TO GREGG ARAKI, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, DONNA SLASH
A love letter to the countercultural messiah of my disillusioned generation
Originally written for a film studies course, good luck plagiarizing not in my voice.
Gregg Araki is a Japanese American filmmaker who came to prominence in the early-1990s as a major force in the New Queer Cinema movement. His films were not only vividly colored and abrasively honest, but they were also crucial to many gay and queer millennials’ formative years. Araki was the creator of the queer counterculture of the early information age. His characters were/are hyper-aware of fringe subcultures such as punk and goth, but their perspective and razor-sharp witticisms are also the product of over-saturation from MTV and late-night TV infomercials. This mix of alternative music, pop culture references tinged with early internet lingo, and pansexual ennui helped define what I like to call the “What Now?” generation. These were the youths who remember life before the internet but were also on the cusp of the total digital crossover that would become normal American life. We essentially saw everything that was once necessary become obsolete, and the world became rapidly more temporary and disposable without explanation, apology, or recourse. Our parents are boomers, the gay community was experiencing the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, and us youngsters listened to disaffected grunge and shoegaze music while wondering, “What now?” The films of Gregg Araki, specifically his first proper feature The Living End (1992) and his first “big” studio production/festival bait Mysterious Skin (2004), were cynical reactions to problems plaguing the gay and queer communities (HIV and pedophilia, respectively) that viewed these issues with Araki’s unmistakable mix of sage wisdom and pessimistic sarcasm. These films, along with Araki’s “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” — Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997) — helped define my generation as realistic in our hopelessness and steadfast in our unspoken belief that optimism is counter revolutionary. Not only was he challenging buttoned-up, heterosexual standards and practices, but his films also sneered at the superficiality and hypocrisy of the rigidly judgmental and depressingly heteronormative nature of the gay men and queer people working tirelessly to gain societal acceptance. “Gay” was already counterculture at the time, but not everyone qualified to join felt comfortable; this is where Araki stepped in as a voice for the latchkey kids, raised on American television’s stark blend of fairytale love, doomsday preachers, and capitalism-as-religion. Gregg Araki addressed the problems of modern society while subverting mainstream and predominantly heteronormative gay beliefs, with a distinctly nihilistic and countercultural perspective that defined my generation of alternative queers.
The Living End tells the story of young, hip film critic Jon (Craig Gilmore) and rough trade drifter bad boy Luke (Mike Dytri) who cross paths one random night in LA, confess that they’re both HIV-positive to one another, and eventually set out on a Thelma & Louise-esque road trip ready to take out their aggressions on a very unforgiving, Reagan and George Bush Sr.-voting America. Araki wrote, directed, filmed, and edited this film, which is apparent in its sound and picture quality, but these rough edges are among its many endearing qualities. The entire mood of the film is cynical and unaffected, which can feel a bit forced in some of its acting. Again, the film has many rough edges, but Araki was working to establish his distinct and specific world view — a view not uncommon with young queers who were growing rapidly desensitized to the constant threat of death. Queer teens and young adults were not only facing a constant threat of physical violence for simply existing openly, but the AIDS epidemic was in full-tilt chaos mode at this point. The mood of the film is aggressively apathetic yet exhilarating in its characters’ freedom through their brutal honesty. Jon’s doctor is emotionless as he gives the diagnosis: “Positive, sorry.” Similarly, his New Age-y best friend Darcy has a very spiritual and therefore equally dismissive response: “Was it that one guy? I knew his karma sucked.” Araki tackles the very new (at the time) and demonized topic of men living with HIV and allows the characters (and viewers) the upper hand via the irresponsible yet necessary things that Luke spouts throughout the film. Deep into their adventure, they make a stop at a travel center. Luke has his gun out, and says: “What do you say we go to Washington and blow Bush’s brains out? Or better yet, we can hold him at gunpoint, inject him with a syringe full of our blood; how much you wanna bet they’d have a magic cure by tomorrow?” Though this conspiratorial sentiment was common among the edgier set back in those days, a suggestion this radical still left me gobsmacked by its violent power and provided catharsis for frustrated gay male viewers. When Luke cuts his arm and looks at the blood, he says, “It’s living inside me, but I can’t see it.” Araki’s plea for humanity amidst the cynicism works as a stark reminder that everyone struggles, but everyone is human. The film’s end credits conclude with a dedication to someone within Araki’s circle, that serves as a reminder of what’s happened and as a warning of the attitudes bubbling over in the community at large: “To Craig Lee (1954–1991) and the hundreds of thousands who’ve died and the hundreds of thousands more who will die because of a big white house full of republican fuckheads.” Like Araki himself, the characters inn his films are always ready to fire back, even if indirectly. In the beginning of the film, Luke spots the words, “kill fags”, written in graffiti. Instead of getting upset, Luke scratches out “kill” and writes “rule, ok?” to say, “fags rule, ok?”, with his own marker that he has in anticipation of moments like this. Beginning with The Living End, Araki created a queer counterculture movement that fought homophobia and HIV stigma with apathetically witty fervor; its impact would carry on for the next three decades.
A common theme of the New Queer Cinema movement, and of Araki’s generation that permeated into my generation, was that no hope equals no fear, and optimism is practically counter revolutionary. Araki’s films aren’t simply entertainment: Beginning with The Living End and cemented with 1995’s The Doom Generation (and specifically, Rose McGowan’s debut performance as the fabulously vicious Amy Blue), the dialogue, viewpoints, anti-fashion (to later become fashionable), and attitudes created the 1990s counterculture movement for disaffected queers. Though the films have plenty of sexuality-specific conversations, the overall vibe was pansexual before there were countless think pieces creating commonality among the many colors of the rainbow. The characters exist post-inquisition and treat any new situation or personality as old hat; using apathy as a weapon, Araki fought to nix straight/gay/bisexual labels and treat everyone equally (even if equally uninteresting.) In a recent interview in Variety, acclaimed & influential filmmaker Stephen Soderbergh described Araki as ahead of the curve: “He creates characters who refuse to be boxed into one definition or another. Now we’re in the middle of a wave where people are doing everything they can to get rid of all these labels.” (Debruge, 2019). His subject matter paralleled his filmmaking in that it was a carefully curated hodgepodge of influence and innovation. The dialogue was a blend of childhood nerdiness and culturally oversaturated teenage hipster-speak, that would eventually become the norm with mainstream offerings such as Clueless (Heckerling, 1995) and Scream (Craven, 1996), the latter featuring another subculture-specific iconic performance from 90s alt-queen, Rose McGowan. Scream was written by a gay man, Kevin Williamson, who was no doubt influenced by McGowan’s performance (and Araki’s dialogue) in The Doom Generation, but I digress. Araki’s bricoleur style came of influence and innovation: “This style is based in the cultural practices of bricolage, mainstream incorporation of avant-garde phenomena, and postmodern narrative approaches. Araki functions a bricoleur in the way he modifies Godard’s techniques to produce films of even greater subversive potential. His postpunk bricolage is seen even more clearly in the way. He plays with the conventions of various genres in order to make them serve new and radical purposes.” (Hart, 2003). As Araki progressed, his films’ plots became focused on subject matter often mentioned flippantly in previous works: 1999’s Splendor took a realistic look at open, bisexual throuples, and 2010’s Kaboom was about a decade ahead of gen-Z’s obsession with polyamory. Whatever the case or reasoning, Araki approaches subjects with his distinctly countercultural perspective, making them relatable to one set and palatable to the rest.
Araki’s most ambitious and unforgettable project was undeniably 2004’s grimly beautiful Mysterious Skin, adapted from Scott Heim’s 1995 novel. The subject of pedophilia has always plagued the gay community, whether we’re being accused of it or romanticizing childhood and teenage crushes on (and forbidden trysts with) full-grown men. For victims of such heinous trauma, there isn’t one single way of dealing (or not dealing) with this experience. There was also the concern about how to adapt this story without harming child actors in the process. “I didn’t want to make a movie about childhood trauma and traumatize two children in the process of making it. It wasn’t until I figured that out that I figured out a way to adapt the book.” (Esther, 2005). Mysterious Skin tells the story of Neal (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Bryan (Brady Corbett), two men who were abused repeatedly as kids by their little league coach (Bill Sage), and the way that their traumatized brains processed what happened. Neal remembers the experience as one of love, completely in control of the situation and even the aggressor in some cases (with coach, and eventually with other kids as this behavior became normalized). His denial of wrongdoing and acceptance of his own misguided desire for emotionless interactions as transactions lead to a life as a young prostitute in Kansas and eventually New York City. Bryan’s situation is a bit more nuanced, as he blocks the memory and instead spends his teenage years searching for answers as to why he can’t remember long periods of time as a child. Araki carefully balances Heim’s story and character arcs, allowing the viewer to piece together what led these men to such strange places in their lives. Bryan’s storyline helps to address the betrayal trauma theory that was first explored with the book but still hadn’t received enough mainstream attention by the film’s production. Essentially, Bryan’s situation was common but had been used to discredit sexual assault victims who didn’t have proper memories of the attack and who had remained close to their abusers. “Withdrawing from a caregiver on whom the child victim depends could further threaten the child’s life. For the child who depends upon an abusive caregiver, the situation demands that information about the abuse be blocked from mental mechanisms that control attachment (bonding) behavior. The information that gets blocked may be partial (for instance, blocking emotional responses only), but in many cases the information that gets blocked will lead to a more profound disruption in awareness and autobiographical memory.” (Freyd and DePrince, 2001). Bryan’s denial turned to fantasy, and he convinces himself he was abducted by aliens. Neal’s denial of the abuse’s long-term effects gave him the false confidence to turn to prostitution in the rough and unforgiving world of early-90s NYC. Both boys end up in abusive situations as adults (Neal is viciously raped, Bryan is assaulted by another alien abduction “survivor” in whom he’d trusted), and the experiences jar the boys’ memories and trigger understandably emotional responses. They return home to Kansas, and the film ends with them weeping in each other’s’ arms in their former coach’s former house- the site of their childhood trauma.
The subject matter in Mysterious Skin is extremely dark, but the story is approached with Araki’s now-polished cynicism and endearing signature tricks — this time with a real Hollywood budget. His previous films were known for their alternative soundtracks featuring queer and queer-adjacent punk, shoegaze, and pop music such as Cocteau Twins; for Mysterious Skin, Araki enlisted Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie and pioneering avant-garde composer Harold Budd, to compose the soundtrack. The music is crucial to Araki’s stories as queer youth (inn my experience) famously clings to music and musicians for guidance- this music, and subculture attire, become armor against an uncaring world. (A notion ingeniously weaponized in a scene in The Living End where Luke attacks and beats a would-be gay-basher with a boombox that’s blasting the industrial band, Babyland). The characters existed with that identifiably-Araki carefree abandon — like when Neal kisses his male friend to freak out a redneck, who then pulls a shotgun to chase the teenage boys as they drive away laughing. The colorful and candy-like details such as the dreamlike opening sequence of cereal falling, the neon touches to the mostly-black costuming, and the interior decorations of the sets remind you that you’re watching a film directed by the person who brought you 1997’s color explosion, Nowhere. Araki relinquished cinematography to Steve Gainer, but the close-up shots, cut-aways, production design, and overall mise-en-scene were clearly conceptualized, directed, and edited by Araki himself. Though the characters are not his, Araki’s influence materializes in the actors’ performances and through the camera lens. “The present of this artwork, in other words, is a space of convergence of the disorganized world of stress and pleasure, and appears in motions and tones that raise questions. Its events could indicate a range of registers from trauma-related psychic dissociation and punk antiauthoritarianism to ordinary dissipated, distracted, or loosely quilted consciousness.” (Berlant, 2015). The subject of pedophilia is normalized in our culture (R. Kelly’s marriage to Aaliyah, constant jokes about Michael Jackson, that stupid rose petal scene in 1999’s overblown mess of white male angst American Beauty, etc.) and practically a rite-of-passage in some gay male circles. Bleach blonde circuit queen cum broken conservative bullshit faucet Milo Yiannopoulos was so comfortable with this notion that he mistakenly/thankfully outed himself as an emotionally numb victim (and possibly abuser.) Much like the character of Neal, Yiannopoulos believes/d that molestation is a rite of passage and that 13-year-old boys having sex with older men provided a sort of coming-of-age opportunity for teenagers (Lopez, 2017). Heim and Araki challenge this regrettably common belief and crafted a story to show the aftermath of such experiences and the myriad ways in which this type of trauma can affect people’s brains. Not to mention, gave a voice to people who have delt with their pain in different ways while urging uninformed viewers to not judge someone’s situation without attempting to understand what led them to such extreme circumstances. In typical Araki form, these subjects are highlighted and explored, and their representatives’ attitudes and dialogue are bone dry and post-sensationalist; in other words, these new (to some viewers) and painful topics are presented as already-passe, punctuating their need for attention through weathered disgust and apathetic boredom. The victims are given the upper hand as this (and most of Araki’s own narratives) are unapologetically first-person without space for candy-coated debate.
Gregg Araki has created a distinct voice as a truly original and visionary filmmaker, bricoleur, constructive antagonist, and countercultural messiah for the disaffected queers of my (and many others to follow) generation(s). He has addressed some of the problems of modern society while subverting mainstream and predominantly heteronormative gay beliefs, with a distinctly nihilistic perspective. Whether treating serious subjects with reckless abandonment-as-revolution like his 1992 formal debut The Living End, or with nuanced compassion for the arrested development and subsequently reckless behaviors of abuse survivors like 2004’s Mysterious Skin, Araki pulls the viewer in and reveals (or justifies their already-held) seasoned attitudes and beliefs for those living post-sensationalism. The characters accept their HIV-positive statuses, acknowledge to (hopefully) heal from their abuse, and thus embody the “Now what?” attitudes of a generation whose parents survived depression and war, whose worlds changed with the dawn of the information age, and who had survived the shock and outrage of their perils only to form apathetic yet finely tuned, hyper-aware personalities and perspectives. Araki’s signature photography and editing choices continue to be driven by queer sensibility, pulling back the curtain for plebians (read: heterosexuals) to view our world from our perspective and challenges any notions of what is and isn’t appropriate for discussion. Araki is a child of Los Angeles’ burgeoning punk and goth scenes of the 1980s and translated queer youth’s pursuit of stability via iconic underground rock stars with his characters’ alternative idol worship and his films’ satisfyingly niche soundtracks. Though some of his characters faced the bleakest finality (Andy’s/James Duval’s suicide in Totally F***ed Up), the themes of, “Okay, we survived that-what now?”, resonated with myself as well as other queer peers that I have interacted and grown close with throughout my teenage and adult life. The Living End helped establish and Mysterious Skin was an expertly-crafted yet sly reminder of Araki’s talents and distinct world view — and their hopeless and apathetic themes and attitudes inadvertently gave so many young queers the
FILMS MENTIONED
American Beauty (1999) Directed by Sam Mendes. Written by Alan Ball. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Benning, Chris Cooper.
Clueless (1995) Written and Directed by Amy Heckerling. Starring Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd, Dann Hedaya.
The Doom Generation (1995) Written and Directed by Gregg Araki. Starring Rose MccGowan, James Duval, Johnathan Schaech.
Kaboom (2010) Written and Directed by Gregg Araki. Starring Thomas Dekker, Juno Temple, Haley Bennett.
The Living End (1992) Written and Directed by Gregg Araki. Starring Craig Gilmore and Mike Dytri.
Mysterious Skin (2004) Written and Directed by Gregg Araki. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbett, Elisabeth Shue.
Nowhere (1997) Written and Directed by Gregg Araki. Starring James Duval, Rachel True, Guillermo Diaz.
Scream (1996) Directed by Wes Craven. Written by Kevin Williamson. Starring Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan.
Splendor (1999) Written and Directed by Gregg Araki. Starring Kathleen Robertson, Matt Keeslar, Johnathan Schaech.
Totally F***ed Up (1993) Written and Directed by Gregg Araki. Starring James Duval, Susan Behshid, Gilbert Luna.
SOURCES CITED
Berlant, L. (2015). Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin. International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, 28(3), 191–213. https://doi-org.ezproxy.umgc.edu/10.1007/s10767- 014–9190-y
Debruge, P. (2019) Doom and Bloom. Variety, 343(8), 38–41.
https://search-ebscohost- com.ezproxy.umgc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=135071427&site=eds- live&scope=site
Esther J. (2005) Gregg Araki: tackling the tough ones on film. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 2005;12(5):44.
https://search-ebscohost- com.ezproxy.umgc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsglr&AN=edsglr.A135818735&sit e=eds-live&scope=site
Freyd, J. J., & DePrince, A. P. (2001). Perspectives on Memory for Trauma and Cognitive Processes Associated with Dissociative Tendencies. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 4(2), 137–163. https://doi-org.ezproxy.umgc.edu/10.1300/J146v04n02_07
Hart, K. (2003) Auteur/Bricoleur/Provocateur: Gregg Araki and Postpunk Style in The Doom Generation. Journal of Film and Video, 55(1), 30–38.
https://search-ebscohost- com.ezproxy.umgc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.20688402&site=e ds-live&scope=site.
Lopez, G. (2017, February 24) Meet the 16-year old Canadian girl who took down Milo Yiannopoulos. Vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/2/24/14715774/milo-yiannopoulos-cpac-pedophile-video-canada
Moran, J. M. (1996). Gregg Araki: Guerrilla Film-Maker for a Queer Generation. Film Quarterly, 50(1), 18–26.