ABSTRACT
In Utopics: Spatial Play, Louis Marin focuses on the generative power of utopic discourse. He suggests that such discourse occupies the empty place of a historical resolution to a contradiction – neither one nor the other of contraries, but contradiction itself. Utopic rhetoric stages an imaginary or fictional solution to the contradiction, and thus engenders incongruous spaces which are not comprehensible via a totalizing philosophy. Marin defines u-topia, literally meaning no-place, as “the place of the limit on which depends the disjunction that founds knowledge” – a place we acknowledge via the play of spaces rather than something about which we directly know (xiv). Such spatial play sketches out “the empty places (topics) of the concepts social theory will eventually occupy,” and, as such, “is an ideological critique of the dominant ideology” (xiv). Marin’s theories enable us to see how Araki’s genre-bender pushes the road film to the paradox or perversion of its limits. The Living End stresses life instead of death; overt homosexuality instead of an oblique subtext of erotic homosociality (as found in a road film like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, 1974, for example); a productive utopia/dystopia rather than a representation of a particular space; and cinematic reversals and “winks” in place of slavish subjection to Hollywood or avantgarde formulas. When the ending is altered, the entire epistemology of telos is paradoxically, retroactively revisioned – which has obvious implications for the stories a society tells about a life-threatening disease. The Living End’s heroes break out of the genre’s strictures, and although driven by AIDS, their end is living. The alchemy by which Araki transforms the road genre moves us from rigid conventionality into hoping that the progression of the virus’s damage could be suspended just as miraculously as the road genre’s predetermined endings. The road motif symbolizes the movement of gay bodies not only through the landscape, but especially metaphorically forwards into the future when there might be a cure to the disease.
