Luke and Jon are in love. A pair of gay desperados who just tested positive for HIV, they embark on a fatalistic journey to nowhere.
The plot of Gregg Araki`s third feature, ”The Living End,” now playing at the Music Box Theatre, is straight out of the Hollywood B-movie tradition of outlaw-couple-on-the-lam. But with a twist.
”The characters are from my generation, the lost generation desperately trying to survive on the fringe of the mainstream. And they happen to be gay, just like me,” he says.
Along with Douglas Coupland, who wrote the cult favorite ”Generation X,” and Richard Linklater, director of the underground classic ”Slackers,” Araki has been a compassionate chronicler of the sexual politics of the disenfranchised punk subculture in its 20s.
”We`re very cynical,” he says. ”We feel a certain weariness towards the naive optimism of the Reagan era. For us, AIDS is the major issue. It`s foregrounded in bigotry. It heightens the insecure feelings we have about sex, love and trust.”
A third-generation Japanese-American, Araki, now 31, grew up in a
”cheerfully normal yet socially oppressive” suburb of Santa Barbara, Calif. ”I dated girls and did all these other high school things,” he recalls. ”But being Asian and secretly gay, I felt like an outsider, a rebel. I was drawn to the punk rockers and the motorcycle gangs. I couldn`t wait to move to L.A.”
He got his chance-enrolling in the University of Southern California`s cinema school in 1982. While there, he discovered European filmmakers who dealt with characters and themes dear to him. ”(Jean Luc) Godard and (Rainer Werner) Fassbinder saw through the absurdities in human relationships, the all-consuming irrationality of love,” he says. ”Yet they celebrated the possibility of romantic redemption. Their films are my touchstones.”
Araki also took up their guerrilla style of filmmaking. ”To maintain my independence as an artist, I can`t afford to make expensive movies,” he says. ”My first two features were shot black-and-white, Super-8 and dubbed afterwards. They each cost about $5,000. We`d move into a location without permission, shoot quickly and move out before anybody noticed. The working conditions are usually horrible. I`ve been lucky in getting the right people for the crew. And actors who don`t mind kissing each other on screen.”
”The Living End,” Araki`s first movie in color and sync-sound, came in under the $25,000 budget. But getting it made was a struggle.
”My producer had to borrow money from his mom. And we worked in fits and starts in fall and winter of `90, around the schedules of the actors and other personnel,” he says. ”I operated the camera myself. But I must say that other underground filmmakers helped us out a lot. Jon Jost lent me his camera equipment and donated leftover film stock. Then a grant from the American Film Institute came through at the last minute.”
When ”The Living End” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, it was hailed as a breakthrough film, a defiant, impassioned statement about being gay and HIV-positive in the `90s. The tempestuous romance between a rebel without a cause and a sensitive writer is played out against the backdrop of an urban wasteland populated by intolerant misfits.
”Their volatile relationship gradually takes on a metaphysical meaning, like the virus itself,” Araki says. ”Their escape from the law is really an existential, psychological journey. At the end of their emotional showdown, they are stranded with the ocean to their backs-facing uncertainty and despair, like most of us.”
The thematic concerns of his films notwithstanding, Araki doesn`t like to be labeled a ”gay” or ”AIDS” filmmaker.
”I don`t work or socialize with gays exclusively,” he says. ”One of my producers is a heterosexual female. One of the leads in `The Living End` is straight. I`d say I`m interested in any social milieu that involves both gays and non-gays coping with life.
For his next feature, made on a slightly more generous budget and to be released early next year, Araki took inspiration from Godard`s ”Masculine-Feminine.” ”With a twist, once again,” he says, smiling wrily. ”The relationships are gay and lesbian-and totally confusing. My films are not autobiographical, but they are very personal.”
