The Doom Generation (1995)

Pride Film Series

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About

“The Doom Generation is an 85-minute, darkly comic assault on the audience, laden with satirically over-the-top (and below-the-belt) violence, unending profanity and enough references to the posterior to fill a proctologic encyclopedia. Araki wants to serve up the sleaziest, crudest fare he can dream up. His efforts can only be described as successful.” — Desson Thomson, Washington Post

“Slick and outrageous and subversively funny, The Doom Generation is the kind of date movie that will tell you perhaps more than you want to know about your date.” — Jay Carr, Boston Globe

SYNOPSIS

Announced with a provocation — “A heterosexual film by Gregg Araki” — The Doom Generation immediately undercuts the label, spiraling into a nihilistic road movie where identity, desire, and violence collapse into one another. The centerpiece of his “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” this still-controversial provocation (and self-aware nod to Godard’s Band of Outsiders) follows a trio of disaffected youths marked even by their color-coded names — Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), Jordan White (James Duval), and Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech) — as a chance encounter sends them drifting through a hyper-stylized American wasteland. Rendered in lurid, artificial hues and punctuated by sudden bursts of violence and absurdity, their journey unfolds like a fractured media stream, drawing on the scorched-earth ethos of Natural Born Killers while pushing further into sensory overload. What begins as pitch-black satire curdles into something more punishing, trapping both its characters and its audience in a closed loop of affectless excess. Equal parts parody and provocation, The Doom Generation remains a defining statement of queer nihilism in ’90s American independent cinema.