The Doom Generation

"i love you" can mean a lot of things... like "you'll do 'till someone better comes along," or "i can't describe how i really feel but i know that I'm supposed to say this," or "shut up, i'm watching tv."a heterosexual movie by gregg araki? i doubt it 😭 i don’t think he could make a straight movie. the last of the teen apocalypse trilogy i needed to watch and this might just be my favorite of the 3. tonally, it’s such a perfect middle ground between the absurdity of nowhere and the sincerity of totally f*ed up. it’s sexy, it’s horny, it’s dialogue is witty (amy’s lines are so iconic), it’s sardonic, its nihilistic but hopeful, it’s painfully queer coded, it’s alienating, it’s overtly political, it’s absurd yet sincere, what more could you want from a movie?  i think the fact that it was marketed and produced as a “straight movie”, to probably appeal to a wider demographic, is somehow poetic. it’s a reflection of how visibility creeps into mainstream cinema and probably connected with queer audiences who would never otherwise have engaged with queer cinema, and discovered themselves in the process. and let’s be real, the subtext, the queer longing, the almost kisses, is so much better than your lover exploding into a cockroach 😭. i’m not a nowhere hater, but that ending just didn’t click with me.  the theme of hell and death recurs throughout this movie, through the opening scene of a nine inch nails track at a rave with the sign “welcome to hell”, the $6.66 payments at drive-throughs and convenience stores, jordan’s, smiths loving, stoner best friend, who killed himself in the school bathroom, and the dog they accidentally ran over, who xavier killed to end its suffering. i think the idea of hell and death is cathartic to a lot of queer people, because our identifies are a threat to the status quo, intertwined with dystopia, framed as satanic, where so many people would rather us not exist at all. in the age of teenage apocalypse and disillusionment, we too are tired of existence. we are constantly angry and tired, so we embrace contrarianism, being constantly deviant in nature, in an almost futile attempt to break down the systems we don’t want to be defined by. all the sex and accidental crimes culminate into an adsurd scene involving homophobic neo-nazi which i can’t even begin to recount 😭, but it ends with the death of johnson, our main character. which makes this the second movie where james duval’s character dies. he was the conscience of the 3, the voice of reason. symbolically, the death of their conscience, feels apocalyptic in the giving of license to apathy and selfishness, in response to their ostracism from society. in the mourning of his death, amy and xavier share a pack of doritos, driving off into the aimless, empty, and uncertain american horizon, listening to slowdive. “there’s just no place for us here.”