Film Findings is a biweekly column where I explore a movie that I think is underseen or undervalued, and try to present a case for why it’s worth watching — or, at the very least, interesting. What’s covered will vary from week to week, but my goal is to encourage people to consider the artistry and value in films that are often unfairly dismissed. Feel free to watch along and share your thoughts!
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In the nineties, director Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse trilogy launched a tactical nuke on the sensibilities of contemporary cinema and American culture as a whole. The three films — Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) — are connected by a thematic underpinning of queer, youthful alienation and delirious pop moviemaking mania. They feel ripe for the same sort of reclamation that other “transgressive” films have enjoyed on platforms like TikTok due to their lush soundscapes and color-smeared, “liminal” photography, yet continue to fly under the radar. The first two films are excellent in their own respects, but Nowhere, the trilogy’s final entry, feels like the zenith of Araki’s postmodern stylings, wildly oscillating between acidic humor and anguished sorrow until the boundaries of both begin to blur. It feels, well, genuinely apocalyptic, an apt description for the teenage experience if there ever was one.
Plot isn’t really much of a focus here. What little there is centers around Dark, a forlorn, bisexual eighteen-year-old who spends his time wandering around LA. He hangs out with his friends, takes drugs, and navigates various romantic and existential crises, all while preparing for the big party at a guy named Jujyfruit’s house. These happenings make up an average day in Araki’s radioactive vision of the city, only today, Dark is haunted by premonitions of the end of the world. Despite following him as a protagonist, the film pulls its focus back early on, mostly functioning as a series of vignettes with similarly lost teens plunging headfirst into psychedelic hedonism. At just 83 minutes, it’s an absolutely relentless barrage of candy-colored images that move with both the rhythmic fluidity of a DJ set at a rave and the breakneck pace of glimmering youth careening towards oblivion.
While it may sound like a typical, moralizing Teen Issues story, Nowhere mercifully avoids the drab miserabilism of something like Euphoria. There’s a notable lack of judgment here too, with partying and sexual expression portrayed not only as release valves from repressive social structures, but also just natural parts of growing up. Still, Araki never shies away from the everyday horrors of living in a society that rejects one’s existence. In one of the film’s most affecting fragments, Bart, a gay industrial musician and friend of Dark’s, stumbles around the city like a zombie, brain fried from a crippling addiction to heroin that’s gone unnoticed by his clueless parents. He crawls into bed and turns on the TV, only to be greeted with more grim news about the AIDs epidemic. After spending his final moments reminded of the world’s flagrant disregard for his life, he sticks his head inside an oven and commits suicide. Another upsetting portion follows Egg, a teenage girl who is elated when her favorite movie star comes to town and chooses to spend the day with her. He takes her home and proceeds to sexually assault her, and you can practically see all of the light leaving her eyes as it happens. She kills herself soon after.
These kids aren’t just cyphers, though; they’re performed with genuine humanity and personality despite being shown as victims of a culture that continues to deliberately swallow up the lives of gay people, women, and anyone who doesn’t adhere to the rigid normative standards of American society. At the same time, these painful moments are thrown into sharp contrast by the film’s core, overwhelming beauty. Aesthetically, it’s leagues ahead of almost anything else, like a bright neon shoegaze Suspiria. Teen sanctuaries like bedrooms and cars are turned into objects of pure, boundless expression. And what a soundtrack! Featuring Lush, Cocteau Twins, Seefeel, Coil, and Radiohead, just to name a few (although think of any cool sonic movement from the time period and it’s probably represented here in some form). It becomes clear that, through all the heightened absurdity, Araki has immense reverence for the music and culture of young people, and he depicts their plights with empathy, no matter how big or small in scope. Dark’s blunt declaration of “I’m only eighteen years old, and I’m totally doomed” in the film’s final moments is treated as a genuine emotional climax. Based on the world around him, there’s nothing to suggest that Araki is treating this with any irony. For kids like Dark, it’s easy to see why total apocalypse didn’t seem like too far-fetched a prospect.
Nowhere is gleefully blunt and more than willing to spell itself out to the audience. Once the teens arrive at Jujyfruit’s party, they witness a guy literally beating another guy to death with a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Still, it’s a testament to both the film’s power and the state of things today that the kind of stark nihilism it depicts doesn’t feel all too foreign. The world has only gotten smaller and more insular, far from the endless party showcased here. But after years of seeing (specifically queer) teens post their final words on apps like TikTok and Twitter, Dark’s dejected sentiments ring true.
