The Doom Generation

The middle film of Gregg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse trilogy. Araki himself presented it as a heterosexual film, a description everyone who watches it understands to be a joke. Amy and Jordan are a young couple. One night a stranger called Xavier gets into their car and the three set off on a bloody, absurd journey that turns steadily into nightmare. An America where everyone dies, nothing is explained, and the supermarkets and motels are painted in neon. Its register is one of the outer limits of 1990s independent cinema: the violence is funny, the sexuality is fluid, the dialogue is deliberately ridiculous, and everything is ironic and serious at once. Rose McGowan plays Amy, James Duval plays Jordan and Johnathon Schaech plays Xavier. It was rated NC-17 in the United States, which kept its distribution limited. Before you watch, know this: the final section is extremely hard and involves a hate crime; the film uses it to break its own tone rather than for shock, but the effect is heavy. Nothing about the violence or the sex was shot with a brake on.