On Monday, January 17, 1994, at 4:31 a.m., the Northridge Earthquake shook Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, killing at least 57 people, injuring more than 9,000, and causing an estimated $35 billion in property damage. It was The Big One — the largest in the area since 1971. Shaking could be felt as far away as San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. The vibes were decidedly end times.
That morning, Johnathon Schaech and James “Jimmy” Duval went to work. Schaech picked Duval up in his Toyota truck and drove them to the set of the movie they were starring in, The Doom Generation, alongside then-unknown Rose McGowan.
“We go all the way to the Valley, and pieces of the freeway had fallen,” Duval, now 52, says over lunch in South Pasadena, California, where he lives.
“We were both so naive to it,” Schaech, 55, adds over a phone call from his home in Nashville. “Buildings around us had collapsed. It was bizarre. No one really knew what was going on.”
They were too busy creating their own apocalypse. A small, independent film with a budget of $800,000 and directed by the budding auteur Gregg Araki (Nowhere, Mysterious Skin), The Doom Generation wasn’t a hit at the time. “I ask that question a lot: ‘How many people saw Doom Generation in the theater?’ And literally it’s like three people,” Araki joked in a 2023 interview with filmmaker Richard Linklater.
But 30 years later, the second entry in Araki’s so-called Teen Apocalypse Trilogy — which was restored and rereleased by the Criterion Collection last year — looks more prescient than ever. With its jumbled-up sex, violence, ironic comedy, and moments of deep sincerity, it was a peek at the confused world that would come out of so much collision.
Araki continued making films steadily through the late ’90s and early 2000s, sticking to his artsy, indie roots, albeit with somewhat bigger budgets. The auteur took a 10-year break from film after the Shailene Woodley–starring White Bird in a Blizzard, creating Now Apocalypse for Starz and picking up directing stints on Riverdale and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.
Then, last spring, it was reported that Araki had kicked off a new film project: a psychological thriller called I Want Your Sex about an artist who hires a young man to be her “sexual muse.” Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman — son of Philip Seymour — star, along with just about everyone else: Charli XCX, Margaret Cho, Daveed Diggs, and Chase Sui Wonders. After a shoot in October, the always perfectionist Araki admits he’s been ensconced in editing.
While not much is known about the movie itself, production is almost certainly a far cry from the Doom Generation days. Duval — Araki’s ethnically and sexually ambiguous ’90s muse — seems happy just to have survived production. “It was an insane shoot. All nights in the middle of winter, freezing cold. It was grueling and psychologically challenging,” he says. “And there were certainly times I think Rose, Johnathon, and I felt like it was us against the world, which also became a very organic thing that shows through the movie.”
Araki saw that 1994 earthquake as a “sign from the cosmos that the universe did not want the movie to happen,” he says. “But we said, ‘Fuck the world,’ and did it anyway.”
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The plot of The Doom Generation is simple: A young couple, Jordan White (Duval) and Amy Blue (McGowan), has a meet-cute with drifter Xavier “X” Red (Schaech) after he flees a fight. When the three accidentally behead a convenience store clerk, they drive off across an increasingly wasteland-like America — all while discovering their own free-spirited desires.
The sexual play among Jordan, X, and Amy is a constant where-will-they-take-this tease, with the two male actors giving each other some of the most lustful looks ever committed to celluloid. A crystal meth-addled Amy sleeps with both of them indiscriminately.
The movie’s opening credits start with a statement: “A heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki.” This is meant as a joke, or a warning, or both. Coming off the explicitly gay The Living End and Totally F***ed Up, which echoed the despondency of the AIDS crisis, Araki wanted to subvert expectations of what kind of story he would — or could — tell.
“I had a producer once say to me that I needed to make ‘a heterosexual movie’ because my queer movies were too punk rock and upset mainstream gays,” Araki says. “Doom has outrageously over-the-top homo subtext. It’s intentionally the queerest hetero film ever made.”
Araki is “third-generation Japanese American, but I grew up in Santa Barbara, which is very white, very middle class suburbia,” he told Bomb in 1992. “My friends say that I’m whiter than they are, because that’s just my upbringing.”
His films don’t easily slide into categories like “white,” “Asian,” “gay,” or “straight,” instead demanding that audiences expand their cinematic language and, more broadly, their understanding of the world. Araki has tattoos, has dated men and women, and populates his films with weirdos of all skin colors and sexual proclivities.
“To a large extent, my outlook is not exactly embraced by a lot of the gay community, especially the ‘Stonewall Generation.’ You know, the characters are definitely gay, but they’re fucked up. There are problems,” Araki told Bomb. “I realize that my work is bound to be marginalized. Not just because of the queerness of the subject matter, but because of the whole punk thing, which probably much more than being gay or Asian is the biggest cultural influence on me.”
Duval, who is of mixed Vietnamese, French, Irish, and Native American ancestry, also defied labels at a time when “society was labeling everything,” he says. He and Araki first connected at the now-shuttered Double Rainbow cafe on Melrose near Hollywood. They bonded over their shared taste in records: The Smiths, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins, the kind of aching alt rock that speaks to listeners who feel displaced no matter where they come from, and which soundtracks every Araki project. Araki told Duval he’d be “great” for a role in his “no-budget” 1993 indie Totally F***ed Up — the first script Duval ever read — and ended up casting him as the lead.
“There was an outsiderness, but also a certainty. While being lost and looking for yourself, you also have a pretty good idea of who you are in the sense that it’s not what other people are telling you you are,” Duval recalls. “I got tired of people telling me what I was about, what I was thinking, and they were all wrong.”
Duval, who dates women, once bristled at assumptions that he was queer because of his involvement in Araki’s movies. But he’s more open now, confirming that he’s attracted to more than one gender. “When we were kids, we all experimented. It was natural. I just didn’t talk about it,” he says. “Whether people want to admit it or not, we’re all somewhere on that Kinsey Scale.”
Criterion calls The Doom Generation “an unapologetic vision of sexual fluidity,” which makes Duval chuckle. “It’s a term for something that didn’t have a term at that time. Literally, there was no nomenclature for it. Maybe you were bi or ‘try,’ like ‘try anything.’ But it is a big part of those movies. And I think it’s beautiful to see how the new generation relates to it. Everyone can claim their own identity, which is important. But we were trying to get rid of identifiers. ‘Don’t put me in a box.’”
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Jordan White’s last name is not an accident. He’s the only innocent in the whole mess, prone to lines such as, “He’s not so bad.” Amy and X are broken, but they’re survivors. Duval compares Jordan to a lamb led to slaughter. Things do not go well for him.
Not unlike Araki and Duval when they shot Doom in 1994, Jordan, Amy, and Xavier go through life trying to enjoy themselves — including some threesome action — only to be told they’re someone else. In a running joke, Amy is constantly mistakenly recognized by strangers who refer to her by a different pet name. X and Jordan are heckled as “faggots” by the main antagonists toward the end of the film, George, Dan, and Pat. (Duval tells me they were named for Republicans George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, and Pat Buchanan. “It was not supposed to be subtle on any level.”)
“We were all pretty pissed off” going into Doom, Duval says. The result is “the angriest of all of Gregg’s movies, what he calls his Nine Inch Nails movie.” It’s also the director’s most gruesome work. When it premiered at Sundance in early 1995, there were walkouts. Roger Ebert panned Doom, giving it zero stars. “That was a badge of honor for us,” Duval says. “If he would have liked it, that would have meant that we did something wrong.”
The climax is pure brutality: After Doom’s central trio consummates their three-way inside an abandoned warehouse, the right-wing zombies George, Dan, and Pat enter, blasting a deranged version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They rape Amy. Jordan protests, crying.
“You, dude, are going to die,” George tells Jordan. He cuts off Jordan’s genitals with garden shears, leaving him to bleed out. Amy breaks free. There’s more struggle, more chaos, more death.
By the final shot, we’re left with Amy and X in her vintage Lincoln Continental, speeding away. Silent. Shattered. The absence of Jordan is too heavy. All they can do is smoke cigarettes and eat Doritos.
“It was tough because I’m kind of living that character,” Duval remembers of the pain of acting out his fate. “There was anxiety, knowing what my future was, and not being able to change it.”
Could he relate to Jordan’s unbridled innocence, in spite of all that? “That part of Jordan is always going to be a part of me,” he says. “I wouldn’t say I’m innocent enough to be sent to the slaughter, but I’m not as jaded as I could or should be, because I made the choice that I don’t want to be jaded.”
Doom’s portrait of three disaffected youth who refuse, their own wellbeing be damned, to be anything but themselves has resonated with the kinds of people who were missing that self-reflection at the time. “It’s been quite moving for us to help people who didn’t understand or know their sexuality and watch something and go, ‘Oh my god,’” Duval says. “To spark not just that self-realization, but self-acceptance.”
The film gives fans “confidence, oddly enough,” Schaech adds. “I remember I was sitting on a plane, and there was a man next to me, and by the end of the flight, he turned his entire body to me and said, ‘I just have to tell you, The Doom Generation changed my life. It allowed me to understand who I was.’”
The world has caught up with the kids who always identified with Araki’s brand of queer, for better and worse. “The millennial generation is much more like Nowhere [and Doom Generation] than young people were at that time. Unfortunately, this sense of apocalypse and chaos and the madness of this world that we live in is so much crazier now than it was in the ’90s,” Araki said in 2019.
But therein lies the power of the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy in general, and Doom in particular, past and present. “I love that Doom pulls no punches and is so honest and unapologetic about what it is,” Araki says. “It’s a small, indie art punk film that comes from a very pure artistic place — it’s not made to please all the people, all the time.” As for the noise it still makes among Gen Zers: “That the movie matters and means what it does to so many is the greatest honor I could ever hope for.”
