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I want to be nice to this movie because so many of my friends adore it. But I’ve pondered this review for over a month and can’t put it off any longer. I don’t like this movie. Like, at all. I’m not even sure how to review the damned thing.

Did I enjoy watching it? No.  Do I appreciate it? Parts of it.  Peter Weller is very good in a few scenes, the Howard Shore score is moody and groovy. Chris Walas’ special effects are often pretty nifty. Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography is gorgeous to look at. But what the hell is it about and what am I supposed to take from the experience, besides a shower?

The film, directed by David Cronenberg, is as much an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs book as it is a biography of the author. It’s a little stream-of-consciousness and very surreal, so I had a really hard time grabbing onto anything. I can’t say I completely understand what was happening. Even my friends who love the movie say they don’t completely understand it. And honestly, I don’t always need to understand a movie to enjoy it anyway.

No, my main problem with Naked Lunch is that I just don’t care. It’s about a drug addict bug killer (Weller) whose wife (an underutilized but always amazing Judy Davis) starts snorting his bug powder. He accidentally kills her and goes into exile in some weird netherworld of drug abuse and homosexuality while answering to a bunch of bizarre characters and creatures, including mugwumps who drip jizz from their many spiny tendrils and a giant cockroach who talks out of an asshole on its back. I think there’s some sort of conspiracy afoot, involving an old woman who may or may not be Roy Scheider (Jaws).

Anyway, if I cared more about the self-imposed plights of drug addicts, I might have tried harder to figure out what was happening. But I don’t like watching drug addicts take drugs. And in Naked Lunch, you’re pretty much watching people do drugs for two solid hours, and then you have to hear them whine and cry about how shitty their lives are for having taken all the drugs they’ve taken. I have no pity for such characters. I have disdain for them. I couldn’t invest in Weller or any of the characters in this movie because I have a fundamental dislike for what they do.

That the hallucinations in Naked Lunch are so beautifully (if also horrifically) rendered further alienates me, because I don’t think drugs and drug abuse should be glorified in any way. I would argue that while the film certainly shows the negative side of drug abuse, it also paints a somewhat romantic portrait of it. I just can run with it.

I also don’t enjoy the depiction of homosexuality here. I’m not arguing with the accuracy, and I’m sure the depiction is faithful to Burroughs’ experience. I understand that queer culture in the past century was often relegated to the seedy underworld of society — but I don’t want to see that. It really bothers me to see homosexuality equated with drug abuse and general awfulness. It offends me.

No matter how accurate it is to a time and place, or Burroughs’ own experience, Naked Lunch just isn’t the kind of film I want to see, not something I ever want to re-experience.

With Ian Holm and Julian Sands.