The Doom Generation

as part of a university assignment last year, i wrote a review of the three films that comprise Gregg Araki’s teenage apocalypse trilogy. this excerpt is the segment of the piece i wrote pertaining to 1995’s The Doom Generation: ‘A heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki’, his first major film The Doom Generation begins - as the sound of Nine Inch Nails’ Heresy blares. James Duval is again the first non-text image of the film, here he’s moshing under the red strobe lights of a dingy underground club - a set which looks as though it has already cost more than the entire budget of the first film. A tracking shot reveals a sign: Welcome to Hell. The camera’s movement lands on our co-lead, Rose McGowan, who makes the first verbal contribution of the film: ‘fuck’. She’s looking for her skull lighter and claims that, if it’s missing, she’ll slit her wrists. Just like that, as swiftly as in the first film, the tone is set. As she gives someone the finger, we see the word ‘kill’ tattooed on her knuckles à la Night of the Hunter (1955, Laughton). Her name is Amy Blue, and she and her boyfriend - James Duval’s Jordan White - are about to meet rebellious drifter Xavier Red, played by Johnathon Schaech. The character’s names are testament to Araki’s disregard for subtlety. They live in an America where everything is exaggerated: the food is bigger and more disgusting, the television is even more obtuse and everything costs $6.66. Araki doesn’t reflect the world but magnify it, pushing this culture to its extremes in an attempt to highlight its absurdity. With this, the longer the film goes on, the less the ‘Welcome to Hell’ sign in the opening feels just like the club’s branding, and the more it is reframed as a general warning. Araki - in this film more so than its surrounding two - paints America as a hellscape full of hatred, gun violence and religious references, all done in a way that is either prescient or proves history’s ability to repeat itself. Less despondent and more angry, the film flexes its - still sub-one million USD but vastly increased - budget with mise-en-scene that reflects its mood. Araki was able to show off his talent for set design in expressionistic spaces who’s otherworldly atmospheres contribute to the film’s overall feel of apocalyptic dread. This combined with location shooting in underdeveloped areas and arid landscapes truly makes Los Angeles look closer to Mad Max (Miller, 1979) than La La Land (Chazelle, 2016). It is a perfectly aestheticised visualisation of the characters’ Gen X nihilism and teenage ennui. Narratively, the film follows our three protagonists as they flee from the accidental killing of a shopkeeper who accused them of shoplifting. It mirrors the traditional American lovers on the run roadtrip archetype of a film like Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967), or even Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but pushed to its absolute extreme. The trio are a sexed up ball of teenage emotion storming through Los Angeles backroads and finding trouble along the way. They are accosted by a series of Amy’s violently obsessed exes and neo-nazi groups, and sometimes both at once. The heterosexuality mentioned at the start of the film proves itself to not just be the self aware gag by Araki that it first seems, but actually crucial to the film’s central themes. In many ways it ties back in to the headline at the opening of Totally Fucked Up, the news article under which reads: ‘Authorities explain that gay youths readily become despondent over their failure to succeed as heterosexuals while betraying their feelings of homosexuality because of society’s prejudice’ It is hinted many times throughout the film that Jordan White has homosexual desires but is afraid to act on them. At the beginning of the film he states that he’s afraid of catching AIDS and Xavier Red, who is more open with his sexuality, is frequently targeted by hate groups. Any moment of open homosexuality is immediately snuffed out by prejudiced violence - most notably in the bone chillingly brutal final sequence. It’s as though the film itself is afraid to express its homosexuality, as Araki portrays America and fascism as inextricably interlinked. This is why I find it so easy to disagree with Roger Ebert’s assessment of the film where, in his 0 out of 4 stars review, he equates the film to ‘fascist twaddle about the ubermensch’, when the film’s characters are so clearly victims of the ideologies that he claims they help perpetuate. The film is an expertly crafted, low budget indie mood piece, who’s often hilarious dialogue and surreal world render it completely memorable. It was a sign of things to come for Araki who, two years later, would hone his skills even further in 1997’s Nowhere.