There’s sexual fluidity, bodily fluids, screwball dialogue, symbolic dream sequences, liberal drug use, and an ever-mounting sense of stoner paranoia. It’s a comic, anarchic, hyper-stylised riff on both the search for sexual fulfilment and the end of the world. Set in the director’s familiar vision of Los Angeles: a place of performative play and growing terror, at once candy-coloured and shadowy. It marks the culmination of Araki’s narrative migration away from HIV-positive to sex-positive: co-written with sex columnist Karley Sciortino (Slutever), it’s a celebration of sexuality in all its many varied forms.
And, in that most Araki-ish way, Now Apocalypse is full of music. There’s not just a rolodex of indie-rock hits—Beach House, Chromatics, My Bloody Valentine, The xx, Ladytron—but endless references. Episodes are named after songs by the Pixies, Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, and Dead Can Dance; a consistent gesture by someone who has titled films after Jesus & Mary Chain songs (1992’s The Living End) and Ride albums (1997’s Nowhere).
Whilst Araki is fond of depicting sexual liberation and winking post-modernism, his most fervent love is for song.
Whilst Araki is fond of depicting sexual liberation and winking post-modernism, his most fervent love is for song.“Music is very important to me and we are eternally grateful to the following people and bands for their support,” offered the credits to 1993’s Totally Fucked Up; Araki having personally pleaded to Nine Inch Nails and the 4AD label to use their songs as soundtrack cues.
“Music has always been probably the biggest influence on me,” Araki confessed, in a 2011 interview; the director having worked as a music critic before his filmmaking career took off (a job taken up by a character in 1999’s Splendor). It resounds in the dream-pop needle-drops throughout his films, but goes deeper. Mysterious Skin (2004), a study of the after-effects of childhood abuse that marks Araki’s most restrained film, has two characters named after Slowdive songs (from ‘Avalyn II’ and ‘Erik’s Song’), and features a score, by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd, that echoes their prior collaboration on the 1986 LP The Moon and The Melodies. The opening credit sequences to Splendor and Mysterious Skin evoke classic shoegaze artwork, and 4AD’s seminal sleeve design.
While Araki’s sexual sensibility feels millennial, his musical fandom hails from a wholly different era. It harkens back to when ‘alternative’ represented not just a genre, but an oppositional stance.
Even his fondness for depicting characters—and the world—hurtling towards oblivion (1993’s Totally Fucked Up, 1995’s The Doom Generation, and 1997’s Nowhere form the ‘Teen Apocalypse Trilogy’; and Kaboom ends with the Earth blown to smithereens) can feel like a rock’n’roll reference. “You ever heard of the rapture?”—“The Siouxsie & The Banshees album?” goes one exchange in Nowhere. It’s a gag so nice Araki essentially ran it back in Kaboom: “Ever heard of The New Order?”—“The seminal new-wave band from the ’80s?” In Kaboom, that’s the name of its sinister doomsday cult, and their sacred text is called An Ideal For Living, which is the name of Joy Division’s first EP.
When Araki’s characters bond over Ministry or Explosions In The Sky, head to loft shows or desert raves or dive-bar gigs, hole up in attics or dorm-rooms or cars spinning beloved tunes, it conveys the centrality of Araki’s musical ardency to his own life, and his own sense of identity. And, in turn, expresses the eternal adolescent experience of finding self-identity through music, and belonging in fandom.
They were openly angry, defiant works, railing not against just heteronormativity, but mainstream gay culture.
While Araki’s sexual sensibility feels millennial, his musical fandom hails from a wholly different era. It harkens back to when ‘alternative’ represented not just a genre, but an oppositional stance. The Living End—his breakout third film, made for just $20,000—is full of rage against the AIDS plague and America’s conservative 1980s, and the soundtrack, in turn, is angry, industrial, queer: Coil, Chris & Cosey, Psychic TV. The film comes billed as “an irresponsible movie by Gregg Araki”; its follow-up, Totally Fucked Up, as “another homo movie by Gregg Araki”. They were openly angry, defiant works, railing not against just heteronormativity, but mainstream gay culture. “Everything,” spits one of Totally Fucked Up’s disenfranchised youth, “that homos are supposed to like — disco music, Joan Crawford, drag shows— I hate. And Bette Midler! God, I hate Bette Midler.”
Just as these kids in his films are doubly alienated, so, too, has Araki been. When he was in a relationship, in the late-’90s with former 90210 starlet Kathleen Robertson—whom he directed in Nowhere and Splendor— he was met with blowback from gay gatekeepers; this maker of “homo movies” judged for not being homo enough. It’s no surprise then, that so many of his films feature his favourite dramaturgical dyad: “the sensitive, queer bisexual protagonist and his snarky female best friend”.
Araki’s movies are, ultimately, about the refusal of categorisation.
Araki’s movies are, ultimately, about the refusal of categorisation. It’s there in the way characters call themselves “sexually undeclared”, refute fitting in “standardised sexual pigeonholes”, or identify themselves as sitting in the murky middle of the Kinsey scale. It’s there in the way he melds tones and genres, highbrow and lowbrow. And it’s there in the way he employs music. When you hear Curve or Slowdive or The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart in an Araki movie, it’s an expression of his personal taste, but also of his individualism.
There’s sexual fluidity, bodily fluids, screwball dialogue, symbolic dream sequences, liberal drug use, and an ever-mounting sense of stoner paranoia. It’s a comic, anarchic, hyper-stylised riff on both the search for sexual fulfilment and the end of the world. Set in the director’s familiar vision of Los Angeles: a place of performative play and growing terror, at once candy-coloured and shadowy. It marks the culmination of Araki’s narrative migration away from HIV-positive to sex-positive: co-written with sex columnist Karley Sciortino (Slutever), it’s a celebration of sexuality in all its many varied forms.
And, in that most Araki-ish way, Now Apocalypse is full of music. There’s not just a rolodex of indie-rock hits—Beach House, Chromatics, My Bloody Valentine, The xx, Ladytron—but endless references. Episodes are named after songs by the Pixies, Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, and Dead Can Dance; a consistent gesture by someone who has titled films after Jesus & Mary Chain songs (1992’s The Living End) and Ride albums (1997’s Nowhere).
Whilst Araki is fond of depicting sexual liberation and winking post-modernism, his most fervent love is for song.
Whilst Araki is fond of depicting sexual liberation and winking post-modernism, his most fervent love is for song.“Music is very important to me and we are eternally grateful to the following people and bands for their support,” offered the credits to 1993’s Totally Fucked Up; Araki having personally pleaded to Nine Inch Nails and the 4AD label to use their songs as soundtrack cues.
“Music has always been probably the biggest influence on me,” Araki confessed, in a 2011 interview; the director having worked as a music critic before his filmmaking career took off (a job taken up by a character in 1999’s Splendor). It resounds in the dream-pop needle-drops throughout his films, but goes deeper. Mysterious Skin (2004), a study of the after-effects of childhood abuse that marks Araki’s most restrained film, has two characters named after Slowdive songs (from ‘Avalyn II’ and ‘Erik’s Song’), and features a score, by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd, that echoes their prior collaboration on the 1986 LP The Moon and The Melodies. The opening credit sequences to Splendor and Mysterious Skin evoke classic shoegaze artwork, and 4AD’s seminal sleeve design.
While Araki’s sexual sensibility feels millennial, his musical fandom hails from a wholly different era. It harkens back to when ‘alternative’ represented not just a genre, but an oppositional stance.
Even his fondness for depicting characters—and the world—hurtling towards oblivion (1993’s Totally Fucked Up, 1995’s The Doom Generation, and 1997’s Nowhere form the ‘Teen Apocalypse Trilogy’; and Kaboom ends with the Earth blown to smithereens) can feel like a rock’n’roll reference. “You ever heard of the rapture?”—“The Siouxsie & The Banshees album?” goes one exchange in Nowhere. It’s a gag so nice Araki essentially ran it back in Kaboom: “Ever heard of The New Order?”—“The seminal new-wave band from the ’80s?” In Kaboom, that’s the name of its sinister doomsday cult, and their sacred text is called An Ideal For Living, which is the name of Joy Division’s first EP.
When Araki’s characters bond over Ministry or Explosions In The Sky, head to loft shows or desert raves or dive-bar gigs, hole up in attics or dorm-rooms or cars spinning beloved tunes, it conveys the centrality of Araki’s musical ardency to his own life, and his own sense of identity. And, in turn, expresses the eternal adolescent experience of finding self-identity through music, and belonging in fandom.
They were openly angry, defiant works, railing not against just heteronormativity, but mainstream gay culture.
While Araki’s sexual sensibility feels millennial, his musical fandom hails from a wholly different era. It harkens back to when ‘alternative’ represented not just a genre, but an oppositional stance. The Living End—his breakout third film, made for just $20,000—is full of rage against the AIDS plague and America’s conservative 1980s, and the soundtrack, in turn, is angry, industrial, queer: Coil, Chris & Cosey, Psychic TV. The film comes billed as “an irresponsible movie by Gregg Araki”; its follow-up, Totally Fucked Up, as “another homo movie by Gregg Araki”. They were openly angry, defiant works, railing not against just heteronormativity, but mainstream gay culture. “Everything,” spits one of Totally Fucked Up’s disenfranchised youth, “that homos are supposed to like — disco music, Joan Crawford, drag shows— I hate. And Bette Midler! God, I hate Bette Midler.”
Just as these kids in his films are doubly alienated, so, too, has Araki been. When he was in a relationship, in the late-’90s with former 90210 starlet Kathleen Robertson—whom he directed in Nowhere and Splendor— he was met with blowback from gay gatekeepers; this maker of “homo movies” judged for not being homo enough. It’s no surprise then, that so many of his films feature his favourite dramaturgical dyad: “the sensitive, queer bisexual protagonist and his snarky female best friend”.
Araki’s movies are, ultimately, about the refusal of categorisation.
Araki’s movies are, ultimately, about the refusal of categorisation. It’s there in the way characters call themselves “sexually undeclared”, refute fitting in “standardised sexual pigeonholes”, or identify themselves as sitting in the murky middle of the Kinsey scale. It’s there in the way he melds tones and genres, highbrow and lowbrow. And it’s there in the way he employs music. When you hear Curve or Slowdive or The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart in an Araki movie, it’s an expression of his personal taste, but also of his individualism.