My Favorite F***ing Movie: Love in a Wasteland (The Doom Generation)

“I think one of the problems in America right now and it’s kind of what the whole Fox News right-wing stuff feeds into, is there’s such a level of unhappiness. These fucking old people are miserable and hate their fucking lives, so they have to fucking lash out at like immigrants or trans people or whatever it is, just to fucking lash out at something. My theory is a lot of it’s because they’re so sexually repressed and they have such shitty lives. That’s why I think it’s good for people to get out there and experiment a little bit.”

“These times are so dystopian, so I didn’t want to make something super dark. [My new movie is] kind of a love letter for Gen Z. There’s this thing going on that’s discussed in the movie: Gen Z doesn’t have sex anymore. But looking back on my life, sexuality, falling in love, and getting your heart broken were what made you a person.” –Gregg Araki (i-D Magazine, 2025).

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Welcome to Hell.

So says the burning sign hanging over our ill-fated protagonists’ heads in the opening shots of Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, orienting the audience to a world not quite ours, and yet awfully familiar—perhaps even more so today, on the whole, than when the film first came out 30 years ago (10/27/95 to be exact). Heresy by Nine Inch Nails blasts from the speakers and the air crackles with a wild, youthful energy as the camera pans across bodies slamming against each other in a mosh pit. Lean muscles and shorn heads flicker beneath fluorescent red lighting.

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