Queer Filmmaker Gregg Araki Looks Back on 'The Living End'
Gregg Araki, a groundbreaking queer filmmaker whose 1992 film "The Living End" sees its 30th anniversary this year, looked back on the movie in a new interview.
i-D noted that Araki's "filmography, particularly his early projects, gels 90s queer subculture with hallucinatory fantasy; a horniness mixed with existential malaise."
That ethos made its way into "The Living End," a film that tackled the issue of AIDS head-on during the peak years of the crisis. i-D recalled that the film follows "Jon, a film critic, and Luke, a drifter, two HIV positive lovers who kill a cop and embark on a self-destructive road trip across California."
"It's quintessential Araki," the article added, "messy, gay, tragic and daring."
Indeed, one of the film's most daring choices was a scene in which the two male protagonists have unsafe sex in a shower. "When it screened at Sundance, I remember people were just so outraged," Araki told i-D. "Seeing it today, it seems almost naive and a little bit cute. But it wasn't viewed that way in 1992."
Such boldness was part of the film's DNA. Araki pointed out that the film "had a very punk-rock attitude, and it was very unapologetic."
"Gay and queer representation was so limited at the time and, really, almost non-existent," the director said.
i-D recounted how Araki had made two zero-budget movies before shooting "The Living End" with a borrowed camera, free labor from actors and crew, and some donated color film stock, which enabled him to depart from the black-and-white of his earliest projects. With a budget of $20,000 and the backing of Marcus Hu and Jon Gerrans — the same-sex couple who founded Strand Releasing — Araki was able to bring "a tiny bit more production value" to the project, he said.
In the years since, Araki, now 62, has directed nine more films, including "The Doom Generation" (1995), "Kaboom" (2010), "White Bird in a Blizzard" (2014), and, perhaps most notably, the cult favorite "Mysterious Skin" (2004). He's also helmed numerous television episodes — including what he calls "the gayest episode of 'Riverdale'" in which he "directed the male characters" of the pot-boiling series "in wrestling singlets," i-D said.
But what else would you want from the man who made "The Living End?" That film, the article noted, was heavily influenced by works like Andy Warhol's "Blow Job" and Gus Van Sant's "Mala Noche," from which the filmmaker took a cue regarding how he posed and filmed his actors.
"That whole world of men being seen as sex objects and being lit and shot in a certain way [in 'Mala Noche'] was a huge visual influence on me," Araki disclosed.
Moreover, Araki told i-D that "The Living End" is a document not only from his youth, but of his youth. "My sensibility is in a different place — obviously, you grow up — but I appreciate that the film captures that period of my life," the director reflected. "It was my crazy, random, wild thoughts."
"That 'The Living End' is a document of that is, for me personally, really cool and something I look back on very fondly."
Watch the film's trailer below for your own look back at an early gay classic.