Genuine Anarchy
Kaboom
Directed by Gregg Araki
Runtime: 86 min.
Using the sound-word title Kaboom, director Gregg Araki puts his new film in the genre of sarcastic graphic novels. Its cartoon-like narrative takes a sci-fi, apocalyptic slant on Smith (Thomas Dekker), a sexually undeclared college kid who is fatalistic about his future. But Kaboom is much funnier than any previous graphic novel-derived movie (with the exception of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) because its tone is genuinely anarchic, genuine Araki.
Look at how he introduces his characters: Smith stares into the camera with delicate, bright-eyed forthrightness. He’s casual about his own homosexuality, yet stunned at the first tempting appearance of his blond, surfer roommate Thor (Ha!). His laissez-faire response to females gets challenged by the cheerfully exotic campus adventuress London (Ha! again) and his lesbian BFF Stella (Very Ha! for Tennessee Williams initiates). They all speak in dry ironies yet are seen in an openly erotic mode that is as comic-book blatant as a schoolboy crush—a style that derives from Araki’s post-gay-lib, post-ACT UP audacity.
Inspired equally by Godard’s early pop art simplicity and the androgynous British groups of the ’80s like The Smiths and New Order, Araki’s a pop-geek who impudently celebrates the license of sexually unabashed youth. Sharing their prerogative and chagrin, he also sees the world’s absurdity as they do— but looks deeper. Libertine hijinks—where Araki exercises his bisexual whimsy—are undercut by a sense of dread. This isn’t mere David Lynchian morbidity (a wobbly subplot features abductors in animal masks); Araki has learned to indicate where apprehension comes from even in the psyches of the most carefree and unthinking youth. Smith may dread the future, but his “whatever” present is not that of a nihilist. Conscience and history rouse him from indifference. Araki discovers modern morality within the blueeyed ruins of a Hollister model the same way archeologists uncover ancient totems.
Satirizing a civilization where college kids do anything that occurs to them while taking unhelpful classes in “Imagination Theory,” Arakai is not far off the mark of our contemporary crisis. He’s been at this for a couple decades (The Doom Generation and Totally Fucked Up were totally ’90s), though not always successfully. The low-point came with his pathology opus Mysterious Skin, which appealed to lingering AIDS-phobia in the mainstream press that acclaimed it—although it probably also expressed Araki’s own fear, revulsion and self-loathing. He snapped out of it with the 2008 Anna Faris vehicle Smiley Face, the funniest, most unexpected movie ever made about Communism’s worthless legacy. Faris played an innocent guarding one of the last original copies of Marx-Engels’ Manifesto in a society that has zipped so far past its 20th-century need for subversion that guideposts and idealism were no longer sought nor valued. Smiley Face might have revived Araki’s caché if a self-critical counterculture still existed; instead, there’s only an ignorant mainstream which preferred to ignore Araki’s confession of liberal disenchantment for the sentimentality of Gus Van Sant’s Milk that same year.
With Kaboom, Araki revives himself. Always impudent about sexuality—whether portraying it as socially subversive (the apocalyptic AIDS satire The Living End) or an indice of the zeitgeist (Nowhere, his teenage Fellini movie)—Araki is the opposite of jaded. Like his white-boy alter ego Smith, Asian-American Araki is continually awed by life’s erotic potential: His polymorphous, multiculti perversity makes him the most freewheeling of what used to be called independent filmmakers.
After the dread packaged in Mysterious Skin, Araki s finally got his groove back. It’s apparent in the way Chris Zylka’s Thor radiates the frame like a pop-up pornsite graphic. Juno Temple gives horniness a bunny-rabbit innocence; and Hayley Bennett’s butch femininity holds attention with serious glam intensity. Araki depicts modern screen sexuality as if just discovering it. His visual panache and teasing directness seem more than youthful but ageless. For Araki, pop culture isn’t just a graphic novel, it’s an endlessly reinvented bildungsroman.
As Smith gets closer to his own sexual fulfillment—first with bisexual jock Rex (Andy Fischer-Price), then rascally married beach bum Hunter (Jason Olive) and the puppyish Oliver (Brennan Mejia)— intimations of his sexually active mother (Kelly Lynch) and the identity of his longestranged father intrude. These maturing misadventures parallel Stella’s difficult break-up with a fetching witch (Roxane Mesquida, a striking Megan Fox-alike). Both scenarios find depth where a silly picture like Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body completely missed the point of relationship difficulty, misusing the teen-horror genre.
One thing a graphic novel is supposedly good at it is putting a philosophical interpretation of experience into a visual instant—turning the essence of conventional literature into a modern medium. Araki grasps that innovation in his filmmaking. Kaboom climaxes with a montage of closeups, in which Smith and his pretty co-stars realize their own guilt and fear, and project it onto the hostility and unmanageability of others. Growing up at the last minute, they experience the ultimate shock of recognition.
That’s when Godard’s style and Araki’s fatalistic lust for life merge in pure pop imagery: Kaboom!