Totally F***ed Up

Gregg Araki's film from the early 1990s, following the lives of six young people. All the characters are gay or lesbian and all are in Los Angeles, cut off from their families. The film shows them not as a group of friends but as a community getting each other through. The structure is fragmented: the film is made of numbered sections, with camcorder footage, on-screen text and pieces spoken straight to camera in between. There is no conventional plot; the narrative proceeds like a diary. The characters talk constantly and most things stay unsaid. The tension sits in that gap: all of them present themselves as fine and none of them is. It was shot on an extremely low budget with a small crew. Araki wrote, shot and edited it himself. It is the first part of the series he called the Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy; James Duval appears in all three. An important starting point for anyone curious about American independent cinema and the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. Before you watch, know this: the film does not rescue its characters and the ending is hard; the narrative is deliberately scattered too.