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The Doom Generation 12

The Doom Generation

Gregg Araki

  • 1995
  • USA
  • Dark comedy
  • 1h23mn
  • Original version with French subtitles
  • Color
After a booze driven party, Jordan White and Amy Blue reluctantly pick up hitchhiker Xavier, as charming as he is dangerous. After he “accidentally” murders a cashier, they're on the run. It’s the start of a frantic, bloody and sensual trip.
It’s essential not to reduce this second installment of the Apocalypse trilogy, started in 1994 with Totally F***ed Up, to its provocative aspects. So let’s rediscover this true 90s masterpiece, this ode to every kind of sexuality, unrestrained, both exciting and political. All Araki’s virtuosity resides in this autopsy of a racist homophobic country, dressed in joyous pop colors, redeemed by its absurd humor, until laughter freezes in the windpipe. And flesh, so beautiful and raw, draws the viewer into this odyssey.

Alexis Langlois

Araki is super important to me because I discovered him when I started going to queer clubs. In those days, in college, he was never mentioned, friends made me discover his films.

When I watched them, I felt I was at last seeing people who were like us. Araki showed our desire to live intensely, to dance, fuck, take drugs, but also our insatiable need for love and our melancholy. In his films people seem to be dancing so they don’t shoot themselves.

Totally fucked Up, Nowhere and The Doom generation: these films are called the Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, but even today, when we’re clearly no longer teenagers, we still share the same desires and fears with those characters. That’s why these films are so important to queer people.

Araki is also an incredible formalist, a bit like if Godard had made MTV videos. At the start of The Doom Generation, to the sound of Nine Inch Nails’ Heresy, there are some shots of ultra virile pogo dances alternating with text cards, like the joky "a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki". Then a lateral tracking shot films flaming letters spelling Welcome to hell, before ending on Rose McGowan’s face muttering “fuck”. All Araki’s style summed up, a mixture of irony, partying and depression.

The Doom generation, like all Araki films, makes you want to live hard and make movies!

Screenings

05/09 • 16h30 • Screen 300
Screening presented by Alexis Langlois

Credits

  • With : Rose McGowan, James Duval, Johnathon Schaech, Cress Williams, Skinny Puppy...
  • Screenplay : Gregg Araki
  • Photography : Jim Fealy
  • Editing : Gregg Araki, Kate McGowan
  • Music by : Don Gatto
  • Production : Gregg Araki, Andrea Sperling