[rating=2]
“Love! What is it? Most natural painkiller there is.” The last written words of William S. Burroughs tell us everything and nothing about the Harvard educated King of the Beats. How would he have said it? Chewed the words sardonically in that sometimes grating manner, that arch little man armed to his junky teeth with hand guns that made his wizened little frame look like a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon?
The trouble with love is that a lot of the time it’s blind. In patches Yony Leyser’s documentary about Burroughs drags through the projector with a team of guide dogs and a flurry of white sticks leading the way. Narrated by Burroughs’ disciple and star of “Naked Lunch” Peter Weller, “William S. Burroughs: A Man Within” is not quite the balanced inquiry into the influences of the author and artist it wishes it was.
Weller occasionally escapes from his voice over limbo to scare the shit out of us with some preposterous Dame Edna Everage glasses waxing lyrical on his addictions, “Life handed to you on a toilet seat.” While Weller’s good value in a nutzoid sense, Patti “Linda Blair from the Exorcist” Smith and the increasingly irrelevant John Waters just add to the general air of smug hero worship. So much so that when Smith proclaims, “He’s another bible-so many things come from him” we couldn’t care less about her observations, just that she needs to brush her hair and teeth once in a while.
There is no doubt about Burroughs’ immense contribution to twentieth century culture, but Smith and Waters and Weller and the rest of the talking heads assembled for this film are never challenged. Mailer may have described Burroughs as, “The only living American novelist who may conceivably be possessed of genius” but this was a man who shot and killed his wife, walked free, and had the front to employ a gun handler to look after his arsenal of firearms. Our artistic heroes never ask to be heroes and they’re more often than not flawed, fallible and fucked up, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take them to task every once in a while.
Thankfully in one of the film’s more enlightening moments we find out that Burroughs didn’t deal in remorse, certainly not for the shooting of his young wife Joan Vollmer as her death to him was far beyond that, something so terrible, “You can’t fix it” and consequently guilt he carried wretchedly around with him for the rest of his days. When you look at the previously unseen footage of Burroughs he appears as a spectre jump cutting in and out of existence, haunted, drained, breaking the 180 degree rule, the ghost of Vollmer everywhere.
Did he love her? Did she love him? If so, did this distant memory of a feeling enable Burroughs to dull the pain of her death but never cure it? “William S Burroughs: A Man Within” is a film without, without the punch and clout to take on one of American counter culture’s biggest sacred cows. Instead it bows and scrapes at his feet when it should be blasting some uncomfortable bullets at them.