Three Colors Doom: The Return Of Gregg Araki’s Doom Generation

“The Doom Generation”

Then there was the time James Cameron had to save my life over that piece of “Doom Generation” memorabilia.

There was a press junket at the Regency Hotel in New York City, and Twentieth Century Fox was excited about the possibilities of Kathryn Bigelow’s fiery, feverish fifth feature, “Strange Days,” set in that distant future of 1999 tying into the new millennium. The vivid, violent screenplay was by Jay Cocks and her ex-husband of a couple of years, James Cameron. 

The half-filled elevator opens onto the ground floor. There’s a scrum of men in the area, and they are surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who would be assassinated less than a month after the release of the movie.

The Shin Bet security detail looks the motley group of interviewers and publicists up and down, and I am dressed down, casual as they come. My faded canvas messenger bag has a small white-on-black all-caps button pinned to the shoulder strap, promoting “The Doom Generation,” which debuted in January of that year at Sundance: 

“EAT
FUCK
KILL“

A barely perceived instant and, oh, I am against that wall, three-four of the phalanx of security muscle pressing me and Rabin’s face a couple feet from mine. Asks one, “What is this… EAT? FUCK? KILL?”

A beat. A bell dings. Another elevator arrives. James Cameron takes one look to size up the circumstance and confidently strides into the moment.

“Whoa!” Cameron says, “What’s going on here? Hi, hello, I know this guy,” he says, indicating me to the wall of security. “We were just talking!” 

He extends his hand toward the group and says, “Hi, I’m James Cameron, I made ‘Titanic,’ and we’re working here.” (I have a memory of a low, “Hmmmm!” from one of the men.)

The “Eat Fuck Kill” button can be briefly glimpsed on the lapel of Rose McGowan’s black leather Chicago police jacket.

So I’m standing in the lobby of a Park Avenue hotel within feet of the prime minister of Israel, taken as a likely threat and James Cameron has saved me in seconds from hours or even days of interrogation. The group disperses quickly, one of the half-dozen or so men holding the door open as they hustle Rabin onto an elevator.

Cameron puts a hand on my shoulder as he’s about to step away. 

“Eat, fuck, kill? Really? Really, Ray?” He laughs and laughs again.

“The Doom Generation”

One of the sweetest exchanges in Gregg Araki’s “Doom Generation,” ” now in a 4K digital restoration is a murmured “I love you, fucker”; “I love you, too, fucker.” 

Take tenderness where you find it. The 1990s-bred punk-independent filmmaker was working on his own trilogy at the same time as Krzysztof Kieslowski, and the timing of the three-color “Doom Generation”—with Rose McGowan as Amy Blue, James Duval as Jordan White and Johnathon Schaech as Xavier “X” Red—paralleled that of the Polish filmmaker’s “Three Colors: Blue” (1993), “Three Colors: White” (1994), and “Three Colors: Red” (1994). Araki’s American tricolor tends mostly to the bloody red. 

Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” came out in the fall of 1994, and its energy parallels the pop provocation and matches Araki’s modest apocalypse with its pattern of observing on the patter of an affectless but  sexually charged girl-boy-boy trio, captured largely in two-shots and tighter two-shots. 

“The Doom Generation” is something wild, too, as punchy as a comic book comprised of nothing but the splash panels, with faces made more of improbable sculpture than traditional “beauty.”

Here’s part of a 1995 conversation with Araki.

“The Doom Generation”

Insolent and tawdry, profane and violent, apocalyptic yet comic, flamboyant yet tender, Gregg Araki’s “The Doom Generation” is the smartest of his five released features, an artfully art-directed maelstrom. Clocking in at a fleet eighty-three minutes, “Doom” is a gaudily-colored methedrine blur that takes the stuff of outlaw couple movies, and jacks it up as a three-way flirtation with sex and danger, pushing road-to-hell nihilism toward a brutal conclusion. (There are early glimpses of Mortal Kombat carnage, but it’s only mild spatter in light of the world Araki’s foul-mouthed Candides will face.) Araki says his earliest inspiration was Mark Beyer’s “Amy and Jordan” comic strip, peopled by a pair of stick figures in a crudely drawn world, repeatedly blown into the bowels of hell or comically eviscerated. James Duval’s Jordan is terminally dim and sweet, a twinkier Keanu Reeves; Rose McGowan’s Amy is petite, buxom, lacquered, enameled, bewigged, wigged-out, insults always flying from her scowl, her perfectly rouged kissy-lips.

Out for a night of clubbing and making out, they meet the all-too-handsome, all-too-polymorphous Xavier (Johnathon Schaech), who saves them from a bloody fight and then from a shopkeeper with a shotgun. The mix is combustible, with the predominant palette of bright red accented with semen, blood, mustard, relish, shotgun decapitations, infanticide, erotic asphyxiation, masturbation, diverse couplings, voyeurism, Heidi Fleiss, and castration (implied and otherwise).

Araki’s a student of lovers on the lam: echoing the prologue to Nick Ray’s archetypal “They Live By Night,” Jordan  sighs, “There just isn’t a place for us in this world.” Over a rapidly congealing breakfast, all too reminiscent of some of the gross-outs in “Doom Generation,” Araki and I talk road movies. 

“Road movies? Road movies are about a longing for a story that hasn’t begun,” Araki says in a fast, quiet tone. “When I was in film school, I realized road movies tend to come out in times of social and political duress, like the thirties, the sixties. At this point in history, things are a little bit fucked-up. So I make a road movie! I think road movies are about leaving the ordinary behind, and a search for something beyond that. Unfortunately, most road movies I like tend to reinforce the notion that there really is no escape. You can run but you cannot hide. Sadly!”

“Doom” is Araki’s first large-ish-budget film—”It cost a million, 35mm, stereo, the whole deal,” he laughs—but it’s still unmistakably of a piece with his earlier work, particularly with his profane, airhead Angeleno youth. In awestruck tones, they speak the kind of bathetic commonplaces that make the lyrics of a New Order or Morrissey song ridiculously affecting. (Of a teen suicide, Jordan muses, “He was really into the Smiths.”) Or, in a film filled with close-ups of libidinous intensity, Jordan’s wide-eyed revelation about sex, “I think it’s more powerful than we want it to be.”

“The Doom Generation”

The sex in “Doom Generation” goes through a range of permutations. “For me, the movie is all about the threesome and their sexual relationship and their romantic relationship,” Araki says. “The idea is that the sex scenes in the film are mirrored, there’s a Jordan and Amy scene, an Amy and Xavier scene, so literally the whole film they’re having sex together, but it isn’t until at last at the end they try to consummate this tension. It’s not really a coupling, it’s a threesome. I wanted to make a movie that was very sexual and very homoerotic but wasn’t this ‘gay’ movie, that wasn’t like ‘The Living End.'”

“The Doom Generation”

However lulled an audience might be by the pretty faces and flirtations and seductions and the criminal adventures and the wall-to-wall soundtrack by the likes of Nine Inch Nails, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins, Meat Beat Manifesto, Front 242 and 4AD and Wax Trax standards, “Doom” rapidly descends into a long night of despair. Is this retribution imposed on the characters? “I hate to, um, interpret my own movies,” Araki says, “But my own feeling is that ultimately it’s about purity and innocence. I’ve heard people call the film raunchy and dirty—”

I suggest that it’s actually kind of sweet. “Yeah. I think the film is mainly about sweetness and purity and innocence,” Araki says. “The Jordan character is the soul of the film. I think all three have a degree of innocence, but Jordan is the personification of innocence. He hasn’t got a malicious or jealous or negative bone in his whole body. That’s what the triangle is about, this pure world traveling through this incredibly hostile and chaotic world. The film is about a lot of things, but it’s very much about how they become desensitized to everything, to violence, to mayhem, to all the carnage around them. Then things don’t affect the audience, except for a dog being run over, a nosebleed.”

Both audiences I’ve seen the film with squirm over the accident with the dog. “Yeah. They’re on this kind of freewheeling road, the highway to hell, and the dog is what literally knocks them off the road and spins them toward this fate. For me, at that point, the film is headed toward something very terrible. In fact, it’s kind of unspeakably terrible what happens to them! The other scene that to me foreshadows the idea that the characters are mortal and that they are flesh and blood is the scene in the bathtub when Jordan bumps his nose on the side of the tub and has a nosebleed. It’s interesting to me you’ve just seen somebody get their head blown off and it’s like the funniest thing you’ve ever seen; But when Jordan slips and hits his head on the tub, everyone goes whoop! and flinches. There’s this feeling, suddenly, of the frailty of the body, that we’re only made of flesh and blood.”

“Doom Generation” opened in November 1995 at the Music Box. The 4K digital restoration of “Doom Generation” opens Friday, April 7 at the Music Box.