ARAKI AND THE APOCALYPSE Written by Kristin Haegelin Illustrated by Kelly Doherty Layout by Ellie Chun
It’s not every day that your new gay crush climbs through your window, confesses their love, and then promptly explodes in a shower of blood “Alien” style, leaving behind a cockroach-like extraterrestrial. But it happens in Gregg Araki’s surrealist sextravaganza “Nowhere.” With a directing career born out of his desire to see underrepresented, marginalized groups “identify themselves via the cinema machine,” queer, Japanese American director Gregg Araki is no stranger to disrupting the traditional Hollywood narrative. Beyond his transgressive portrayals of queer and marginalized characters, his cinematic worlds are equally distinctive, characterized by the 2
provocative and obscene, the nihilistic and romantic, and love-it-or-hate-it plotlines. When Araki does engage with tropes, he takes exhausted cliches and revitalizes them in queer and punk spaces, soaking them with shoegaze before lighting them on fire with neon light. Araki’s work with genre is equally significant. Over the years, his efforts have brought queer characters into genres we never expected to see them in before — everything from the sappy coming-of-age film to the Bonnie-and-Clyde-style road movie. Yet perhaps the most significant feature of his experimentation is Araki’s lifelong relationship with the sci-fi genre. Specifically in the films
