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| Images courtesy of Strand Releasing |
Back in 1995 on the cusp of such violent countercultural provocations
as Natural Born Killers and The Basketball Diaries came gay
Japanese-American writer-director Gregg Araki’s New Queer Cinema answer to
those films with his hotly debated and detested second installment of his Teenage
Apocalypse trilogy: an ultraviolent hypersexual road movie known as The
Doom Generation. The first major
motion picture for the indie director working on the fringes of the cult cinema
scene, loosely based on Mark Beyer’s running comic strip Amy and Jordan played
by Rose McGowan and James Duval respectively, the NC-17 film was all but
completely burned at the stake by critics upon initial release and it barely
made a profit at the box office. Reviled
by major critics including Roger Ebert, this Bonnie and Clyde inspired amphetamine-laced
companion piece of sorts to Natural Born Killers was among the most
hated films of its time.
In recent years however, Gregg Araki’s stature as one of the
torchbearers of transgressive and unforgivingly bleak New Queer Cinema filmmaking
only grew with time, earning critical acclaim for his child abuse drama Mysterious
Skin while also further working in television such as directing several of
the episodes for Netflix’s Dahmer.
But where was perhaps the director’s most personal project in all of this? Languishing in rights issues for years only
available in poor quality non-anamorphic masters, The Doom Generation’s
chance at finding a second life outside of its initial theatrical condemnation
seemed remote at best. With its snarky
subtitle on the poster “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki”, the director’s
first real shot at pushing his contested narrative into the mainstream seems
more than ripe for reevaluation. Thanks
to a newly minted 4K restoration supervised and remixed with a new 5.1
soundtrack by Gregg Araki spearheaded by New Queer Cinema film label Strand
Releasing, audiences of both orientations now have a chance to see one of the
most polarizing films of the 1990s perhaps in a different light.
After a wild night out at the club blasting industrial
music, teen lovers Jordan White (James Duval) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) bump
into and give a lift to a charismatic drifter named Xavier Red (Johnathon
Schaech) or X for short. Turning out to
be more trouble than they anticipated, Xavier kills a convenience store clerk
during a pit stop and the three find themselves hiding out in a cheap motel to
evade incarceration. During their hideout,
it becomes apparent Xavier is watching in on their bathtub sexing and over the
course of the movie these miscreants start developing bisexual feelings for one
another. Meanwhile their aimless sex-and-drugs
addled sojourn through Los Angeles continues to end up in violent encounters,
usually stemming from random men claiming to be Amy’s ex-lovers. Eventually rousing the unwanted attention of
the FBI, this trio of murderous lovers-on-the-run soon finds itself fending off
the lasciviously antagonistic advances of a neo-Nazi group while the brewing
sexual tensions between the three reaches a boiling point.
Openly surreal with heightened realism such as a severed
head which flies across the screen Wild at Heart style still speaking
for a moment or two after landing on a table, aggressively darkly humorous and
loaded with intensifying sexual encounters, The Doom Generation was
destined to be an uncategorizable mashup of increasingly transgressive
provocations. At once a character study
of three criminals wading through a bizarre Boschian vision of then-90s
America, a refutation of genre expectations such as having straight characters
experiment in homosexuality, and a hard, heavy slamming of the gavel on our
sense of composure, its a movie that seemed (at the time) to unify gay and
straight audiences in their hatred for it.
Seen now, however, in the context of Araki’s filmography, it is a
defiant declaration of an important new cinematic talent whose film was perhaps
ahead of its day.
One of the first films in Araki’s filmography not shot by
the director himself, this time leaving the duties to Jim Fealy who captures
the sleazy neon-lit interiors of the shady clubs and cheap motels with carnivalesque
relish. The soundtrack itself has a
mostly acoustic score by Dan Gatto from the synth punk band Babyland
though the needle drops including but not limited to Nine Inch Nails and Aphex
Twin are endless. The central three
actors give startlingly nuanced performances with Rose McGowan’s bitchy meth
addicted nymphomaniac arguably being the performance of her career. James Duval, best known as Frank from Donnie
Darko, makes the film’s beleaguered and frightened lover Jordan a character
not afraid of Jonathon Schaech’s drifter so much as he fears his attraction to
him. Then there’s the bevy of cameos
including but not limited to Parker Posey, Margaret Cho, Skinny Puppy and Heidi
Fleiss, rounding out the film as a most wild ensemble road trip.
Though widely attacked initially, decades later Gregg Araki
invites viewers to take a look at his most personal film with a different pair
of eyes. While some may still feel as
strongly negative towards the piece now as they did in 1995, The Doom Generation
while looming somewhat in the shadow of Natural Born Killers seen
now represents an important forward step in the development of Gregg Araki’s
special brand of New Queer Cinema. Still
a difficult and at times obscenely filthy shocker with a coda that perhaps goes
too far, The Doom Generation while debatable whether or not it is
actually a misunderstood masterpiece nevertheless has a new unique opportunity
to shine brightly as it was intended after years of being treated so poorly by
critics, audiences and distributors.
Still has the uncanny power to inflict heavy pain and aesthetic
pleasures on even the most jaded of cinematic edge lords.
-- Andrew Kotwicki
