The early-nineties American gay scene and eternally naff film student aesthetics collide in this extremely overrated film about a couple of HIV-positive guys on an angry-at-the-world road trip to nowhere.
Jon (Craig Gilmore) is a freelance writer, blocked and frustrated over an article which is past deadline when his doctor tells him that he’s HIV-positive. He drives around introspectively before encountering Luke (Mike Dytri), who jumps into Jon’s passenger seat while escaping a trio of gay bashers. Luke hears about Jon’s HIV status, welcomes him to “the club”, and the two commence a frenetic highway love affair, replete with dead cops, robbed convenience stores, and plenty of shadowy low-budget lighting. On the way, we sense the surreal ennui of being HIV-positive in the very early nineties, when diagnosis meant impending death and the rise of grunge music and gritty independent movies created a suitably apocalyptic media backdrop.
Unfortunately, while The Living End is part of that gritty independent movie explosion, it’s not a highlight of it. The film hasn’t dated well, as its up-to-the-minute (at the time) ideas and styles have time-stamped it and make it look, today, more like a grunge retro special hour on MTV than a memorable and skilful film. As well, though we can’t expect low budget (The Living End was shot for around $20, 000) indies to be beautiful and technically slick, but they don’t have to be this oily, either. There’s lighting problems galore, and occasionally muffled sound.
Worse, there’s script and style problems, with a banal psycho-social commentary and a very cloying approach to homage, two areas where indie films often shine. Araki’s characters talk cheese dialogue with pompous Shakespearean diction, while undergraduate Freudian metaphors abound. A couple of butch, man hating lesbians are terrorised by a stealthy roadside snake. Get it? A HIV-positive gay guy puts a loaded gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger during orgasm. Get it? The gang of gay bashers mentioned earlier wear movie title t-shirts, so when they get shot in the chest we have the opportunity to see blood ooze out over the titles. It’s bratty, trite and obvious film making. Godard’s Breathless is colourlessly updated with a cheap gay filter – but who’d notice when every other wall (or chest) in the film is covered in posters, titles or stills from a dozen or so different films.
The gay commentary follows suit – it’s diluted and confused. Though The Living End was (and still is) acclaimed for cheekily bringing seropositive homosexuality into an all-American genre, and capturing some of the rage and confusion of HIV-positive gay life at the time, on both these counts it’s a bit of a failure. Is the road movie format just a container for any amorphous exploration of displacement, anger or loss? Do either of the characters have a reaction to being HIV-positive, or do they just think it’s a great excuse for them to burn around the countryside like Bonnie and Clyde? Perfect opportunities for a bit of much-needed character development and intellectual weight have been missed. In their place: convenience store hold ups and metaphors. Fast-forwarding through a bunch of ideas and images in the search of meaningful pastiche and gritty nothingness, it’s an energetic wank, a sort of movie mosh-pit for Gen-Xers who want to thrash around in their own self-pity, as well as see themselves as really groovy fringe dwelling outlaws.
It’s a trendy and shrill polemic that looks a bit like a recruitment video for ACT-UP.
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