Occupied Territories

Perhaps the most transgressive aspect of Cronenberg’s adaptation [of Naked Lunch] is that it follows the general approach of some of the very worst movie versions of literary classics–for example, Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man and Mishima—by turning what was once fiction into ersatz biography of the author. The vulgar presumption of this approach is that the artist’s life counts for more than the art itself, which is regarded as little more than a symptom. In effect, whatever the artist has done to transform and transcend the banality of his or her own experience is undone by the filmmakers, who turn it back into raw material; by assuming that biography and art are coextensive and virtually interchangeable, they produce works that lack the integrity of either.

—Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Sex and Drugs and Death and Writing”