It takes mere seconds for director Gregg Araki to show, in the provocative counter-culture classic The Doom Generation, that the America he saw in 1995 was in ruins. In a subterranean club pounding industrial dance music soundtracks a hellish scene built around pyrotechnics and standoffish aggression. Rose McGowan (Scream, Death Proof) sits front and center, and through her character Amy, a confrontational attitude will be perfectly distilled via the film's opening dialogue: "FUCK!". It will be repeated endlessly in a script riddled with abrasive one-liners.
Moments later, Amy will be demanding James Duval's Jordan to "Put your dick in me!" while sat in a parking lot that resembles the futuristic wasteland of Escape From New York more closely than that of mid-90s California. But his response, which prefaces a violent and surreal crime spree across vivid American badlands, speaks volumes of the state of the world in 1995: "Sorry," he meekly states. "I'm afraid of getting AIDS."
"As a young queer artist, you [felt] like you needed to say something," Araki told The Ringer in 2019. And indeed, the Bush administration of the early 90s did little to alleviate the anxieties of the USA's homosexual communities. Anti-gay violence had spiked by 200% under Reagan, and the government had taken scarce little action to prevent the spread of what was referred to behind closed doors as the "gay plague." The situation looked no less bleak when President Bush summated in 1991 that "behavioral change" was the solution to overcoming the AIDS epidemic. During his presidency, AIDS was the leading cause of death for men aged 25-44 in New York, and between 1986—1995 over 330,000 men succumbed to the disease in the US.
While "History Will Recall, George Bush Did Nothing At All," a new generation of creatives armed with video cameras had already begun crafting a mini-revolution in the early 90s at the height of the indie cinema boom. In a widely-circulated Sight and Sound essay from 1992, B. Ruby Rich would cite filmmakers like Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, and Tom Kalin as key mobilizers of a "Queer New Wave" in cinema. While there was no collective manifesto between them, there was synchronicity amongst the directors in their desire to bring homosexual themes into the mainstream during a period defined by government inaction.
These filmmakers' targeted homophobic society through queer narratives and a racy, provocative filmmaking style. And in the years before The Doom Generation's sexually fluid, motel-soiling trio of Amy, Jordan, and X (Jonathon Schaech) tore across America eating Doritos and shooting up Quickie Marts, a defiant theme of queers-as-criminals was already being established.
Tom Kalin's Swoon was a homosexual re-telling of the infamous Leopold and Loen case, detailing the story of two wealthy students who kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old boy Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924. Haynes' Poison was a three-part science fiction anthology that concluded with the story 'Homo,' which concerned a gay fascination between two prisoners. And Gregg Araki's own The Living End, sometimes referred to as "the gay Thelma & Louise," depicted a killing spree by two HIV-positive lovers. Praised by critics like Rolling Stone's Peter Travers for its focus in the face of "Hollywood's gutless fear of AIDS movies," it was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.
TRANS-gressive couldn't be more fitting a descriptor. Filmed with no permits, no budget, and no fucks given, Araki's early works would build enough momentum for him to tackle the "Teen Apocalypse" trilogy in the mid-'90s. Between 1993's Totally Fucked Up, a rag-tag story of a dysfunctional "family" of gay adolescents, and 1997's future-star-studded bisexual black comedy Nowhere, The Doom Generation would provide a crucial central chapter. Araki's major studio breakthrough — his first to be shot on 35mm with a full crew and a proper budget of $800,000 — was filmed almost exclusively at night-time across undeveloped urban areas in Los Angeles, amplifying the film's apocalyptic atmosphere.
The result is a film that feels genuinely dystopian. Described by The Face a "Gen X Bonnie and Clyde," The Doom Generation is a super-stylized and neon-soaked fever dream featuring copious sex, decapitations, and swastika-bearing thugs adorned in stars and stripes.
It is a world dominated by the number "666,"; where clothes stores fly banners that read "PREPARE FOR THE APOCALYPSE." The lead characters fly in the face of self-care by dieting exclusively on hot dogs, cigarettes, and "passionfruit slurpsters," their identities defined by kitsch toys and garish fashion inspired by 60s Pop Art. And the film further confronts the audience with racism, blasphemy, and almost defiantly poor acting as characters reel off lines like "I feel like a gerbil smothering in Richard Gere's butthole." When it went on general release, 11 minutes had to be cut to ensure an R rating.
After mass walkouts marred its Sundance premiere, The Doom Generation famously received a zero-star review from film critic Roger Ebert, who likened Araki's "sleazefest" to a trashy Natural Born Killers. But audiences repulsed by the film's depraved content clearly missed the point. The allegory of Araki's pretentious, lowbrow masterpiece is made evident during the opening frames as it introduces itself as "a heterosexual movie." This doesn't refer to the sexually-fluid relationship shared between the three main characters — it's a statement on the hypocrisy of "heterosexual" mainstream society, which had lost its way entirely by the height of the AIDS crisis.
