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Gregg Araki's fifth feature is destined to provoke controversy. Ostensibly a road film in the ultraviolent mold of True Romance or Natural-Born Killers, The Doom Generation goes against the grain of these studio-manufactured postmodern genre pieces and transcends their ultimately conventional vision of pop-media hipness. Araki has made a more radical personal and political film than the bombastic Stone could have managed in his wettest of wet dreams. And he has captured the cultural apathy and violent dissolution of the present in a manner unseen since A Clockwork Orange.
This is familiar terrain for Araki. The Living End (1992) featured an HIV-positive male couple who flee Los Angeles after a sudden eruption of violence. As in The Doom Generation, the characters' journey is as much metaphorical as literal. Both films avoid the clichés of the road movie: there is virtually no traceable topography in his characters' odysseys, and no destination. The desolate L.A. universe Araki evokes lacks traditional iconography — no Bradbury building, Melrose Avenue, Hollywood landmarks, just convenience stores, vacant parking lots, and drab apartments, clubs, and hotel rooms. Billboards and signs pop up in the frame like grim Greek choruses: "Choose Death," "Welcome to Hell," "666." Punctuating these visual signs is the music of The Smiths, Jesus and Mary Chain, This Mortal Coil, Nine Inch Nails. Together the visual and the aural fuse the fragments of a black-comic, trancelike narrative that at first glance seems minimal or even slight. Araki strips his cinematic space to the bare psychological essentials. Parent-child clashes familiar from such films as Rebel without a Cause and If... are practically nonexistent. The cartoonlike violence of The Doom Generation, where people's heads and limbs are blown apart in graphic detail, is presented as if unconnected with the story. These characters are cultural ciphers of a fractured society, wounded souls who wander through a corrupt, alienated world in search of redemption.
Johnathon Schaech,
Rose McGowan,
and James Duval in
The Doom Generation
The Doom Generation is Araki's first film with a reasonable budget, making it possible to hire professional cinematographer Jim Fealy. (Araki shot his first four features, from 1987's Three Bewildered People in the Night through 1993's Totally F***ed Up.) Production designer Therese Deprez has created some astonishingly beautiful images that give the film the feeling of an hallucinogenic nightmare. Steeped in psychedelic shades of red, purple, green, and blue, The Doom Generation features a series of hyperstylized hotel rooms that the color-coded threesome Jordan White (James Duval), Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), and Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech) occupy while on the run.
These rooms — and an abandoned warehouse — are the isolated chambers in which the film's real journeys occur; they are also the locus of the film's controversy. Araki is an anarchic filmmaker in the tradition of Vigo and Pasolini, showing us areas of human behavior and transgression that test our limits as an audience. His characters explore their sexuality in a series of erotic scenes initiated by the mysterious character of Xavier Red, whose presence sets off the narrative a la Teorema. The film is structured around the group's sexual encounters, beginning with the opening scene between Amy Blue and her boyfriend Jordan White in their car at a drive-in theater and culminating in the final three-way coupling that is abruptly preempted in a scene of ferocious violence and surprise. This juxtaposition of sex and horror will no doubt propel some viewers out of the theater in disgust. Leaving the theater is of course one way of fending off Araki's implication of the viewer in what is happening onscreen.
At the press screening for The Doom Generation, many of the critics walked out, and those who stayed seemed unsure how to respond. Aside from a few nervous laughs, the film played to almost total silence. At the San Francisco International Film Festival, however, the audience responded enthusiastically. Variety and the local San Francisco papers gave it good reviews, most proclaiming it as "Gregg Araki's breakthrough film."
I met with Araki, Rose McGowan, and James Duval the morning after the SFIFF show at the Castro Theater.
Matt: What has been your feeling about the general response the film's getting?
Gregg: Really good. It really needs an audience to respond and react to it, though. Did you see the film?
Matt: I've seen it twice, actually.
Rose: Did you see it last night?
Matt: I saw it last night and I saw it at the press screening here about two weeks ago.
Gregg: I hate press screenings.
Jimmy: It was probably better last night.
Matt: At first there were a lot of press people who walked out during the film — it was dead quiet — people seemed afraid to react to it. And yet the response was completely different last night...
Rose: It's just like when Xavier licks the come off his hand, everyone gasped in shock at the press screening but then when we show it to a regular audience everyone is clapping and screaming — it's like a roller-coaster ride.
Rose McGowan and
James Duval in
The Doom Generation
Jimmy: At the end of every screening they're always speechless — it defies people's expectations.
Matt: People are really expecting the film to go one way, riding at one level, and to end on this certain note ...
Jimmy: And then it smashes them upside the head! Leave with this! It definitely leaves them with something to think about.
Matt: Totally F***ed Up is also an amazing film. Like The Doom Generation it seems to speak to this generation in a way I don't think has been captured on film before. Certainly not like most films that tend to deal with agendas and issues.
Rose: Like "After-School Specials."
Matt: It seems that your aesthetic and ideas are so relevant to today's youth culture. You've often been quoted as being greatly influenced by Godard, saying that Totally F***ed Up was your Masculine-Feminine. Would you say that The Doom Generation is your Weekend?
Gregg: That's what this French critic told me — "It's your Weekend!" When I made Totally F***ed Up I consciously thought, "This is my Masculine-Feminine." The Doom Generation I never thought of in that way. I mean, they're obviously related, with the car, the couple, and the violence. Weekend is totally apocalyptic, and I guess my film shares its nihilism.
Matt: The Doom Generation makes inventive use of color and cinematography. In Variety, Emanuel Levy wrote "Stylistically, Araki may have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange or Peter Greenaways The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover." What do you make of this?
Gregg: I've seen those films, but they are not any huge influence. I've seen A Clockwork Orange, and I like it more than the Greenaway film — and, well, it's obvious where the writing comes from because of the red rooms, etc. But that's what happens when you make a film: you make it, and then people interpret it any way they want.
NEXT: Today's youth
