Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy: No Fucks Given

Totally F***ed Up is, as the title suggests, about teenagers hooking up, hanging out, doing drugs, and generally feeling bummed out and over it. Jaded and messy may be the eternal condition of the modern adolescent, but these particular rebels without a cause are screwed several times over. Parceling out its attention across a group of friends and lovers with shifting allegiances, the movie doesn’t so much tell a story as survey a mode of existence: being young and queer in the age of acid rain and AIDS, safe sex and serial killers, Jesse Helms and Morrissey.

Divided into fifteen chapters interspersed with title cards (for example, “lifestyles of the bored and disenchanted,” “teenagers in love,” and “the alienation generation”), Totally F***ed Up has two main loci of attention. Steven (Gilbert Luna) is an aspiring filmmaker whose videographic interviews, confessionals, and bits of quotidian vérité—many featuring his boyfriend, Deric (Lance May)—are collaged throughout the film. Andy (James Duval), a baby-faced soft boy with floppy hair, is adrift on tides of moodiness and cynicism until he meets handsome, confident Ian (Alan Boyce), a sophomore studying filmmaking at UCLA. In the Arakiverse, love is hard to find, harder to keep, and prone to result in disappointment—and, not infrequently, disaster. The happiest couple in the film is a pair of psychedelic-addled lesbians (Susan Behshid’s Michele and Jenee Gill’s Patricia) who, in the film’s sole gesture toward a productive future, bust out a turkey baster for an insemination party with their gay besties.

Araki has cited Godard’s Masculin féminin (1966) as a model for the fifteen-part structure of Totally F***ed Up, but the movie’s behavioral performances and depiction of wasted time feel equally indebted to the forms of stylized queer lassitude developed by Andy Warhol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Duval emerges here as Araki’s muse and would go on to star, with an increasingly potent screen presence, in The Doom Generation and Nowhere. Distinguished by his guileless charm, affable melancholy, and boyish, pansexual appeal, he is the perfect avatar for the mix of cynicism and sincerity that characterizes the trilogy. It’s no surprise that he was cast as the enigmatic Frank the Rabbit in Donnie Darko (2001), director Richard Kelly’s own riff on the doomsday adolescence of Gen Xers. Moreover, Darko’s use of supernatural tropes as a proxy for inarticulate generational angst echoes Araki’s own turn toward outré surrealism as his oeuvre approached the millennium.

The Doom Generation reprises the road-movie template of The Living End while conjuring a new, feverish expressionism. If Totally F***ed Up asked, “Can this world really be as sad as it seems?” its successor answers that yes, it can—but which world are we talking about? The Doom Generation travels its own private highway to hell, burning rubber through a mindscape of outrageous ultraviolence and bizarre non sequiturs. It is both the funniest and the nastiest entry in the trilogy, turning its scurrilous tenor ever more postapocalyptic.

The story of a couple whose lives are thrown into chaos by an erratic bisexual freakazoid, The Doom Generation announces itself as “a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki.” This is only the first of many perversities. The film opens in a stroboscopic nightclub, where Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) and Jordan White (Duval) thrash and pout to an industrial throb, and a sign on the wall reads “Welcome to Hell.” Amy is speeding on meth; Jordan is itching to bail: “I feel like a gerbil smothering in Richard Gere’s butthole.” They head over to Heaven, a run-down drive-in theater populated by skaters, kids making out in cars, and one Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech), a tumescent demiurge in a mock “D.A.R.E. to Keep Kids Off Drugs” shirt. Fending his way out of a brawl, Xavier flings himself into Amy’s car. Red, White, and Blue duly assembled, the three tear off into the purgatorial American night. While Jordan is infatuated with the blood-soaked alpha male he calls X (“I can’t really pronounce all that”), Amy is having none of it, and tosses the “jism-breath” “scum fuck” to the curb.

What follows is a frantic, frequently funny, and (surprise, surprise) increasingly fucked-up road movie set in motion by one of Araki’s most uproarious set pieces. After the gang pulls into a Quickie Mart so Jordan can load up on processed meat slathered in radioactive cheese, things go sideways when he can’t find his wallet and the shotgun-brandishing proprietor, named Nguyen Kok Suk (Dustin Nguyen), is leapt upon by Xavier. Despite the shrieking, machete-wielding intervention of the shopkeeper’s wife (Margaret Cho), the gun goes off, and Kok Suk’s decapitated head sails across the room and plops into the condiment bin, where it proceeds to gargle green sludge. Sometime later, the news will report that the head is still talking . . .

Now wanted for murder and on the run, the trio also have their own internal problems to deal with. Unleashing a ceaseless torrent of baroque vitriol (“I’m so pissed at you I could rip your testicles off and staple them to your ankles”), the meth-addled Amy is repeatedly accosted by men and women (notably including a character played by Parker Posey) who mistake her for a former lover. Attempts to ditch these malevolent weirdos are the primary engine of the narrative, whose other chief concern is whether Amy’s sexual romps with Xavier will find room for Jordan too. Araki’s “heterosexual movie” is, in this regard, an exercise in bisexual edging in which the tension is consummated, in true apocalyptic form, by the incipient throuple’s destruction at the hands of enraged neo-Nazis. The movie ends as it began, on the road to nowhere.

If such a volatile mix of pop provocation, graphic violence, and flagrant disregard for respectability politics was, to some extent, of its moment—Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers were released the year before—Araki’s perspective remains that of an outsider. The racist buffoonery, outlandish violence, and blitzkrieg petulance of The Doom Generation are rooted in an oppositional stance distinct from the edgelord postures of midnineties filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, who, for all their provocations, were comfortably ensconced in the Hollywood machinery and (largely) embraced by its gatekeepers and tastemakers. In contrast, The Doom Generation was purchased at Sundance by Samuel Goldwyn Films, despite its mixed reception from critics (several of whom walked out of the premiere), but soon thereafter was dumped, reportedly by Mr. Goldwyn himself, who was appalled when he got around to watching it. Picked up by Trimark, the movie “played for five minutes,” as Araki would later bemoan.

Not entirely doomed to oblivion, The Doom Generation earned McGowan a well-deserved nomination for Best Debut Performance at the Independent Spirit Awards. Yet, for all the buzz around the New Queer Cinema and Araki’s notoriety, the films of the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy have long retained the status of cult objects. In some cases, they have been difficult to see; Nowhere, long out of print, was for years watched by devotees on imported DVDs or unsanctioned internet platforms. More pointedly, the movies are, in any era, too weird, too disreputable, too dangerous for widespread acceptance.

For several years, in a queer-cinema course I teach to university students, I have prefaced screenings of Nowhere with a content warning to end all content warnings: this movie features violence, substance abuse, eating disorders, rape, suicide, everything, you name it. And while over time more and more students have opted out of watching it, those with a stomach for the tough stuff have found the movie oddly consoling and even cathartic. Young people today are, after all, grappling with their own generation’s apocalyptic conditions: mass shootings, climate disaster, surging authoritarianism, the profound disruption of their formative years wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and attacks on reproductive autonomy and LGBTQ rights. For all the ways it maps a quintessentially nineties psychosocial terrain, the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy will resonate as long as teenagers feel lost, restless, angry, and powerless—which is to say forever. Nowhere might well have been called Now, Here.

The concluding film of Araki’s trilogy plays like the spiritual sequel to Totally F***ed Up, following an ensemble of characters as they live and die in LA. Nowhere is less direct in its references—by 1997, effective treatments for HIV were finally available—and even more eccentric in its characters and their discontents. Duval plays Dark, a doe-eyed melancholic who yearns for a deeper connection with Mel (Rachel True), his girlfriend, who is banging Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson) on the side. The appearance of a sweet-natured twink named Montgomery (Nathan Bexton) suggests the possibility of real intimacy in Dark’s world until, in the uproarious conclusion, it very much does not.

The denouement entails the intermittent presence of an alien reptile equipped with a laser gun that only Dark can see. Swirling around him is a constellation of loosely associated frenemies, lovers, and siblings wrapped up in dramas big and small. Cowboy (Guillermo Diaz) is dating Bart (Jeremy Jordan), who struggles with heroin addiction. Egg (Sarah Lassez) is seduced by an actor on Baywatch (Jaason Simmons), to catastrophic results. Alyssa (Jordan Ladd) fares better with her lover, Elvis (Thyme Lewis), a masochistic, deeply unhinged biker. Shad (Ryan Phillippe) and Lilith (Heather Graham) are mostly on hand to fuck nonstop. Other players in this madcap collective include personages named Zero, Dingbat, Ducky, and Handjob; the stacked cast includes appearances by, among others, Chiara Mastroianni, Christina Applegate, Scott Caan, Beverly D’Angelo, Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty, and John Ritter. Most of these folks end up at a raucous party thrown by a dude named Jujyfruit (Gibby Haynes, lead singer of the cult band Butthole Surfers) before dispersing into the night.

That Araki manages to cram so many performers into a movie that runs less than ninety minutes, while also granting each of them a razor-sharp turn even when allotted only a single scene, testifies to his ability to concentrate maximum effect into minimal space. Nowhere brings to its most accomplished state Araki’s approach to narrative form, in which the organization of characters and events is largely unmoored from interior motivation and the overcoming of dramatic obstacles. In the absence of narrative convention, his movies operate in a diagrammatic manner: the characters are not so much developed as they are coded through stylization of costume, physiology, and body language. The plot, such as it is, initiates vectors of varying length and effectiveness: people are launched into diverse lines of action but rarely meet their targets. Nowhere is the movie as pinball machine, sending dozens of oddballs bumping and bouncing about until they tumble into a hole.

Nowhere is largely digressive in form, moving among its ensemble at whim. Charting the characters’ journey to Jujyfruit’s party affords the movie something of a narrative trajectory as well as a final stage for Araki’s punk-pop aesthetic—“Beverly Hills, 90210 on acid,” in his words. What is most striking about Nowhere is how, amid its erratic plotting and audiovisual hurly-burly, the movie is deeply touching. Dark’s yearning for intimacy, Bart’s addiction, and Egg’s experience of sexual assault are genuinely affecting—even though, as Rich remarked of the New Queer Cinema, this is not your daddy’s humanism. That in each instance Araki immediately reverses these emotional effects with cosmic absurdity, corrosive humor, or hysterical melodrama strikes at the heart of what makes Nowhere one of the queerest of all queer films.

Araki’s imagination is simply incapable of, and entirely uninterested in, playing it straight. We can look to one of his touchstones—the music of the Smiths—for an analogy. In songs like “Girlfriend in a Coma” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” the band combines depressive lyrics with chipper pop melodies. The ethos of such music doesn’t pit sarcasm against sincerity, or irony against depth of feeling, but understands these various tones and positions as, on their own, inadequate to capturing the (queer) mode of experience they aim to evoke. Just like the Smiths’ songs, Gregg Araki’s films are adolescent in the most powerful, purposeful sense, giving voice to the irreducible contradictions and affective clusterfuck of every kid who feels unlovable.

If, to quote a classic Smiths line, there is a light that never goes out in these movies, it’s the gleam of leather jackets under neon signs, of TVs tuned to static, of the glint in the eye of someone, maybe someone, at long last someone, who might just love your messy ass back.

But probably not.

Related Films

• 

• 

• 

•