Since we started the Greg Araki cycle I will go on from where Doom Generation left. Actually it leads to Nowhere. The plot is nearly undescribable but still let’s try to sum up what is going on in that film.
Nowhere chronicles 24 hours of some alienated Los Angeles teenagers. Despair, alienation, failing relationships and imagine the rest. Things are centered around 18-year-old Dark, an alienated UCLA film student, his bisexual African-American girlfriend Mel, her purple-haired, acid-tongued lesbian girlfriend Lucifer, Dark’s homosexual classmate Montgomery, and Montgomery’s poetess friend Alyssa. Into the set entera queer industrial rock star named Cowboy; his drug-addicted lover and band mate Bart, the local drug dealer Handjob, his live-in S&M girls Kris and Kozzy, the intellectual Dingbat and her older brother Duckey, the bulimic Egg, Alyssa’s self-destructive twin brother Shad and his girlfriend Lilith. Mel’s little brother Zero and his blond girlfriend Zoe, plus a Teen Idol so famous that no one needs to utter his name, a trio of Atari gang members, nattering Valley girls, scary drag queens, a pragmatic party, Logan from Baywatch and a mysterious alien from outer space that only Dark sees.
Confused, yes it’s normal, Araki actually takes the idea of Totally F***ed up and puts it on acid, combining it with visuals he tested in Doom Generation. If Totally F***ed up was portraying the Los Angels bored generation X and Doom Generation tried to be an ellegory of sexual discovery and self distruction, nowhere just throws evrything on you and leaves it up to you to find any meaning. I don’t know if Araki actually cared about plot, he just had the oportunity to create unique set-pieces and a series of events that you will never see in a mainstream movie.
The first half of themovie just passes by with people talking abou sex or doiong sex to prove that the new generation is so corrupted and in need of something to believe. First you realize that no matter how much you think about your sex life compared to the 1997 Araki generation you are the most conservative guy (girl) of the world. Kinky, homosexual, S/M, fetishes anything on your screen shot in a frenzy way that it’s more anxious than erotic. Slowly religion comes in as a result of lost morals and lost soul, as comes the invisible alien to kill all the sinners. Till the end you are in limbo of what you have been watching.
The film is also a who is who of the yound actors of the time. You get to have two beverly Hills stars Shanen Doherty and Kathleen Robertson, you have Married with Children Christine Applegate, you have a pre-American Beauty/Pie Mena Suvari, Heather Graham shagging Ryan Philippe, Rose McGowan, Baywatch’s Jaason Simmons, Chiarra Mastroianni, denise Richards in her first steps, some porn actors and the Araki casual connecting all this trilogy (Totally, Doom and this) James Duval. Sex is in the air and it’s funny to watch all of them playing characters so close to them or that they will never risk to play again, once the mainstream accepted them.
What is left in the end is a movie that you can love for it’s style and the visual valor but if you need a story you are doomed. Araki is out of control and probably lost, and his lynch-style story needed a lot more to be actually acceptable. Still his style, the music, the rythme save him from a complete turkey. He really shows that the american society no matter how much liberated wants to be, no matter I don;t care about manners, is always imprisoned of a conservatism that slowly wins over them. The masks of heterosexuality and comme-il-faut falls down each second of the movie.
The greatest thing about these Araki films is that they gave him the oportunity to get rid of all these stuff and later show an emotional side that we have almost forgot. if you want to see it the whole film is on you tube in 9 parts.
7 07 08 at 12:48
Ayto pou mou aresei poly ston Greg Araki kai tis tainies tou einai oi fwtografia kai oi eikones pou xrisimopoiei, i skinothesia, ta perierga xrwmata, oi symvolismoi, oi cameo emfaniseis kai pou den exei katholou ploki (kathara surreal). To “Nowhere” mou arese eksisou me to Doom.
Kali vdomada