Seeing Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation as an early twenty something industrial fan was easily a foundational viewing of my cinematic development. The happenstance VHS rental at my local Mom and Pop video store of the R-Rated cut, mind you, was pivotal in in creating an interest in indie and transgressive cinema and showed me that indies could push the boundaries far past the mainstream. The film, even in its highly truncated unapproved form, pushed the boundaries of what I knew as cinema, in almost every way shape and form. It was ultra-volent, queer, had singularly one of the best soundtracks ever and it really attempted to explore and capture the goth and industrial subculture of the 90s, in a way a big budgeted film could never.
Thankfully Criterion just released the entire Teen Apocalypse Trilogy on a 4K UHD/Blu-ray set and unless you were lucky enough to catch the restorations that screened at festivals and in cinemas you’ve never seen these films look this good. I was lucky enough to have caught Nowhere at Fantastic Fest last year and found it a revelatory and relevant viewing. The set here contains Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere, which make up the trilogy. While the films don’t have a conventional narrative throughline, they do share a lot of similar themes nihilism, social alienation and this sort of bleak coming of ageness and self and sexual discovery. Also all three films also star James Duval, Araki’s muse who plays a different lead in each one as well.
Now before digging into this set I had never had the pleasure of seeing Araki’s first film in the series Totally F***ed Up, and I am kind of glad that was the case. While Doom and Nowhere have more of a counterculture anti-MTV sensibility, F***ed Up is very much a heady, intellectual indie look at queer dating culture in the early 90s. This was when queer cinema was really breaking through on the 90s festival circuit with films like Go Fish and Paris Is Burning. With a few previous films under his belt, Araki leveraged his experience living in Hollywood, as a gay man during the AIDS crisis, into the first film of the series. It’s a twisted bit of a slice of life, of a group of queer men and women – as they struggle with dating and connection during this time.
Seeing this now, with my current cinema vocabulary, it’s a bit easier to digest and appreciate this film that bridges the early 90s queer boom, to the more conventional offerings that they would inspire and that the later films would infiltrate video stores. F***ed Up follows the sensitive yet completely nihilistic Andy (James Duval), who is basically the male equivalent to the Rose McGowan character in Doom, who one day is picked up and the film follows his relationship with a mysterious college student. He’s surrounded by his close knit support system who all have their own issues, the super couple that faces infidelity, and the lesbians who will stop at nothing to get their first child including bizarre insemination parties.
It’s Andy’s through-line that dictates the film as his urge for self destruction is quelled when he falls in love, but things change, like they always do. It’s a perfect snapshot of a time, with all the requisite 90s friend archetypes, technology and it really sets the stage and lays down the visual style and wordy dialog for the later films.
Next up was The Doom Generation, the film that first introduced me to the director and it wasn’t until watching this restored cut, that I knew I had only been acquainted with the R-rated cut. Doom is like a 90s goth, Easy Rider. But instead of a pair of hippies on bikes smuggling dope, we have two bi-curious men Jordan White (James Duval) and Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech), and Jordan’s girlfriend of 3 months – Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) who aren’t just exploring the American countryside on a killing spree, but their raging teenage sexuality. After kind of accidentally killing a convenience store owner post a night of partying, the three go on the run. If you’ve seen Rider, you know where this is going.
While Doom is definitely more conventional than Totally, it does so with the same unrelenting Nihilism and also biting commentary on America, and even on the very folks this film would be targeted at. My favorite bit of this is, how Amy is constantly mistaken for other women as sort of a commentary on how even in a subculture, you all essentially look the same. This coupled with the film’s bleak look at violence, capitalism and consumerism and growing up in America operates as both a statement and a manifesto. It’s something that definitely deals out the bleakest of the three and a film that in this unrated cut had way more semen and nudity than its R-rated counterpart. But that kind of explains why Araki has publicly disavowed that cut that loses almost 20 minutes of footage.
For those wondering, the primary driving factor of this was probably Blockbuster, which was the largest video retail/rental chain in the US, wouldn’t carry unrated films, since they were touted as a family establishment. They didn’t stock adult films or have back rooms either. So this basically forced distributors with more risqué offerings, to either cut their films or lose that stream of revenue and shelf space altogether. I can see how this would be a very tempting and lucrative get and how smaller distros would be more inclined to make sacrifices to end up on their shelves.
Finally we have Nowhere, where I think Gregg hits his stride seamlessly melding his take on Hollywood from the first film, with the weirdness of Doom, and amping it up to 11 with its surreal Lynchian candy colored lens. The film pulls a page from Dazed and Confused and follows a group of friends in the space of a day as they all try to get to this party. It’s a bizarre, drug fueled trip, but one that really once again touches on the same themes from the previous films. This time, the film features several couples of all sexual orientations as they struggle with the oncoming transitionary period from high school to college. The cast here is insane with the likes of Denise Richards, Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan, Rachel True, Christina Applegate, Ryan Phillippe, Heather Graham, Mena Suvari and of course James Duval.
Knowing this film was originally meant as a pilot originally makes so much sense, a nugget of knowledge I gleaned from the bonus features. The film has a twisted episode of the week quality, but channeled through a stream of consciousness narrative. It’s like 90210 on crack and that hits even harder when Brenda herself shows up. It’s definitely the most experimental of the three and shows a real evolution in style and storytelling from the director and you can see him get more adventurous with not only his visual storytelling, but how he crafts a narrative. While Doom is still my favorite of the three, I love the aliens and ditzy valley girls of Nowhere as well.
Like the Once Upon a Time in Mexico set I previously reviewed, this set billed as 4K is a mix of both 4K UHD for the 35mm releases (The Doom Generation and Nowhere) and Blu-ray for the 16mm (Totally F***ed Up). Given the limits of 16mm as a format, this decision for a 2K digital restoration for Totally F***ed Up and a 4K digital restoration for the others is a great one for both practicality from a production standpoint and to help keep costs down. The transfers definitely deliver the quality you’d expect from Criterion and really work to highlight the film’s visual style and heightened color palettes. The scans are crisp with immaculate white balance and contrast, given how much of Doom was shot at night this couldn’t have been an easy feat to keep those blacks from turning into dark grays. But that said the colors here simply explode off the screen, and this is parallel with new 5.1 DTS sound mixes. Given these films weren’t easy to come by, except in the R-rated incarnations, there isn’t a better way to experience them.
As far as extras there’s a decent amount of new interviews with Araki who fondly looks back on these films and the experience of shooting them. He’s often joined by James Duval who’s definitely gotten older, but his enthusiasm for the films is completely infectious as if he was doing his first junket. Their relationship offscreen is definitely palpable from these on screen interviews, as you see a genuine bond between the pair as they recall shooting the films and share behind the scenes anecdotes.It was also a bit surreal to see Araki’s rather charming conversation with Richard Linklater, who the director met while on the festival circuit with Slacker. All the conversations feel very personal and are as informative as they are enjoyable. These films were small labors of love and you can tell that from these interviews and commentaries, where the camaraderie and love for the art really shines through.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 2K digital restoration of Totally F***ed Up and new 4K digital restorations of The Doom Generation and Nowhere, supervised and approved by director Gregg Araki, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
- One 4K UHD disc of The Doom Generation and Nowhere and two Blu-rays with all three films and the special features
- New conversation between director Gregg Araki and filmmaker Richard Linklater
- New audio commentary on Nowhere with Araki and actors James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Jordan Ladd, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, and Jaason Simmons
- Audio commentary on Totally F***ed Up with Araki, Duval, and actor Gilbert Luna
- Audio commentary on The Doom Generation with Araki, Duval, and actors Rose McGowan and Johnathon Schaech
- New documentary on the trilogy’s visual style featuring Araki, Duval, producer Andrea Sperling, cinematographer Jim Fealy, costume designers Cathy Cooper and SaraJane Slotnick, production designer Patti Podesta, art director Michael Krantz, and hair and makeup artist Jason Rail
- James Duval’s Teen Apocalypse Archive, a new conversation between Araki and Duval
- Q&As with Araki, moderated by filmmakers Gus Van Sant and Andrew Ahn
- The Doom Generation video comic book
- Trailers
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Nathan Lee
Getting to re-discover this trilogy in 4K with the Criterion treatment and presentation was an experience filled with nostalgia, appreciation and revaluation. The way Araki, who is obviously queer member of this smaller subculture, is not only commenting on society as a whole, but the microcosm of that scene is impressive to say the least. The film’s have that commentary, but also don’t feel like it’s just for the cool kids either. Having the tools and cinematic vocabulary I do now, there were layers of nuance to the film’s message of youth gone wild that was nothing short of revelatory on these viewings. Everything from the dialog to the visual style showed a profound command of the media that was decades ahead of its time and would color my perception of cinema going forward. It would spark my interest in not only more transgressive indie fare, but LGBT cinema as well, and send me on the hunt for Pink Flamingos next.
Thank you Gregg Araki.
