Queer com­ing of age in the Teen Apoc­a­lypse Trilogy

Com­ing of age has changed a lot in queer films over the last 20 years. As rep­re­sen­ta­tion has changed on screen, and accep­tance has changed off of it, recent queer films have been called ​“post-gay,” where the queer­ness of char­ac­ters is inci­den­tal, and unim­por­tant to the wider sto­ry, a kind of expan­sion of queer assim­i­la­tion into straight soci­ety, a way of say­ing, ​‘See, we’re just like you.’

But Gregg Araki’s films are dif­fer­ent. Even 1995’s The Doom Gen­er­a­tion, giv­en the tongue-in-cheek descrip­tion of being ​‘a straight movie by Gregg Ara­ki,’ embraces a kind of strange, punk queer­ness, sit­u­at­ing char­ac­ters on the fringes, liv­ing life dif­fer­ent­ly to the straight major­i­ty. These lives are imper­fect; the char­ac­ters are lone­ly, vic­tims of vio­lence. But in spite of the blood­stains and anger that dec­o­rate Araki’s apoc­a­lyp­tic ado­les­cence, it still shines a light on cor­ner­stones of grow­ing up queer, look­ing for art and par­ties and lovers to escape with.

The cli­max of Nowhere, the final film in the tril­o­gy, sums up the nihilism at the heart of the trip­tych best, when Dark (played by James Duvall, who appears in all three films) says, ​“Our gen­er­a­tion is gonna wit­ness the end of every­thing. You can see it in our eyes. It’s in mine. Look. I’m doomed.” This short, clipped dia­logue, and inner dark­ness echoes the nov­els of Bret Eas­t­on Ellis; the lone­ly youth and emp­ty promis­es of ​‘Less Than Zero’ can be seen through­out the Teen Apoc­a­lypse Trilogy.

Ara­ki him­self has spo­ken about the films in com­par­a­tive terms, describ­ing Total­ly F***ed Up as a ​“queer John Hugh­es flick,” and Nowhere as ​“901210 on acid.” The films exist at odds with, and along­side tra­di­tion­al com­ing of age sto­ries simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, with their world­view changed by the explic­it queer­ness run­ning through them. The things that the char­ac­ters engage with is a reflec­tion of this; queer authors like Clive Bak­er and Den­nis Coop­er are ref­er­enced in the tril­o­gy, plac­ing Araki’s char­ac­ters and films with­in a kind of queer canon.

Total­ly F***ed Up and Nowhere are sim­i­lar in the sto­ries they tell. Both focus on groups of queer teenagers: their loves, lives and loss­es; all of them look­ing for some­thing to hold on to at the end of the world. Not only are the vast major­i­ty of the char­ac­ters in these films open­ly queer, Ara­ki explores iden­ti­ties that even more con­tem­po­rary queer films tend to steer clear of (bisex­u­al­i­ty fig­ures promi­nent­ly, for exam­ple). The lone­li­ness that per­me­ates the tril­o­gy – often char­ac­ters are deal­ing with breakups, dis­tance between them­selves and a loved one – is insep­a­ra­ble from the queerness.

Ara­ki doesn’t shy away from show­ing homo­pho­bic abuse, either ver­bal or phys­i­cal, show­ing the ways in which the world can be inhos­pitable to queer peo­ple, and that even the pre­sumed safe­ty of fam­i­ly is some­thing that can be tak­en away after some­one comes out. This hap­pens near the end of Total­ly F***ed Up and, even now, it res­onates, espe­cial­ly when con­sid­er­ing the rates of home­less­ness among young LGBT+ people.

The char­ac­ters in Araki’s films feel like a kind of rag-tag cho­sen fam­i­ly; they’re often on the run, either lit­er­al­ly like in Doom Gen­er­a­tion, or metaphor­i­cal­ly, with aliens and the apoc­a­lypse creep­ing onto the hori­zon at the end of Nowhere. Ara­ki under­stands the kind of lone­li­ness that can come with grow­ing up queer, and he refus­es to shy away from it; the pow­er of the films comes from the fact that he offers a poten­tial anti­dote; com­pan­ion­ship and sol­i­dar­i­ty, ways of let­ting peo­ple remind them­selves that, what­ev­er the rest of the world thinks, being queer doesn’t mean you have to be alone.

As well as explor­ing the heart and heart­less­ness of queer­ness, Araki’s Teen Apoc­a­lypse is in tune with the ways in which peo­ple grow up; how they sur­round them­selves with art and media, and how this can impact them. The queer Nat­ur­al Born Killers ener­gy of Doom Gen­er­a­tion under­stands this as it shows sur­re­al news broad­casts, and the mas­ter­ful pro­duc­tion of Nowhere is full of nods to a wide vari­ety of artists, from Yay­oi Kusama’s Dots Obses­sion, to the over-sat­u­ra­tion of TVs in the work of Nam June Paik. Araki’s por­trait of ado­les­cence is full of know­ing winks to the way the world shapes his char­ac­ters, includ­ing the dark com­e­dy of a char­ac­ter in Nowhere being beat­en to death by an assailant who uses a Campbell’s can of toma­to soup.

At first glance, it would be easy to dis­miss Araki’s Teen Apoc­a­lypse Tril­o­gy as a kind of out­dat­ed queer­ness, one root­ed in self-loathing. But the lone­li­ness depict­ed in Araki’s work is some­thing that his char­ac­ters are des­per­ate­ly fight­ing against; they’re all look­ing for com­pan­ion­ship, for love. In Nowhere it’s described as the search for some­one who can ​“hold me in their arms and tell me every­thing is going to be okay;” in Total­ly F***ed Up the char­ac­ters are look­ing for ​“some­thing for peo­ple to cling to besides TV.” Araki’s char­ac­ters are look­ing for hope in an inhos­pitable envi­ron­ment, try­ing to grow up while the world is end­ing around them.