Hear Me Out: Gregg Araki understands the drama of adolescence unlike anyone else
‘It’s hard being a teenager’ is a sentiment we’re all familiar with. No one goes through their adolescent years easily, what with the amount of hormones coursing through your body, which is also drastically changing. The general pressures of being young – exams, friends, first crushes, parental clashes – are bad enough, but for many teenagers, issues like poverty, racism, and homophobia add another layer of stress and pain to the ever-complicated puzzle of adolescence.
For years, movies have often depicted the era when characters come of age as comical, with teenagers seen as melodramatic and laughable. While, yes, it can be frustrating to hear 14-year-olds worrying about their mock exams and slamming doors because no one understands them – “just wait until you get older,” you might mutter under your breath – when you’re a teenager, everything really does feel like the worst thing in the world.
Many filmmakers have tried – and failed – to capture an authentic experience of adolescence, but few seem to get it like Gregg Araki. It’s not that many of his works are super realistic (I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen an alien zap three valley girls at a bus stop and leave nothing but their retainers on the floor), but Araki’s movies understand the drama of being a teenager perfectly. He seems to simultaneously empathise with his teenage characters while also poking light-hearted fun at them, making his films both profound and ridiculously entertaining.
Emerging during the start of the New Queer Cinema movement, Araki made several films that are now relatively hard to find before rising to prominence with The Living End, a movie set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis. It’s his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy that remains some of his most popular work, however, which is full of succinct commentary on growing up in 1990s America – especially from a queer perspective – often leaning purposefully into the cliches that define growing up.
In Totally Fucked Up, a group of teenagers, all of whom identify as gay, talk into a video camera about life, expressing their disgust with the state of modern America. It’s so lo-fi and raw that it’s hard to remember you’re watching a fictional film and not a documentary; in fact, while the movie might contain actors, it is essentially a documentary, a time capsule that depicts an era that failed to live up to the promises it set out for many.
In one scene, a character comments, “All the stupid people are breeding like mad having tens and tens of kids, while the cool people aren’t having any! So, the population just keeps getting stupider and stupider! I mean, it’s no wonder the whole world’s going down the toilet.” While the characters are full of angst, it’s hard to disagree with many of their statements, which express a disappointment with the government’s lack of care for its citizens, particularly those who fall outside of the norm.
The ‘90s came several decades after various revolutionary movements that advocated for people on the margins of society; yet, many people were still facing serious oppression and were treated like second-class citizens by the government. The characters in Totally Fucked Up might be young, but they know that a rocky future lies ahead of them, and they have the unbridled confidence of adolescence to share their anger.
The film even begins with a newspaper article that reads ‘Suicide Rate High Among Gay Teens’, with Araki clearly using his movie as a statement on the complicated climate of ‘90s America, the so-called land of the free. As the teens smoke, drink, go shopping, hang out, and have sex, the movie paints a searingly accurate picture of what it’s like to exist as a young person, uncertain of your future and making do with the resources around you.
With Nowhere, Araki amped up the surrealism by using unconventional set design that makes the film feel like a bizarre fever dream you might conjure up after one too many. Yet, the movie is not short of heavy themes, from rape and drug addiction to violence and suicide. Araki’s ability to blend trashy aesthetics, campy humour, and sheer ridiculousness with such poignant topics sums up the experience of being a teenager pretty accurately. It’s a rather brutal watch at times, but Araki carves out a film that reflects the adolescent psyche, showing viewers that they’re not alone in feeling like an outsider.
Blending incessant violence and nihilism with humour, Nowhere is darkly surreal and abstract, presenting a muddled view of the world that resonates with the way we navigate the world as adolescents, drawn to both bright colours and the newest styles as much as unprotected sex and negative ways of thinking.
A few years after the trilogy was released, Araki directed Mysterious Skin, which shed light on child abuse and the way trauma can affect individuals as they grow older, another instance of the filmmaker understanding the broad spectrum of the adolescent experience. The movie meets the characters when they are 18, a pivotal point in their lives that sees them attempting to move into adulthood.
Yet, the memories of being abused haunt the two main characters, Brian and Neil, with their trauma manifesting in extremely different ways, from prostitution to a preoccupation with alien abduction. It’s easily Araki’s most moving film, highlighting how hard the transition from adolescence to adulthood can be when you are tormented by your memory. The director treats his subjects with empathy and care, and while it’s no easy watch, Mysterious Skin is one of the most essential movies about childhood and coming-of-age.
Araki’s filmography has also spanned stoner comedies (Smiley Face) and bizarre sci-fi comedies (Kaboom), but it’s his works about the complexity of adolescence and the move from childhood to being a grown-up that have endured the longest. From Totally Fucked Up to The Doom Generation and beyond, Araki’s understanding of the hardships that face many teenagers, particularly those who identify with identities marginalised in American society, has allowed many viewers to feel understood and represented on screen.
The auteur’s love of weird humour and campy aesthetics give his films a specific quality that mirrors the innate absurdism of growing up, which is also reflected in the sometimes over-the-top acting style Araki encourages in much of his work. Like the lovechild of John Waters and Jean-Luc Godard, who grew up on a diet of David Lynch, Araki’s movies invite viewers into the chaos of adolescence, where nihilism runs free, sex is often had a little too recklessly, and violence lurks around every corner. His movies might not always end happily, but they’re always completely real, encapsulating the drama of adolescence in all of its equal danger and stupidity.
