William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers

“It was a little difficult to see old friend Bill looking at me as if I was a robot sent to check him out. And also to be suggested by him that I examine him to see who he was representing, because he assumed that everybody was an agent at that point. Not necessarily for the government at all; an agent for a giant trust of insects from another galaxy actually. Women were suspect as being agents and Burroughs thought that maybe you had to exterminate all the women, or get rid of them one way or another. Evolve some sort of male that could give birth through parthenogenesis.” <-- Allen Ginsberg Ah, the late great William Seward Burroughs, what a card! Hardcore drug addict, extreme misanthrope, literary outlaw, lover of teenage boys, experimental shotgun painter…and a bit of a nutcase. Even admirers of the man’s work (as I am, finding some of it very inspirational, if pretty creepy; to me ‘The Market’ section from ‘Naked Lunch,’ one of my all-time favourite books, has some of the most beautiful prose poetry ever written in it) would have to say that he was a disturbing genius, living in the theoretical world in his own head and transcribing what he found in there in his fiction as what he actually believed. When he talked about the usefulness of Scientology or the curative powers of orgone boxes or about him being a representative of alien insect trusts he wasn’t kidding, and he’s one of these people whose achievements, to a degree, that you can admire from afar. After all, the above statement, coming from a man who shot his own wife in the head and who subsequently became even more enamored of guns than he had been before the tragic event, is a frightening prospect indeed. However. It’s always interesting to see the man read his own work (which, as has been noted before, adds a great deal to the prose; he truly was a hilarious performer, with his desert-dry voice and wit, which really bring the words on the page before him to life (look for the old, now-deleted abridged Warner Brothers release of ‘Naked Lunch’ if you want to hear a fine reading), as this DVD is testament to. It presents clips from a reading done by El Hombre Invisible in Berlin on 5/9/1986, where he reads segments from works like ‘The Western Lands,’ (his attempt at writing his own Book of The Dead) ‘Naked Lunch’ and ‘Roosevelt After Inauguration’ amongst others. These readings are presented with clips of films made of the text back-projected behind them, to varying degrees of effectiveness, along with a selection of Burroughs’ own paintings or appearances in films ‘Drugstore Cowboy’. The clips of old experimental films like ‘Ghosts at No.9’ and ‘Towers Open Fire’ look very interesting, and I’d personally love to see them in full. Forming the meat of the DVD is an interview with Burroughs conducted by author Jurgen Ploog, who is a pretty bright guy; you’d have to be to interview the subject of this film. Nevertheless, it’s fun to see Burroughs correcting Ploog a number of times on the exact correct usage of words, like some crotchety old English teacher intolerant of mistakes from a pupil. Subjects raised include the word as virus, death, dreams, an evolved humanity getting off the planet earth into space (chuckling, Burroughs wryly notes that any post-human organism achieving escape velocity from terra firma would have to resemble some sort of mutant jellyfish, because we wouldn’t need our bones in space), cut-ups (an interesting if somewhat pointless literary experiment, at least in its more extreme forms – it’s actually a pretty good way of representing the psyche and its stream-of-consciousness perceptions on the page) and more. It’s always fun to hear Burroughs droning away in his nasal atonal emotion-free diction about his often weird and wonderful and wacky theories about life, the looney universe and everything, but there is nothing here that any hardcore fan of the man’s won’t have heard before, I should imagine. And that’s just the ultimate problem with this DVD. Good as it is, it doesn’t showcase any new material, and presents its contents somewhat haphazardly, without rhyme nor reason. It’s just a Burroughs pick-and-mix hodgepodge and should be taken as such. Completists of the man’s work will want to buy this; everybody else won’t care too much, especially as so many people find his wordwork either distasteful or confusing or both. This is definitely worth watching, but it tells no real story and at the end will leave you scratching your head and thinking it could have been so much more. Damned by faint praise indeed.