In this essay, I’d like to analyze the characteristic of aimlessness and the excessive use of violence that make The Living End a road-movie, and I’d also like to analyze it as a romantic comedy.
So far in class, we’ve talked about a sense of aimlessness which I think is intrinsic to queer road movies. It certainly holds true of the ones we’ve seen so far (Fellini’s Satyricon and My Own Private Idaho, for example). These movies, along with The Living End, share a similar sense of aimlessness when it comes to the plot: if the movies have a specific “plot goal,” it’s one that’s very hard to identify, and the characters rarely seem to be sure of where they’re going. This aimlessness speaks to the “queer” part of the definition as much as it does the “road-trip.” There’s something uncertain about queerness in general, not when it comes to its existence but when it comes to what and how it encompasses. The lines are blurry, the destination uncertain.
These queer road-trip movies just exist — they refuse to be delineated or boxed in by any identifiable plot structures, and they force the audience to confront the reality of queerness because the plot itself is aimless, and the characters are just there existing instead of fulfilling a queer stereotype. Take The Living End: the film rejects many Hollywood stereotypes, from the all-too-common tragic end to the “flamboyant gay” character. There’s something about having not one but two gay main characters that subverts stereotypes; you can fit one person in a box, but there’s not usually enough room for two. And Jon, the main protagonist is very much a normal, average guy — he has a mainstream job, and he’s soft-spoken and rule-following. This contrasts with Luke’s character, but not in a way that casts one of them as straight passing and the other as flamboyant/diva-like: Luke is cocky and intense but not caricatured. The characterizations of Jon and Luke present queerness in a matter-of-fact tone that, coupled with the aimlessness of the plot, forces the audience to both confront their queerness and to consider it almost secondary to the actual events of the movie.
But back to said actual events: the road-trip. In the films we’ve watched so far, the “road-trip” aesthetic encompasses so much more than just the movement itself, and I would argue that removing the actual road-trip element from any of these movies would significantly weaken the plot, the atmosphere, and the movie’s relationship to queerness. First, it dilutes the aimlessness. If you’re not moving, you can’t have a goal that you’re moving towards; likewise, if you’re not moving, you can’t not have a goal you’re moving towards. In each of these movies, there is movement, but no goal. Thus, a feeling of aimlessness. Second, while I don’t think any of these movies have a glaringly obvious plot goal, the road-trip element nonetheless enhances whatever underlying message the movie conveys. I think this is especially notable in The Living End.
The excessive violence in The Living End enhances the aimlessness in the film as well as its double-edged message; it also may or may not be Camp. Luke spends a fair amount of the movie going around killing people, and while there are usually identifiable reasons for the murders, Luke’s careless violence feels aimless. It’s different from, say, a revenge movie, in which the main character’s goal is to murder someone and they spend the whole movie accomplishing it. Luke’s murders are secondary to the plot (except for the moments where he’s running from the consequences of his crimes), and thus they feel excessive and debatably necessary. Luke’s violence also highlights the films message(s), which I interpret as a nihilistic “we’re dying so nothing matters (and we may as well go kill people)” wrapped around a more subtle but equally important “we’re dying so everything matters (and we may as well fall in love).” The film’s message, to me, necessitates a road-trip. It’s the extremity of their situation that makes the road-trip inevitable: Jon and Luke are technically running from Luke’s crimes, but they’re also dying, and who wants to stick around the same place you’ve always been if nothing matters and everything matters? Without the road-trip, the plot would be less compelling, less aimless, and completely incompatible with Camp.
Camp seems to be about appreciating the failures of art, and I think this movie tries to be rebelliously cynical and fails. I think it succeeds in making its violence come across as jarring and flagrant, but it fails to let this de-sympathize the main characters. By “de-sympathize” I mean dehumanize, but more than that I mean it fails to force the audience into a state of pure observation as opposed to one of compassion and sympathy for the main characters. I’m not attempting to assume anything about Gregg Araki’s exact intentions here; regardless of whether he intended it to, the film fails to be purely nihilistic, pessimistic, or iconoclastic. I would like to posit that this very failure lets us view aspects of The Living End as Camp.
The clearest argument for reading Camp into The Living End begins with its violence. Susan Sontag posits that Camp is purely an aesthetic sensibility. I think the violence in The Living End is ripe for aesthetic appreciation, if you have a fondness for the morbid — both the scene where the wife stabs the man Luke was hooking-up with as well as the scene (which Robert Mills analyzes extensively) where Luke murders his would-be assailants are very aesthetic scenes when it comes to the violence. In the stabbing scene, the sound effects are dramatically gruesome; the scene is bloody, garish, and over-the-top, with a particular focus on a dog licking blood off the arm of the dead man. Similarly, in the scene that Mills analyzes, there are “too-loud” sound effects — gunshots instead of a stabbing this time — and up close, disjointed shots of bloody arms and faces. These are scenes of purely aesthetic violence; it’s not violence where we’re supposed to focus on the tragedy of it, or the emotional impact on the enactor. We don’t even see Luke’s face for a while in the second scene, and he’s certainly not sobbing remorsefully when we do see him. Our focus is directed to the exaggerated violence itself. This, as far as I see it, is Camp.
Sontag also associates Camp with comedy as opposed to tragedy, and specifically “comedy [as] an experience of underinvolvment, of detachment” (11). I think Sontag is speaking more to the detachment of the audience’s relationship to comedy as opposed to the detachment of the characters within a piece of comedy itself, but I’d like to adapt Sontag’s speculation for my own purposes. Part of what makes The Living End campy to me is how funny it is — I went into the movie expecting it to be terribly depressing and disturbing to watch, and instead (or maybe in spite of this) I found it incredibly funny. I would like to argue that it’s Luke’s sense of detachment from his own crimes — or at least, the film’s perspective sense of his detachment — that makes this film funny as well as campy. There’s a two-step process to this detachment. First, there’s Luke’s emotional detachment from the violence he enacts: throughout the film, there’s very little documentation of Luke ever having regrets, or having to come to grips with what he’s done. Second, Luke’s sense of detachment removes the audience from the emotional weight of his crimes, leaving nothing but the violence itself, which we’re then forced to view aesthetically as opposed to emotionally. Which brings me right back around to the aesthetics of violence and the opportunity to read said violence as Camp.
Here, I get to briefly mention another new intellectual fascination of mine — the overlap between Camp and the genre of romance or romantic comedies. I think it’s worth mentioning here because I’m arguing that The Living End is both campy and a rom com. I think there’s overlap in the sensibilities of Camp and the romance genre; both are often viewed as “cheesy” or as bad art. I’m not here to argue that The Living End is bad art, but I am here to argue that it’s a romantic comedy, and that this reflects positively on both The Living End and on the rom com genre in general.
The first step to analyzing The Living End as a rom com requires matching up its plot points with the stereotypical plot points and tropes of a rom com. Here, I’ll give a brief list of some of The Living End’s plot points in order to illustrate the fact that they line up with rom com tropes:
- The Meet Cute: At 16:15, Jon asks, “Well, now what?” and is immediately provided with an answer: Luke, in need of an escape after having just murdered three people, essentially throws himself at Jon’s car.
- The best friend: I’m analyzing Jon as the protagonist, and his friend Darcy fits the best friend trope — Jon consults her about Luke.
- Challenging worldview: as I’ve observed through watching rom coms, the romantic interest usually challenges the protagonist’s worldview in some way that is compelling to them. At 25:00, Luke tells Jon to say “fuck everything” (in regard to his life/obligations) because they’re both going to die, and thus they are free from societal constraints/expectations. This turns out to be appealing enough to Jon that it prompts him to go on the road-trip with Luke, which we’re led to believe is very out of character for Jon.
I could continue with this indefinitely, but I want to touch on one final essential plot point before I get to the rest of my argument:
- The “happy” ending. The ending of this movie is what first prompted me to think of The Living End as a rom com, and it’s something that I find endlessly fascinating. At the end of the movie, Luke attempts to commit suicide, which would give the movie its anticipated (at least by me) tragic ending. But the gun jams, and so he survives.
There’s so much complexity to this ending. It defies what I would consider the “tragic ending stereotype” of many queer movies — neither of the main characters dies in the movie — but it’s nonetheless an unsatisfactory ending for the characters themselves (or at least for Luke). This is why I call it a “happy” ending, and not a happy ending. This ending is the most crucial component to analyze in considering what makes The Living End a rom com, and in considering the implications of how it both adheres to and breaks the rules of the genre.
I think The Living End can be considered an “unhappy rom com” that nonetheless makes use of the conceits of the genre in a way that subverts them and enhances the film’s message.
There are two self-evident plot elements that make something a rom com: the romance, and the comedy. It shouldn’t take very much arguing to convince you that these elements exist in The Living End — Jon and Luke fall in love, and I’ve already discussed the comedy to some extent when I analyzed the violence as Camp. But both of these elements enhance the movie’s message in a way that simultaneously makes the movie more “palatable” and more jarring.
The rom com elements make the film more palatable to the audience because rom coms are the epitome of palatable — they’re usually lighthearted and cheesy, and don’t contain much, if any, inflammatory political content. So in this sense, viewing The Living End as a rom com is somewhat reassuring; it makes it easier to categorize. But at the same time, viewing The Living End as a rom com is radical, uncomfortable, and jarring, because while it fulfills many of the conventions of a rom com, this doesn’t remotely diminish how provocative the film is. There’s something incredibly strange about being able to recognize familiar rom com tropes in such an unfamiliar setting — the film is extremely violent, very political, and at many points unsettling or sad. The presence of rom com tropes serves to highlight how radical, and “irresponsible” (to borrow Gregg Araki’s term) the film is in contrast.
The Living End is a very political film — it centers around two men dying of AIDs, and it very blatantly criticizes the US government’s response to the AIDs epidemic — and the movie’s status as a rom com enhances this message instead of diminishing it. Rom coms are about love, but they’re also about fulfilling one’s purpose: the main character is almost always unsatisfied with their life in some way at the beginning of the movie, and their relationship with the love interest prompts them to pursue and achieve their goals, or to find some sort of new satisfaction in life. This is very much the case in Jon and Luke’s relationship: at the beginning of the film, Jon is a relatively conventional citizen and rule-follower. It takes Luke’s influence to get him to admit he’s a victim of a corrupt and indifferent system and to get him to go and do something about it. This gives him a new sense of purpose. But I would argue that this point about purpose goes even further: beyond Jon and Luke’s relationship, the movie’s status as a rom com helps it achieve its goals as a political film.
Viewing The Living End as a rom com gives the audience an accessible, recognizable framework through which to view the film, but its message and politics contrast so extremely with our expectations of a rom com that the film’s message is impossible to ignore or misinterpret. This puts a spotlight on the film’s politics in a way that could make it unappealing. But The Living End is ultimately, beautifully, hopeful — even though (or maybe because) nothing matters and the main characters are both dying, everything matters, and they fall in love. This, too, is a powerful message; in my opinion a much more powerful one than nihilism or pessimism. There’s always hope for the future, even in the midst of despair and anger and violence, and viewing The Living End as a rom com allows us to uncover the hope in it.
Works Cited
Mills, Robert. “Violent bodies and victim narratives: On the cinematic activism of Gregg Araki’sThe Living End.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, Volume 2 Number 3, Intellect Ltd Article, 2017.
The Living End. Directed by Gregg Araki, Cineplex Odeon Films, 1992.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Published 1964.
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