Good films made from bad books

[M.10rda]

Then there's "Blade Runner". The book by Philip K. Dick is... interesting, but has little to do with the film. The main characters are there, and so is the hunt for the replicants. But the characters feel underdeveloped, and the plot deviates to all sorts of bizarre places, like a mixture of TV show / religion called Mercerism many humans in the book follow. More than adapting his book, they adapted some of Dick's obssessions then made something much more elaborate with them.

I guess if we're going to expand the conversation to include adaptations that depart significantly from (not bad) source materials, NAKED LUNCH seems related to the BLADE RUNNER discussion. I think Burroughs was a masterful writer, if not one whose gifts lent well to satisfying narratives. His "novel" (well, people call it a novel) is brilliant blank verse poetry, surrealism, and/or free associative nightmare journaling, but there's little structure there on which to hang a cogent storyline.

I always liked Cronenberg's film but also used to think Cronenberg had missed the boat by injecting/imposing so much exterior material, particularly stories from Burroughs' life that aren't actually in the book. I've come around on it though. It feels like as authentic a Burroughs' biopic as one could hope for but also kinda' feels like a Rosetta Stone for Cronenberg's own catalog of personal preoccupations. Watching VIDEODROME again a couple months back (for the first time in decades) really sealed this deal. In many ways Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH is almost a remake of VIDEODROME, just reskinned for the Burroughsverse. I guess Cronenberg really found a kindred spirit in Ol' Bil Lee.