Looking at Greg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse series as part of a wave of queer cinema released in the late 80's and early 90's. I was joined by my good friend Conor Toner for this one; we talk about the new queer cinema movement and millennial anxiety. The primary text we discussed was Queer Temporal Camp by Dustin Bradley Goltz and secondary sources were Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag and Linda Hutcheon's Theory of Parody.
New Queer Cinema was a wave of mostly American and British independent films released in the late 80's and early 90's. Socio-politically they're partially a response to Reagan and Thatcher and growing conservatism of the 80's; Araki's films for me hit all the same points as a Bret Easton Ellis novel but way less self indulgent. They are brash, garish and sexy! They are overtly political but also disaffected and absent! They're films for outsiders and have a no care for assimilation into mainstream culture (despite a lot of these directors now being Hollywood staples). If you wanna watch more new queer cinema I recommend these lists; BFI intro to New Queer Cinema and a brief history of the scene on Vulture. I also recommend this very thorough article on The Doom Generation frog Dazed which features interviews with the director Greg Araki as well as the 2 stars of the film Rose McGowan and James Duvall which you can read here!
Queer Temporal Camp is the big essay for this show and is a real exciting read! It's about how time is treated on screen; the argument in brief is that cinema usually engages with a straight timeline which suggest the course of life in a narrative fits into the following stages: grow up, mature, copulate, have children and die. This heteronormative structure can be found in almost all film really, there is almost no other option. Consequently, a lot of queer film also follows this trajectory and like the move to legalise gay marriage as the focal point for gay rights, it's about a culture of assimilation. Queer temporality is about portraying and imagining a non heteronormative timeline; where do our characters go if they cannot marry, reproduce or even have a lifespan past 30 in light of the AIDS crisis (this is quite a contextual article as obviously gay marriage is legal, HIV is no longer a death sentence and IVF exists; though I'd like to stress that even though options like IVF exist; why the presumption that a life must include the nuclear family/that the only valid family is genetic? What real purpose does marriage serve?) Consequently, this essay examines how Araki presents a 'queer' sense of time and uses camp to undermine and interrogate 'straight time'.
press shot from The Doom Generation
Film's referenced
All directed by Greg Araki; The Teenage Apocalypse Series
Totally Fucked Up (1993)
The Doom Generation (1995)
Nowhere (1997)
More 'New Queer Cinema' 2 watch...
Born in Flames (1983) dir. Lizzie Borden
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) dir. Todd Hayne
Tongues Untied (1989) dir. Marlon Riggs
Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991) dir. Julien Isaacs
My Own Private Idaho (1991) dir. By Gus Van Sant
The Living End (1991) dir. Greg Araki
Go Fish (1994) dir. Rose Troche
The Watermelon Woman (1996) dir. Cheryl Dunye
But I'm a Cheerleader (1999) dir. Jamie Babbit
