Groundbreaking New Queer Cinema filmmaker Gregg Araki is hard at work on his next feature I Want Your Sex—his first in over a decade!—which he’s said is a response to the fact that Gen Z isn’t having sex, at least compared to the ’90s.
And he would know: Araki basically wrote the book on Gen X queerness and sexuality. Or, he made the movies, rather.
After his provocative response to the AIDS crisis, The Living End, put him on the map in 1992, the writer-director would go on to capture the life and love, the alienation and aggravation, the romance and rebellion of an emerging generation with three consecutive movies that would come to be known as the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy.
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Set against the backdrop of ’90s nihilism, all three movies were connected by common threads: Edgy and stylish explorations of queerness, sexuality, and teen malaise. 1997’s pitch-black comedy Nowhere explored the literal end of the world, while 1995’s The Doom Generation was a winking “heterosexual” crime story.
But first was Totally F***cked Up in 1992, an anthology story, of sorts, focused on a group of friends—four gay men and a a lesbian couple—just struggling to get by in Southern California.
Araki envisioned the film as his response to the seminal teen comedies of the ’80s, like John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, but with a decidedly bleaker, queerer worldview speaking directly to the restless voices of disaffected youth.
He was heavily inspired by French New Wave filmmaker Jen-Luc Goddard’s seminal Masculin Féminin, and uses similar documentary-style interviews with the characters, contrasting their frequently heady and hyperbolic statements to camera with the hum-drum realities of their everyday lives.
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Director Gregg Araki on his unrated cut of ‘Nowhere,’ aging gays, & why Gen Z needs more sex
The legendary director also shares his hot takes on ‘Barbie,’ ‘Euphoria,’ and “androngynous” stars like Timothée Chalamet and Harry Styles.
There’s the uptight Andy (James Duval, the centerpiece of Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy) whose aversion to sex might threaten his new romance. His friend Tommy (Roko Belic) doesn’t have the same hang-ups, and will do whatever it takes to get laid.
Meanwhile, aspiring filmmaker Steven’s (Gilbert Luna) penchant for recording his friends provides Totally F***ed Up with its doc-like framing device. He’s in a relationship with Deric (Lance May), but, feeling suffocated, has started cheating.
And, last but not least, the aforementioned lesbian couple, Michele (Susan Behshid) and Patricia (Jenee Gill), are trying to convince their male friends to donate sperm so that they can have a baby. But, given what we’ve seen of these guys, maybe they’d be better off looking for a donor outside the friend group…
While loose with an improvisational feel, Totally F***ed Up would lay the groundwork for Araki’s trilogy to come, which, as the Criterion Collection puts it, “pushed 1990s indie cinema into bold new aesthetic realms, while giving blistering expression to adolescent rage and libidinal desire.”
The entire trilogy will receive a box-set release from Criterion this September. Meanwhile, acclaimed art house distributor Strand Releasing has been restoring Araki’s films one by one, and will bringing Totally F***cked Up to digital VOD services for the first time in years on September 13.
In anticipation of the re-release, check out a new trailer for the classic film below:
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For over 30 years, Gregg Araki’s been making cinema a queerer, sexier place
Need some streaming recs for Pride Month? Try the films of Gregg Araki, which all feel as fresh and shocking as the day they were released.
