Themes: Love Triangles, Thrill Crime, Lovers on the Lam
Main Cast: James Duval, Rose McGowan, Johnathon Schaech, Lauren Tewes, Margaret Cho
Release Year: 1995
Country: FR/US
Run Time: 84 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Billed as "a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki," The Doom Generation is the director's self-styled bad-taste teen film. Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) is an obnoxious teenage speed freak and her boyfriend Jordan White (James Duval) is a passive, slow-witted poseur who won't have sex with her because he's terrified of AIDS (even though they both claim to be virgins). One day, they run across Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech), a charming but enigmatic drifter who has a bad habit of killing people. Joining the young couple on a seemingly endless road trip, Xavier (or "X,"as the verbally challenged Jordan insists on calling him), proves a threatening and repulsive yet strangely alluring companion whose very presence raises issues of loyalty and sexual identity. The Doom Generation is dotted with a variety of eccentric cameo appearances, including comic Margaret Cho, actress Parker Posey, musician Perry Farrell, "Hollywood Madame" Heidi Fleiss, and onetime Brady Bunch star Christopher Knight. This is the middle installment in Araki's "teen apocalypse trilogy," which also includes 1993's Totally F***ed Up and 1997's Nowhere. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
After the in-your-face queerness of his indie breakthroughs The Living End and Totally F***ed Up, cult auteur Gregg Araki wrote, directed, edited, and produced this obliquely homoerotic road movie full of sex, gore, slang, convenience stores, cameos, credible alt-rock and tentative existentialism. An unlikely blend of Dennis Cooper's dark gay fiction, John Waters' garbage aesthetic, and Valley Girl's So-Cal teen vacuity, The Doom Generation works best on the level of trashy, subversive comedy, its video-game violence and naughty thrills played for laughs instead of titillation. Rose McGowan established her singularly snotty and sexy screen persona as Amy, the meth-head with the Pulp Fiction hair, the heavy-lidded eyes and the gift for slang neologisms so bad they're good. James Duval, in the second of many Araki outings, displayed the Keanu Reeves-on-downers vulnerability and the confused affability that would make him a sexually ambiguous alterna-pinup. Johnathon Schaech offsets his almost absurd good looks and supple body with a genial psycho persona that finds him masturbating, seducing, and killing almost absentmindedly, yet still somehow emerging as a sympathetic protagonist. Araki's casting is dead-on, but it's his overall vision that impresses, for he bypasses such played-out aesthetic strategies as irony and appropriation to strand us in a surreal Los Angeles whose plasticity and moral ambiguity are as alluring as they are alienating for his young protagonists. Wandering a punkishly art-directed landscape of endless motel rooms and hallucinatory strip malls, Amy, Jordan, and X embody Araki's quest for novelty and connection -- in that order -- in a world given over to complete alienation. In the end, then, The Doom Generation is a simultaneous condemnation of and love letter to mass teen culture, its solaces and its deceits. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Cress Williams - Peanut; Amanda Bearse - Barmaid; Billy Bullet; Don Galloway - FBI Man; Nicky Katt - Carnoburger Cashier; Christopher Knight - Male News Anchor; Dustin Nguyen - Quickiemart Clerk; Johanna Went - Carnoburger Co-Worker; Salvator Xuereb - Biker; Perry Farrell - Stop 'n' Go clerk; Parker Posey - Brandi; Dewey Weber - George; Heidi Fleiss - Liquorstore Clerk; Paul D. Fow - Pat; Dwayne R. Goettel - Goon; Cevin Key - Goon; Nivek Ogre - Goon; Zak Spears - Dan
Credit
Michael Krantz - Art Director, Jim Stark - Associate Producer, Shelley Surpin - Associate Producer, Kira Smith - Boom Operator, Joseph Middleton - Casting, Yves Marmion - Co-producer, Catherine Cooper-Thoman - Costume Designer, Peter Bækkel - First Assistant Director, Jennifer Gentile - First Assistant Director, Christien Tuttle - First Assistant Director, Michael J. Moore - First Assistant Director, Gregg Araki - Director, Gregg Araki - Editor, Kate McGowan - Editor, Nicole Arbib - Executive Producer, Pascal Caucheteux - Executive Producer, Gregoire Sorlat - Executive Producer, Jason Rail - Hair Styles, Chris Baugh - Location Manager, Dan Gatto - Composer (Music Score), Jason Rail - Makeup, Therese DePrez - Production Designer, Jim Fealy - Cinematographer, Gregg Araki - Producer, Andrea Sperling - Producer, Jennifer Gentile - Set Designer, Christopher Mabli - Special Effects, Kevin Hudson - Special Effects, Ann Ruark - Unit Production Manager, Gregg Araki - Screenwriter, Bob Goold - Sound Effects Editor, William "Pinetop" Perkins - First Assistant Camera, Malik Hassan Sayeed - Gaffer, Mike Mickens - Gaffer, Rob Schmidt - Gaffer, Malek Sayad - Gaffer, Mark Rozett - Re-Recording Mixer, Jaie Laplante - Script Supervisor, John Pedone - Best Boy Electric, Steven C. Ward - Casting Associate, Karen Kennedy - First Assistant Editor, Paul Holzborn - Foley Artist, David Michael Evans - Foley Artist, Julie Hansen - Production Accountant, The Jesus and Mary Chain - Featured Music, Love and Rockets - Featured Music, The Verve - Featured Music, Meat Beat Manifesto - Featured Music, Curve - Featured Music, Lush - Featured Music, Cocteau Twins - Featured Music, Wolfgang Press - Featured Music, MC Nine Hundred Foot Jesus - Featured Music, Slowdive - Featured Music, Pizzicato Five - Featured Music, Mark Deren - Production Sound Mixer
The Doom Generation is a film by director Gregg Araki. Released in 1995, it stars Rose McGowan, James Duval and Johnathon Schaech as two teenagers and a 20-something punk drifter who get involved in a ménage à trois. It is the second of a trilogy of films known as the Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, the first being Totally Fucked Up and the last Nowhere. It was Araki's first movie to deal with a heterosexual relationship,[citation needed] and is billed in the opening titles as "A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki".
Teenage lovers Jordan White (Duval) and Amy Blue (McGowan) pick up a handsome drifter named Xavier Red (Schaech) while driving home from a club. Jordan gives Xavier the nickname "X". A late-night stop at a convenience store leaves the three on the run when X accidentally kills the store's owner (Dustin Nguyen). The trio hides in a motel to avoid arrest. While Jordan and Amy have sex in the bath tub, X learns from the local television news program that the store owner's wife (Margaret Cho) disemboweled her children with a machete before committing suicide, thus, he concludes, removing any possibility of the trio's being caught by the police.
Later that evening, Amy has sex with X, even though they do not get along. Eventually Jordan finds out, and things become tense as the two men develop a lingering sexual attraction for one another. As the trio journeys across small-town USA, they continue to get into violent situations due to people either claiming to be Amy's previous lovers or mistaking her for such. The FBI has a meeting where they declare they will find Amy and kill her (the exact same sentiment is voiced by several other parties in the film).
Jordan, Amy, and X spend the night in an abandoned barn, where they engage in a threesome. While Amy goes to urinate, Jordan and X are attacked by a trio of Neo-Nazis, one of whom had previously mistaken Amy as his ex-girlfriend "Bambi". The gang proceeds to beat up X and then hold Jordan down as the aforementioned Neo-Nazi ties up and rapes Amy on top of an American flag. The group finally castrates Jordan with pruning shears and feeds him his genitals. After Amy breaks free, she kills the Neo-Nazis with the shears and escapes with X, leaving Jordan for dead. The film ends with Amy and X driving aimlessly on the road. X is eating Doritos and offers Amy some, but receives no response. Amy simply smokes a cigarette and continues driving as the film fades to the end credits.
Response
The Doom Generation received mixed reviews, with critics often comparing the film both favorably and unfavorably to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Film website Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles reviews from a wide range of critics, gives the film a score of 50 percent.[1] Roger Ebert famously gave the film "zero stars".[2]
The gang of goons in the beginning of the movie is played by the Vancouver-based industrial group Skinny Puppy. cEvin Key, who falls off the car, broke his arm during the shooting of this scene.
Jordan Ladd was originally cast as Amy Blue, but her mother, Cheryl Ladd, vetoed her playing the role at the last minute. The end credits include "Special thanks to:" a long list of third parties, including Jordan Ladd, and "A big no thanks to: Cheryl Ladd" and "those who had no faith". However, Jordan Ladd did appear in Araki's next film, Nowhere, and Araki has stated then that he and Cheryl Ladd are friends now.
Dan Gatto, from the band Babyland, did extra score-like music for the film.
In all the publicity pictures for the film, Rose McGowan is wearing a bobbed black wig. The pictures were taken after the film was made, and her hair had since grown.
Porno For Pyros' "Dogs Rule The Night" plays in the background while the group's frontman, Perry Farrell, plays a store clerk.
The British band Amy Blue are named after Rose McGowan's character in the movie.
The number 666 is mentioned several times throughout the film most commonly as the price of items bought, i.e. $6.66.
