You have to give David Cronenberg an "A" for effort in his attempt to translate William S. Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch to the big screen. The book, loaded with obscene and disgusting imagery, would not make for a good movie (at least not one people would watch). In addition, the book's nonlinear structure also hampers any effort to make a movie that mainstream audiences would enjoy. Cronenberg realized this; so, instead of doing an out and out adaptation, he decided to base the movie around the novel's themes and drew on events from Burroughs' life for the plot.

Events in the movie kick off when William Lee, an exterminator, is informed by a giant, talking fly that his wife Joan is an enemy agent. He believes the whole experience to be a hallucination brought on by drugs and disregards it. Heading home, Joan and he decide to act out their "William Tell" routine, in which Joan places a glass on her head and Lee shoots it off. He misses and accidentally kills her. Informed by a giant insect-like creature called a Mugwump that the authorities are after him, he flees to the Interzone, a bizarre hallucinatory version of Tangiers.

Once there, he finds himself tangled up in a bizarre conspiracy involving a drug called "the black meat," and makes the acquaintance of Tom Frost, another writer, and his wife, whose name is also Joan. Making things even weirder is the fact that she bears an uncanny resemblance to Lee's Joan (in fact they're played by the same actress). As it goes, Tom is working for the enemy, who is revealed to be Dr. A. Benway, a physician Lee met stateside. Benway seeks to destroy the world's supply of the black meat, and replace it with the just as addictive Mugwump juice, of which he will control the supply.

There are some amazing parallels between the life of William Lee and the life of Burroughs' himself. Both men worked as exterminators; both men accidentally killed their wives; and both fled to Tangiers and befriended writers while there. Living in Tangiers, Burroughs typed up a good portion of Naked Lunch which was prepared for publication by his Beat friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who came to visit him. In the movie, Lee must send home reports of the goings on in the Interzone; at the same time he is sending copies of these reports to his friends Hank and Martin, who also come to visit him and inform him that they are preparing the reports for publication. The title of the book? You guessed it...Naked Lunch.