09 · 03 · 26

Williams S. Burroughs: his passagge through Mexico and the movies

Rafael Aviña

William S. Burroughs, the author, the junkie, the culprit of manslaughter, and the prophet of narcotics and the shadowy universe between reality and hallucination, died in August 1997, taking to the grave the secret of his exacerbated imagination. That man, who was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, and who was closely linked to drug use, had a tragic time in Mexico; however, the big screen fell under his spell and his literary work.

He was the creator of pulp, surrealist, and alternative works, and also the creator of a clandestine subculture alongside Beat Generation figures, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs majored in archaeology and ethnology before taking an interest in literature; once he did, he reshaped the course of postwar writing and paved the way for the new culture of postmodernity. Indeed, Burroughs was a man ahead of his time, capable of recreating nightmare universes—worthy of Lovecraft’s darkest visions—though, ironically, realistic.

His addictions, whether to words, drugs, or guns, together with his ambiguous sexuality, found direct expression in his literary work. This was reflected in his narrations about endless pasones [bad trips], unfiltered and wild depictions of homosexual encounters, and police chases during his wanderings from Paris to Morocco, from London to Mexico or to New York. It was in a timeworn building in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma, on September 6, 1951, where Burroughs, intoxicated by drugs and alcohol, accidentally killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, with a shot to the head while he was reenacting the William Tell scene, using a glass and a gun instead of a crossbow and an apple. Burroughs managed to leave Mexico and avoid prosecution, aided by Mexican judicial corruption and the manipulations of his unethical lawyer, Bernabé Jurado, a man famed for taking on “lost” cases.

It has been said that to grasp Borroughs’s literature (Nova Express, Queer, Naked Lunch, and others) requires a kind of psychic communion between the reader and his texts. Evidently, the world of cinema quickly turned its gaze toward Burroughs and portrayed him in documentaries and experimental films; he also had brief appearances in commercial films, and even in the Irish band U2’s music video “Last Night on Earth”. However, none of these productions equaled what the cult filmmakers Gus Van Sant and David Cronenberg did. 

Gus Van Sant was the creator of the existential thriller and the road movie Drugstore Cowboy (1989). This film tells the story of a group of paranoid drug addicts who roam from one apartment to another, consuming the “fruits” of their burglaries. The movie starts with Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon) being transported on a stretcher after being shot. Inside the ambulance, he recounts his drug-dependent life with his “drugstore cowboys,” his partners in crime with whom he used to steal narcotics and pills from hospitals: the addict’s loot and the junkie’s paradise.

In this film, we witness one of the most disturbing portrayals of a drug addict—an interpretation stripped of moral pretension and hypocrisy that immerses us in the urgency of addiction, the conflicts of daily life with his partners in crime, and the relentless police harassment suffered by four misfits in the seventies. William S. Burroughs himself has a cameo, playing a prophetic role that perfectly suits his social theory, the “algebra of need”. Burroughs plays the role of an aged priest and drug addict whose deeply wrinkled face fills the screen and embodies the nihilism of this independent film directed by another marginal filmmaker, Van Sant, who later included Burroughs once again in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994).

The universes of Burroughs and Cronenberg appear to have been made for one another. It was a blissful yet morbid  union that gave birth to the cursed creation Naked Lunch (1991). Rather than a straightforward adaptation of the 1959 novel, the film reimagines both the text itself and Burroughs’s creative process. In this film, we witness typewriters mutated into beetles that speak through sphincter-mouths; women whose skin peels away to expose male bodies; humanoids  with phallic protrusions emerging from their heads; and the use of extraordinary hard drugs such as “insect powder, black meat, and Mugwump jissom.” 

The renowned actor Peter Weller leaves behind his role as Robocop to play William Lee, an aspiring writer who creates anomalous worlds while trapped in a disturbing spiral of drug addiction. Naked Lunch offers a portrait of addiction as a way of life, revealing the networks that sustain it, its ambiguous sexuality, and the persistent harassment of authority. The film evokes the mysteries of the organism imagined by Cronenberg, the obsessions of a filmmaker who has carried the conflict between mind and body, between brain and flesh to unimaginable realms—where a malignant power is born from within the body itself.

Beat, directed by Gary Walkow in 2000 and filmed in Mexico, is a disturbing biographical film centered on the legend of the Beat Generation and the footsteps of Burroughs—portrayed effectively by Kiefer Sutherland. The film opens with the death of his wife, Joan Vollmer (Courtney Love), and through a series of flashbacks recounts the life of this ill‑fated marriage. A more unsettling and elegant vision is found in Queer (2024), directed by Luca Guadagnino and set in the early fifties in an almost imaginary Mexico City. There, William Lee, a fifty‑year‑old US-American expatriate—played remarkably by Daniel Craig—spends his lonely days among other paisanos [fellow countrymen]. However, his encounter with a young student newly arrived in the city offers him the possibility of an intimate connection. Ultimately, this most recent film is a magnetic, painful, and hallucinatory story reminiscent of Burroughs’s own life.

Translated by Michelle Olvera