#araki

araki posting time!!

you guys don’t get how much I LOVE this cover

What is most striking about Nowhere is how, amid its erratic plotting and audiovisual hurly-burly, the movie is deeply touching. Dark’s yearning for intimacy, Bart’s addiction, and Egg’s experience of sexual assault are genuinely affecting—even though, as Rich remarked of the New Queer Cinema, this is not your daddy’s humanism. That in each instance Araki immediately reverses these emotional effects with cosmic absurdity, corrosive humor, or hysterical melodrama strikes at the heart of what makes Nowhere one of the queerest of all queer films. Araki’s imagination is simply incapable of, and entirely uninterested in, playing it straight. We can look to one of his touchstones—the music of the Smiths—for an analogy. In songs like “Girlfriend in a Coma” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” the band combines depressive lyrics with chipper pop melodies. The ethos of such music doesn’t pit sarcasm against sincerity, or irony against depth of feeling, but understands these various tones and positions as, on their own, inadequate to capturing the (queer) mode of experience they aim to evoke. Just like the Smiths’ songs, Gregg Araki’s films are adolescent in the most powerful, purposeful sense, giving voice to the irreducible contradictions and affective clusterfuck of every kid who feels unlovable. If, to quote a classic Smiths line, there is a light that never goes out in these movies, it’s the gleam of leather jackets under neon signs, of TVs tuned to static, of the glint in the eye of someone, maybe someone, at long last someone, who might just love your messy ass back. But probably not.

araki gifs +aname gif/button that i made for myself to use for fartfight