The Living End (1992)

I had never seen Gregg Araki's The Living End before, but I watched it last night because the Criterion Channel's Pride month celebration has a whole collection of films by Araki in it. The Living End is sexy and fun and irreverent. It's not really a gay Thelma and Louise, as I guess people called it when it originally came out, and the two men certainly do not go on a killing spree as some plot summaries say they do, but they do go on the run on what would appear to be an endless road trip.

Araki is exploring the disaffection of life in the early 1990s for people with HIV. The characters' frustration with the promise of USAmerican success is thrown into relief because they are promised so little of it and not promised a future. In this way, The Living End becomes a fascinating meditation on modern existence.

The men are also violently attacked on all sides, by murderous homophobes, murderous lesbians, murderous heterosexual wives of bisexual husbands. But the violence in the film is campy. This might not work for everyone. It worked for me. It felt actually scary at the same time as Araki mocked it and made it absurd.

Oh! There are a bunch of film posters and other references hidden in plain sight throughout the movie, but my favorite is a physical copy of the soundtrack to Making Love, which can be seen leaning against a window before the couple first has breakfast in Paul's house.

There are two or three more Araki movies in this collection on the Criterion Channel. I'm gonna check out the rest of them soon.