Mike Dytri as Luke and Craig Gilmore as Jon in The Living End
The Big Picture “Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.” It’s an early line spoken in The Living End where director Gregg Araki unleashed his rage at the catastrophic handling of the AIDS epidemic. It became a groundbreaking, early entry in the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s, released in the second decade that saw AIDS ravaging communities. Governments worldwide did little to nothing to save people whose life spans were cut down exponentially.
Buddies was released first, an indie film with a limited theatrical release and a more personal viewpoint that centered on David , a hospital volunteer or “buddy” to gay patient Robert , whose health is deteriorating from AIDS. Directed/written by gay activist, Arthur J. Bressan Jr., Buddies didn’t face attempted interference by network executives who were concerned about a mainstream audience like with An Early Frost.
Luke’s response is rageful, spray-painting in bloody red letters, “Fuck The World” from a view overlooking LA, but it’s a lonely image. Society doesn’t know he’s there, spray-painting or dancing to his music. When Jon is given his diagnosis, it’s from a bored doctor who sits behind a desk with a human skull model perched on the corner. Although Jon reaches out to a friend for support, what he needs is someone who can relate to the “new normal” he finds himself in.
Then there are the memorable side characters that populate the journey. Luke is often the one to get himself in trouble, encountering a wife who keeps a butcher knife in her purse to use on her unfaithful husband, and a bickering pair of lesbian man-hating killers that nearly shoot him. The performances, from the smaller roles to the leads, can be stilted or over-the-top, which becomes integrated into the strange experience of a Gregg Araki film.
The Living End isn’t overly bleak, but Luke’s impulsive behavior causes him to self-destruct, shifting the violence from bigots onto Jon and himself. At a beach, Luke wants to take control of his death, so he puts a gun in his mouth and rapes Jon, hoping to end his life with sexual gratification — until the gun jams. Despite Jon having every reason to abandon an utterly defeated Luke, he stays behind. Luke’s actions are ugly, but it’s a reaction to how society has tossed aside people like him.
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