The Doom Generation, and Gregg Araki, Restored

 Gregg Araki is a pivotal figure in the "Queer Wave" movement, which makes him a key player in the 90s independent film wave as a whole. To a younger person, someone young enough that I could not have possibly watched an Araki film in a theater before, it sure seems that he's never gotten the respect of a major filmmaker. Part of that is due to his edgy content, okay, sure. But what part of that lack of love is due to distribution? One of the topics that fascinates me in the history of film is this idea of functionally "lost" media that's only a few decades old and was reasonably notable when it did come out. "The Doom Generation" premiered at the Sundance festival less than 30 years ago, was nominated for multiple Indie Spirit awards, and then vanished off the face of the earth, its distributor bankrupt and its content as un-mainstream as one can imagine. You cannot stream "The Doom Generation", nor can you buy or rent it from Apple or Amazon or wherever you go for digital VOD. Araki's direct follow up in his thematic trilogy, 1997's "Nowhere", suffers the same fate. How can any filmmaker build a new fanbase of young people when their most famous works are so inaccessible? And this is extra important for Araki, because nearly all of his films are purposely vulgar and decadent depictions of youths. I love "The Doom Generation", and I think it holds up well. It might be more relevant now than when it came out. But I can't imagine anyone watching this film for the first time over age 25 really connecting with it. 

 So what is actually here? Shocking sex and violence, mostly played for laughs, until they aren't. Roger Ebert gave the film 0 stars in his review at the premiere, and I would sum up his explanation as: 'Araki needed to either moralize or demonize his protagonists, because inventing scenarios where they can be morally in the right for murder is a cop out'. I think he missed the point. The gore effects are quite silly and way over the top, and if you focus on that, maybe you think it's funny or maybe you don't. Maybe the teens' sense of humor catches on with you or maybe it doesn't. The dialogue is laced with silly catchphrases and pop culture references from the mid 1990s, and while I laughed a lot, any script making a Richard Gere hamster joke is going out of its way to date itself. But I think there's something to be said for the idea that Araki's teens are constantly threatened with sexualization and violence at every turn. No matter where our main couple and enigmatic drifter friend named X go, someone is there to treat the teenage girl as a sex object and point a gun at the trio for doing normal teenage things. Amy is misremembered as a proustite or mistress by 3 different people, because American society at large treats teenage girls in that way. "Shoplifters will be executed" is not a subtle line, but it is a meaningful one: American society is trigger happy to punish people for minor transgressions. Given that, how can these kids turn out in any other way than sexual and violent?

 It must be stressed that Gregg Araki is the least subtle filmmaker this side of Oliver Stone - this is, after all, a descent into hell where the price of everything the kids buy is $6.66. But I do think there's a bit of a surprising reveal built into the concept. One would probably expect X, the violent rogue who accidentally finds himself on the lover's road trip, to be the devil here. In a socially conservative sense, he is. It's X who introduces Amy to kinky sex and Jordan to gay feelings, and it's X who actually commits each murder in the story. But Araki makes it pretty clear that the real hell is just America, a country where teen girls are assaulted and queer people are murdered every day. Drugged-out decadence isn't the problem, it's the natural byproduct. 

 Which brings us to the ending set piece, where nothing is funny and the film gets uncomfortable. Jordan and X get very close to performing the film's first gay sex scene. Instead, American Nazi fascists show up and perform the first violence with real consequences. I again feel the need to emphasize how little interest Araki has in being coy about this: a man with a Nazi tattoo unfurls an American flag and plays the U.S. national anthem on a radio while cutting off the penis of a homosexual. It's this part which convinces me the most that "The Doom Generation" is still relevant to today's youth, both because American fascists are louder now than they've been in decades and because I think today's young cinephiles don't care much for subtlety (or at least, they don't treat subtlety as an inherent virtue in storytelling). This is a deeply angry film about how teens are treated, but Araki has more smarts than angst, and the movie we got out of it is phenomenal.