The Doom Generation
Kicking and Screaming
Chet: Here’s a joke. How do you make
As luck would have it, I had my second looks at The Doom Generation and Kicking and Screaming, two radically different youth movies about defeat and paralysis, back-to-back. Both seemed better the second time around, though for very different reasons. Noah Baumbach’s first feature, Kicking and Screaming, which I’d originally seen and liked at Cannes last May, seems to have been tightened up in the editing and given more focus. Perhaps because I disliked Gregg Araki’s fifth feature, The Doom Generation, when I first saw it last August, I found it harder to decide on a second viewing whether it had been changed in the interim; in any case I found myself disliking it less.
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The three characters at the center of Araki’s new movie are two young lovers, Jordan White (James Duval) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), and a lawless drifter they pick up named Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech). The color-coded surnames make it clear from the outset that stylization is very much the name of Araki’s game, so don’t expect full-blown characters with coherent pasts or imaginable futures. Even if this weren’t clear, the very first scene establishes a world of comic-book exaggeration and formal abstraction; it’s set in a raucous club ablaze with syncopated strobe lights and the announcement “Welcome to Hell.” The film never strays very far after that from loud colors and minimalist decor.
If this is independent cinema’s alternative to Natural Born Killers, I can’t see that it represents much of an improvement. It adopts the same specious pretext that we’re gazing deep into the dark American unconscious rather than catering to the audience’s worst instincts; and it advances the same duplicitous claim that parody of excess is somehow different from plain old excess–a claim that becomes just another pretext for heaping on more. The embrace of negativity and cynicism–as much a staple of contemporary commercial filmmaking as the standard happy Hollywood ending was of yore, and every bit as much an evasion of reality–is proffered dishonestly, as if it were simply arrived at by looking at the world rather than at the box-office grosses in Variety.
The main mover in this world seems to be Jane (Olivia d’Abo), Grover’s former girlfriend (her eccentricity is a habit of removing her retainer while she’s talking). A onetime coffeehouse waitress, Jane decides to study in Prague rather than live with Grover in Brooklyn, thereby sending him into a funk that lasts most of the remainder of the movie, keeping him on campus along with his no more decisive friends. (Otis can’t even board a plane to attend graduate school, one time zone away.) When Grover’s father (Elliott Gould), who recently separated from his mother, turns up to visit him–my favorite scene, perhaps because it has so much to say about the uneasy interactions between fathers and sons–Grover can’t even commit to staying in his dad’s Greenwich Village apartment while he’s away. Meanwhile Jane calls periodically from Prague, leaving Grover various messages, but he never calls her back.
