"This is no time to doze off like a freckle-faced boy on a fishing raft."
Naked Lunch is a non-stop surrealist train wreck filled with disturbing imagery related to sex, drugs, violence, and human cruelty.
WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.
The Book
- "Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?"
- The book's cover as shown on the main page is quite a disturbing thing.
- The graphic, racial slur-filled description of a lynching.
- Dr. Benway mentions a method of torture he devised called the "Switchboard". Drills are clamped against the victim's teeth, and the victim is then tasked with making connections on an arbitrary switchboard in response to colored lights and bells. Making a mistake or missing a connection turns the drills on for twenty seconds. The switchboard is gradually sped up beyond the victim's reaction time...
- Hassan's orgy. Complete with buggery, alien pederasts and, as a grand finale, AJ flying into the party dressed as a pirate as he starts decapitating people left and right while singing sea shanties.
- AJ himself. Some of his "pranks" include triggering an orgy by releasing pheromone-producing insects at a US Embassy function, unveiling a homoerotic statue in front of a boys' school and hosting a party with the main event being a snuff film.
- Crosses over with Tear Jerker: The absolutely brutal descriptions of what drug addiction can do to a person's life. Some Junkies have been reduced to cutting themselves open with bobby pins and then using an eye dropper to apply heroin to the open wounds. Rinse and repeat until the wounds become purple and septic. To paraphrase the book: the pusher doesn't improve his product for the buyer. He degrades his buyer for the product.
- One junkie is so sick on heroin that he gives a pharmacist a phony prescription on a roll of toilet paper. And he still gets his fix.
- The simple fact that the entire book was written during a heroin binge so egregious that Burroughs himself couldn't remember the writing process for the life of him.
The Film
- Insect-typewriter hybrids that encourage uxoricide, speaking through gigantic pink sphincters on their backs. Does anything more really need saying?"Your wife is not really your wife. She is an agent of Interzone Incorporated. You must kill her."
- The rape scene. Poor Kiki is ripped apart and bleeding as Cloquet, in the form of a giant centipede with a creepy version of his face, violates him while a drugged but horrified Lee looks on before fleeing.
- The Mugwumps are particularly gross-looking. Imagine a cross between a skinned chicken and the Prophets from Halo. Their hoarse Brooklyn accents don't help one bit.
- As Lee naps in his chair, his typewriter starts writing words into itself. Soon enough, it transforms into the typewriter bug from before and urges him to begin his "report." Lee, understandably, freaks the hell out and reaches for the wine bottle before it talks him into writing. He does, and the bug responds to his opening sentence with orgasmic glee.
- Fooling around with an attractive woman is sexy. But fooling around with an attractive woman while you're being humped by a misshapen... thing that is actually, or used to be, your typewriter (which, beforehand, grew a phallus after erotica is typed on it)? Not so much.
- Worse, the production crew referred to the thing as "The Sex Blob."
- The positively squick-y scene in the den where people suck semen from the teats of large insects. Yuck, just yuck.
- The Mugwump typewriter trickles the same substance from its head tendrils whenever Lee writes something good. Lee adds it to his coffee like creamer.
