An arty atrocity for thugs and sub-literates” is how The Washington Post described The Doom Generation, the breakthrough film from the freaky, fanciful day-glo auteur Gregg Araki, in 1995. Mention this to him today – when his films, including his new black comedy I Want Your Sex, typically earn raves – and Araki laughs, slapping it on like a badge of honour. At the time, he wasn’t so sanguine. “Literally everybody walked out of the press screenings for that movie,” he smiles. “No one was left by the end. I wasn’t happy about it, but it’s also like… Oh well, they didn’t get it.”
More than 30 years after being anointed one of the central voices of New Queer Cinema, a subset of caustic, sexy, volatile art made by the likes of Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant, Araki has stubbornly yet winningly refused to grow up. His film sets are still decorated in polka dots and neon, and his stories still traffic in apocalyptic malaise, embittered teenage bisexuals and occasional space aliens. The Doom Generation, starring Rose McGowan as a sensationally outfitted nihilist on the road with a timid baby queer and a psychopath, remains a bit of an outlier in his work. So too does Mysterious Skin (2004), about two young men – one a hustler, the other permanently adrift – coming to terms with their childhood sexual abuse. It’s beautifully told, but you wouldn’t rush back to it in a hurry. His others lean soft: the polycule romcom Splendor (1999), the garishly silly stoner comedy Smiley Face (2007), the lusty, MTV-era teen-dream fantasia of Nowhere (1997). And now I Want Your Sex, which casts a career-best Olivia Wilde as a vampy contemporary artist who convinces her permanently awe-struck assistant Elliot (a revelatory Cooper Hoffman) to get on his knees, bark on command, and do her sexual bidding. Elliot loves it, then resents it, then is grateful for it. The HR rep in your life would spontaneously combust were they were to glimpse a second of it all.
