ABSTRACT
Like Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets , independent fi lmmaker Gregg Araki is known for scoring his fi lms from his personal music collection. In his breakthrough production of 1992, The Living End , he makes use of the sort of post-punk music that will later lend its “aggressive grind” to his “teenage apocalypse” trilogy of the 1990s: 2 Totally F***ed Up (1993), Nowhere (1997), and The Doom Generation (1995). Whereas these fi lms depict teen struggle in an oppressive and irrational world, The Living End creates a similarly dystopic milieu to critique governmental mismanagement of the AIDS crisis and imagine an alternative to mainstream representations of homosexuality in the AIDS era. Individual songs used in the fi lm might be variously described as industrial rock, industrial dance, electroindustrial, industrial metal, techno, synthpop, electronic body music, ambient, or dark wave. In addition to music by local LA bands Babyland, Drance, and Braindead Soundmachine, the soundtrack gives signifi cant space to musical groups and performers descended from or related to the industrial/ experimental band Throbbing Gristle: Psychic TV, Fred, Chris & Cosey, and Coil. Like the German industrial band KMFDM, which began in Hamburg as a “performance art project” in 1984, Throbbing Gristle grew out of visual arts practice and became known for its punitive (or as one reviewer put it, “character building” 3 ) experiments in noise and confrontational multimedia performances. As the 1976 press release for its anti-music, produced and released on its own label, Industrial Records, made clear in its description, “fi lm music to cover the holocaust,” 4 the group was committed to sharing a dystopian vision of the world, through which it aimed to awaken the social conscience of its listeners. As part of its address to how The Living End queers gay screen representation while engaging with the political contexts of its time, this discussion focuses on the way that the aesthetics, aims, values, and beliefs associated with industrial music pervade Araki’s fi lm. 5
Like punk, the aim of industrial music-and its related art movementswas to disturb and shock. Unlike punk, industrial music emphasized noise experiments (tape loops, sampling, white noise, spoken word performance) calculated to resist commercial co-optation of the sort experienced by punk in the 1970s, while communicating a critical view of the world that industrialization created. As Daphne Carr sums it up,
industrial musicians embrace the technologies of management, the sounds of the shop floor . . . in their critique of power. Their cutups, sputtering drum machines, and shreds of harsh noise are the ugly mirrors of pop music’s technological wonderland, while their lyrics literalize the horror of humans being treated as dead machines in popMarxist language and production styles that robotize the voice. . . . [I]ndustrial posits a central theme: dystopia is already around us, if only we were awake enough to see it. The music becomes a way for its listeners to stay sharp, to hear and feel not sorrow for the betrayals that have led to their lost way of life but to see causes, feel rage, and be moved to resistance. 6
In its substitution of rage for sorrow, its commitment to a dystopian vision of modernity, and its embrace of a “post-holocaust” morality that leaves no room for “false politeness,” 7 industrial music infl ects the emotional tone, aesthetic priorities, and general worldview of The Living End .
