nothing to be said
by
Douglas Messerli
Gregg
Araki (writer and director) Totally Fucked Up / 1993
The
four gay adolescents and 2 lesbian teenagers who are the subjects of Gregg
Araki’s 1993 film Totally Fucked Up may describe themselves this way,
but as the director makes clear in the 15 parts into which this truly rag-tag
film is divided—reminding one a bit of Volker Schlöndorff’s Baal—these kids are basically okay,
while it is the society into which they were born that is a grotesque version
of what a healthy world should represent. Certainly in 2020 we can relate to
these terrible disoriented youths (Andy, Tommy, Michele, Patricia, Steven,
Deric, and Brendan) who came of age in the time of AIDS—safe sex is constantly
invoked, although it appears that few of them completely embrace it, the central
figure Andy (James Duvall), at one point suggesting he practiced it with his
new friend “mostly.”
The problems they must face together do
not only in include AIDS, which forces them into tentative sexual explorations,
but the hostility of their fathers and mothers—in one case, when a boy comes
out to his parents, he is permanently thrown out of the house and must depend
on others for temporary sleeping quarters—and, even more importantly, of the
ignorance of the institutions around them, particularly at the highest
government levels which have not yet come around to fully accept their
sexualities or to properly fund AIDS research. At least, Clinton, in his second
year is 1993, was not entirely deaf to these issues, as Regan had been at the
beginning of the AIDS crisis or as Trump as been during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet, violent white vigilante groups
regularly appear out of nowhere, with clubs swinging, to attack and possibly
kill late-night gays walking without the protection of others. One of their
friends is hospitalized after just such a beating, the group gathering in his
hospital to demonstrate their love and support.
In
the pages of LAWeekly and other newspapers and magazines that these
adolescents read there is report after report of gay teen suicides, sometimes
for the loss of their lovers to disease and, more often, just because of the
isolation they feel from family and the society at large. If they are still in
high school, as a couple of these boys are, they surely suffer some bullying from
their peers.
The only ones lower on the societal
totem pole, they sense, are the street teens who are totally drugged out or
have had to live as male hustlers just in order to survive. At one point, Andy,
witnessing a stoned-out kid next to a hat he has laid out for donations, asks
his new-found lover, Ian (Alan Boyce) a college boy from UCLA, if he has a
half-dollar to throw into the kid’s hat. When his boyfriend declares he has no
pocket change, Andy himself pulls out a dollar and donates it to what his
friend suggests is probably “just a scam.”
This is an important incident, I might
suggest, in Andy’s—who is perhaps the most cynical of his friends, as well as a
latent true idealist—education about the realities around him. At another point
the same boyfriend, to cover up a phone-call from another gay friend, tells
Andy that it was just his mother who calls from time to time, after which she
writes out another check to her son. The brooding Andy, like his colleagues,
has no financial fallback. If he has a small allowance, he spends it on
cigarettes, beer, and candy bars.
Yet all of these dreadfully overlooked
LGBT individuals (there was no category Q, queer of “questioning,” which
actually might define Andy’s position in this film, in 1993) also dream of more
normative possibilities. The lesbians both would love to have a baby—but
without the male intercourse, a problem for them because they obviously cannot
afford a sperm donation and implant—; the homeless gay guy claims to have found
a cheap apartment in a questionable neighborhood; Steven (Gilbert Luna) wants
to become a filmmaker; and Andy falls so seriously in love with his college boy
pick-up who he has, so the movie hints, even allowed to be fuck him, something
early in the film he found distasteful. It is he who declares on tape that things
are “totally fucked up.” All of them, moreover, share their generation’s music,
as does Araki’s eclectic score.
At the moment we least expect in this
tale of the rugged bonding between members of this outlier community, Andy
mixes some of the most lethal of household cleaning chemicals, swallows them
like a tantalizing milkshake and falls into a nearby swimming pool, dead.
The tearful last scene shows the
remaining five gathered, again lined up on chairs in a hospital, with no longer
any recourse to words—precisely how they’d begun this series of camcorder
interviews, nearly all of them insisting that they truly had nothing much to
say and even questioning the efficacy of such an enterprise.
Slowly the credits come up, their names
in blue (again reminding us of the white on blue numbers that define the episodes
of Baal).
This film was the first of what generally
is described as the director’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy. Today is often
appears as if both teenagers and adults were facing such an apocalypse that is
perhaps even worse, all over again.
Los
Angeles, July 17, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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