Totally F***ed Up

Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, thirty-three-year-old Gregg Araki set out to craft his own 16mm version of Masculin féminin (1966) with six gay and lesbian youth for his first color film, which features primarily nonprofessional actors in a piece Araki himself dubbed “a kinda cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick.” With muse James Duval in his breakout leading role, Araki’s Totally F***ed Up is a paean to drifting, queer youth culture, a pseudo-documentary, Gen-X love letter to the “young gays and lesbians who didn’t fit into the cultural stereotype of the ‘gay community’” of the early 1990s.