Billboards read ‘Choose Death’. Limbs explode in gaudy Brechtian fashion. Disaffected, polymorphous perverse youths go at it like sledgehammers. Beatings are administered by the members of Skinny Puppy. Coil and Trent Reznor growl from the soundtrack over date-rapes and S & M games. Welcome to the toxic world of the Gregg Araki movie; a place of smudged allusions to Weekend, where adults are entirely absent but for trash-pop celebrity cameos (Heidi Fleiss, anyone?) and every time you think the protagonist can’t possibly pull the trigger again, well, guess what happens?

The native Californian writer-director-cinematographer-editor-producer (he does everything, okay?) came to prominence with the first wave of new queer film in the early ‘90s. At that time, when the new right-on, politicised gay cinema seemed punkish and promising, Araki was readily fingered as the movement’s enfant terrible. While contemporaries like Todd Haynes and Tom Kalin set about communicating the otherness of the gay experience, Araki’s feverish DIY efforts were mercilessly subversive; like someone foolishly cornered the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.
“I’ve always said that us filmmakers – me, Todd Haynes, Tom Kalin, etc – did not invent the queer new wave,” Gregg tells me. “It was created by critics who felt the need for a label. All we ever wanted to do was make movies and express ourselves. While I appreciate that the label helped create more visibility for our little queer movies, I personally don’t accept any label foisted on me, whether it be gay, queer, Asian-American, Sundance-y or what have you. They’re limiting, ghettoising and not necessary. I think of myself as a filmmaker. That’s all.”
Nonetheless, his breakthrough film, The Living End, a fuck-it-all nihilistic queer road movie, was hailed by critic Robin Wood as the greatest debut since Texas Chain Saw Massacre; a perfect queer riposte to Hollywood’s heterosexual, bourgeois, patriarchal (and so on) product. This mondo-cheapo exercise made for $20,000 of Araki’s own money featured two HIV positive fugitives – one a violent rent-boy, the other a mild-mannered film critic – embarking on a spree of cop-killing, gun fellatio and post-MTV guttersnipe existentialism; thereby providing the perfect car-crash introduction to the filmmaker’s pet preoccupation with doomed youth.
Since then, it would be fair to describe most of the auteur’s output as being intended to angry up the blood. His ‘Apocalyptic Teen’ trilogy played like Coupland’s Girlfriend In A Coma bleached of humanity, gleefully managing to offend just about everybody. The parade of diseased psyches and hormonally charged omni-eroticism of Totally Fucked Up, (1993), Nowhere (1997) and particularly, 1995’s The Doom Generation brought murmurs of heresy from several gay critics, unhappy with Araki’s fluid notions of sexuality and as he puts it, “my negative portrayal of gay kind”. He responded in characteristically provocative fashion, turning up for the Sundance premiere of Nowhere with a freshly acquired girlfriend on his arm.
Now, aged 45, Araki, appears to be mellowing. Somewhat. His last film, Splendor, a tribute to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the thirties, wherein a girl, unable to choose between two suitors moves both in, was decidedly sweet and at a considerable remove from the grubby video transfer and wilfully anti-professional garbage aesthetic of his earlier films. His current offering, Mysterious Skin, continues with this softer, more accessible visual style, but it sees Araki return to dark, provocative material and ambivalent ultra-sexuality.
“Yeah, that’s true,” agrees Gregg. “One of the things I love about Mysterious Skin is that while it is a radical departure for me – my first serious drama without the satirical, postmodern edge of say, Nowhere or The Doom Generation, it also fits perfectly into the ‘flow’ of my previous work. There’s so much commonality in terms of themes, characters, relationships, even imagery. My films have always focused on outsiders in society, and as you say, I’ve always been interested in sexuality in all its complex permutations – most especially as a grey region of human identity. I suppose what attracts me most to sex in movies is because it’s the most intimate way to get to know a character, to see how they tick.”
Adapted from the cult novel by Scott Heim – a tome usually located to the left of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Other Things on tragically hip bookshelves – Mysterious Skin is a troubling, yet strangely dreamy account of childhood sexual abuse and False Memory Syndrome. Beginning during the summer of 1981, the films opens with eight-year-old Brian regaining consciousness in a basement, unable to remember the last five hours of his life. Meanwhile, his Little League and small-town Kansas contemporary, Neil, is seduced by the team coach, whom he hero-worships.
As a teenager, Brian (Thunderbirds’ Brady Corbet) remains desperate to account for his childhood memory lapse, becoming fixated with alien abductions. His quest ultimately leads him to Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt from Third Rock From The Sun), now a slinky, New York based boy-hustler, who took leave of Kansas once he’d “fucked every guy in town and his ugly uncle.” In common with Araki’s other midnight cowboy anti-heroes, Neil is a romantic, though dangerous figure.
“Joe (Gordon-Levitt) did such a phenomenal job,” explains Gregg. “Everyone in the cast was so prepared that any adjustments I had to make on set were minor. Joe and I talked about his character Neil, and the fact that he describes his coach as his ‘one true love’. Because he had gay desire for his coach, what happened fucked him up even more than Brady’s character, Brian. While Brian is obviously traumatised – with blackouts and nervous tics and bedwetting – Neil’s damage is so much more internalised and deep-rooted. That’s why he acts out in such a hyper-sexual, self-destructive manner.”
Mysterious Skin’s engagement with sexuality is expectedly shocking, yet complex. However the jaded negativity of Araki’s earlier films has given way to something vaguely resembling optimism. Has his inner-angry adolescent finally chilled out?
“I really just fell completely in love with Scott Heim’s novel,” gushes Gregg. “It had such a huge devastating impact on me. The ending literally left me in tears. It was such a dark, disturbing story, but so beautifully and poetically told. I just wanted to bring it to the screen in the most faithful and uncompromising way possible. So the more serious and contemplative mood comes from Scott – the voice of the piece, the characters, the stories – are his. But yeah, as a person and a filmmaker, I‘m in a perpetual state of change and evolution. I‘m not the same person I was when I shot The Doom Generation or The Living End. I can say that the older I get, the more comfortable I feel in my own skin and the more confident I feel as a filmmaker. If that qualifies as optimism, then great!”

Mysterious Skin is released May 20.