MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The Beat novelist William S. Burroughs’s depiction of addiction stands as one of the most potent thematic engagements in 20th century literature. The drug addict in Burroughs’s fragmentary novels is a figure possessed of a ‘modulatory subjectivity,’ or a sense of self forged in the crucible of the control society. Because the addict is marked by a pattern of behavior that can be understood to reflect the imperatives of the control (read: Industrial capitalist) society, he is acutely aware of the contingency of his subject formation, and how power relations have delimited his sense of self. This positions him as a possible agent of change since he is able to probe the limits of the self in potentially transformative ways. Though the addict is hardly an empowered figure, his modular subjectivity serves as a counterpoint the disciplinary functionality of the bourgeois industrial capitalist society, and it’s mechanisms of dispersed, non-centralized, disciplinary power. In Burroughs’s work, addiction functions like an ‘internalized possession’ with malevolent, externalized controllers doing the possessing.
The 1988 Frank Henenlotter film Brain Damage is a strikingly Burroughsian work that engages similar themes. The plot involves a sapient brain parasite who befriends a young man named Brian and addicts him to a psychotropic drug secreted through the parasite’s mandibles. In exchange for this “juice,” Brian must acquire human brains for the parasite to eat. Possessed by an alien entity and a slave to his habit, Brian is forced to re-negotiate his identity and confront the mechanisms of control that govern his life. I will endeavor to show that the pattern of addiction depicted in Brain Damage mirrors the formation of the control society subject described in the works of Burroughs. The aesthetic significance is the exploitation film’s depiction of the subversive grotesque: the addict becomes an agent of chaos with transcendent and transgressive potential.