Review: "William S. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sewers" (2 of 2)

But this film about the Commissioner of Sewers…it isn’t really enlightening.  Like Old Bull Lee in On The Road, I feel a have to “make a complaint.”  I suppose my main complaint is that the film is incoherent.  It seems as if it’s simply thirteen or fourteen short clips randomly lined up and pinned together.  It’s possible of course that this is meant as an artistic statement:  What better way to honor William S. Burroughs than by adapting the Cut-Up Method to documentary with what seems a random series of film clips?  However, the next problem is the quality, both visual and audial, of those film clips.  Most of the film is old and grainy (or new and grainy).  The images are blurred.  The sound is blurred.  I can’t always understand what the subjects are saying.  Throw in Burroughs’ distinctive declamatory style (well, that’s one way of describing it!) and you’ve got a good muddle of slop.

And what is he saying?  He talks about life after death, extra-terrestrials etc.  Maybe it makes sense.  Kerouac insists that Burroughs was a teacher who had every right to teach because he had spent his live learning.  “We all sat at his feet.”  But does the teaching make sense, even in a nonsensical way?  I’m not persuaded.

I guess I just preferred the film I had watched right before this:  William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, which was considerably more coherent and interesting (and featured a slew of people influenced by Burroughs, including Iggy Pop and John Waters.  Burroughs really was an influential artist).  When all is said and done, I do find Burroughs a fascinating person; he just also gives me a bit of the creeps.  I could guess that quite a few acquaintances of his felt the same way.  I could in fact imagine that some people in the Beat circle found Burroughs fascinating because of his elements of creepiness.  Fascination with the grotesque is an element of the Beat sensibility, drawn from the Gothic and the French Decadence.

Incidentally, the film title is drawn from the answer Burroughs gave to the question “When did you finally decide you didn’t want to become President of the United States?” which was printed coincidentally next to a newspaper interview with Ronald Reagan when Reagan was Governor of California.  Burroughs confessed that he had never wanted to become President of the United States—although he had once considered applying to become Commissioner of Sewers wherever he was living at the time.

The question remains:  Why was this man so influential?  But avant garde artists often turn out in retrospect to be tremendously influential—for reasons that aren’t particularly clear.  Why was Van Gogh influential after his death, after selling only one painting during his lifetime?  Artistic vision can be an extremely tricky business.