If The Living End and Nowhere, the cinematic mescaline cocktail that closes Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, emerged from the spirit of political rebellion and postmodernist norm-busting that defined queer culture and the new queer cinema of the 80s and 90s, Now Apocalypse is a similarly audacious but somewhat more mainstream distillation of Araki’s favorite themes.
Gritty, colorful, and militant, Araki’s low-budget work in the 90s operated in but still outside of that decade’s indie boom the director deployed his guerrilla film-making tactics and genuine iconoclasm in service of a decidedly queer, zany and sexed-up vision of life on the post-Reagan, post-Aids fringes. They are nihilistic, rudderless men and women who anxiously invoke thoughts of suicide or nuclear catastrophe and are slaves to their whims, be they casual sex, acid trips or violence, especially toward what one character in the new series calls the “miserable capitalist patriarchy”.
A part of the New Queer Cinema movement that included directors like Todd Haynes, Isaac Julien, and Gus Van Sant, Araki’s worlds are populated by the young, hot, sexually fluid and existentially worrisome.
