This remarkable footage comes from Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie from 1983. In this scene, two modes of address are skillfully intercut, Burroughs himself reading the hospital passage from early in Naked Lunch, which becomes the voiceover for an actual filmed enactment of the same scene, starting Burroughs as his memorable creation Dr. Benway, described by one observer as “the high priest of manic irrationality.”
Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis is tasked with embodying the nurse, a task she does admirably—the mind practically invents a cigarette for her to puff on between lines, so world-weary and seen-it-all is her nurse. I couldn’t figure out the name of the fellow playing Dr. Limpf. Of course, Roy Scheider played Dr. Benway in David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of the book.
Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, who together did so much to define American independent film in the 1980s, both worked on Burroughs: The Movie. Jarmusch’s masterpiece Stranger Than Paradise came out a year later, of course.
There is surprisingly little information out there about this sequence. Did Brookner cast and direct it? Whose inspired idea was it to have Burroughs play the part? In his useful volume Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, Jack Sargeant adds some context, although I still thirst for more:
One scene juxtaposes Burroughs reading a Dr Benway routine from the ‘Hospital’ section of Naked Lunch, with footage depicting the hilarious/gore sequence in all of its lurid and bloody detail, in a white walled toilet/operating theatre, with Burroughs as Dr Benway and Jackie Curtis making a cameo as the Nurse. This brief sequence offers a tantalizing glimpse at the possibilities inherent in making a film from Brion Gysin’s screenplay.
I couldn’t agree more. We’ve all seen amateurish moviemaking, and this has some of the hallmarks of a student film, etc., but what’s striking is how effortlessly it pops. Whether it’s the unmistakable presence supplied by Burroughs and Curtis or the stark, absurd impact of Burroughs’ prose, the scene just works.
Here’s the passage from Naked Lunch:
The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid…. I think they are using it for an operating room….
NURSE: “I can’t find her pulse, doctor.”
DR. BENWAY: “Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall.”
NURSE: “Adrenalin, doctor?”
DR. BENWAY: “The night porter shot it all up for kicks.” He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets…. He advances on the patient…. “Make an incision, Doctor Limpf,” he says to his appalled assistant…. “I’m going to massage the heart.”
Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl….
NURSE: “Shouldn’t it be sterilized, doctor?”
DR. BENWAY: “Very likely but there’s no time.” He sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his assistant make the incision…. “You young squirts couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture…. Soon we’ll be operating by remote control on patients we never see…. We’ll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery…. All the know-how and make-do… Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides…”
DR. LIMPF: “The incision is ready, doctor.”
Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall…. The cup makes a horrible sucking sound.
NURSE: “I think she’s gone, doctor.”
DR. BENWAY: “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.” He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet…. “Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush! Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!”
via {feuilleton}