Today, the Screengrab introduces a new semi-regular feature, in which we look at movie adaptations of high-profile novels. Movies based on books are a dime a dozen -- or at least they were before around 1998, when every single movie became based on a television show that originally aired between 1971 and 1983. But movies based on good books are still rare enough to warrant a closer look, possibly because the qualities that make a good book are rarely the same qualities that make a good movie. Great novels tend to focus on philosophy, psychology, and internal narrative, while great movies often emphasize action, movement and dialogue. All too often, the word "unfilmable" is applied to truly ambitious and complex fiction, as if the very idea of encapsulating on screen what so impresses us on the page, and nowhere is this more obvious than in 1991's Naked Lunch. David Cronenberg, with his literary pretensions, obsession with mutated human bodies, and appetite for the grotesque would seem to make him a natural for making a movie version of William S. Burrough's infamous Beat-influenced black comedy; but even with a like-minded director, filming Naked Lunch would be an uphill battle. It's not a narrative novel in the traditional sense -- or any sense, really; it's more a series of vignettes, impressions, monologues and riffs, more like a heroin-soaked jazz fugue than a story. Even if Cronenberg could find a way to make Burroughs' masterpiece palatable to an audience without getting an X rating (Burroughs was rather fond of notions like talking assholes and rectal mucous), could he make any narrative sense out of a non-narrative novel?
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