No [ALTERNATIVE]: Gregg Araki's Teen Apocalypse Trilogy

This week, in book announcements: Look, man, I don't even know.

The final issue of Dead Teenagers was supposed to come out last Wednesday, and it apparently did, on digital platforms, but I am told the print book is out today, August 5th. Please go buy a copy to celebrate its release from the nebulous liminal state where it has been trapped.

Either way, Issue #2 of Clayface: Celebrity Dirt is out August 12. You can pick it up then, and make sure to put in a pre-order for Issue #3 before the final order cut-off on August 17.

I didn’t know it was possible to love something so much that it actually made me angry, but then I watched Nowhere, and I did. 

Nowhere, for those who haven’t seen it, is a ‘90s teen party movie. It might be the ‘90s teen party movie: Neon colors, retro fashion, a deep bench of era-defining teen actors (Ryan Phillipe! Mena Suvari! Denise Richards, for about three seconds!) all headed to a Party, where there will be recreational drug use and premarital sex and prematurely jaded posturing about how adults just don’t get the crushing ennui of being a teen in the edgy 1990s. People talk about “alien abductions” and “the Rapture” like they’re brand-new concepts. At any point when the characters are not speaking, the closed captioning will read “[ALTERNATIVE MUSIC PLAYING],” and that alternative music will be good. (I’ve never known anyone else to harbor a fondness for the remix EP of Ruby’s Salt Peter; Nowhere features it prominently in a scene where a guy gets his nipples torn off, which feels like some kind of love.) 

I think I’ve been looking for this exact movie my whole life, I remember thinking, about ten minutes into Nowhere, and I was right; if you could concentrate everything Jude Doyle likes in a movie into an hour and twenty minutes, this would be the result. I wanted to devour Nowhere. I wanted to melt into it and merge with it. I wanted to climb into it and smear it all over myself like a pig in a mud puddle. I loved it that much. 

That’s where the anger started. Because the fact is, as much as I love this movie, I would have loved it more — so much more — if I had seen it when I was an actual teenager. This is a deeply, gloriously high-school-age-alt-kid-brained work – all style and pose and splatter and hornt-up no-one-understands-me!!!! energy – and you love it with the part of your brain that still remembers what it felt like to be a teenager. As great as that is, it's no replacement for experiencing the thing in real time.

I was looking for this movie as a kid. I needed this movie as a kid. And I wasn’t allowed to watch it, when I was a kid, for the very reason that seeing it was most urgent: Because it was queer. 

Gregg Araki is — to slip into the sort of 2010s Tumblr-speak that his characters would probably deplore — a Queer Director of Color, specifically a bisexual Asian guy. These qualities come through in his work, along with other qualities that seem to be just as defining: Being an obsessive shoegaze fan, and very very Gen X, and funny, and a fan of over-the-top gore. The queerness in his work is radical, and beautiful, and confrontational, and just plain cool in a way that no other director is — and the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy, which comprises Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere, is the coolest thing he’s done.