ABSTRACT
The Living End focuses, as do most road films, on the steps taken by individuals to recuperate personal power when rejected by society. The difference between the typical road film anarchist, however, and Araki’s fugitives is the fact that they aren’t simply loners, but gay loners involved with each other. Araki never connects his anti-heroes Jon and Luke to any larger counter-cultural community (as did Easy Rider, 1969, when its lone heterosexual buddies went to the hippie commune, for instance), but he throws the presumptions of the road genre – especially its focus on the heterosexual male – into high relief. By deploying the road genre as the source of collective identifications and desires in which the two elopers run amok, Araki bridges the distance between private anarchy and political affiliation. These are rebels with a cause, simply by virtue of being gay in a road film.
