How this sexy, violent & very gay road trip movie paved a provocative new path for queer cinema
The Living End to heat up, it’s the opening images—first, its self- identification as an “irresponsible movie” by the filmmaker and second, crimson spray paint, ruby drips hanging from each letter: F*CK THE WORLD.
Fueled by righteous anger, a clownish nihilism, and the desire to shake things up, Araki’s rough-hewn aesthetic and direct acknowledgment of AIDS as the political and personal, signaled him as one of the incendiary artists confronting a culture of homophobia, prudishness, and normativity that had seeped into the very natureof film and telling it to fuck off, which scholar and critic B.
Ruby Rich described as the New Queer Cinema. As Craig Gilmore, playing cynical film critic Jon says, film is dead, and perhaps Araki thinks that out of it a new language, a new kind should be born.There’s a bit of knowing irony in that approach, as The Living End is widely referred to as a kind of “gay Thelma And Louise.” There’s death and fatalism all over the place, as Jon, whose life is changed when he learns he’s HIV positive, falls for the reckless and wild (and also HIV-positive) Luke (Mike Dytri).
And when Luke, smeared with blood, tells Jon that he’s killed a cop, the two of them go on a road trip into the heart of an America at a political and social crossroads.
