasure of boundaries, a lack of containment. The threat of abjection is at base a threat to the self and its tenuous opposition to the outside world, the not-self; or, in linguistic terms, between subject and object. To objectify is to dispel the abject.1 The abject has the capacity to produce that feeling of instability because, per Kristeva, it reminds us of our own subjective fragility. Once it is stabilized – on screen, for example, or in a creature – it is no longer truly abject, despite any lingering abject associations one might have with it. Instead, it becomes grotesque, or monstrous. Kristeva’s response to the ‘art of abjection’ – gallery artists, many of them contemporaries of Cronenberg, similarly concerned with transgressing bodily order – addresses exactly this issue: if ‘abject’ bodily fluids are made into artistic works that can be purchased by collectors and displayed in museums within an esthetic context, then they are necessarily made into objects. As such, they may overcome the residual abjection of the substances from which they are made. Such an artwork turns gross and offensive substances into fetishes, and ‘the moment it is fetishized, it becomes an object; it becomes a commodity’ (Kristeva and Lotringer 1999, 30).2 Any abject figure, or abject spectacle, is always on the verge of objectification, because abjection is fundamentally a relationship to the subject and exteriority of any kind may stabilize that relationship. This dynamic between object and abject is at the heart of my own, highly Cronenbergian monster theory. In my monstrous fusion in which I place the rigorously anti-psychoanalytic Carroll and the Lacanian ‘semanalyst’ Kristeva into the telepod, monstrosity can be understood as a stabilization of category transgression. It embodies and objectifies what in monsters might be fearsome, shifting, or ephemeral. Whether or not the monster’s body is stable, its status as object external to the subject – and its status as onscreen spectacle – is secure. We tend to think of monsters as the sources of fear, but we might productively think of the function of monsters being more closely aligned with limitation and objectification. Mugwump monstrosity Throughout his filmography, Cronenberg has shown an insistent interest in explorations of transformations: of the body, of the mind, of identity. Film after film explores ways in which separation between bodies and psyches might be complicated and undone. His films about telepathy (1969’s Stereo and 1981’s Scanners) posit not just a mode of non-verbal communication, but a meeting and merging of minds, and the physical manifestations of those psychic fusions. Films like Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), and Videodrome (1983) depict bodies and identities in transition, minds reshaping bodies, and vice versa. Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999) both focus on fusions between NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 165 humans and technology. The former film’s car crash fetishists eroticize and pursue the ‘reshaping of the human body by modern technology’, while the latter film’s gamers create new orifices and new modes of perception by plugging directly into video game systems. Spider (2002), meanwhile, depicts a schizophrenic protagonist whose mind is just as out-of-control as are the bodies in Cronenberg’s more science fictional films. More recent films like A History of Violence (2005) and A Dangerous Method (2011) adopt somewhat more naturalistic – and explicit – approaches to unstable, transitional subjects as characters adopt radically different, and evolving, emerging identities. Even The Fly (1986), probably his most traditional ‘creature feature’, is less concerned with the threat associated with the monster than it is with the mutating, evolving figure of its protagonist, which never fully crystallizes into a stable physiology or psychology. Scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) transforms not into the ‘fly’ of the title, but into ‘Brundlefly’, a fusion that troubles the boundaries between human and insect, and which cannot be reduced to one or the other. Some body parts fall off, while others change, its no-longer-human protagonist observing his own physiological changes with the detached curiosity of a medical researcher. Meanwhile, Brundle has been fully fused in both body and mind with the fly. Neither Brundle nor fly, he is ‘Brundlefly’ – and Brundlefly is a figure whose mind and body are constantly changing. The film doesn’t just follow a physical transformation, but a transformation of identity, of self. It’s a monstrous, continuously evolving category violation seen from the inside. Whether or not it’s manifested through monsters and other generically determined conventions of the horror genre, Cronenberg consistently uses his films to map out and test the edges of the self, and to trouble the basic foundations of individual identities. He is, in short, concerned with abjection. The always-shifting bodies and psyches of Cronenberg’s creatures and characters bring a sense of abject instability even to his monsters, but nowhere does he work through the monster function and its relation to abjection more thoroughly than in Naked Lunch. This is precisely because Bill Lee asserts a radical separation between himself and his monsters. He fails to see the fundamentally abject blurring of lines between them. Naked Lunch is suffused with abject imagery: slimy, dripping, transforming bodies, sometimes with impressively imagined orifices. But it’s also a film of monsters: a giant bug that speaks through a suspiciously mammalian anus, various creaturely typewriters, the quivering mass of erogenous signifiers referred to by Cronenberg as the ‘sex blob’ (Browning 2007, 111), and, of course, the Mugwumps. In Carroll’s terms, Cronenberg’s Mugwumps are monstrous because they blur the line between human and animal, looking something like a humanoid dinosaur, and behaving and speaking with the voice of a man. But, like all of the film’s creatures – the monstrous bugs and talking typewriters and sex blobs – they more pointedly blur the boundaries between internal and 166 A. C. HART external. The film blatantly declares its creatures’ status as projections of Lee’s own deeply conflicted psyche, ‘forcing’ him to go undercover as a homosexual. In interviews, Cronenberg makes this explicit: ‘In the script, the Burroughs character Bill Lee creates this insect controller. It tells him he must be a homosexual, that he’s got to play the role because it’s a good cover for him as an agent. But he has created this; he’s making it his excuse. He’s demanding of himself that he must do it. But it’s for ‘other reasons’, not because he’s homosexual’ (Rodley 1997, 163, 164). The gendered and sexualized aspects of Cronenbergian monstrosity have long been objects of critique from detractors (Wood 2004; McLarty 2015; Creed 1993), but here Cronenberg dramatizes a character’s repression of his queerness, and the monstrous manifestations that result from that repression. Here, Cronenberg demonstrates how Lee’s denial of his sexuality leads to both monstrous behavior (the shooting of his wife) and literal monsters, feeding him the instructions he cannot admit he wishes to receive. This is precisely Cronenberg’s reconception of monstrosity in Naked Lunch: because the film is so explicit about their projective origins in Lee’s denial of his own queerness, they are both internal and external. And so the film uses monsters to explore abjection. Nick Davis parses the film’s unique relation to the fantastic in Deleuzian terms, pointing out that the film asserts ‘incompossible’ truths: these creatures are both real and hallucinations, with neither version being fully consistent with or recuperable into the other (Davis 2013, 74–86). However, Cronenberg also recognizes the seductive power of monsters as stabilizing agents. While the film might be open about the fuzzy line between Lee’s psyche and the figures that populate the hallucinatory outside world, Lee is creating, as Cronenberg says, an ‘excuse’. He treats his monstrous contacts as external beings. They embody and appear to stabilize that which he refuses to confront within himself. In Naked Lunch, the viewer cannot fully identify the distinctions between ‘reality’ and the protagonist’s hallucinations, and neither can the protagonist. Of course, the protagonist doesn’t seem all that curious about the distinction because it is not an explanation he wants to hear. Cronenberg’s investment in a sort of paradoxically abject form of monstrosity is indicative of his uneasy relationship with horror more broadly. In the influential formula of Cronenberg’s highest-profile detractor, Robin Wood, horror films dramatize a clash between the monster’s return of the repressed and the restrictive forces of normality (Wood 2004). The Cronenbergian worldview sees no such opposition, even if he shares a similarly psychoanalytic, therapeutic project: Cronenbergian monstrosity, often issuing from the repressed and the neurotic, unearths the internal self, making it visible (and sometimes dangerous) to all. The monstrous is a revelation of that which had been hidden about the subject, and so Cronenbergian monstrosity is simply an extension of normality, always already co-existing with it, hidden inside of it. As a fantastical form of therapy, the problem of monstrosity usually arises in Cronenberg’s films around questions of denial and repression rather than through their attacks NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 167 on representatives of normality. In Naked Lunch, Bill Lee willfully refuses to recognize the connections between himself and the return of his repressed desires incarnated in his creatures, which becomes even more fantastically exacerbated when this projection and denial results in him shooting his wife. He ignores abjection, seeing only monstrosity. In Cronenbergian terms (as well as those of Wood), he is a poor reader of monsters. The Cronenbergian subject Naked Lunch’s Bill Lee is a typical Cronenbergian protagonist: a cold, detached observer who serves as a blank-faced witness to a vividly surreal landscape in which monstrosity à la Carroll is everywhere. Lee begins the film as an exterminator and ends as a writer. The film follows him through a series of addictions to various insect – related drugs, as well as meetings with various ‘case agents’ who issue him directives: murder, writing, and sex, in that order. After being ordered by a giant bug to kill his wife Joan (Judy Davis), Lee shoots her in what he calls their ‘William Tell routine’ – a macabre, tragic episode borrowed from Burroughs’ own biography. Following the suggestions of another case agent, a monstrous ‘Mugwump’, Lee escapes to the fantastical North African city of Interzone, where his sexual liaisons include both the young local Kiki (Joseph Scorsiani) and the American Joan Frost (Judy Davis), who happens to be an exact doppelganger for his dead wife. The film ends with Lee escaping Interzone with Joan for Annexia. Asked by the border guards to prove that he’s a writer before allowing him into the country, Lee repeats the ‘William Tell routine’ with Joan Frost, once again shooting her in the forehead. The guards accept this as proof of his profession, and let him into Annexia. In the novel, the Mugwumps are described by Burroughs as reptilian humanoids with a penchant for absurdly violent sexuality. Cronenberg’s Mugwumps are distinct from Burroughs’s in a way that serves as an emblem for Cronenberg’s larger project for the film. Passive creatures that ‘specialize in sexual ambivalence’, they are voiced by the same actor (Peter Borestki) who plays an elderly exterminator – implied to be an old junkie – and who also voices the various bugs and typewriters that give Lee his marching orders throughout the film. These creatures supervise and direct Lee, giving him assignments and missions (Figure 1). They end up in chains, with junkies fellating the phallic protuberances on their heads for their highly addictive secretions. As Cronenberg makes clear, all of the monstrous case officers were conceived in explicitly psychoanalytic terms as manifestations of Lee’s internal conflicts and anxieties. They embody and enable a disavowal of Lee’s own guilt, his own compulsions, and, especially, his own sexuality – a disavowal that fails in the end, as he repeats his great transgression. The landscape, the narrative, and the creatures found within them externalize a network of internal conflicts. Through this projection, Lee (and the film) never has to fully parse the precise 168 A. C. HART Figure 1. a mugwump counsels Bill lee (Peter weller) in Naked Lunch (david Cronenberg, 1991). relationship between sex, violence, drugs, and writing. They are all, at various points, equated, and Mugwumps allow for a monstrous embodiment of that equation. That is, Lee’s internal conflicts never fully resolve into a coherent set of relationships precisely because they are embodied by creatures. Lee appears to be an infinitely passive character, who disavows responsibility for his own actions, and even his own desires. But his one decisive action, the killing of his wife, reverberates throughout the film. It structures the film’s narrative, such as it is, by problematically locating Lee’s denial, guilt, and creative inspiration in Joan’s murdered body while attributing responsibility for murder to the monstrous agents who give Lee orders and question Joan’s humanity. Lee – and to some extent the film – never fully engages with his violence, in part because the monstrous narratives are so seductive, even at their most absurd. Naked Lunch’s monsters are, like any monster, semi-coherent assemblages, not just in terms of the category violations described by Carroll, but in the anxieties they embody: guilt, shame, sexuality, addiction, and violence. The film poses tantalizing questions about their relationship, but never resolves them into any identifiable system. They are all, of course, linked, but they’re linked in the sense that they are all manifestations of the same conflicted psyche. Projection means in part that the thorny internal anxieties don’t need to be disentangled; the same goes for monstrosity. Lee is a remarkably unpsychologized character. Peter Weller gives a blankfaced performance, bringing a subtle deadpan humor to a character with very limited emotional expression. Lee sleepwalks through New York and Interzone as an unresponsive protagonist, an unreliable witness to whom things are done. The few moments of genuine emotion we witness are surprising, even shocking. After seeing an Arab-run open-air market stall selling black centipedes (one NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 169 of the film’s fantastical narcotics), Lee suddenly breaks into tears. This scene arrives early in the film, before he leaves for Interzone, and immediately before he shoots his wife. Out of time and out of place, the scene seems almost like it has been misplaced in the editing room, its placement decided by Burroughsian cut-up methods. As a result, we get the grieving response to Joan’s killing, or some approximation of it, before the act has even been committed. And we get some suggestion that the ‘exotic’ city of Interzone is not a fully foreign location that it has already begun to bleed into New York before Lee has booked passage. What I’m working toward is the assertion that Lee is a void at the center of Naked Lunch not just because he’s stoned on bug powder, but because his insides are on the outside. He has essentially hollowed himself out: projection here externalizes not just his conflicts and anxieties, but decision-making, agency, etc. He acts as if he has no free will, as if he has no choice in the matter. As if the act has already been committed. Cronenberg is not just using this sort of projective externalization to explore Lee’s psyche. He’s using it to interrogate the very process of projection and the dangers of disavowal. For Cronenberg, failure to confront those sorts of anxieties lessen one’s humanity – it is directly related to Lee’s wooden demeanor and lack of action. That failure, however, might be an essential part of being a writer. Mugwriting The film ties together all of Lee’s conflicts and anxieties not just with monsters and creatures, but also with the act of writing. Writing is directly conflated at different points with sex, addiction, and violence. Lee’s typewriters give him orders because the externalization they enable is itself a form of writing. Lee’s projections are narratives, and his writings are projections. They externalize his internal conflict, but, as with his monsters, he feels no connection to them: ‘I didn’t write that’, he insists. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s essay on ‘Monster Culture’ can help us to pivot this argument here. Cohen discusses monsters in Derridean terms, focusing on différance: monsters are a signifying system, but, as in any form of writing, the sign is never fully identical to the signified (Cohen 1996, 4). And so the monster can never fully embody any particular anxiety, and defeat of the monster can never fully eradicate whatever anxieties it embodies. There is always a remainder. Cronenberg brings that sense of différance to the forefront by making the monster/monsters so unstable. The world of Naked Lunch is constantly shifting, and the giant bug becomes Mugwump becomes the Clark Nova typewriter becomes Mugwriter. One can never get a handle on who is directing or surveilling Lee, and the film is awfully insistent that it doesn’t matter. Neither Lee nor the film seems to expend much energy trying to pick apart the ‘reality’ within the narrative. So there’s a sense in which Lee is not just showing indifference to 170 A. C. HART his own hallucinatory mental state, but to the fundamental conflicts that they are clearly, if incoherently, representing. This mode of projective monstrosity is constantly depicted as an inadequate response to Lee’s problems. But Cronenberg’s critique extends further. Naked Lunch is, in the end, a critique of the monster function, and perhaps of the genre with which he has always been associated. Lee is clearly an abject figure whose psychic boundaries are porous and fragile, and projection is an attempt to stabilize those troubling elements. That’s what monsters do best; they’re receptacles, locations onto which anxieties can be placed. They objectify his abjection, but insufficiently so. So the film ends with a remainder, a reprisal of the originary, structuring trauma of the film as Lee repeats the ‘William Tell routine’, shooting his wife’s doppelganger in the head. It closes on an uncertain note, as Lee’s failure to escape his internal conflicts – his sexuality, guilt, grief – becomes evident. As he crosses over into a new, unknown country, his flight seems to continue, but now he does so as a writer. And, of course, as a murderer. To the various incompossible realities in the film we must add one more: the writing of the book Naked Lunch. The film is, among other things, a fantastical version of the process of the book’s writing. And the book is, of course, the source of the Muwgumps. So the film concocts a situation of rhyming projection with that of its protagonist: do the creatures come from the book, or do they compel its writing? The film asks its viewers to read each event and each character (and each creature) not only as taking place within the book but also outside of it: in Burroughs’ life and in Bill Lee’s life. Cronenberg sees the book as a (failed) exercise in therapeutic projection on Burroughs’ part: ‘He felt that maybe writing Naked Lunch had cured him of his homosexuality, and that he was really looking for cunt’ (Rodley 1997, 163). That is, Cronenberg’s very Kristevan understanding of the book’s writing was that Burroughs sought the expulsion of his own sexuality through its absurd extremes. This is precisely the sort of psychological projection that makes the film’s monsters so problematic: writing can be revelatory, and even therapeutic, as it brings the author’s insides to the outside, but it can equally be a form of disavowal. It can force confrontation, but also displace that confrontation onto an external narrative. In Naked Lunch, the Mugwumps and other creatures provide an objectification of various anxieties, but their ultimate inadequacy, the remainder that can’t be fully contained within a body, is baked into their initial formula. The creatures serve the basic monster function – they embody fears and anxieties – but they are constantly changing, opening up or spilling out. They fail to provide Lee with the sort of reassuring objectification that he’s seeking (and that monsters usually provide); there isn’t a neat containment. Significantly, it is at the moment of the Mugwumps’ most explicit containment – in chains hanging from a factory ceiling – that Lee finds himself back where he started: shooting his wife in the head, an ultimate assertion of the inadequacy of this externalization. Lee’s murderous act provides evidence for an abjection that NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 171 cannot be sufficiently confronted through monstrosity, or any other form of expulsion or objectification. Notes 1. 2. By focusing on the semiotics of abjection, I differ from Kristeva’s most influential scholar in horror studies, Barbara Creed. Creed’s primary concern with abject imagery, while acutely insightful for analyzing the problematic gender dynamics of monstrosity, is at odds with the semiotic function of abjection (Creed 1993). Kristeva goes on to say that ‘… One might think that even if they show pieces of shit and toilet paper, insofar as it is composed, even in a minimal way, thought out, it is already not the substance. Therefore there is a process of displacement, of pushing aside …’ (Kristeva and Lotringer 1999, 30). Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. References Browning, Mark. 2007. David Cronenberg: Author or Film-maker? Chicago, IL: Intellect Books. Carroll, Noel. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. “Monster Culture: Seven Theses.” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Davis, Nick. 2013. The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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