Nowhere

Trying to Watch as Many of the Films I Blind Bought this Year Before the Year is Over 12Nowhere, directed by Gregg Araki, 1997 I don’t remember exactly when I first heard of Gregg Araki, but I do know I first heard his name in a film. I don’t remember the name of the film, but I do remember it was a French film about a closeted gay French teenager. He and the boy he is interested in go to watch a Gregg Araki film - Nowhere, to be exact. That name stuck with me and I did a quick dive into the name, soon learning that he is a gay filmmaker who was making some really subversive films that were internationally acclaimed. It would make sense for a French film about gay teens to draw inspiration from his work and even go so far as to insert it into the film itself. It would be a while before I would watch my first Gregg Araki film, Totally Fed Up. It was dripping in anger and gen x disaffectedness, shot on a low budget and exploring how to those marginalized for their sexual orientation, a toxic relationship can sometimes feel better than no relationship at all. Is it better to be alone or to be with someone like you even if they are themselves troxic?  I’d soon watch The Doom Generation, blown away by how much more visually striking the film was. There is an evolution of style between Totally Fed Up and this film. I went ahead and added the rest of his films to my watchlist on letterboxd once I watched The Doom Generation. Once Criterion announced that they were releasing his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, which included Totally F*ked up and The Doom Generation, I knew that that would be an instant purchase for me. The stylistic growth of The Doom Generation is then carried over to Nowhere. The third in his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, Araki continues the conflicting cynicism and desire for connection that was present in the previous two films while also ramping up the visuals by a hundred. Dark is an apathetic loser whose few sources of joy includes the girl he is in an open relationship with, Mel, and the mysterious boy he keeps meeting, Montgomery. The way queerness is presented in the film is relatively tame compared to the default-hetero relationships that we see throughout the film. Mel and Dark are both bisexual but the main conflict in their relationship is a “defining of the relationship”, so to speak, and both of their respective same-sex relationships are not presented with the same level of salaciousness or outright perversion as most of the heterosexual relationships we see on screen. Early on in the film we are treated with artifice. The bright colours and the strange and overly-decorated sets set the individuality of its large cast as central and important. These identities clash and merge and are heightened during group scenes, even as characters disappear or move from place to place. The way Araki portrays the party scene in of itself is chaotic and brash with a level of frenzy that makes the fact that there are alien abductions going on feel rather mundane by comparison. The strange is just presented alongside the everyday as if it themselves are part of the everyday.