In the mid-1990s, the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy canonized Gregg Araki as a cult filmmaker and a leading figure of the American “New Queer Cinema.” Its three feature films, Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997), explode traditional Hollywood conventions with their visual flamboyance and their creator’s post-modern nihilism. With the city of Los Angeles and the actor James Duval as their common threads, these three films paint a hallucinatory portrait of 90s-era American youth: disenchanted, hyper-sexualized, lost in an image-saturated world, drawn to drugs and death.
