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Bad Boy Gregg Araki Grows Up
by Joel Dossi, May 10, 2005

The “bad boy of queer cinema,” Gregg Araki, recently joined the ranks of Pedro Almodóvar, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, Todd Haynes and Lisa Cholodenko by being named a recipient of the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival’s HBO Career Achievement Award. Celebrating his film Mysterious Skin (opening this month in limited release), the MGLFF proclaimed that Araki’s first feature in five years is “eagerly awaited not just by GLBT but international art house audiences all over the world.”

Critics have also heralded Araki’s newest film as a departure for the auteur, saying that by abandoning his edgy punk-ridden milieu while making Mysterious Skin, he demonstrates an artistic maturing.

During a press conference at the Toronto Film Festival, where the film received its world premiere, Araki was asked to respond to claims that “he’s lost his edge.” The director jokingly replied that those critics were simply insulting him.

“(Mysterious Skin) is a departure for me,” admitted Araki. “It’s the first time I’ve ever adapted (someone else’s novel into a screenplay), so the story’s not mine, and the characters aren’t mine. The tone is also a bit different. It lacks the satirical edge of my movies like The Doom Generation.”

In the 1990s, Araki helped fuel the rapid growth of gay-themed independent film. Dubbed part of the “New Queer Cinema Movement” by B. Ruby Rich in The Village Voice, Araki’s films aimed at empowering the gay community by holding a mirror up to queer culture, politics and identity, warts and all.

The Living End presented its lead characters as a queer Bonnie and Clyde. Araki subtitled Totally F***ed Up “Another Homo Movie,” and labeled The Doom Generation as “heterosexual,” despite queer references like a bumper sticker that reads "Ditch the bitch. Make the switch." Topping off his bad boy’s anti-establishment aura, Araki had an off-camera romance with Kathleen Robertson, the female lead for his next two films, Nowhere and Splendor, spurring an entertainment magazine to run the headline "Gay filmmaker falls for 90210 babe."

In his adaptation of Scott Heim’s 1995 novel Mysterious Skin, Araki remains faithful to the book by maintaining its structure and much of the text’s cadence and language. “The first time I read the book, it made me cry,” stated Araki. “The story is so heartbreaking. I’ve never read anybody’s material before that moved me so much that I wanted to make it into a movie.

“A movie is such a big commitment of time and effort,” Araki continued, “and you can only make (a limited number of films) before you’re dead. So I’ve never made a movie that I didn’t absolutely love.”

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