Apocalyptic pop
![[Gregg Araki]](gregg.gif)
Filmmaker Gregg Araki's Nowhere plays with a sexually ambiguous, pornographic brutality
With his debut feature, The Living End, Gregg Araki became one of the first filmmakers to pry open the cinematic closet and usher out what would become a powerful new wave of gay film. Immediately after its release, however, Araki began making movies that were in many ways completely unlike his first, a series that he calls his "teen apocalypse trilogy": Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, and the just released Nowhere (playing at Harvard Square). With their saturated color and playful production design (a tinfoil-covered bar, a checkerboard hotel suite, and a bedroom resembling a Twister game), these films play as if John Hughes and John Waters had spawned a hyper-sexed, hyper-violent adolescent love child. Their ingredients are almost identical to those of high-camp B-movie horror: T&A (both male and female), mind-numbing violence, and, of course, the requisite rubber monster.
Araki's characters are primarily alienated, disaffected teeny-boppers with supercharged hormones. They inhabit the cartoon landscape of the filmmaker's electric Los Angeles, a world populated by sitcom rejects, Hollywood strays, and the detritus of '70s television. This LA is in a surreal state of arrested development, a place where communication is limited almost entirely to the exchange of prepubescent locker-room putdowns. The characters' lives have become a monotonous barrage of overstimulation, and their offhand carnality is interrupted only by the occasional sociopath or alien invader.
At the core of each film is Araki's "Everyteen" (played in all three by actor James Duval), a sexually ambiguous, fragile creature who yearns for something like old-fashioned love. Duval moves through the psychedelic, pornographic brutality of these films like a deer caught in a Mack truck's headlights. In Araki's universe, hope survives only in the look in Duval's eyes and the assurance that someone, at least, is unhappy with what he sees. One in Ten recently spoke with Araki.
Q: With The Living End, you became the center of a lot of attention for being one of the first young and vocally out filmmakers. The gay community puts a lot of pressure on its artists to make specifically gay-oriented art, but you've refused to be tagged in that way -- even going so far, in the credits of The Doom Generation, to title it "a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki." Have you received a lot of criticism for this?
A: It's one of the many reasons why I'm so hated. I've never really toed the politically correct line. I've found that's sort of a cardinal sin for a lot of people. I'm not interested in other people's political agenda -- I'm much more interested in being a filmmaker and making films that are interesting to me. I'm not interested in being anyone's propaganda machine. I'm not in advertising, I'm not trying to brainwash people. I'm just expressing the world that I live in, and my sense of that world.
Q: Your characters are basically sexually ambiguous, and I get the impression from your recent films that just about everything turns you on -- boys and boys, girls and girls, boys and girls. What turns you on?
A: What turns me on -- what is a great influence on my films and on my life -- is alternative music and alternative music culture. If people want to write papers or something, that's where all my influences come from in terms of the sensibility of my movies -- the sort of do-it-yourself garage aesthetic. That is where my head is, much more than in other people's politically correct dogmas.
Q: What bands in particular influence you?
A: They're pretty much all on the Nowhere soundtrack. Music is really a profound influence on my existence, in that I pretty much listen to music all the time -- from when I wake up in the morning to when I go to sleep. I'm listening to a Walkman when I write. It's just such a part of my whole life. The soundtracks to my films are integral -- they're a sort of soul to my movies, rather than an afterthought. The films are pretty much inspired by that music.
Q: I noticed in your last two films, particularly, that unrequited love -- especially unrequited homosexual love -- is a running theme. Is that a reflection on your own relationships, on your own life?
A: I wouldn't say that it's a reflection of my own relationships -- I think that all my films are highly romantic. I think they have been unjustly criticized as being nihilistic, being about this kind of chaos with no redemption. That's just not accurate. I think that they're all very romantic in the sense that they're all clinging to this ideal of love, the search for love and purity in what essentially is a chaotic and impure world. Thematically, that's at the core of all my movies. In that way, they are unlike movies like Kids -- which was, for me, a completely nihilistic film. Those characters didn't believe anything, they didn't care about each other, they didn't care about anything except drugs and fucking.
That's why Jimmy Duval is the center of all three films -- because his persona is very sensitive, there's a sense of poignancy about him. For me, having that sort of emotional center to this topsy-turvy, chaotic universe is really crucial. Because otherwise it really is just this bunch of crazy shit going on, with no emotional center. I think that his character makes the films more resonant.
Q: I feel at times that he's literally speaking for you.
A: Well, I feel like there's a part of me in every one of my characters. My films are not autobiographical, but I do relate to certain levels of his dilemma.
Q: You really have a knack for casting these forgotten film and television icons.
A: They're gone but never forgotten.
Q: If you could cast anyone -- dead or alive -- in your films, who would it be?
A: Oh God, that's way too hard a question. I mean, that's just overwhelming. I'm very into pop culture, and I'm not elitist about it freely influencing my work. I don't have any pretense about using pop culture in my films. So it's just endless, the people I could have in my movies. But, you know, I've already cast Heidi Fleiss. Really, what more could you ask?
-- Jessica Hundley