The Fearlessness of Gregg Araki
A Newsletter Post
I’m not sure if this is visible elsewhere, but at least in New York City, there’s been something of a 90s indie movie renaissance. The Sundance darlings and Miramax kids’ edgy, hip, MTV-inspired and in retrospect gluttonous and decadent movies described in Down and Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind have been remastered and showcased all this last summer in repertoire cinemas across the city, particularly at the IFC, which was home to many of these features when they first came out.
It’s been interesting ‘revisiting the era’ from the perspective of film history considering I’m definitely one of the cohort that got into filmmaking because of the graphic provocateurship of late ‘90s filmmaking — my adolescence is history and all that. But the biggest excitement I’ve gotten from this trend is my terribly belated introduction to Gregg Araki.
There’s always some sort of author, filmmaker, music band or whatever that for you, personally, is hiding in plain sight. Once you ‘discover’ them, everyone else looks at you boggle-eyed and delivers that obnoxious high-pitched, “YoU’vE nEvEr SeEn ThIs BeFoRe?!” And in this case Gregg Araki is definitely one of those experiences.
His work has always been around. In fact, I saw Mysterious Skin in my teenage years and rewatched it a couple of times in college (and am well overdue a revisit now). But one of my biggest memories of Mysterious Skin was the time I worked at Hastings and a customer asked for it for rent, and when I handed the rental copy to him, he said in that thoughts-out-loud manner, “It’s so strange that Gregg Araki made this. Not at all what you would expect from him.” And then he wandered off. So I just assumed I’d figure it out one day, but in the meantime didn’t bother to follow up.
The big hiding-in-plain-sight aspect is straightforwardly that Araki’s movies were perennial best renters with highly visible and interesting slipcovers: