The Living End: Radical Anger

Th e Livin g End an d Radi cal Anger A subversive exploration of the trauma of the AIDS epidemic

Written by Diti Belhe Contributing Writer | Illustrated by Emily Han, Contributing Illustrator and Designer

What would you do if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness? Would you continue to live by the rules of the society that oppress you? Would you lock yourself in your room with a bottle of wine and listen to The Smiths? When Jon, the protagonist of Gregg Araki’s “The Living End,” is diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, his quiet existence is turned inside out. This is when he meets Luke, a fellow HIV-positive man who happens to be on the run for murdering a cop. What ensues is an adventurous, Bonnie-and-Clyde road trip where passionate love scenes alternate with bank robberies, fi stfi ghts and the murder of homophobes. But beneath its satirical veneer, the movie says a great deal about what it means to be a gay man in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.

By 1991, AIDS already ravaged America. Over 100,000 died of the disease by the turn of the decade, with almost onethird of deaths from 1990 alone.1 The U.S. government, under the Reagan administration, had continually ignored and downplayed the epidemic that largely aff ected one of the most marginalized groups in society.2 Queer activists were understandably angry.

LGBTQ+ fi lmmakers became less concerned about making fi lms that served a tame, palatable representation of queer people and relationships to a wider audience. Instead, they produced works that delved deeper into what it means to be gay and centered the righteous anger that the LGBTQ+ community felt. Dubbed the New Queer Cinema movement,

1 “Current Trends Mortality Attributable to HIV Infection/AIDS—United States, 1981-1990,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Jan. 25, 1991. 2 Richard Lawson, “The Reagan Administration’s Unearthed Response to the AIDS Crisis Is Chilling,” Vanity Fair, Dec. 1, 2015. these fi lms provoked audiences and explored taboos.3 Genre-wise, “The Living End” can’t be put in a box. Following the structure of a buddy crime fi lm, it’s intentionally tonguein-cheek, with over-the-top acting, gratuitous edginess and comical violence. This purposeful lack of realism constructs a fantasy. What if you could just take a gun and shoot every violent homophobe you meet daily? What if you could just say, “fuck work, fuck the system, fuck everything?”

“The Living End” centers and celebrates rage; it explores the living manifestations of it resulting from having your life taken from you by a disease that the government doesn’t care to fi nd a cure for. It doesn’t claim violence as the answer but follows the characters as they struggle with the lack of meaning for their suff ering.

In 1990s America, the very act of engaging in intimacy could get a Queer man killed. Thus, violence becomes inextricably linked with sexuality and pleasure. Araki acknowledges this: when it’s not angry, and especially when it is, “The Living End” is intimate: love scenes are tender, but often feature a gun or fi ghting—an ironic reference to rhetoric of the time claiming gay sex is deadly.

Both cathartic and exhilarating, the movie ends on a somber note as Jon and Luke lean against each other on a beach, exhausted and sick with nowhere left to run to. All their rage, revenge and desire are spent, and all that remains is defeat. While criticized by some for being nihilistic, “The Living End” is on the contrary a brutally honest and beautiful expression of pain and anger. ■

3 Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffi n, “Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America,” Rowman & Littlefi eld Pub., Oct. 13, 2005.