Was this movie written by someone in 9th grade?

Intellectuals like this movie because of its underlying messages. Gregg Araki is a very clever filmmaker who disguises the emotions of the film behind nihilistic landscapes and pretty flat characters. By this I mean that the characters in the film didn't really present much of an emotional attachment; but what I think that he wants us to concentrate on is them as human beings. Take for instance, the ending sequence which is fairly brutal; James Duval's character has obviously been pinpointed as a homosexual and is being literally persecuted for his sexual orientation; which makes up the brunt of the film. Araki is trying with his trilogy; which begins with "The Living End" and ends with "Nowhere" to eradicate the problem of homophobia; which may not be prevalent to everyone; but for some reason I sense that the whole idea behind the apocalypse trilogy was that if we don't stop discriminating against people the world will come to a tumultuous end.


I realize that its an obscure theory; but I just wanted to throw it out there.

When I was a ninth-grader this was one of my favorite movies. I think Araki is really good at showcasing how sensless people are, while at the same time being very sensistive and emotionally charged; I think a lot of the qualities that I enjoy in Doom Generation were created by accident.

"Realism is not the point of art"

Tell that to Flaubert.

There is no unifying "point" to art. Sometimes the point is realism, sometimes it is something very different; it depends on the artist. Obviously, realism was not an objective of this film. Unless pretension is an art form, however, there was nothing even vaguely artistic about this film in any sense.

Like many other alleged works of art, it has gathered a coterie of defenders who mistake gore, calculated offensiveness, and complete lack of taste for "edginess" or "transgressive subversion" or some such nonsense. True art can be very offensive, but the offesniveness is a side-effect of an aesthetic, ideological, or philosophical stance.

Being as offensive as one possibly can just for the sake of it is not art, despite the vehement claims of droves of underclassmen goths in second rate film programs. Perhaps, to be a little more precise, such a trick can be innovative enough to consider it art the first time that it's done. But Doom Generation is far from the first attempt to cross as many social mores as possible just for the heck of it.

I enjoy Zombie Holocaust, Dead Alive, Frankenhooker, and the like for the pure entertainment value in seeing just how bad they are in every sense. But I couldn't enjoy this film on that level because of the constant insistence, by fankids and by the film itself, that, underneath all the crap, something deep was going on. It's juvenile in the extreme, as the OP pointed out.