“He was the first person who was famous for things you were supposed to hide — he was gay, he was a junkie, he didn’t look handsome, he shot his wife, he wrote poetry about assholes and heroin. He was not easy to like.” John Waters pretty much sums it up in Yony Leyser’s new documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, which is the first posthumous look at the legacy of El Hombre Invisible as seen through the eyes of all the other counterculture minds he touched—people like Iggy Pop, David Cronenberg, and Jello Biafra—and rare clips of the author himself, narrated by his Naked Lunch alter ego Peter Weller. You can check out an exclusive preview of the film here in our Coming Distractions section. Smash the control images! Smash the control machine! But yeah, watch the video first.
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