William S. Burroughs: A Man Within

William Burroughs is one of the most controversial artists of the century, his book "Naked Lunch" still disgusts and repulses some readers. Here, Burroughs is examined as a man with little emotion who refused to be loved, but inside the intellect and the anarchy lies a man of much sadness and alienation. The film shows Burroughs and his influence on the counter-culture, revealing his influence on films such as "Blade Runner", bands such as Steely Dan, and the punk movement of the '70s. It also explores his personal life, such as his homosexuality, drug addiction, guns, and his guilt over the accidental shooting of his second wife. Although Burroughs has been examined in documentary features many times, here he is given a more personal look.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within explores the life of a Beat writer who was arguably the grittiest and most bedeviling of the group. Despite his association with punk and grunge, Burroughs's work was lyrically plaintive and his voice provided a window to his ineffable sadness. The documentary features interviews with Burroughs and his admirers, but they frustratingly only alight on his literary significance when speaking in terms of personal influence. Leyser attempts to equate Burroughs's gun fetishism with Hunter S. Thompson's recklessness, but Burroughs's most accomplished fiction was the boiling run-off of his inner-demon-induced sweat. Burroughs epitomized the 20th-century ideal of the over-educated libertine and forever changed the conversation about sexual orientation, but his last boyfriend recounts an evening where he confessed his love, only to be laughingly dismissed. A Man Within persuasively argues that Burroughs's most dangerous addiction might have been the refusal of love.

When I heard about the new documentary about William Burroughs I was pretty excited . Over the years I read many of the popular books including the reader , listened to the spoken word material and watched many of the short films and movies he appeared in . I thought I had a pretty good grasp of his work . However , I didn't know what a treat I was really in for when I walked in the the Denver premier of this very well directed and produced film . I found the insight that many of the friends and colleague opened my thought process on his work opened so much wider and I have a deeper understanding of the man and his work . Showing a time line from childhood to death and his life process was amazing . Seeing so much footage from performance to everyday life was great . He is still a voice and lighthouse in counter culture . I was so grateful for many of the interviews with his friends as they were very insightful and very personal . If you are fan of the man , have just found out about him or just heard that this was a good film you have to see this one . You won't be disappointed , so check it out and pass on the good word.

It's quite a brave idea to condense an incredible life into a 90 minute documentary. Yony Leyser has produced an interesting and sometimes enlightening experience even for myself, who has read much of Burroughs's work, and many books about him. For those of you who don't know, William Seward Burroughs was born in 1914 within a very prosperous family (The Burroughs Adding Machine Co.), but a perpetual rebel. Primarily a writer - most notably for The Naked Lunch, which was published in 1959 and immediately courted controversy due to it's explicit nature - Burroughs explored painting, film, amongst others, but always with the intention of experimentation and subversion. His writing technique, The Cut-ups (where pages of text can be cut up and rearranged to conjure word and sentence juxtaposition), was of course revolutionary, and the style was adopted from, particularly, musicians such as David Bowie and The Dead Kennedy's.

Burroughs's life was lived very different from the rest of the world. A junkie, homosexual who fit in no group throughout the 1940's, 1950's and '60's, he used his alienation to create the persona that would later be called "Il Hombre Invisible" (amongst many other "nick-names"). He was a mentor to the Beat generation of writers, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who were also witness to a tragedy in 1951 at a party, when then wife Joan and Burroughs executed the William Tell trick, where an apple was placed on her head. Unfortunately he missed the apple and shot her in the head, killing her.

Each "chapter" of the film are introduced with some nifty animations using coat-hanger wire, and the structure builds to Burroughs's rise in the New York scene of the 1970's. He was a celebrity within the world of punk rock, art and literature, and seemed for the first time to fit into the popular culture; his debased and transgressive imagery very fitting within this context. He would later collaborate with the (mostly) Seattle rock scene in the early '90's, even collaborating with Kurt Cobain with a sound scape to Burroughs' distinctive voice and words.

Whilst the film cannot completely penetrate the full life, philosophy and art of this visually unusual man, it does produce an idea of him. The inclusion of new interviews with friends and colleagues does bring to the film a more emotional edge to the man. The past portrayals do focus on his "cool" in his later life; his celebrity. However, this does show the old man in a light I've never seen committed to film. We see him as an almost vulnerable man, lonely, and lost of love - his utter love for Ginsberg seems to have haunted his life. Essential viewing for any Burroughs fan, and an incredibly decent introduction of the man's genius to any Burroughs virgin. For those of you who have not reveled in his transgressive imagery, his paranoid fascination with control, and the governmental forces behind these, you need to get some of his brilliant, surreal, and disturbing writing.

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Leyser is clearly a Burroughs acolyte, and he taps into the man's sensibility: The abstract stop-motion animation by Aimee Goguen and Dillon Markey creates aptly crazy interludes between interviews and archival bits, which include avantgarde movies Burroughs made when was a relative youth (even if he never quite looked like one). There is a wealth of anecdotal material. Like his subject, Leyser strives to disengage from the conventional, while still being lucid. He succeeds admirably.