NOW
APOCALYPSE
IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD
AND I LITERALLY CAN'T EVEN
by Emma Fromont - December 2019
WHY SHOULD NOW APOCALYPSE HAVE A SEASON 2?
Once again, you viewers disappointed us. Or at least me. Gregg Araki finally launched his show, it was the best one of the year – even if I haven’t watched any other. Why has it been cancelled then? How am I supposed to overcome this decision?
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First, you might ask yourself who the f*** is this filmmaker. Gregg Araki invented the New Queer Wave. In the 1990s, he led this new cinematographic movement in the United States. Obviously inspired by the French New Wave, he introduced the public to queer characters and sex fluidity, almost shown for the first time on screen. Totally fucked up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), Nowhere (1997), the ‘Teen Apocalypse trilogy’, were his low budget masterpieces that changed the world (or at least the world of cinema (or at least mine?)). His work is full of drugs, sex, teen anxiety, and colored enough for you to have an epileptic crisis: no need to have drugs to feel high with Araki’s cinema. But it also depicts very accurately our liberal societies and raising individualism.
Now Apocalypse seems to be a 2019 version of these movies. Characters now have smartphones and iPads, they chat a lot, use Skype and the main female character is an occasional camgirl. Most of them have open relationships and Araki shows how difficult it can be for some. Uly, the main character, is a young man seeking for true love who smokes a lot of pot. Strange things are happening, including aliens (which look exactly like the one in Nowhere), bizarre symbols and the fact that a guy Uly likes, Gabriel, disappears a bit too often. Uly’s best friend believes this is only because he smokes but a French female astrobiologist, called Séverine, seems to have a lot of work regarding aliens corpses at the moment…
Uly and his best friend Carly in Now Apocalypse
Like in other Araki’s movies, there is a lot of sex and of different kinds. Araki shows very freely young people of the west coast looking for what they like and testing role plays, threesomes of many configurations and BDSM. In fact, I have to admit that there is no clear narrative and the only way to summarize it would be “a bunch of young people waiting for the end of the world”. That is also how I would sum up each movies of his "Teen Apocalypse Trilogy".
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Finally, what makes Now Apocalypse such a good TV Shows is with no doubt James Duval’s (the protagonist of many of Araki’s movies) cameos and the last episode of the first season: we are told very clearly that Now Apocalypse is nothing but the sequel of Nowhere, 20 years later.
Sadly, we will never know more about it since Starz cancelled it. What a scandal. Thanks god there is streaming to discover this last show.[1]
[1] According to Wikipedia there is in fact a way to see it legally in France:
it was shown on Starzplay on the 3rd of June and is now on their streaming platform.
James Duval in Nowhere (1997)