When I first moved to Austin, there were four different video rental locations that were still open, despite the fact that streaming was already nearly omnipresent at the time. There were two locations for I Luv Video and two for Vulcan Video, with both organizations consolidating into one storefront each by 2020 and both of them ultimately closing during the pandemic. In those days, my devotion was to Vulcan Video, even though the giant outdoor mural of Spock on their campus-adjacent “North Vulcan” location, which I saw when visiting the city before moving, was long gone by the time that they had been pushed out to North Loop Boulevard. Back then, I Luv Video’s website didn’t have a catalog search feature, while Vulcan did, and that won me over. Back when I wrote about every Dario Argento movie, every single one of those DVDs was rented from Vulcan North (except for Le cinque giornate, which was, and to my knowledge remains, only available on VHS). Within the past year, however, both Vulcan and ILV have returned in some form, with the collection of the former being donated to the Alamo Drafthouse and operating as “Vulcan” out of the Village location, while ILV is now known as We Luv Video and has set up shop in the exact location that was once Vulcan North. They recently had their first anniversary and threw a block party to celebrate, with VHS swapping and getting new members to sign up. I was won over by the pitch, and invited my friend to have a nineties movie night this week, wherein we would go to the video store to pick out a movie, order a pizza, and enjoy. One of the great things about having a local rental store again is the “Staff Picks” selection, and my companion was immediately drawn to Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai’s tender but turbulent 1997 drama that’s easily one of the best examples of New Queer Cinema.
Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are a gay couple from Hong Kong who, hoping that a visit to Argentina will break the cycle of their constant break-ups and reconciliations. Po-Wing insists that they rent a car instead of taking a bus to visit the Iguaza Falls, which results in them getting lost and never making it to their destination. Their trip is marked by the acquisition of a lamp that creates a simulated image of a waterfall, which Fai keeps when he and Po-Wing break up once more because of the stress of their failed venture and the conflict that ensues. Lacking the funds to fly home, Fai takes up residence in a rundown motel in Buenos Aires, where he has a shoebox of a room and shares cooking facilities with all of the other residents, and he finds work as a doorman at a tango club. Po-Wing takes up a life as a sex worker, and Fai is forced to watch him entertain john after john at the club where he works. After the two of them argue and Fai confronts Po-Wing about spending all of their money and stranding them there, Po-Wing steals an expensive watch from one of his clients so that Fai can pawn it and go home but is badly beaten by the man over it. Po-Wing’s hands are badly injured, and he is forced to wear plaster bandages on them for an extended period, and Fai reluctantly becomes his caretaker.
Po-Wing makes his interest in resuming their affair clear—Fai notes that Po-Wing’s “Let’s start over” was a constant refrain over their rocky separations and reunions—but while Fai clearly still loves and cares for him, they do not become lovers again. Po-Wing’s attempts to climb into bed with Fai only alienate him, and his constant whining and demanding tell us a great deal about what their relationship was like, even before he became largely incapable of fending for himself. He forces Fai to go jogging with him in terrible weather despite his ex’s reluctance, and when Fai takes ill because of the weather, Po-Wing still demands that he cook for them. Of course, Fai is revealed to be no shrinking violet or victim either, as we see that he becomes intensely jealous; when Po-Wing goes to get cigarettes and isn’t home when Fai returns from work, Fai buys multiple cartons so that Po-Wing has no reason to leave. He even takes Po-Wing’s passport the first night that his former lover stays with him following his release from the hospital and hides it so that Po-Wing can’t leave him. It’s clear that they were always toxic for each other, but that they were also madly, passionately in love in a way that defies all logic and common sense and drives one to extreme highs that make the extreme lows seem worthwhile. And that love is still present, even if it’s so tainted by mutual bitterness at this point that there’s no way for them to walk the same path ever again.
Fai is fired from the tango bar when he attacks the man who beat Po-Wing and starts working at a Chinese restaurant. There, he befriends a young, handsome Taiwanese man named Chang (Chen Chang). Although Chang never expresses overt attraction to Fai, his affection is clear. Po-Wing becomes jealous after overhearing Chang in the background of one of his constant, demanding phone calls to Fai at work, and this, combined with Fai’s continuous refusal to return his passport, leads Po-Wing to move out when he is recovered from his injuries. Fai opens up to Chang about having left Hong Kong in disgrace due to stealing money from his employer, who was a friend of his father’s, and Chang tells Fai about his family’s food stall in the night market in Taipei. Chang eventually earns enough money to continue his travels and tells Fai he intends to travel to the southernmost tip of South America, where he has heard that one can release all their cares. He offers his tape recorder to Fai so he can carry his worries for him, but Fai can muster no words, only sobs. Fai starts to work nights in an abattoir so that he can get his body back on Hong Kong time and goes home, with Po-Wing breaking down upon realizing that Fai is really gone.
This is one of the most moving films that I have ever seen. I’ve never been in the kind of relationship that the film depicts, one in which one partner’s jealousy and control issues and the other’s learned helplessness and deliberate provocation of envy put them in constant conflict with one another, but I’ve been a teenager (and a twentysomething, and a thirtysomething) in love, the kind of love that’s so big and so loud that it takes up the whole room. Love immiserates as well as illuminates, love consumes as well as sustains, and love can craze as much as it can ground. Po-Wing and Fai’s relationship is one that can swing back and forth between Po-Wing’s mad desire for the physical intimacy of sharing a bed even if they don’t touch, with complete disregard for Fai’s boundaries or well-being, to Fai berating his former lover for his promiscuous ways (before later cruising in the same ways and in the same places after Chang leaves, noting in his internal monologue that all lonely people are the same, deep down) while making him a virtual prisoner, to the two of them slow dancing in the shared kitchen of Fai’s hostel, sweet and kind and perfect — but only for a moment.
The copy of this film that I watched was a grey market region-free DVD, and although the transfer was terrible (there are several scenes during the portion of the film where Fai is working in the restaurant wherein the subtitles are completely illegible against his white chef’s wear), it was nonetheless a beautiful movie. It’s a mood piece, wherein there are several long shots of urban decrepity punctuated by neon and headlights as well as very long shots of Iguaza Falls as we take in the majesty of the pouring, pulsing water, countless gallons and tons of the stuff moving at incomprehensible volume, churning with a power that can only be imagined and yet which pales in comparison to the raging waters that push and pull inside of Po–Wing and Fai. It’s powerful stuff, and worth tracking down.
If you follow enough fired-up cynics on Twitter, you’d think that queer youth culture is suddenly going soft after decades of consistent, unified radical politics. There are surely some fruitful debates to be had about the ways corporate & police presence have been welcomed into Pride celebrations recently, especially when it comes at the expense of freer, kinkier expressions of queer sexuality. However, I’m a little more skeptical about the recent in-house dogpiling on “tenderqueer” Zoomers for their generational desire to see wholesome, conflict-free Gay Representation onscreen, as if that impulse is anything new. Politically edgier queer audiences have been debating Gay Assimilationists about the value of presenting “the right kind of representation” to the public at large since at least as far back as Stonewall, which has led to much controversy over “the wrong kind of representation” in movies like Basic Instinct, Cruising, and The Boys in the Band for presenting their queer characters as flawed & villainous when they had no wholesome mainstream counterbalance. I have to wonder how much that eternal controversy has dulled the career & reputation of queer provocateur Gregg Araki, whose signature works have been left to rot in censored, out-of-print obscurity since he first made a splash in the New Queer Cinema era of the 1990s. All those decades ago, Araki got enough pushback for making hyperviolent, oversexed queer art he describes as “too punk rock for gay people” that he thought it’d be easier to sneak his edgier, more outrageous ideas into his version of a straight film. Araki’s breakout 1995 road trip flick The Doom Generation is even subtitled “A heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki,” a cheeky in-joke about how it’s easier to get away with making his provocative, overtly queer outsider art within a heterosexual dynamic, since there’s much less pressure to deliver “the right kind of representation” in that context. Or, as Araki put it in a recent interview, “I made this heterosexual movie, but in a very punk rock bratty way, made it so gay.”
That hetero cosplay may have landed Araki easier production funding, but the prudish straights in charge of mainstream movie distribution were not fooled. The Doom Generation has been heavily, viciously censored since it first premiered at Sundance, with its various R-rated home video cuts removing up to 20 minutes of footage so that what’s left onscreen is borderline incoherent. Although some of those Blockbuster Video-friendly edits removed scenes of cartoonish ultraviolence, you will not be surprised to learn that a majority of what has been removed is its queer sexual content, which drives most of the relationship dynamics between its trio of disaffected Gen-X leads. So, it’s a huge deal that The Doom Generation has been recently restored to fit Araki’s original vision nearly three decades after its film festival premiere, re-released into a post-She-Ra, post-Steven Universe tenderqueer world that’s just as squeamish about the wrong kinds of representation as it’s always been. Its theatrical victory lap is a bittersweet blessing for me personally, in that I wish it was around in my life when I was a John Waters-obsessed edgelord teen, but I also cherished getting to see it for the first time with a rowdy crowd of queer weirdos who hooted & hollered the entire screening. Laughing along with like-minded genre freaks made every horned-up, airheaded line reading hit way harder than it would have if I watched it alone on VHS in the 90s, with or without the prudish MPAA censorship. There was something heartwarming about sharing that experience with multiple generations of in-the-flesh human weirdos who might be inclined to snipe at each other for minor political differences online but can’t help but cackle & gasp in unison at campy, radical queer art when it’s presented IRL. It’s just not that often that boundary-pushing queer art survives the controversy cycle to reach queer audiences in the first place, and it turns out that costuming itself as “heterosexual” can only help it get so far.
Internal gay debates about positive representation in American media may have not changed much in the past few decades, but to be fair neither has America at large. If The Doom Generation lives up to its “heterosexual” subtitle in any authentic way, it’s in its depiction of an apocalyptic USA in cultural decline. It’s one the best movies out there about how boring, rotten, and beautifully cheap life in America can be, defining US culture as a putrid pile of junk food, junk television, fundamentalist Christians, and Nazi right-wingers. Set in an America where everything costs $6.66 and is protected by loaded gun, the film responds to the nation’s final moments before Rapture with pure Gen-X apathy, shrugging off every grotesque fascist afront with a Valley Girl “Whatever!” worthy of Cher Horowitz herself. Rose McGowan & James Duvall star as a pair of aimless, politically numb punks whose teenage puppylove is disrupted by the intrusion of Johnathon Schaech, a leather-clad agent of chaos. After the third-wheel interloper makes them accomplices in the brutal (and somewhat accidental) murder of a gas station clerk, the trio go on a cross-country, Natural Born Killers crime spree touring the nation’s cheapest fast-food joints & honeymoon motels. The reluctant throuple’s initial sexual dynamic starts as adulterous betrayal, but quickly devolves into a bisexual free-for-all that edges the audience to desperately want to see the two male leads kiss (and more). Only, Araki interrupts the gay male tension in that central threesome with a violent reminder of just how broken & violent life in America can be, concluding their road trip with a shock of strobelit Nazi brutality that fucks everything up just when it things are starting to get properly heated. The Doom Generation might feature characters exploring the boundaries of their emerging queer sexual identities, but it’s also honest about how horrific it can feel to do so among the straight Christian psychopaths who run the USA – something all generations of queer audiences can relate to, no matter how sensitive they are to onscreen sex & violence.
I could go on all day about how sexually, politically transgressive The Doom Generation is in both its modern & retro American contexts, but really its greatest strength is that it’s extremely cool. McGowan’s Gen-X punk uniform of plastic gas station sunglasses, see-through plastic raincoat, and blunt, dyed goth bob looks just as hip now as it ever did. Every motel room & dive bar interior is a gorgeously cheap fantasy realm of D.I.Y. decor & artifice, so much so that I mistook the out-of-context screengrabs I’ve seen over the years for a momentary dream sequence instead of the overall art design. Decades before anyone would think to tweet “Give Parker Posey a sword,” Gregg Araki gave Parker Posey a sword, casting her as a crazed lesbian stalker in a cheap drag queen wig. And yet Duvall’s performance stands out as the coolest detail of all, nailing the kind of puppydog himbo humor that would have made him a beloved Keanu Reeves-level cult figure if this film were given the proper, uncensored distribution it deserved. It’s not often you see a movie combine the finer points of Heathers, Freeway, Blood Diner, and Terminal U.S.A. into one toxic Gen-X gumbo, even if it’s one that crassly force-feeds the concoction to its audience through an unwashed beer funnel. I was overjoyed to gulp down The Doom Generation unfiltered with a full crowd of fellow filth-hungry weirdos, if not only for the reminder that radical queer art has always been controversial by nature, and America has always been an apocalyptic cesspool. At the same time, I also left the theater angry that the film hadn’t been funneled into my brain sooner, and that so much of Araki’s back catalog of bad-representation punk provocations are still not readily accessible to the modern public. Here’s to hoping that titles like Nowhere, Splendor, and Totally Fucked Up get this same digital-restoration victory lap soon—theatrical re-release and all—before Christian America gets the Rapture it so desperately wants.
PBS programming was apparently a lot more adventurous in the 80s & 90s than I remember it being as a kid, even though I watched it religiously as a pretentious nerd without cable access. Or maybe it’s that local PBS affiliates in Louisiana weren’t broadcasting The Good Stuff (the gay stuff) that aired in less morally regressive areas of the country. Whatever the case, a few weeks ago I learned that PBS broadcast the radically queer video art flamethrower Tongues Untied the year of its initial release (admittedly to some national controversy in the press), and now I’m just finding out that the publicly funded network also broadcast a 30-minute Todd Haynes short about a child’s sexual awakening as a burgeoning kinkster. Made between Poison& Safe, Dottie Gets Spanked was a dispatch from the earliest, most abrasive period of Haynes’s career, when his voice was such an anomaly on the indie film scene that critics had to coin a new term for it: New Queer Cinema. And PBS was there to push that outsider-art queerness in front of a larger audience, risking morally righteous pushback from the Conservative pundits who are always on the hunt for excuses to defund the network. I think that’s beautiful, and it’s very different from the super-safe (although still incredibly helpful & informative) version of PBS I remember from my own childhood.
In Dottie Gets Spanked, a small suburban child in the 1960s becomes fetishistically obsessed with a spanking scene in an I Love Lucy type sitcom, much to the horror of his super straight parents. True to the messy multimedia style of Haynes’s early work, this simple story is told in a deliriously fractured, layered narrative that’s spread across three tiers of reality: the real world, the sitcom world, and the dream world. In the real world, the young boy is terrified of his emotionally distant father, a cold brute who mostly looms in doorways & watches football while his wife takes care of the actual parenting. The child escapes this tension by sitting inches away from the television and disappearing into the sitcom world, a black & white spoof of I Love Lucy era comedies (a fan-favorite of girls his age, which makes him out to be an outsider at school). In turn, this sitcom world informs the boy’s fantasies: surrealist De Chirico dreamscapes that become intensely erotic once a spanking episode of The Dottie Show introduces a burgeoning fetish into his nightly repertoire. It’s an uncomfortable but deeply relatable portrait of a young child discovering their first sexual impulses in a household where anything that’s not married heteros in the missionary position is considered an abomination & a personal moral failure. Because Haynes is behind the wheel, it’s implied that the young child is gay but unaware of that predilection, but the story is universal enough to hit home for anyone who’s ever discovered their queer identity or unexpected kink obsession while growing up in a conservative household.
Personally, I identified with this on a cellular level. It reminded me of recording sitcom episodes & other random television ephemera that overlapped with my own emerging kinks onto homemade VHS tapes in the 90s. It’s a shame those tapes were lost to flood waters in Hurricane Katrina; I imagine they might play with the same feverishly horny delirium that’s established in this film’s spanking dreams (or maybe the found footage video diary of a serial killer, if I’m being more honest with myself). A lot of those clips were likely pulled from PBS, appropriately enough, even though I don’t remember my local station’s programming being as boldly daring as the psychosexual overtones of Dottie Gets Spanked. But the whole point of this movie is that the content we fixate on while we’re mapping out our own erotic imaginations does not have to be direct or overt to be effective. Even when locked away from the broader spectrum of sexual play & identity in a morally buttoned-up household, we still find a way to indulge ourselves in what turns us on. That searching-for-scraps-of-kink scavenging may now be a relic of a pre-Internet world, considering how much access most children have to information outside their parents’ control, but it is perfectly captured in this playfully naughty Todd Haynes short from the 90s. Knowing that the movie’s production & distribution was at least partially publicly funded only makes its existence more perversely amusing.
Swampflix 