The 1990s already felt mid-apocalyptic to the queer community -- AIDS had torn through America largely unimpeded in the '80s thanks to the utter disregard of the Reagan and Bush governments, and though life-sustaining treatments began to roll out in the '90s, the gap in the community felt cavernous, and unfillable.
Couple this with the fact that Los Angeles always feels slightly mid-apocalyptic -- a sprawling nowhereland frying under persistent heat and even more persistent cultural cannibalism -- and you arrive at the blistering vibe of Gregg Araki's "Teen Apocalypse Trilogy," which rolls out in 1993 (Totally F***ed Up), 1995 (The Doom Generation), and 1997 (Nowhere), newly restored by Strand Releasing and made available through the Criterion Collection as a boxed set.
Araki -- whose queer-punk ode to HIV and self-liberation, The Living End, was filmed after Totally F***ed Up but released prior -- seems to catalogue the slow recession of AIDS' decade of terror in real time as he works his way through his trilogy. The disease is very much on the minds of the sextet of teenagers at the core of Totally F***ed Up, who seem to have taken their own annihilation as a foregone conclusion and are trying to work out what to do in the meantime. The film is built around fifteen "random celluloid fragments," à la Masculin Feminin, and a video chronicle being compiled by one of the teenagers gives the conceit, and its endless video confessionals interspersed with dramatic scenes, its spine.
Totally is the film where Araki begins working with James Duval, an androgynous sadboy muse with Keanu-esque marbles in his mouth. Here, Duval is playing Andy, who, like many or most of the characters across the whole trilogy, understands his own queerness to an extent, but cannot fit it within the broader mainstream context of "queer culture."
He hasn't figured out how he wants to be sexual yet; he thinks anal sex is disgusting; but he knows he's into Michael Stipe, a better celebrity crush than the alternatives offered by his friends (Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, or Kevin Costner!). This tension -- that "there's no right way to be queer," and how each character understands themselves against that -- is critical to Totally F***ed Up, and goes on to inform the subsequent films.
A quintessential DIY film of its era, Totally features janky sound, questionable takes, and strange rhythms from performers who aren't used to shaping a scene into a watchable flow, all side by side with wild openness and genuine boundary-pushing in the content. Its follow-up, The Doom Generation, sees Araki take a major leap in budget and grants him a modest-sized crew, but in both Doom and Nowhere, the third part of the trio, he continues to use the tools of his cinema to threaten safe, "insider" gay politics.
The Doom Generation is more straightforward than its predecessor. It essays the age-old question: can heterosexual delusion withstand the intervention of a pansexual chaos goblin? Jordan (Duval again) and Amy (Rose McGowan) are teenagers in love when we meet them in the film's blood-red nightclub opening. They haven't slept together (at least not successfully, yet) when they encounter Xavier (Johnathon Schaech, described later as being "like a life-support system for a cock") in the middle of getting the shit beaten out of him in a club parking lot.
Before long, the couple has been caught in the middle of a violent convenience store robbery gone very wrong, and we're into a "lovers on the run" movie -- except that the lovers have picked up a third, and the third keeps murdering people as they all move from place to place, while wanting nothing more than to fuck Amy, and Jordan, and ideally both at the same time.
The Doom Generation announces what kind of movie it is as soon as Xavier blows the convenience store clerk's head off and that selfsame head begins babbling and vomiting green goo. This movie would play great with a midnight crowd; I can imagine them roaring as Nicky Katt shows up as the "Carnoburger Cashier" and begins a lunatic pursuit of Amy (he thinks she's his ex-girlfriend), which ends with him armless and wearing a doll's mask. The oversaturated colour palette and fever-dream aesthetic makes the entire adventure feel like a Repo Man for the '90s, a decade I realized I remember better than I thought, when Heidi Fleiss turned up and I Leonardo-pointing-meme'd the screen immediately.
It's the second movie in a row where the performances are... questionable... but in which they seem to gain mileage as they go along, making me wonder if the film was shot in sequence, allowing the performers to become more and more comfortable with their roles, the camera, and each other.
Nowhere completes the trilogy with a well-developed sense of camp. One long day and night in L.A. stretches itself across a composite cast of perhaps 30 characters; an absolute litany of '90s faces graces the screen, including Rachel True, Heather Graham, Shannen Doherty, Debi Mazar, Kathleen Robertson, Ryan Phillippe, Scott Caan, Denise Richards, Traci Lords, Devon Odessa (My So-Called Life represent!) and a Mena Suvari so baby-faced that the 4K frequently highlights her peach fuzz.
"It's like we all know, way down in our souls, that our generation is going to witness the end of everything," Dark announces, once again played by James Duval, the Bruce Campbell of Araki's queer Evil Deadverse. Dark's gloomy pronouncements both perfectly communicate the vibe of the sex-mad, good-times-only cast and, unintentionally, might remind older viewers that every teen generation feels this way, no matter how much proof they each seem to have available to them.
Nowhere's particular cadre of Gen Xers (or are they elder Millennials?) might have a point, though: there's an alien roaming around the hinterlands, murdering people, even as all of the main characters try to get to the same party in the Hills, and get laid, and get love, and get some sense of their place in all things before the sun comes up.
It's a bubblegum pop-culture explosion kind of apocalypse, given the art direction, which absolutely explodes off the disc in Nowhere's new 4K presentation. (Both Nowhere and The Doom Generation are presented in both 4K and blu-ray in the Criterion Collection's new package; Totally F***ed Up is blu-ray only, in a 2K restoration from the original 16mm master.) Araki's visuals, always a treasure-trove of cinematic homages and new inventions, become more and more maximalist as the trilogy wears on. The director of Happy Face and Kaboom is well in evidence by the time Nowhere's marquee credits roll.
The Criterion package gets the Nowhere band back together for a new commentary track, and repurposes older commentaries on both Totally F***ed Up and The Doom Generation. Also newly-produced is a conversation between Araki and fellow indie maven Richard Linklater, where they talk about becoming friends, being indie filmmakers in the '90s, and the lost cinematic art of that decade: the soundtrack album.
In a separate feature, Araki and Duval sit down to go through Duval's archive of materials from the making of the trilogy. The "Doom Generation Video Comic Book" is also presented, as are archival Q&As with Araki.
All of these films have moved in and out of availability in the three decades since they were made; Araki's intention, as outlined in a note in the enclosed booklet, was to create something definitive for fans of the film. I can't speak to that, seeing all three films for the first time! -- but I will say that the presentation of the entire triptych makes for a very compelling package, clearly outlining the thematic concerns that stretch across their stories, their decade, and their community, as specific to their time and place as they are universal to ours.