The End of the Fucking World
They finally sanitized my specific type of nineties indie downer. No decade was good, I’m just undergoing the process of LRE (life review experience) triggered by a rush of noradrenaline. The masterpieces integral to the preteen woes of that era: The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, Butterfly Kiss, Freeway, The Ugly, The Doom Generation have been pitched, cornered, and slivered into one soft mess. Will no one stuff a grenade down the periscope of nostalgia and call the wound that was their face a better product? Might be time to call it quits on who I am.
Filmmakers studied dark contemporary visions for a generational lull between the seventies and nineties, when they were able to convert them into slick, cost-effective perfections, opening the door to many an idiosyncratically fucked take free of too much mainstream manipulation. If your gigantic company and their self-censoring title can’t breach you half the gall, the gusto, the curb biting nut-weight or the talent to approach anywhere near a new wave Love & a .45, remove yourself from the digital shelf, and bow out of the category the big bucks rubbed all over your apparently healthy run through high school. Sterilized quirk rarely equals much beyond standup, or ninety-nine percent of poets doling out extrinsic yucks for a readership. Brilliant trick, mainstreaming the minority, draining it of any unique appeal or coolness with the most whining KGB self-cannibalized decade of art possible, so the only counter-culture options left are the original opposing squares against art and their revamped political pride. I can’t even partake in my own comeuppance via whichever fetishized minority without my arousal for self-flagellation being already culturally marketed.
If you involve me in your crime tale and then, at any point, cut away to the police investigation, pray my attention span confines itself to the laxative you were just pinned by, because you will never be Clean, Shaven. If the detectives suffer thyroidal malfunctions and repeat the same apt eye roll like some deadpanned PC version of those Last House on the Left slapstick troopers, I might write a letter to the editor on my foreskin with mozzarella or vice versa. Perhaps I am mentally unsalvageable, but Keystone Cops meets The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is not as sexy as it sounds. Of the main two, the guy’s likeable in his icy zombification (underrated classic Coldblooded) and she’s cute enough with her insufferable bitchiness, as are most interchangeable men and women today. They both seem like actual virgins, which might be the hardest role for any actor to portray. Apologies, my disaffected youth went from River’s Edge to these cool customers. Between Netflix’s mitigating A Futile and Stupid Gesture and some defunct sports mag publishing a geriatric, arrogant editorial closing the casket on brilliant writer Michael O’Donoghue, accusing his anarchic legacy (moronically bitching that a similar type of nihilism led Cobain to blow his “darn fool head off”) of not tackling the crowd with the supposed necessary roughness of a semiliterate hack, it’s two thumbs down for every hour teasing me halfway there.