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Published on 2/22/08
Time passes some films by: Fashions, themes and attitudes change or become worn-out. In 1992, when Gregg Araki’s seminal HIV-positive-lovers-on-the-lam indie flick, The Living End, made its debut, its anger felt so real, one worried the screen might catch fire. Today, the world it depicts has changed quite a bit: For starters, AIDS is no longer the death sentence it used to be. And yet, as a film it hasn’t really dated—none of its anger has diminished, despite the fact that much of it now seems like it takes place in another galaxy.
“It’s kind of like stepping into a time machine,” Araki says of revisiting The Living End for the “remixed and remastered” version, which arrives on DVD Tuesday 29. “It took me back to the late 1980s and early ’90s, when I was making it.” He notes that the film was made for about $25,000, with a borrowed 16mm camera. “Nobody got paid. Producers were running errands, and the crew was sometimes three or four people, and often one or two. It was so ‘indie,’ in a way that’s very foreign to the way films are made today. It was almost like an art project.” Recently, the director was intrigued by the chance to revisit the film while preparing it for DVD release. “It always bothered me that the film only existed in these crappy old VHS copies, even though it was being taught in colleges,” he says. Now it’s been given a high-definition digital transfer with redone color correction, and the once-mono soundtrack a 5.1-channel surround mix (the restored version premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and can be seen locally on the big screen June 6 as part of this year’s “Sundance Institute at BAM” series). But Araki is not about to pull a George Lucas anytime soon: He didn’t tamper with any actual edits. “I didn’t want to fuck with the movie itself; I just wanted to make the viewing experience more modern.”
The Living End tells the story of Jon (Crag Gilmore), a shy gay film critic who has just learned that he is HIV-positive, and Luke (Mike Dytri), a seemingly free-spirited, possibly suicidal gay hustler, also positive. The two meet when Luke runs into Jon’s car after shooting dead a bunch of gay-bashers. The film explores their ensuing attraction and repulsion as they journey through a surreal, though decidedly American, wasteland, indulging in all varieties of sex and mayhem along the way.
An overarching mood of caustic hopelessness is the film’s most compelling feature. “A lot of young people can’t imagine what it felt like to be alive in that period,” Araki says. “Whether it was societal pressure, homophobia or the despair of the AIDS epidemic, it all contributed to this sense of confusion and anger and total uncertainty.” Of course, what really attracted attention was Araki’s in-your-face approach to sexuality and his flaunting of so-called mores. The tag line was “An irresponsible film by Gregg Araki,” and many were shocked to see depictions of such things as unprotected gay sex by two HIV-positive characters. “People asked how dare I make such an impudent film,” the director recalls with a bit of a chuckle. But he admits that the film also represented a lot of his own feelings at the time, not only about being gay but about the neutered way homosexuality was portrayed in the media. “At the time, we had Longtime Companion, a very sincere, TV-movie-ish film dealing with the AIDS crisis. I wanted to do something that was sexy, that had an irreverent, punk-rock feel to it.” A year after The Living End’s release, Hollywood and the mainstream were still playing catch-up, with Tom Hanks’s nobly suffering AIDS patient in Philadelphia raising eyebrows after getting an innocent kiss from lover Antonio Banderas.
Today, The Living End stands not only as a testament of early-’90s despair, but also as one of the iconic films of the New Queer Cinema. The movement arguably had its annus mirabilis in 1992, the year that The Living End, Tom Kalin’s Swoon and Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times all premiered to acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. (Munch, it is worth noting, also did the lighting for Araki’s film.) “It wasn’t ever really a true new wave, where people sat around and came up with a dogma,” Araki observes. “It was just something about the zeitgeist, with a lot of anger and emotion on the streets. It was natural that a lot of our films shared this common outlaw sensibility.”
The Living End: Remixed and Remastered is available Tue 29 from Strand Releasing for $27.99.
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