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I ENJOY SCREENING director Gregg Araki's 1995 creation The Doom Generation in the film courses that I teach because, upon viewing it for the first time, most students want to dismiss it as cinematic rubbish. They are quick to state that the narrative is too fractured and surreal, that the come-hither (or at-least-just-come) approach to exploring teen angst is superficial, that the (at times) hardcore images and throbbing hard-rock soundtrack result in visual and aural over stimulation rather than a satisfying, meaningful viewing experience. In addition, they consistently maintain that the brutal, unexpected bloodbath at the end is there for its shock value, not to make a compelling point.
Clearly, after experiencing a tour de force, a film that leaves them in a mild state of shock and emotionally spent, my students-most of whom have been raised on mainstream Hollywood movies-have difficulty knowing what to make of the themes common to Araki's oeuvre: "pointless[ness], boredom, futility, nothingness, hamster wheel [reality], no fucking idea where I'm going, emptiness, no meaning, no future, no past, just a present that's really fucked up, what difference does it make, alienation, stagnation, detach[ment], betray[al], nothing matters" (Chang 49). In response to their (highly predictable) reactions, which parallel my own first reactions, I ask them to trust me. Then I attempt to demonstrate why I regard The Doom Generation as a masterpiece and Araki as one of the few modern-day auteurs. These are the goals of the present essay as well.
Araki's fifth feature, The Doom Generation maximizes the effectiveness of the postpunk style developed in his earlier films, a style that is the essence of both his film making and his radical/subversive potential. This style is based in the cultural practices of bricolage, mainstream incorporation of avant-garde phenomena, and postmodern narrative approaches.
The Punk Movement and Beyond: Toward Identifying Key Components of a Postpunk Style
The punk rock movement in the United States and Britain emerged in the mid-1970s in opposition to rock music, which had by then-just a few years after Woodstock-become firmly entrenched in mainstream popular and consumer culture. As media scholar Richard Campbell explains, punk music, which "has generally been characterized by loud, unpolished distortions, a jackhammer beat, primal vocal screams, crude aggression, and defiant or comic...