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Bad Boy's Club

Brooks Sister: Rose McGowan makes like Louise Brooks

On the road with

'The Doom Generation'

By Richard von Busack

Three on the lam: zoned-out young kids Jordan White (James Duval), Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) and Xavier Red, nicknamed "X" (Jonathon Schaech), run for their lives after a fatal altercation with a Vietnamese convenience-store clerk, named, you'll love this, "Suk Dik" (Dustin Nguyen). In Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation, the trio is forced to run, well, to drive slowly with sunglasses on their eyes and put-upon looks on their faces, from Technicolor motel to Technicolor motel, while the police and a gang of thugs (played by the band Skinny Puppy) look for them. On the way, they eat a lot of processed food that always totals out at $6.66; in fact, the last line of the film is "Do you wanna Dorito?" How significant, how evocative of young people alienated from a diet of television, fast food and snacks sold by convenience-store clerks named, say, Suk Dik.

There's a muted sexual tension between the three; underground gay director Araki calls this his first "heterosexual movie." (It must be his revenge on the breeders.) McGowan, wearing the requisite Louise Brooks haircut, has an interesting face set off by a big pouty smear of red lipstick for a mouth; her blank, white-powdered face is blurry from the red, as if printed off-register on a poster. If The Doom Generation hadn't had a portion of sex in it, it would have been unwatchable. It wasn't great sex, but it was sex. McGowan is at her funniest here. When X asks Amy to give him some backdoor stimulation, she chirps, "Repulse me! No way!" Despite the minor sexual charge, and the honest sacrilege of the movie's finish (an unnatural act involving an American flag, a statue of the Virgin Mary and a recording of the "Star-Spangled Banner"), Araki's endeavor to shock for the fun of shock is too obvious.

The Doom Generation isn't as bad as Araki's last, Totally Fucked Up, or as much of an invasive procedure as its model, Natural Born Killers (the soundtrack is at low volume), but it has the same core of self-pity. Self-pity is as dire a form of sentiment as the sentiment contained by the symbols he tries to blow away in the movie's anti-punch line.

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The Doom Generation (Unrated; 82 min.), directed and written by Gregg Araki, photographed by Jim Fealy and starring James Duval and Rose McGowan.


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