Gregg Araki was one of the most famous directors from the New Queer Cinema movement that happened in the 1990s. Born in December of 1959, he made his debut in the 1980s with Three Bewildered People in the Night, and from that point on his movies would rise in popularity until he reached critical acclaim. Creating films like Nowhere, Mysterious Skin, and The Living End which all became cult classics.
In the 80s and 90s AIDs had become a big topic of discussion as the disease reportedly killed 100,777 people from 1981 to 1990 according to the CDC. The major amount of deaths caused by AIDs, along with the medical and social discrimination homosexual people faced at the time caused a large shift in tone for the LGBTQ+ community. The HRC cites, “A 2014 Kaiser Family Foundation survey of gay and bisexual men in the U.S. found that 15% of them had received poor treatment from a medical professional as a result of their sexual orientation, and least 30% did not feel comfortable discussing their sexual behaviors with a healthcare provider.” This lack of safety within the community caused many queer people to think grimly about their own future and life.
Artists like Araki were inspired by this feeling of uncertainty and instability and began to create as a response to the AIDs crisis. Araki’s movie The Living End, led by two characters who are HIV-positive, was his most obvious response to the AIDs crisis. The movie’s commentary on society during the AIDs crisis spoke to people who had felt a sense of doom at the time and to queer people at large.
The overarching theme of many of Araki’s movies is queerness. Where many mainstream directors in the 90s directed a more subtle homosexual tone in films, or avoided homosexuality altogether, Araki ran with it. His film Totally F***ed Up was humorously nicknamed “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki,” demonstrating the amount of queerness shown in his other movies. Araki was known not only for capturing homosexuality in his films but also the essence of being a homosexual teenager, his trilogy of movies including Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere being named the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive describes the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy as “tapping teenage energy, confusion, desire, frustration, and angst, the three films also reflect the fallout from the Reagan/Bush era, as gay artists were caught in the crosshairs of the culture wars while the AIDS death toll mounted.”
One of Gregg Araki’s most popular films, released in 2004, is Mysterious Skin. This film grapples homosexuality intertwined with hypersexuality, repression, childhood sexual assault, and how different people grapple with trauma. The movie is told through the lives of two male teenagers who both experienced childhood sexual assault from the same offender and how the two cope with it differently. One protagonist regresses into a fantasy that he was abducted by aliens while the other faces his trauma head on and deals with hypersexuality as a result, becoming a prostitute. This film goes through many themes seen throughout Araki’s previous films, dealing with topics of sexual expression, STDs and teenage angst.
The themes Mysterious Skin encompasses make it one of Araki’s darkest films for many viewers. Though this may seem like a negative for most film watchers, it marks an important point often made when speaking about art made; that not only can viewers be made to feel emotions other than comfort from movies, but they should sometimes experience discomfort from movies. One of Araki’s inspirations, John Waters, embraces this in many of his movies, including in his 1972 film Pink Flamingos. In Criterion’s series, the Criterion Closet, where they ask directors and actors to pick out movies from a small collection and speak about film, Araki refers to John Waters as “the original godfather of everything.” Araki’s other inspirations includes the likes of David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard.
Gregg Araki’s legacy has gone past his filmography, inspiring many future directors as a key figure in the New Queer Cinema of the 90s. Without the influence of Araki, along with other directors that pushed for more queer visibility in media, the public may have never gotten films like Brokeback Mountain. Araki is not done making films though, as for the first time in over a decade since his last film — White Bird in a Blizzard — it was announced in October of 2024 that Araki was directing a new film, titled I Want Your Sex.
