Though DIY upstart Araki had already entered his thirties when he first drafted The Doom Generation, he nonetheless drew inspiration from the kids slightly too young to be his contemporaries. All the bands, all my idols from those days, they sincerely didn’t give a fuck.” “What really holds up in the movie is the purity and authenticity, which comes from my background in alt-culture. “To a lot of people, this is the OG queer-punk thing,” he says. Araki now finds himself in an unfamiliar yet not unwelcome position, looking back on the work of the man he used to be from a current cinematic landscape shaped in no small part by his nasty little movies’ colossal influence. That changes this week, as a fully remastered never-before-seen director’s cut of The Doom Generation storms theaters, with plans for a run of the freshly spiffed-up Nowhere in the fall and an all-the-trimmings box set with Criterion “hopefully” somewhere down the line. For more than a decade, The Doom Generation and the other features rounding out Araki’s sparsely attended, ardently loved “Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy” - 1992’s Totally Fucked Up and 1997’s Nowhere - have been difficult for casual viewers to access in any respectable quality, bereft of industry-standard home video treatments and unavailable to stream. “It is a very angry movie,” Araki says.Īrmed with a soundtrack of shoegaze and a self-made dialect of “slanguage” allowing for such timelesss turns of phrase as “you fucking chunky pumpkinhead,” this crucial plank of the New Queer Cinema movement lived fast and died young, but didn’t leave such a beautiful corpse. The phrase implies consumption, kinetic energy, propulsive force. Both operate on unalloyed adolescent impulse, ragged with bloodlust and regular lust, hungrily devouring everything in their paths with the restlessness and recklessness of youth. Rose McGowan’s all-American bad girl Amy Blue sports this middle finger of flair, and its slogan supplies a pretty apt statement of purpose for her as well as the snarling, feral film around her. Many like it were pressed as swag in 1995 for the initial theatrical release of his cult masterpiece The Doom Generation, and then, perhaps fittingly, discovered in a box at a yard sale two years later by a kitsch magpie who redistributed them at Burning Man. From his home in Los Angeles, the filmmaker begins our Zoom chat with a quick round of show-and-tell, holding up a half-dollar-sized pin emblazoned with the words “EAT FUCK KILL” in white italic print on a black background. The film just leaves one feeling unsettled and in this way perfectly captures its era and what its characters are feeling and conveys that to the audience.įantastic ending, a real blinder that works so well.Before anything else, Gregg Araki wants me to see his button. Watching this movie is like falling into an abyss of the 1990s and its complacent pessimism. Definitely a film for people who feel like thinking about what they are watching, as much of the detail is in symbolic 90s art creations and the main plot points reference not reality, but B movies. Rose McGowan creates the paradigm of the annoying junkie girl from the 90s and it plays well off the sensitive stoner and daring bad boy cutouts of characters. This film pulls into the world of these three characters so fully. The story is an odd love triangle set in post modern crazy land, with the repeated incidents of sudden deadly violence and cases of unforgivable mistaken identity pushing the plot from one sex scene to another. The soundtrack is near constant, and is as much an important character as the three people this film focuses on. Araki is fantastic with tone, and in this film, he creates an alternate electro junkie 90s fever-dream where the world is always on the edge of ending and everything is distorted into symbols and pop art to convey the indescribable desperation and fear the characters think rests naturally within their souls. This movie has a consistent and unique tone, which is why I wasn't surprised this was an Araki film.
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