No future. Endless freedom.
The Living End is a 1992 film by underground filmmaker Gregg Araki. The film, part of the New Queer Cinema genre, is an early film portrayal of gay men living with AIDS. As such, the film averts many cliches common to portrayals of gay characters at the time; no Magical Queers or buried gays here. Instead, the main characters are Anti Heroes struggling with meaninglessness and alienation from society.
The film follows Jon, a sensitive film critic who learns he is HIV positive at the beginning of the movie. Jon picks up Luke, a mysterious and sexy hitchhiker who is also positive, throwing his life into upheaval. Luke and Jon decide they have nothing left to lose and embark on a road trip filled with sex and violence in response to their own impending deaths.
Not to be confused with the band of the same name ("Prisoner of Society").
The Living End provides examples of:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: A same-sex variant. Jon is incredibly attracted to Luke despite early evidence of his violent and unstable tendencies. Several conversations suggest that his past boyfriends were similarly unsavory.
- Ambiguous Ending: Very little is made clear about the future of Jon and Luke's relationship, whether they'll pay for their crimes, or if they'll even keep on living at the end of the movie.
- Anonymous Public Phone Call: Jon repeatedly tries to call Darcy from different phone booths on his road trip with the increasingly violent and unstable Luke. These intermittent phone calls get her very worried, but due to bad connections and the untraceability of the pay phones, she can't figure out where he is or how to help him.
- Anti-Climax: The ending seems like it's building up to a dramatic, violent end when Luke rapes Jon and tries to kill himself. Instead, the gun jams and Luke and Jon cry together, with their future left ambiguous.
- Auto Erotica: Luke and Jon have sex in the car on several occasions, including the in traditional "back seat of the car" location. More memorably, in one scene Luke gives Jon a blow job while he drives.
- Cassette Craze: Jon keeps an audio diary using a tape recorder, which makes up the narration in the earlier parts of the movie.
- Convenient Misfire: At the climax of the film, Luke tries to shoot himself. Anticlimactically, the gun jams.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Luke flips out when Jon tries to leave him and end the road trip, saying thing like "Nobody loves you as much as me".
- Also the long-haired drivers' wife, who stabs her husband to death after finding him in bed with Luke.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Jon and Luke encounter a number of homophobes. Then Luke kills them.
- Drives Like Crazy: Luke can't seem to stay on one side of the road when he drives, likely due to his constant drinking. After seeing him drive once, Jon refuses to let Luke drive his car again.
- Gay Best Friend: Inverted with Darcy, Jon's straight female best friend whose sole purpose in the story is to help him out with his relationship problems. She's a quirky artist, but her part of the plot deals mainly with how her worries about Jon take over her life.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: If anyone challenges Luke, he gets upset and becomes violent. In one scene, the ATM is broken, so Luke goes inside and kills the teller.
- Hurricane of Euphemisms: Daisy and Fern, the violent lesbians, discuss Luke's penis using every possible euphemism.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: In spades. A major motif throughout the film, likely a commentary on the nature of AIDS. There's a lot of both thanks to Luke, who doesn't seem to think of anything else. Luke and Jon have a number of confrontations that start as a physical fight and turn into sex. In one scene, Luke and Jon have a fight. Luke leans in to kiss Jon, and instead pistol-whips him into unconsciousness.
- Male Gaze: A fair amount of camera footage of Jon and especially Luke's bodies. Of particular note is Luke's sexual encounter with the long-haired driver. Here, the camera lingers extensively on his chest before zooming in to his crotch.
- Mysterious Past: There's virtually no information about where Luke came from before the movie's beginning, or why he was hitchhiking.
- Noodle Incident: Luke tells Jon "I think I killed a cop," initiating their road trip. He refuses to give Jon any details, and we never find out what happened.
- Out with a Bang: The characters see AIDS as this. Luke speaks frequently of his desire to die while having sex, a wish that he attempts to make true near the end when he knocks Jon out, then rapes him while pointing a gun at his own head and attempting to blow his brains out.
- Phallic Weapon: Luke frequently plays with his ...gun in a manner that is downright erotic.
- Potty Emergency: Fern and Daisy are about to shoot Luke when Fern interrupts the high-stakes situation by leaving to go pee. This allows Luke to escape with his life, their car, and Chekhov's Gun. Snakes, man.
- A number of scenes also focus on Luke peeing by the side of the road.
- Psycho Lesbian: Early on, Luke gets picked up by a Lesbian couple. After flirting with him, they pull a gun on him and tell him about the other men they've killed.
- Right Through His Pants: Played surprisingly straight in most scenes, considering the amount of softcore male nudity and gay fanservice in the film. In one scene Luke gets walked in on after sex and springs out of bed, boxer clad. In the only heterosexual sex scene in the film, Darcy is topless while her boyfriend is wearing a t-shirt.
- Reckless Gun Usage: Luke is constantly playing with and caressing is gun, often pointing at others and himself.
- Road Trip Plot: Most of the movie is Jon and Luke driving aimlessly through the Western US seeking to avoid the law
- Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Jon is the sensitive guy, Luke is the Manly Man. Luke is obsessed with violence, which troubles Jon. And Luke makes fun of Jon for keeping a diary and for his musical obsessions.
- Shirtless Scene: Many, bordering on Walking Shirtless Scene for Luke. Jon sleeps shirtless, and the leads remove their shirts many times on the road to have sex, hit each other, or ... just because.
- Tragic AIDS Story: The plot centers around two gay men who, after discovering they have AIDS and not long left to live, embark on a nihilistic and murderous road trip. Neither character definitively dies or survives the film, but the film is a rumination on the interconnectedness of life, sex, and death for queer men in a world with AIDS.
- Troubled, but Cute: Luke has a Mysterious Past and violent tendencies, but is nevertheless alluring and irresistable to Jon. His leather jacket and hairstyle are evocative of 50's bad boys.
