Nowhere (1997)

A bisexual fever dream on acid, and I finally get why queer kids worship it.

By 1997, Araki had spent nearly a decade turning queer adolescence into pop art, and Nowhere is the culmination of that project: a candy-colored, alien-invaded fever dream that treats the ordinary miseries of being young and gay as the literal end of the world. The film follows a sprawl of Los Angeles teenagers across a single lurching day, but plot is not really Araki’s interest. Mood is. He is after the specific sensation of being sixteen and queer, when the sky always seems about to fall, no one appears to understand you, and some corner of the world would clearly prefer you gone. The apocalypse here is not a metaphor bolted onto a teen drama. It is the teen drama, rendered at full and literal scale.

That approach makes the film’s chaos legible in a way it wasn’t to me on a first, baffled viewing. The overstuffed ensemble, the abrupt tonal swerves from slapstick to horror, the sheer density of incident crammed into 82 minutes: all of it mimics the overwhelm of adolescence itself. Araki casts the era’s teen-soap fixtures, Shannen Doherty among them, and stages the whole thing like Beverly Hills, 90210 dosed with acid, which is more or less how he has described it. The joke lands because he means it sincerely underneath.

What has always distinguished Araki is his refusal to treat bisexuality as a crisis or a revelation. Desire in Nowhere moves freely in every direction and no character pauses to agonize over it. The pain in his work comes from somewhere more universal: the ache of wanting someone who cannot want you back in the way you need. The film’s protagonist spends the day chasing genuine connection and mostly finding sex instead, and that gap, between being touched and being understood, is the closest thing the movie has to a thesis.

It is also, for all its dread, ravishing to look at. Araki shoots his artificial, primary-colored world with obvious relish, scores it with a wall of shoegaze and dream-pop, and lets the surface pleasure sit in unresolved tension with the doom underneath. The recent 4K restoration, which Araki supervised, restores the full lurid glow. And in James Duval, playing a sensitive stoner named Dark, the film has an anchor of real tenderness, a few years before Duval would turn up as another doomed boy in Donnie Darko.

Nowhere is not Araki’s best film; his later, warmer work is more controlled and, frankly, easier to love. But it may be his purest, and it is easy to see why it became a life raft for the queer teenagers who found it at the right age. Watch it young enough and the rage pouring off the screen would not read as excess at all. It would read as the truth.

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