It’s all about sex this month. More specifically, it’s all about Generation Z and sex. Jane Schoenbrun’s current Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes, has something to say about that cohort’s neuroses concerning the most intimate recreation. A week or so ago, Variety asked Will Gluck, director of imminent romcom One Night Only, if he agreed that Gen Z (14 to 29 years old) and Gen Alpha (16 and under) didn’t want to see sex on screen.
“The answer is 100 per cent yes,” he replied. “The only thing is I don’t think it’s just Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I believe it’s been a societal shift.”
Who better to chew this over with than Gregg Araki? Now an implausible 66, the unstoppable American film-maker has been parsing the sexual urge since emerging as a power in the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s. I Want Your Sex, his latest film, is not shy of announcing its intentions. Olivia Wilde is terrific as Erika, a pretentious visual artist who bullies Elliot, her new factotum – in the convincingly nervy form of Cooper Hoffman – towards a charged kink-adjacent sexual relationship. Elliot, a Zoomer, seems genuinely fearful of the temptations.
“I think of this movie as being a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z,” Araki says. “It’s not meant to be a lecture or telling anybody what to do – because God knows Gen Z hates to be told what to do. The Erika Tracy character is very much a spokesperson for me. Because she’s an artist who is controversial and provocative and one who deals in sex and sexuality, very much, as I do. I really relate to that character, at least to aspects of her.”
Erika, though awful in many ways, is a convincing Gen X sexual evangelist. Elliot exhibits the same guilty terror of the act that we saw from Kenneth Williams (born 100 years ago) in the ancient Carry On comedies. Funny old world.
“Elliot does a very eloquent job of describing where Gen Z is coming from,” Araki says. “Because they come from a very specific place. They grew up during Covid. They always had a phone in their hands. Social media is 10 times worse than it ever has been. They’re constantly being videotaped. They have helicopter parents who protect them from anything that makes them uncomfortable. I think that contributes to what is called the sex recession.”
Who knows where the time goes? It is hard not to still think of Araki – a lean Japanese-American Los Angeleno – as tribune of a daring new generation. A graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, he made his feature debut as long as 1987 with the funky no-budget flick Three Bewildered People in the Night. The Living End, the story of two HIV-positive men on a troubled road trip, arrived at Sundance in 1992 to strong reviews. Araki has been in critical focus ever since. His movies are daring. They rarely cost much. They are usually on gay themes. He has been an inspiration through four decades.
“For my generation, for older generations, sex, sexuality, dating, love, relationships, all of it … It’s been my whole life,” he says. “It’s who I am. It’s what my art is about. I’ve been talking on this press tour about when I was 19 or 20 years old and snuck out to a gay bar for the first time. I didn’t tell my family or my friends. It was secret. It was my dark secret. But that was probably the most important step I’d ever taken in my life journey. If I had not done that I don’t even know who I would be today or where I would be.”
He makes that seem like a revelation, but he is keen to qualify the experience.
Director Gregg Araki on the set of I Want Your Sex. Photograph: Magnolia Pictures
“It was very scary at the time and very confusing,” Araki continues. “It wasn’t like instantly my life was changed and everything was wonderful. It was a lot of confusion and trauma. It wasn’t fun. There was nothing about it that was pleasant. It was just part of my journey. Because we’re older, we can look back. It’s like so much of my sex-slash-love life has has been traumatic, has been devastating.”
That makes sense in the context of the then-emerging New Queer Cinema. We are talking about darkish films such as Todd Haynes’s Poison, Tom Kalin’s Swoon and Araki’s own The Living End. Gus Van Sant’s more starry My Own Private Idaho also spent time in the larger New Queer tent. The filmmakers were, of course, driven by trauma in the wake of the Aids epidemic and the US government’s unsatisfactory response to that crisis. But such catch-all labels are always reductive. Was it really a movement? Did he ever resent the notion they were all coming from exactly the same place?
“Like we were all together just plotting the future of cinema?” he says with a laugh. “When I was younger, I maybe felt a little bit pigeonholed by it. But in retrospect, I am so honoured and thrilled to be considered a part of it all. Because it was a very important moment in film history. I do think if it wasn’t recognised as a movement, it would have had much less impact on the culture. I feel there was safety in numbers. There was this whole group of movies, and we’re all viewed as part of this same cultural shift.”
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A few of those filmmakers did end up securing mainstream budgets. Haynes made Oscar-nominated pictures such as Carol and Far From Heaven. Van Sant was already on the road to above-ground hits such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Araki has continued to generate acclaim working with slimmer bankrolls. Mysterious Skin, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet in a tale of sexual abuse and its legacies, was hugely celebrated on debut at Venice in 2004. Kaboom won the first ever Queer Palm at Cannes in 2010. He is now an elder statesman. But he must occasionally resent that the big money never came his way.
“No, absolutely not,” he says with convincing sincerity. “Again, it comes with our old age. I just feel the wisdom of old age. I just feel so grateful. How many people have made the number of movies I’ve made? How many people have had this chance to be an artist in the world of cinema?”
Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman in I Want Your Sex
It is delightful to see him gain a strong cast and decent distribution for I Want Your Sex. As well as Hoffman and Wilde up front, the picture also finds space for the likes of Johnny Knoxville and Charli XCX. After a busy premiere at Sundance in January, it is now generating great chatter on its US release. This is the kind of film people enjoy disagreeing about. Is it okay to laugh at Erika’s borderline abuse of an employee? What is freaking Elliott out so much? How ghastly is Erika’s supposedly confrontational work?
“I hope people take away the idea that it’s not a lecture,” he says (and it really isn’t). “But I just want to open that conversation and for people to talk about it – to argue about it, to pick a side, to get into it. That’s why I’m happy about the movie screening in cinemas. Because my ideal thing is a group of friends go to the movie and have a good time. It’s 90 minutes. It’s a comedy. It’s fun. It’s colourful. It’s pop. It’s full of joy. Enjoy yourself, and then go out to the bar afterwards and argue about it.”
Indeed. When people talk about the importance of theatrical exhibition they often stress the size of the screen and the quality of the sound. But what matters more is the communal experience. That notion of enjoying – or hating – something in a crowd before retiring to the bar for spirited debate. You don’t get that after watching something on your phone.
“Yeah, I mean it’s the theme of the movie a little bit – the idea of Gen Z being so isolated, not going out, staying in their bubble,” Araki says. “Watching the movie on a computer or phone or whatever, and then texting their friends. That’s not the same. That’s not the same as going to the cinema and everybody together experiencing the same thing.”
He laughs about some of the more risqué sequences in I Want Your Sex.
“We’ve had some crazy screenings of this movie. We had a screening in San Francisco, and people were yelling and screaming. It was like a riot in the cinema. It was just so much fun. That aspect of a fun room full of people, maybe drunk. The idea that people have that communal high together, and then can, in the aftermath, just dissect it and argue about it. That for me is the best.”
We hope it won’t be such a long time until he enjoys that experience again. Araki’s last film for the big screen was the extraordinary White Bird in a Blizzard in 2014. In that time he did make the comedy show Now Apocalypse for Starz and directed episodes of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and American Gigolo.
“People are like: ‘You’ve been gone for 12 years. Where have you been?’ I’ve been here the whole time, working on movies or working on my next thing. I did make Now Apocalypse in 2018 and 2019 – and that to me is like three movies, because I directed 10 episodes of that show. But, as an indie film-maker, I always have three or four things I’m working on.”
So we will see more Araki on the big screen soon enough?
He holds up crossed fingers.
“I’m working on something, working on something right now. We’ll see if it happens.”
I Want Your Sex is in cinemas from August 28th