For over 30 years, Gregg Araki’s been making cinema a queerer, sexier place
Totally F***ed Up, at the Sundance Film Festival. Rebellious, independent, and fearlessly queer, Araki’s radical spin on the coming-of-age genre would later be recognized as the first of his “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy, which also included the dark road-trip romance The Doom Generation (’95) and sci-fi-twinged black comedy Nowhere (’97).Nearly three decades on, one might expect these films to feel tame in retrospect, that maybe they—like many thirty-somethings—have lost some of their edge.But that’s the thing about Araki: No matter how much the world changes (or does’t), his oeuvre is always on the bleeding edge—sexy, funny, shocking, punk, and unabashedly queer.Timelessly transgressive, Araki is, without a doubt, one of the most important directors to come out of the ’90s, whose influential work will surely continue to inspire the independent filmmaking landscape for another 30 years, at least!Born in 1959 to Japanese-American parents just outside of Los Angeles, Araki has said he came of age at “such an innocent time.” That made him all the more susceptible to the influence of punk rock, new wave, and the indie alternative culture that began to bubble up in the early ’80s, just as he was beginning film school.After attending UC Santa Barbara, he enrolled in University Of Southern California’s School Of Cinematic Arts, and graduated with an M.F.A.
in ’85. From then it wasn’t long until he got to work, creating films independently with practically non-existent budgets.His first was Three Bewildered People In The Night, shot guerilla-style in black-and-white on a stationary camera, telling the story of—you guessed it—three people, one of which was gay.
