GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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The Living End Strand
Releasing, Screenplay/Director: Starring: Unrated, 86 minutes
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Radical
Politics, Guerrilla Filmmaking
The early 90s was an exciting time for queer cinema. The gay community was angry - 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush (The First) in the White House can do that to you - and this rage was spilling onto the screen. I am referring, of course, to independent films and not to mainstream Hollywood. ACT-UP activists were making feature films and their work was being screened at Sundance! The floodgates were opened and the New Queer Cinema was born. |
 A
couple of years ago, I reviewed out director Gregg Araki's Totally
F***ed Up (1993) in Outcome
and commented, flippantly, on my "love-hate relationship" with the man's
films that dated back to 1992. That was when I discovered
The Living End, a demented road trip with two HIV positive
men who flip society the bird. This one took me back to my college film
classes where we hotly debated the camerawork and the politics of Jean Luc
Godard's Weekend. The Living End
recalled the agitprop of Godard's films; it was like a torch passed from
60s Marxist cinema. |
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 The
film's opening shot says it all: a hot young drifter named Luke (Mike Dytri)
is spray-painting the slogan "Fuck the World" onto a graffiti-covered wall.
His opening scenes criss-cross with Jon (Craig Gilmore), a freelance film
journalist who has just learned that he is HIV positive. Pretending to be
fine, he tells his artist friend Darcy (Darcy Marta) that he'll just have
to "lay off the Joy Division records for awhile." Jon is a quiet, and moody,
milquetoast while Luke is sometimes a borderline psycho. Later that night,
Luke shoots - and presumably kills - three gay bashers in self defense and,
while fleeing the scene, runs in front of Jon's car. |
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 Jon
isn't normally the type to pick up a man running with a gun but, still in
shock over his recent diagnosis, he isn't thinking clearly. "How do I know
that you're not some homicidal maniac who's going to bludgeon me to death
and rip off my CD collection?" Jon asks Luke when he takes him home. The
two men are clearly opposites but the laws of attraction triumph. Jon is
both terrified and turned on by the outlaw in his bedroom and, when he meekly
discloses his HIV status, he is stunned to hear Luke "welcome [him] to the
club." |
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| Luke is Jon's id. When he calls AIDS "the Neo-Nazi Republican final solution," Jon can't help but fall under the charismatic drifter's spell. Jon is writing an article on "The Death of Cinema," his walls are adorned with Godard and Warhol posters and it is easy to surmise that his writings are both counter-culture and political. In perhaps the film's most radical scene, nicely captured in one long take, Luke tells Jon over breakfast that, because they have AIDS, they have nothing to lose; they're totally free and can do anything they want. | |
 In
the grand tradition of classic films like Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and
Louise and Badlands, not to mention Godard's own Pierrot Le
Fou, this soon becomes a lovers-on- the-run flick after Luke kills a
cop. Jon, who would adore the four films mentioned above, is at first exhilarated
by the excitement of running away with Luke but, before long, the adrenaline
rush wears off. The shocking final scene is a powerhouse that viewers will
never forget. (I refuse to spoil it for first timers but it has haunted
me for over a decade.) |
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 Araki's
off-kilter images are edgy and evocative. This is guerrilla film-making
at its best. With this also comes a degree of sloppiness (and it is
sloppy in spots) but I'd never seen anything like this before in '92, making
the experience all the more visceral. Queers were fighting back and you
could feel the rage. It might not be as shocking now as it was then, but
it still has the power to provoke. |
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 The
public perception of AIDS was still pretty much in its infancy when Araki
conceived The Living End. AZT
was available but Protease Inhibitors were still a few years down the road.
Death hangs over the movie, and is a constant topic of conversation. Luke
wants Jon to kill him at the first sign that he is getting sick, insisting
that he wants to die with a smile on his face during sex. They roam through
a wasteland of empty parking lots, billboards and neon signs to a pounding
industrial hard rock soundtrack; no bouncy showtunes here. The music they
often reference is by gloom-rockers Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails and The
Smiths. But it is not all dark; there is also comedy, along with
a subversive sense of the absurd. Most of the love scenes between Jon and
Luke are as tender as they are steamy (and they were the most explicit
male love scenes I'd ever seen at that point) and their love story is often
quite touching. |
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| The Living End premiered in 1992 at Sundance, along with Tom Kalin's Swoon, Derek Jarman's Edward II and Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times, garnering unprecedented media attention. But it didn't please everyone on its first release, even within the gay community. One of the biggest complaints was that it was anti-women or, more specifically, anti-lesbian. In most cases this argument really doesn't hold water because the two male leads are just as screwed up as Jon's neurotic friend Darcy, or the wife who comes home and stabs her husband after finding him in bed with Luke. | |
 But
what about the two lesbian serial killers who give Luke a ride early in
the film? I don't know what was going through Araki's mind when he
wrote this moronic scene but it's a no-brainer why lesbians would find offense.
I hate this scene myself. At least he abandoned his original concept, included
in the published script, where Luke is tied up in the woods while the two
women whip him with foam-rubber dildos and sing "men are eeeeeeevil" as
they prepare to castrate him. We can breathe a sigh of relief that he learned
to write much better lesbians in his next film, Totally
F***ed Up. |
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 Offensive?
Yes, but mostly in the same irreverent way that South Park would
later be. Araki wants to push buttons and he succeeds. A lot of it is "politically
incorrect" but you have to admire the director's guts. Ponder the scene
where Luke wants to drive to Washington to infect George H.W. Bush with
their blood and bets that there will be a "magic cure for AIDS by the
morning". Back in 1990, when Araki wrote and then shot the film, I'm
sure thoughts like these were on the minds of every angry queer on the planet.
You also want to cheer when Luke beats a homophobe with a boom box. Love
it or hate it, the film still strikes a raw nerve. |
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More On Gregg Araki Craig Gilmore also
appears in: |
Coming
after too many years of watching gay men and women as victims on the silver
screen, The Living End was
both a bolt of lightning and a breath of fresh air. Though sometimes amateurish,
and at times featuring less-than thespian acting, it was nevertheless
hip and gleeful in its anarchy. Warts and all, Araki's self-proclaimed
"irresponsible movie" was the film that Jonathan Demme's compromised 
The
restored DVD of The Living End
is amazing. This is not a director's cut ala George Lucas. Enhanced might
be a good phrase. The film has been digitally cleaned up and color timed,
and its soundtrack re-mixed into 5:1 Dolby stereo, but it is still the
same film that we saw in '92. The extras include a director's commentary
and a Q&A from Sundance. This one is a must for any student of queer cinema.
Okay, it's not Citizen Kane by any means, but it is one
of our milestones and it still remains one of my favorite queer
films.