The Living End

A strange thing happened to me halfway during this admittedly strange film: I began to like the movie.

At first I had thrown up my hands and regarded this as a dated and cartoonish yet necessary artifact of the era surrounding the birth of the AIDS epidemic. In its first half hour, this film is quite insistently just that. It is an early effort from former provocateur Gregg Araki, and the clothes and speaking style are so early-'90s that at first they drive the viewer to distraction. Despite the strange headgear and presence of portable tape recorders instead of blogs, the love scenes were surprisingly affecting when they began.

The plot concerns two HIV-positive men, a writer and a drifter, who forge a bond based on their shared sense of the "living end" of the title. Before drug cocktails made HIV and AIDS manageable diseases, it is easy to imagine those diagnosed responding just as these men do: with a violent and nihilistic road trip where they are somehow miraculously not arrested despite shooting policemen, robbing banks, and (in a killing that unfairly takes place offscreen) beating a homophobe to death with a boombox.

The crudely drawn edges of Araki's characters are practically beside the point. The characters serve more to symbolize possible reactions to the AIDS diagnosis: struggling but accepting fate or rashly living like one will die tomorrow are but two of the possible responses to this epidemic while it was in its infancy. Expecting characters with such a great symbolic burden to act subtly is an unrealistic hope, and the film's in-your-face style was probably more appropriate for the climate of fear and ignorance about AIDS in which it was released.

Unfortunately, even if the acting was intended to be subtle, such machinations would have been beyond the range of its cast. Unconvincing histrionics are the flavor of the month here, delivered by men who were obviously cast for their looks and possibly for their willingness to spend the night with Araki. The amateurish acting is matched by a camera style that would have been rejected by MTV as too jerky and unfocused. Despite these essential flaws, the film has a historical urgency that recommends it to anyone interested in queer cinema or even in the depiction of the Los Angeles art scene throughout film history. Scenes such as the one where the drifter examines his blood, seeking in vain for what makes it so different and poisonous, retain a touching quality that cannot be obscured even by the film's numerous missteps.

In the unlikely event that you find yourself wanting more of the same after this, check out Araki's "The Doom Generation" and "Nowhere".