Gregg Araki’s Lewd, Surreal ‘The Doom Generation’ Is More Current Now Than It Was When It Was First Released Back In 1995

I think the best way to appreciate Gregg Araki’s work is as a whole, a consideration of his twelve features and work for television, while acknowledging how, on the whole, that’s a journey that will be daunting if you’re not already attuned to the filmmaker’s aesthetic. Even if you are, Araki’s early work especially can feel designed exclusively to provoke an outsized, and largely negative, response. But Araki is more than mere provocateur, his punk inclination to burn down every pillar of the broadly accepted normative mean, the heteronormative hypocrisy that has raised its ugly head again in the run-up to the 2024 election, formed the tip of the spear in the early 1990s of what B. Ruby Rich coined the “New Queer Cinema.” In her landmark article for the Village Voice in September, 1992, Rich writes:

Of course, the new queer films and videos aren’t all the same, and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary or strategy or concern. Yet they are nonetheless united by a common style. Call it ‘Homo Porno’: there are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist and excessive. Above all, they’re full of pleasure. They’re here, they’re queer, get hip to them.

Crucially, Rich goes on to describe the popular and critical backlash to what she identified as a wave of aggressive, even hostile, gay films that, at their best, identified “queer desire as a legitimate source of tragedy.” Her piece is the Rosetta Stone for unpacking Araki’s provocations: their style so studiedly artificial that they demand to be taken as allegory; their tone so superior, so arch and arrogant that they swagger like Morrissey’s incendiary solo album “Your Arsenal,” released concurrent with Rich’s article and sandwiched between “indie-mainstream” contributions to the New Queer Cinema like Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991) and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992). Like most minority-driven movements, the jagged, experimental-unto-avant-garde pictures of a revolution gave way almost immediately to attempts to soften, and thereby profit, from a riotous wave of resentment and frustration. Find evidence of the grinding off of the edges of the New Queer Cinema in how one of the godfathers of the queer movement in the United States, John Waters, began around this time to make films like Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990) and Serial Mom (1994) that veered away from the coprophagia of his Pink Flamingos (1972) toward a broadly digestible version of the Sultan of Sleaze’s own boundaries-punishing early fare.  By 2005, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain garnered middlebrow approval to the tune of nine Oscar nominations (of which it won only three). Many saw its nominal but wide acceptance as the beginning of a new period for queer representation when, really, it marked the end of it. This brave, new, undiscovered country had, as new worlds tend to be, been colonized and, once colonized, immediately gentrified. Such was the fate of Blaxploitation – and such will very likely be the fate of the sudden popularity of Asian-American fare in the last few years, too, if it hasn’t happened already.

But it’s also during this period that Araki was at his most objectionable, generating a loose “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy for which he’s still best known. Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) attack, each in turn, the confessional pretensions of Steven Soderbergh’s Sundance-defining sex, lies and videotape (1989); the fear and loathing of the American dreamscape of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), Dominic Sena’s Kalifornia (1993) and David Lynch’s Wild At Heart (1990); and the broad “Beverly Hills 90210” normalization of hetero-excess and privilege. As satire, Araki’s films aren’t scalpels, they’re sledgehammers. They’re barbaric yawps and their characters speak their disdain in stylized exchanges that play as more of a formal, Ionesco-inspired exercise than anything resembling how people actually talk. It’s the kind of thing perfected by Daniel Waters’ screenplay for Heathers (1988), but made pointedly awkward in Araki’s films to call attention to his contempt at even the requirement to speak the same way as “the normals” whom he sees as the enemy: all those Chads and Karens armored in traditional social mores, gender roles, and perversely-rigid sexual hangups. Araki’s brand is conflict. He’s an Asian-American filmmaker coming to ascendance outside of the Asian-American filmmaking community, blooming at the same time as the New Queer Cinema — violently-opposed to joining, conforming, to being labeled as anything other than furiously himself and irritated by the stupidity and mendacity of everyone else. He portrays himself as Brando in The Wild One, asked what he’s rebelling against, he drums on a jukebox like a bongo, lifts his perfect upper lip in a sneer and says: “whaddya got?”

Criterion is including Araki’s new, uncut 4K restoration of The Doom Generation among their June selections. A nod to Pride Month, on the one hand; on the other, it is affirmation approaching thirty-years-in-the-making of how the film — with its dazzling set design and lo fi ingenuity — has attained an unexpected level of popular acceptance after years as outré cult artifact. It has spent the gap since its release relegated to a brief and limited theatrical run and a shoddy, pan-and-scanned, censored-without-approval VHS/DVD presentation, after all. What choice did it have but to exist in a halflife of enthusiastic testimonials and bootlegs exchanged like mix-tapes between illicit teenaged lovers?

Seeing it for the first time re-colored, its transcendent drop-needle soundtrack rivaled only by The Crow’s soundtrack from this era, remixed to its fullest, pounding glory (play this movie loud), The Doom Generation begins to approximate the sensation of an overwhelmingly sensual, dangerous-feeling underground concert that’s just a raised middle finger to all the weak sauce Hollywood products pretending at rebellion without the jagged edges and gallons of spilt body fluid. When I first saw it in the ’90s, I thought of it as puerile, maximalist exhibitionism instead of recognizing all that as the point and not some unintended by-product. In a recent interview with Natalie Keogan for Filmmaker Magazine (April 3, 2023), Araki says “we were young and just wanted to make something really subversive, punk, transgressive and rebellious. Nothing was too extreme for us.” It’s a strutting, spitting stew of lewd sex, shocking violence, and surreality — the same elements used to if not universally praise at least rationalize engaged scholarship of Stone’s Natural Born Killers (and superior, for my money, U-Turn) and frankly the bulk of David Lynch’s revered filmography. 

For the uninitiated, The Doom Generation finds young Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) sucked into a cross-country odyssey after she and her boyfriend Jordan (James Duval) pick up drifter X (Johnathon Schaech) after the accidental shotgun-beheading of a convenience store clerk (Dustin Nguyen – possibly the most famous person in the cast at the time for his turn in television’s 21 Jump Street). They jump into bed with each other, describe in explicit detail the physical sensation of various sex acts, and are stalked by a group of neo-Nazis who lay down an American flag as a dropcloth to catch the gore from their acts of homicidal, cuckolded, castrated masculinity. I used to think it was “too much” — but now, in our age of porn and the unfettered rise of white nationalism in the radicalization of mediocre men against threatened populations, it actually seems too little.

I used to think The Doom Generation was “too much” — but now, in our age of porn and the unfettered rise of white nationalism in the radicalization of mediocre men against threatened populations, it actually seems too little.

There are no barriers left intact by The Doom Generation, sexual nor political. It’s a full-frontal assault on decorum — a declaration of violent independence in which the traditionally-oppressed and tortured fight back using the same blasted earth tactics used against them. Araki is invested in subverting every romanticized genre, pulling the sexual subtext of films like Bonnie & Clyde into the text and, like all great outsider art, forcing the ruling majority into areas of extraordinary discomfort. Fair’s fair, after all.

In the last film of his “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy, Nowhere, in the middle of a BDSM encounter, a woman says to her partner that he has to believe in something and, incredulous, tied up and getting spanked, he says “no, I don’t.” That’s Gregg Araki’s version of The Wild One, burning down walls like the Achaeans at Troy, refusing to be distracted from a pretty face by things like a decorum he wasn’t asked to define and refuses to patronize in a civilization that’s only civil for the chosen. The Doom Generation is potent stuff that’s more current now than it was in 1995. It’s a lit fuse. Handle with care.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.