Nowhere
Araki has such a talent for making something simultaneously punk rock as hell and also darkly poetic. All of his Apocalypse Trilogy is amazing at it, but this is where it peaks. Funny, incredibly dark, queer, violent, horny as hell, and filled to the brim with insanity, yet it never loses sight of what it wants to be. Mixes the dark humor/irreverence of Doom Gen with the queer tragedy of Totally Fucked Up, which (wouldn’t you believe it) is a winning combination.
A film that touches on so many aspects of the teenage problem runs such a risk of feeling all over the place, and this definitely is, but it feels like it’s by design. Dark is confused and just trying to find something to latch onto in his world, and the movie feels like it’s relaying that to us via the unorthodox storytelling. Plus, it just gives us more time for Araki shenanigans, which is always fun.
Definitely the standout was how the film depicted sexuality. Usually, as someone under the asexual umbrella, films driven by sex don’t really work for me. Nowhere broke that for me, as it depicts sex in a way that makes sense to me; a broken, flawed way to make us feel secure and loved even for a second. It also shows how different people react to sex, with Dark’s relationship with it most closely mirroring my own. It shows sex in its most vapid, flamboyant state, and its most damaging. The “we believe!” scene is one of the most heart-wrenching scenes I’ve seen in a long time.
It helps I really latched into Dark. I found a lot of myself in him. I tried out a life not too dissimilar to this, but it always felt wrong, I felt out of place, I felt lost and scared. Dark’s monologue towards the end felt like looking in a mirror to me a few months ago. Dark just wanted to be loved and safe. You may hear that and go “oh, we’ll doesn’t everyone?” That may be true, but the way people find this is so different, and that’s why I love this film. It shows so many ways of people trying and failing to find happiness that lasts for mere seconds, as it’s better than being unhappy, right?
A new favorite of mine.
“It's like we all know way down in our souls that our generation is going to witness the end of everything. You can see it in our eyes. It's in mine, look.”