The Criterion Collection presents three transgressive queer classics with Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy
Take the conventions of the American teen movie, transpose them to Los Angeles’s freaky fringes, anchor them in an unapologetic vision of sexual fluidity and top it all off with heavy doses of Gen X disillusionment, gonzo violence and hallucinogenic surrealism, and you’ll end up with something like these audacious transgressions from New Queer Cinema renegade Gregg Araki.
Gleefully mixing slacker irony with raw sincerity, Godardian cool with punk scuzz, the savagely subversive, hormone-fueled films that make up Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy pushed 1990s indie cinema into bold new aesthetic realms, while giving blistering expression to adolescent rage and libidinal desire.
A delirious mix of punk nihilism and deadpan irony, the first film in Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy puts an audaciously queer spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Masculin feminin. Across fifteen jagged episodes, Totally F***ed Up plunges headlong into the lives of a group of queer, disaffected Los Angeles teenagers who form a kind of makeshift family as they navigate desire and heartbreak, societal and familial rejection and the alienation of growing up gay in an era of relentless moralizing. Both a defiantly raw anthem of outsider-hood and a furious reckoning with all-American homophobia, Araki’s answer to the 1980s teen comedy captures youthful angst with an immediacy that still bruises.
Gregg Araki takes a road trip to hell in this wild, meth-and-fast-food-fueled joyride through the margins of a menacing American wasteland. When they inadvertently link up with a dangerously alluring drifter (Johnathon Schaech), a chilled-out Cali bro (James Duval) and his spiky, foulmouthed girlfriend (Rose McGowan) find themselves on an increasingly violent, kinky and darkly comic journey in which erotic tensions rise along with the body count. Working with a significant budget for the first time, Araki employs boldly stylized lighting and art direction to create a heightened sense of unreality in a shocking, shoegaze-soundtracked chronicle of young lives careening toward oblivion.
You can practically smell the pheromones wafting off this kaleidoscopic odyssey, which finds director Gregg Araki crossing soap-operatic elements with blasts of science fiction, indie-kid cool and shiny pop-art subversion. On the day when the world is foretold to end, a group of terminally horny, disillusioned, zonked-out teens in Los Angeles see their lives explode in a glitter bomb of sex, death and alien invasion. Bisexual lust, vaporizing Valley girls, sinister televangelists, nipple-ring S&M, murder by Campbell’s-soup can – Araki folds it all into an anarchic orgy that brings his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy to an explosively caustic close.
