Nowhere

Towards the end of the film the main character Dark muses about how his generation is doomed. The Doom Generation was Araki's previous film, but it serves as an appropriate title for Nowhere as well – there is this same nihilistic sense of a culture in decadent decline, where life is so devoid of meaning that death (whether through active suicide or the rush of dangerous sex and drugs) is accepted as an impending inevitability. It's a vibe – Araki is a stylist rather than a philosopher. The title Nowhere is a badge pinned at the start by a voiceover that's as bathetic as it is profound – Los Angeles is a nowhere place where everyone is lost.

The film's plot is therefore appropriately a void around which the fleeting lives of the characters swirl. The only structure provided is that it's a day-in-the-life of a bunch of teens that all want to go to a bacchanalian party in the evening – most of whom make it. But that's just an excuse to indulge Araki's unique visual sense, where the camera's perspective is warped by an (often comically outrageous) impressionism and surrealism. The final moment pushes this to an extreme – turning the AIDS metaphor in the Alien film very literal. The horror of the moment is turned into a big absurd joke. Araki may be suggesting that perhaps that's the only way to deal with the truly awful nature of life in contemporary America.