As Tea Party America celebrates
Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, the Roxie gives us a week long
counter inauguration bash, with Director Yony Leyser’s captivating film hymn to
a queer junkie high priest, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within.
Less a biography than a collection of eulogies by Burroughs’ self-anointed
grandkids, the film takes its title from one of the old reprobate’s favorite
aphorisms. “Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at
all to his advantage.”
Of the Beat Generation’s holy
trinity: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs, perhaps it’s old man
Burroughs, the putative godfather of punk, who best speaks to our confused
times.
As the queer movement sits uneasily
between the curse of impending respectability and our old fevered outlaw
status, the drunken, reactionary Kerouac too closely resembles a FOX TV hate
spewing, bully pundit; the saintly Ginsberg is a hippie Christ figure whose
unique poetic gifts, Gandhi like passivism and legendary long term cohabitation
record makes him a tough act to follow. Burroughs is a far less intimidating
example of how no life is truly ruined no matter how unpromisingly it
commences.
Heir to a corporate empire: his
granddad invented the Burroughs adding machine, young William leaves a fancy
prep school, designed to mold rich sissies into real men, after a painfully
unrequited crush on a classmate, he would later destroy his diary entries on
the episode; still later he would amputate the joint of a finger to impress
another unattainable male god. Graduating Harvard, where he would make early
pilgrimages to the Boston gay underground and junkie precincts, Burroughs rides
the post Pearl Harbor tsunami of patriotism by enlisting in the army. Expecting
an officer’s commission, he’s severely depressed by an infantry assignment,
after which his parents bail him out: achieving a psychic discharge, after
which they gave him a monthly allowance, maybe with the hope that their
unrepentant bad seed would reside in some foreign bohemia.
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Following Beat movement baptism in
wartime New York – where he meets Kerouac and Ginsberg, becomes addicted to
morphine and finally runs afoul of the law after a young friend murders a
meddlesome acquaintance – Burroughs flees to the Southwest, acquires a common
law wife, an adopted daughter and a young son and tries to jumpstart his
literary career in Mexico City. Tragedy then strikes in a most bizarre fashion
when a drunken Burroughs accidentally shoots his wife during a “William Tell”
party moment. Charged with murder, Burroughs is again bailed out by his family
(brother this time) finally leaving the country for decades of a peripatetic
existence in unruly sections of Tangiers and Paris before returning stateside
for the saintly madness of the Sixties.
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How did a man whose early brilliant
work – his third novel, Naked Lunch was the last literary book to be
cleared by the courts in a major freedom of speech trial -- extolled drugs,
pederasty and fetishes like sexual strangulation achieve such a following? Of
all the many artists, friends and camp followers attempting to explain
Burroughs’ appeal, John Waters offers the most succinct, witty and penetrating
observation.
“Everybody was enamored by William
because he was famous before anyone else. And he was also famous for all the
wrong things: he was the first person who was famous for things you were suppose
to hide. He was gay, he was a junkie, he didn’t look handsome, he shot his
wife, he wrote poetry about assholes and heroin – he was not easy to like!”
It’s left to Waters explicate the bitter paradox that the price for Burroughs’
literary breakthrough (by his own admission) would be the destruction of his
blood family – his son Billy, dies at 33 after futilely trying to ingratiate
himself with dad with his own druggie oeuvre, which Waters thinks of as
brilliant.
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The mostly old guy Burroughs on
display in A Man Within – seen lunching with Andy Warhol, touring as a
post punk literary rock star, brandishing a staggeringly large gun collection –
feels the love from an array of hip celebrities: Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and
Norman Mailer. Only around the edges is it hinted that Burroughs never came to
terms with the idea of loving flesh and blood humans who were not paid to be
with him. A touching moment finds a young bed companion confessing how
conflicted Burroughs seemed by genuine expressions of love and affection
between the sheets.
The film takes an odd second act
digression into Burroughs’ fling as a “shotgun” painter.
Several acquaintances give a rather
belabored tour of a jerry-rigged painting machine where he used guns to
splatter expensive paint on canvasses to be hawked to rich patrons. The sly old
dog never gave rich suckers an even break.
Burroughs oddly resembles the
bohemian slacker essayed by Jeff Bridges in the Coen brothers’ parody of hip, The
Big Lebowski, while scenes of Burroughs mumbling through his readings and
underground birthday bashes are disturbingly similar to the slurred monologues
of Bridges’ drunken marshal in True Grit.
The film is brilliant in its
depiction of Burroughs underground icon status, it would have been nice if Leyser
could have devoted more time to explaining his mix rep among the literati –
Mailer hailed him as one of the few genuine American geniuses, while others
have dismissed him as a cult trickster. Much has been written about Burroughs’
pioneering “cut and paste” editing collage method. Was this a moment where
writers become collaborative artists akin to filmmakers? Or an example of the
Beat PR machine’s self-inflating hype?
For another film view, see Gus Van Sant’s
Drug Store Cowboy, where Burroughs has a smart cameo as an aging addict,
or watch Van Sant’s first short, The Discipline of DE where a young student
and an old soldier illustrate Burroughs’ Zen of living well by “doing easy.”
William S. Burroughs: A
Man Within plays the Roxie Friday, through Thursday with a Q&A with
director Yony Leyser after the 7pm show March 15th.