Nowhere (1997)
is vile and John Waters funny (ugh!).”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Gregg Araki (”Totally F***ed Up”/”The Doom Generation”) is the one
man dynamo behind this scatalogical romp to nowhere, who zeroes in on teen
nihilism in his attack on anything resembling taste or good sense or parental
values. It’s the gay director’s third installment in his plunge into the
world of “Teen Apocalypse.” A film that is vile and John Waters funny (ugh!)
in a way that a vulgar film can sometimes be that is so dopey and irreverent
and badly made. It’s bound to annoy the average viewer somewhere along
its hyper kaleidoscopic visual way, where maddening random violence, kinky
sex, and irritating dialogue (filled with Valley expressions like “Whatev”)
go together as well as ham and eggs served in a mosque. But then again,
there’s no average viewer (or for that matter, many viewers at all) for
this almost unwatchable flick–whose target audience is most probably the
teen whose brains have been scrambled by drugs. A film gleefully described
by the filmmaker as a ”Beverly Hills 90210” episode on acid.
So boring and worthless that if I were offered less than a king’s
ransom to see this film again, I would have doubts if I would want to put
myself through such an ordeal again.
Nowhere opens with this heavy quote “L.A. is like nowhere — everybody
who lives here is lost.” Araki finds his way through L.A.’s pop culture
hedonistic teen landscape of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, where every
teen looks as if they could be a model for a Calvin Klein underwear ad.
The filmmaker is obsessed with doomed youths living on the edge of reality
and functioning just as well as any Neanderthal would if armed with a club
and endowed with a peanut for a brain. It’s a film filled with too many
characters (something like 20) who occupy space for a short time and vanish
before we can get past their weird look and know anything about them that
matters. The only character I could make head or tail out of is the existential
hero, the doe-eyed Dark Smith (James Duval), a bisexual romantic who talks
himself into believing he’s doomed and the world is soon about to come
to an end. He’s a probable UCLA film student whose camcorder is seemingly
a permanent part of his shoulder.
The plot is to follow a typical day in the life of Dark. This cutie
pie 18-year-old dude just wants to be loved, as he hangs out with his bisexual
African-American girlfriend Mel (Rachel True) and her purple-haired, lebsian
girlfriend Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson). Dark is spaced out over not having
Mel all to himself. But hunky, golden-locked Montgomery (Nathan Bexton)
has eyes for Dark, even though he claims he’s not gay. Ultimately, the
film turns on Dark’s sincere search for true love which he comes close
to finding in the brainless Montgomery, that is until he is transformed
into an insect-like space alien by his alien abductor’s at the film’s end.
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It all plays out as some kind of tacky fantasy about the teens being
hooked on the popular culture, which is viewed as something set in the
collective consciousness of all teens. What follows on this typical day
for Dark and friends are a series of episodes involving some of the following
situations: fucking, suicide, doing heavy amounts of drugs, some barfing,
alien abductions, being date raped by a member of the Baywatch cast, TV
evangelism, an Armageddon moment, and the usual teen fist fights and angst
over sex. There are just too many such wacky incidents to list or try and
comprehend. Some might have a taste for such West-coast cool and find it
entertaining, but I found it worse than a bad acid trip or playing a game
of kick-the-can.
Carrie Jiminez