Once the aggressive flirt blows the head off of a convenience store checkout clerk hassling them over money for chili dogs, the threesome takes off on the lam, their path interrupted by repeated encounters with Amy’s exes (including a blonde-wigged Parker Posey at the height of her cool). Soulmates for three whole months, pubescent hormone factories Amy Blue and Jordan White (James Duval, discovered by Araki while perusing a record shop’s wares) occupy their nights with underground raves and fast food, a dirtbag idyll shattered as they pick up hitchhiker Xavier Red (Jonathon Schaech). It would seem he had a lot on his mind at the time, judging by the film that condenses into its 83 minutes a blithe update of the Bonnie and Clyde myth, a gay fantasia on national themes, an id-ego-superego ménage à trois, and a demented self-parody pitched somewhere between soap opera and after-school special. My feelings about the world and everything else, dumped onto the screen.” “It’s like a diary, a journal entry for me. “This is exactly what I was thinking and feeling and raging about in 1993, whenever I wrote the script,” he says. An anti-everything ethic bridged the age gap, helped along by a shared taste for thrill-seeking he was there on the scene, going to basement shows and doing speed right alongside the latest rebels without a cause. 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. Before anything else, Gregg Araki wants me to see his button.
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