William S. Burroughs The Wild Boys (1972)
This was bloody rubbish and it don't make no sense and to be honest I'm surprised Simon Le Bon let him write it because it don't even say anything about the band and none of them are in it and it don't even name any of their songs. Mostly it's just about a lot of boys bumming each other and looking at each other's private parts. Disgusting is what I call it. Shame on you, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Seriously, in case anyone ever wondered, Russell Mulcahy who later went on to direct Highlander - which is possibly one of the worst movies ever made - wanted to film Burroughs' Wild Boys, so persuaded Duran Duran to record a song inspired by the book, or at least inspired by his description of the book; he then produced the lavish but essentially ridiculous promotional video for the song in the hope of using it as a showreel to impress upon film studio people just how amazing his big screen version of Burroughs' novel would be if they paid him to make it. I guess they weren't sufficiently impressed because that's the end of the story, aside from me suffering a Duran fucking Duran earworm every single time I picked this up to read it.
I looked all of that up so that you don't have to.
Where The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded all seem to constitute fall-out from The Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys - along with Exterminator! and Port of Saints - were generated by The Job, roughly speaking, specifically as the material taking the form of fiction rather than essays. The shift of focus is difficult to define but is nevertheless tangible with much less actual cut-up material despite the occasional lapse into Cubist or otherwise non-linear narrative. The Wild Boys as a novel works with the logic of a dream, meaning the reader's focus remains in the moment, with the before and after of cause and effect being vague and impressionistic. It feels like it adds up even if it doesn't in terms a mathematician would recognise, which is why simpletons insist that none of it makes any sense, which I would argue is the same as saying that a landscape makes no sense as you move through it. It's all a matter of perspective.
The Wild Boys is a science-fiction novel, one which I personally take as a demonstration of what happens once control systems are disrupted and subverted by the events described in The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded; and what happens is revolution as a natural development, a personal and organic process rather than anything political in the traditional sense.
This was bloody rubbish and it don't make no sense and to be honest I'm surprised Simon Le Bon let him write it because it don't even say anything about the band and none of them are in it and it don't even name any of their songs. Mostly it's just about a lot of boys bumming each other and looking at each other's private parts. Disgusting is what I call it. Shame on you, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Seriously, in case anyone ever wondered, Russell Mulcahy who later went on to direct Highlander - which is possibly one of the worst movies ever made - wanted to film Burroughs' Wild Boys, so persuaded Duran Duran to record a song inspired by the book, or at least inspired by his description of the book; he then produced the lavish but essentially ridiculous promotional video for the song in the hope of using it as a showreel to impress upon film studio people just how amazing his big screen version of Burroughs' novel would be if they paid him to make it. I guess they weren't sufficiently impressed because that's the end of the story, aside from me suffering a Duran fucking Duran earworm every single time I picked this up to read it.
I looked all of that up so that you don't have to.
Where The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded all seem to constitute fall-out from The Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys - along with Exterminator! and Port of Saints - were generated by The Job, roughly speaking, specifically as the material taking the form of fiction rather than essays. The shift of focus is difficult to define but is nevertheless tangible with much less actual cut-up material despite the occasional lapse into Cubist or otherwise non-linear narrative. The Wild Boys as a novel works with the logic of a dream, meaning the reader's focus remains in the moment, with the before and after of cause and effect being vague and impressionistic. It feels like it adds up even if it doesn't in terms a mathematician would recognise, which is why simpletons insist that none of it makes any sense, which I would argue is the same as saying that a landscape makes no sense as you move through it. It's all a matter of perspective.
The Wild Boys is a science-fiction novel, one which I personally take as a demonstration of what happens once control systems are disrupted and subverted by the events described in The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded; and what happens is revolution as a natural development, a personal and organic process rather than anything political in the traditional sense.
The young are an alien species. They won't replace us by revolution. They will forget and ignore us out of existence.
Naturally Burroughs equates existential liberty with man on man action, so there's a lot of that going on, possibly as a symbol of moving beyond the known and the authoritarian. Sex is, after all, freedom.
'The new look in blue movies stresses story and character. This is the space age and sex movies must express the longing to escape from the flesh through sex. The way out is the way through.'
This idea, that we are here to go, is further invoked as part of an arguably traditional science-fiction narrative by a full page of very specific references to Clifford Simak's Time is the Simplest Thing in chapter six, a novel centred upon telepathic projection of the self to other worlds. I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised to find Bill reading Simak, although I suspect the appreciation would have been very much a one way street.
If you have trouble making sense of Burroughs, The Wild Boys is probably less of a headache than a few of his previous efforts, and I can see why the Highlander dude thought he could make a movie out of it - although I'm glad that he didn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment