Totally Fucked Up. 1993. USA. Written and directed by Gregg Araki. With James Duval, Roko Belic, Susan Behshid. 16mm. 78 min.
Gregg Araki described Totally Fucked Up, the first installment of his Teen Apocolypse Trilogy, as a “kinda twisted cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and queer John Hughes flick that explores the various serious problems confronting young [queers] today—AIDS, alienation, suicide, drugs, fag-bashing violence, and not having a date on a Saturday night.” Through 15 vingettes, punctuated by video interviews conducted by the group’s budding filmmaker, Steven (Gilbert Luna), we come to know a close-knit group of six restless, queer Los Angeles teenagers. Araki went on to describe his inspiration for the film as “the desire to portray a way of life, a sub-subculture which is totally ignored by both the mainstream and conventional gay media—to represent the unrepresented. I would venture to say that queer teenagers—with all their lovable confusions and complexities—have never before been depicted as they are in this movie. There is a tendency to sanitize, to gloss over, to moralize when dealing with the subject of young gays which I consciously avoided with the development of this project.”