In Retrospect: "I Have Absolutely No Idea What This Means… It Must Be Good."

A retrospective of David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch and a review of The Sixth Sense.

Quick, off the top of your head, tell me all you know about Naked Lunch.

If you recalled fondly the line that Nelson said in an episode of "The Simpsons" after Bart uses a fake ID to get into this film ("I'll tell you two things wrong with that title"), then you're like most of America. I knew a little bit more coming in: that it was based on a novel by William S. Burroughs that is the quintessence of non-linear narrative and that it was directed by David Cronenberg.

On the way out, I know precious little more.

Naked Lunch is one of those films that is so mind blowing that it is baffling. So intelligent that it feels idiotic, and so strange that you wonder if you took something beforehand and forgot about it. Yet it was one of those movies critics loved.

Screw 'em.

In the movie Contact, James Woods asks "Why is it always the opinion of the egghead set that aliens are friendly?" Although the answer Jodie Foster gave back was sufficient, it should have been a more callous response: "Because we don't fear what we don't understand." However, among the intellectual set, things go one step further. Among the intellectual set, heresy is saying "I don't get it", and thus hidden meanings that weren't there in the first place are put into books and movies. The entire business is subjective, we will not know the metaphors placed into them unless we know their makers, and thus everyone is afraid to say "you're wrong" about what the meaning is.

The unknown doesn't scare us. Admitting we don't know it scares us.

Naked Lunch, like so many movies, has no real point to it. However, because it is so weird and so out of our heads it is the automatically taken position of the intellectual set that "if I don't understand it, it must be good." Two things come out of this. The first is the comedy when someone tries to give an idiotic explanation of what something means in the midst of ignorance (i.e. the man who thought "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was an expose about Bill Clinton). The second is the tragedy when people keep their mouths shut, not brave enough to say what is on their mind.

What is on my mind, and the mind of just about anyone who has seen the film, is "what the hell?" You have no idea what is going on in the movie, and by the end you still have no idea what is going on in the movie. Yeah, you've seen a lot of weird sights (the transvestite drug dealer, the roach-centipede intelligence war, the cannibalistic typewriters), but you're no closer to understanding what went down than anyone else is.

There is a word for this, intellectual elite: incomprehensible. I know that it is the "I" word and that you're not supposed to say it in class or conversation, but that's what Naked Lunch is.

But, you know, what, it isn't just the intellectuals who do this.

For a present day example, see The Sixth Sense, a film so poorly constructed that it is pure textbook as far as originality is concerned. Yet it has a projected domestic gross of $200 Million dollars and has just lost the number one spot at the box office to Stigmata. What's up?

The answer lies once again in the faulty school of thought that if something flies over your head, it must be good. The Sixth Sense flies not too high over the mainstream audience's head… just high enough that, when they finally do figure out the ending, they feel like really smart people. When the ending finally comes if they haven't figured it out, they feel pretty spiffy in a "horray-for-their-side" sorta way.

But, all of those people who did enjoy the movie The Sixth Sense, ask yourselves "why?" From the dry eyes and generally silent theatre I can say quite honestly that, although some people were impressed, The Sixth Sense accomplished none of its tasks. It didn't make you cry, laugh, scream, or evict any other emotion. What The Sixth Sense trafficked in was special effects of the mental variety. Tricks of the mind. It gave the illusion of being intelligent. And, because it gave the illusion of being intelligent, people sang its praises.

Leave it to a business all about illusions to try to act intelligent, for that is exactly what The Sixth Sense does (and actually succeeds at). It acts as if it were a well thought out and constructed piece when in fact it was probably one of those screenplays thrown together on the fly in six days with a how-to-write-your-bestseller book in writer/director M. Night Shaymalan's hands.

Hollywood is all about magic, and it is a great piece of magic indeed that this film pulled itself off. A lesson to be learned for this nowadays is that all you have to do to make a movie that will gross $200 Million is act smart. But, of course, that's only for the next sixth months of short-term memory that studio heads have. After that smart will be passe, and stupid will once again be en vogue.