The Weirdos and the Outsiders: Gregg Araki on “The Teen Apocalypse Trilogy”

It’s impossible to talk about New Queer Cinema without talking about Gregg Araki, whose low-fi, erotic, playfully surreal style still feels one of a kind. He is perhaps most known for his ‘Teen Apocalypse’ trilogy: “Totally F**ked Up” (1993), “The Doom Generation” (1995) and “Nowhere” (1997). Each of these films stars James Duval in a different but spiritually similar role, surrounded by other attractive young queer people coming of age in an increasingly strange world. “Totally F**ked Up” is somewhat grounded in reality, while “The Doom Generation” and “Nowhere” feature more heightened strangeness and violence, which only enhance their beauty. Together, the films paint a complicated picture of social unrest in the modern age. The trilogy was recently restored in 4K and packaged as a Criterion box set, cementing its place in film history. 

In the early ‘90s, Araki had previously made three low-budget films: “Three Bewildered People in the Night” (1987), “The Long Weekend (O’ Despair)” (1989), and most prominently, “The Living End” (1992). Meeting me to discuss the restorations and Criterion box set, Araki describes his fourth feature, provocatively titled “Totally F**ked Up,” as the gay version of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculin Feminin” (1966). “It seemed like a very challenging time to be young and be gay, so I really wanted to make that movie,” he explains. The film follows a group of gay teens coming of age in Los Angeles, dealing with problems of life and love. With confessional asides to the camera mixed with its narrative sequences, the movie is a diary for alienated ’90s kids seeking some semblance of stability and understanding. 

When casting “Totally F**ked Up,” Araki found a muse through a classic LA encounter. “Jimmy Duval was this kid that would come into the coffee shop I used to write my scripts in. I remember seeing him one day, and he was showing pictures to his friends like he was a model or actor,” he recounts fondly. “I just walked up to him and said, ‘We’re casting this movie, would you like to audition?’ Then it was kind of history from there.” “Totally F**ked Up” had a sporadic shooting schedule spanning 4 to 6 months, with no one in the cast of actors older than 20, all bursting with energy. The film was shot on 16mm for the low, low price of 25 grand by just Araki, producer Andrea Sperling, and a handful of crew members. Araki compares the experience to making a student film, but the result was enough to change the trajectory of his and Duval’s careers. “Making that movie inspired me to do a trilogy, and I wrote ‘The Doom Generation’ and ‘Nowhere’ for Jimmy,” he says. “He’s the center.” 

Duval’s three characters in the trilogy–Andy, Jordan White, and Dark–are spiritually one. “He represented to me this kind of earnest romantic soul caught in this world of chaos and violence and surrealism. He’s very sensitive and open to the world. He’s kind of a forerunner in a way to the entire ‘babygirl’-type thing, you know what I mean?” Araki explains with a laugh. “These men who are not alpha men, but a different kind of sex symbol—the sensitive guy, the emotional guy, not the macho dickhead guy. The opposite of toxic masculinity.” 

This distinction is most pronounced in “The Doom Generation,” where Jordan White is contrasted with Xavier Red, played by Jonathon Schaech. Jordan is by far the most innocent of the love triangle he’s stuck in with Xavier and the foul-mouthed, authoritative Amy Blue (Rose McGowan). He loves Amy but doesn’t mind sharing her with the boorish, violent Xavier; he just wants her to be happy. But in this trilogy, things always come to a tragic end. Each time, Araki’s screenplay frontloads comedy and absurdity before a final gut punch changes everything. 

“It was the first movie I did that had a real budget and a crew, you know?” he says. “The amazing Jim Fealy was the DP, and the late legendary Thérèse DePrez was the production designer. The budget was like 750K or something, and it was my first film on 35mm, so that had challenges, but it was an amazing experience to make that leap. It was a hard shoot because it was winter and cold, and the movie took place at night. I have such fond memories of it. I loved making it, but it was a very, very tough shoot.” 

This seems fitting for a film that often feels like a slow descent into Hell, as Amy, Andy, and Xavier are followed by violence everywhere they go. Among the most visually arresting works of Araki’s filmography, “The Doom Generation” attempts to reveal the ugliness of America and how harshly society judges anyone different. “My movies have always been about the weirdos and outsiders and the people who don’t usually fit in,” Araki says with a smile. 

This mission is cemented in the final film in the trilogy, “Nowhere.” “It originally came about because of ‘Twin Peaks’. David Lynch is such a giant icon to me and an idol of mine,” Araki says dreamily. “The pilot of ‘Twin Peaks’ was released as a feature in Europe, so I had this idea of making a feature that was basically a pilot.” With its bright colors and funny cast, it’s easy to imagine “Nowhere” leading to a TV show. The film follows Duval’s Dark, a lovesick puppy who resents having to share his girlfriend Mel (Rachel True) with Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson)—this was long before queer poly culture was much more normalized. Dark yearns for a more traditional, stable connection in a increasingly chaotic world. Surrounding this love triangle is a loosely connected community of outsiders with names like Egg, Cowboy, Zero, and Handjob. “Nowhere” has by far the largest cast of any of Araki’s films, with Christina Applegate, Heather Graham, Debi Mazar, Denise Richards, Beverly D’Angelo, and even John Ritter having small roles, all of them weaved into the drama.

“I was watching “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills 90210” to get the structure, conventions, and all that,” Araki recalls. “The thing about all those soap-opera-y shows is the format is so hermetic, and it becomes so boring after about two seasons. If you’re in the 90210 world, everyone’s fucked everybody, and everyone’s had a drug problem … the paradigm gets so clogged up because you’ve done every storyline so quickly. That’s why ‘Nowhere’ is this teen soap opera with all these kids, but there’s this David Lynch element, the surreal part. Things like the alien and all those dreamlike, nightmare-like elements that make it totally unpredictable. It starts out like any other day with the kids riding around in the convertible and eating breakfast, and then it gets more and more fucking crazy. The whole movie takes place in a day, so you meet all these crazy characters and all this crazy shit is going on. It’s a movie very near and dear to my heart.”

Though “Nowhere” is by far the most bizarre installment of the trilogy, it’s also the one that most represents Araki’s point of view. He says the trilogy is meant to “hold the promise of a chosen family.” Despite all the darkness of his work, he wants to give queer audiences light: “There is a world for you out there. Maybe you don’t see it right now, maybe you’re living in some shithole town in Missouri, but there is a whole world out there. The trilogy opens the door to that world. It’s here. You just have to get through your shitty teenage years, graduate, go to college, and find it. It’s so hard to feel so isolated and different.” Growing emotional, he says, “I think that’s one of the things for me as a filmmaker that’s so special about the trilogy. When people share stories, saying, ‘This movie literally saved my life,’ that means a lot to me.”

Araki embraces how polarizing his work is: “There are people that get my movies and love them. It speaks to them, to their heart, and it’s so gratifying to me. And then there are people that don’t get my movies. I’m used to my movies having these very passionate and sometimes divisive reactions, and honestly, I don’t really care. If you get my movies, they’re for you. If you don’t get them, they aren’t for you. That’s why I make these indie movies. My movies aren’t meant to be all things for all people. They’re not fucking four-quadrant Marvel movies or like ‘Star Wars’. They’re not for everybody. They have a very strong point of view. And I’m so gratified that somebody likes them. I love them.” 

Araki concludes this monologue with a funny aside: “I specifically tell my parents, ‘Do not come see my movies. They’re not made for you, and it makes me uncomfortable, the idea of you watching them.’ I love my parents, who’re so supportive of me, but I can’t make a movie thinking, ‘Oh my God, my mom is going to watch this.’ I’m an artist expressing all of the stuff in my head, and a lot of it is not suitable for my mom.”

Araki’s enduring love for his films fueled his desire to preserve them, but the restoration process wasn’t easy. At first, he had trouble finding the original negatives. “These film labs have all gone out of business. It was very scary at a certain point because we thought we wouldn’t be able to find the original stuff and we wouldn’t be able to do it, and that would mean the movies were lost forever,” he explains. However, they eventually found them and created masters that could be used for at least the next 30 years. “I’m at that stage of my life and career where I feel so grateful and lucky to have made the movies I made and have the legacy I’ve had and the body of work. So “Doom”, “Nowhere”, and “Totally Fucked Up” … I want them to be preserved. I don’t want them to die when I die. Because my background is film school. We went back and looked at all those movies from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s. I just want my movies to continue to live. It was very important to me that we did these remasters and that they were done right, and now I can die knowing “Doom” and “Nowhere” will be seen in a nice version that looks and sounds good.”

Shortly after the restorations were made and the Criterion box set was in the works, Araki and Duval began touring with the films in cinemas nationwide. “Every screening, I would ask: ‘How many people in this audience have never seen these films before?’ And always it was at least 60%-65%, sometimes 80% of the audience was brand-new. That was so crazy and kind of amazing to me. Because I thought it would be a bunch of people who had already seen the movies and just wanted to see them again in a theater. But there were so many new people and so many young people. Teenage kids were coming out and I was surprised they knew about it. It was awesome for me to discover that the movies can live on for another generation,” Araki says proudly. “Because that’s what they’re for. When “Doom” and “Nowhere” came out, there was nothing like them. They stuck out a bit, which is probably why they stuck around for a long time. They were so unlike anything else out there. And now there’s still nothing like those movies. You didn’t see that on Netflix. They’re still so different and new.”

But the Teen Apocalypse trilogy isn’t the only Araki work that deserves renewed interest. Along with his earlier films, 1999’s “Splendor”, 2004’s “Mysterious Skin”, and 2007’s “Smiley Face” are ripe for reappraisal—especially “Splendor”, which has never been available to rent or stream in the United States. “It’s tricky because the rights are in different places,” Araki says. “We had to wait so long for ‘Nowhere’ because the rights were at Fine Line, which is a division of Warner Brothers. So despite the fact it was this tiny indie movie, it was in this giant conglomerate with “Harry Potter” and shit so that we couldn’t get any response about the rights until 25 years later. And that’s how we finally got to release ‘Nowhere,’ because the rights expired,” Araki explains, laughing. “’Splendor,’ ‘Smiley Face,’ and ‘Mysterious Skin’ are all from different companies. I hope we do ‘Splendor’ someday. I think ‘Mysterious Skin’ is going to be next because it’s the 20th anniversary. I’m just taking it day by day at this point. Plus, Brady Corbet just won at Cannes, so it’s time to cash in on that!”

More than 20 years after the release of “Nowhere,” Araki was finally able to make the TV show he’d hoped to. “Now Apocalypse” premiered on Starz in early 2019, lasting one 10-episode season. The show contains callbacks to all of Araki’s films, made for hardcore fans and newcomers alike. “The thing about TV that fascinated me is that it’s just beamed out to everybody. It’s so democratic it just kind of breaks through all the boundaries. If you make a TV show, it’s literally in someone’s living room in the deepest red states … Kentucky, Alabama. It’s on their screens. Maybe they won’t watch it, maybe they’ll turn it off, but it’s the idea that it’s everywhere,” he explains. “The show is kind of a tribute to all my fans through the years. There’s so much stuff from all my movies in it, across ten episodes. But it’s still something completely new and different. Starz was fantastic, and they just let us do anything because [Steven] Soderbergh was producing. There was no censorship, so it’s totally Gregg Araki. My producer, my DP, my production designer … they’re all on it, so it’s all my usual people. It looks amazing, has a super cool soundtrack, and the cast is phenomenal. Roxanne Mesquida, from ‘Kaboom,’ is in it, and she said it was like eating candy. I wanted to make a show that was easily digestible. It’s fun, it’s sexy, it’s pop, everybody’s gorgeous.”

With renewed interest in his work, Araki seems happy with where he is in his career. He has a new film on the horizon, “I Want Your Sex,” with a cast that includes Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, and even pop star Charli XCX. It’s nice to be in a world where Araki’s films are playing in theaters again, with the new box set serving as a great primer for today’s young cinephiles, who will hopefully make the weird, sexy, cool, violent queer films of the future.