Happy birthday! This year Gregg
Araki's "New Queer Cinema" two lovers on a killing spree fable, The
Living End, turns sixteen, but only in the sense that British auteur Ken
Loach meant in his 2002 Scottish gang rumble should this be consider a sweet
sixteen.
The cover art on Strand Releasing's
magnificent new DVD package shows a thuggishly cute, straight acting boy
holding a queer acting bottom inclined film critic at gunpoint with the title: An
Irresponsible Movie by Gregg Araki -- Remixed and Re-mastered -- juxtaposed
over the muzzle of the pistol.
Shot in 1990 on a dime store budget
raised by a loan from the producer's grandma, released in 1992 – three years before
the miracle cocktails and as a wave of long term survivors was dying – to huge
single screen grosses in New York and here at the Castro and heated debates in
cafes and queer studies classes, this weirdly funny, wildly entertaining romp
has been significantly neglected in the wake of Araki's more imposing, master
work, an incendiary take on Scott Heim's lost boys classic novel, Mysterious
Skin.
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I first encountered Gregg Araki
when the plucky, mini skirt wearing, just out of his twenties, blithe spirit
zapped through my radio studio promoting his first feature Three Bewildered
People in the Night (which I have yet to see); I first fell for an Araki
"joint" in the bratty Reagan era, Big Chill comedy, The
Long Weekend (O' Despair) in which a gaggle of old college friends conducts
a friendly home invasion at the crash pad of a terminally depressed gay
filmmaker. Shot on a windup camera in twenty-six second takes, with natural
lighting, tinny sound, and whinny rant like monologues climaxing with witty
asides, "Give her a joint and she turns into Susan Sontag," The
Long Weekend is one of the funniest films of a truly terrible decade.
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The Living End replaces the
Woody Allen quality one liners with a cartoon like supporting cast that exists
somewhere between Warhol and Rocky the Flying Squirrel. But once you get past
the overly accentuated tasteless gags of gun toting lesbian serial killers, and
bat wielding queer bashers, the two improbable lovers snap perfectly into place
giving us a properly based political crime spree caper that is raw, sexy and
flagrantly romantic in all the right ways.
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It helps that the two leads have
virtually disappeared without a trace from movie screens – Craig Gilmore (Jon)
did pop up in the first of Araki's teen trilogy, Totally Fucked Up, Mike
Dytri (Luke) seems to only have worked for one other filmmaker – so these guys
are these characters and bare no star fucking aftertaste, which is good for us,
bad for them. Gilmore has the trickier job of making the sarcastic, weary
before his time "savaging other people's movies at twenty-five cents a
word" critic seem sympathetic as he spins trancelike through the first act
and his HIV sentence (from a doc played by the late brilliant queer cinema
genius Mark Finch). Dytri is awesome in the flashier turn as tough boy
terrorist, Luke, who "kidnaps" Jon into a crime binge that is as
politically constructed for its time as the hetero lovers-on-the-lam were, for
Goddard's 1965 assault on the senses, Pierrot Le Fou.
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The lovers' Subaru – which Araki
informs us in a low key commentary track was later destroyed in the 1992 LA
riots – becomes their bedroom, honeymoon cottage and ghost ship as they peel
recklessly across the country (the film was shot in Southern California, the
Bay Area and near Austin, Texas)
until crashing upon the scruffiest, loneliest stretch of
beach where their madness is cradled in a symphony of waves and low flying
aircraft.
At a time when jaded Castro
residents must duck past subway posters warning "I Lost Myself to Meth,"
The Living End is a joyful erotic cautionary tale that in the spirit of
David Lynch's surreal tagline from Blue Velvet, "He put his disease
in me," recalls a time when queers could still imagine themselves to be
part of an outlaw culture and the best sex felt like Russian Roulette.