CINEMA: ELEGY FOR DEGENERATION X

A YOUNG FILMMAKER WITH A POPUlar first movie is like a singer from nowhere with a surprise hit. The thing is catchy, but it could be a fluke. And the sound: Is it original or just a novelty? Best to wait for the shock of the new to wear off. It’s the follow-up that shows if the artist has staying power, if he or she is worth keeping around.

Two years ago, the Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert, made Menace II Society, a violent melodrama whose film-school flash won kudos. Last year’s top novice was Kevin Smith, with his clever, scratchy comedy Clerks. Now these twentysomething phenoms are flouting the sophomore slump–the Hugheses with the epic-size Dead Presidents, Smith with the loosey-goosey comedy Mallrats. Joining them in the ambition to reach a wider audience is gay cult fave Gregg Araki, who gives his new tragi-comedy, The Doom Generation, the cunning subtitle “a heterosexual movie.” The director of the homo-erratic dramas The Living End and Totally F***ed Up is itching to break out, on his own terms. But straight or gay, black or white, these directors are defining the rage and wild wit of their peers who feel swamped in helplessness. The party’s over, slackers. From now on, you’re Degeneration X.

In Mallrats, Smith puts a clown face on the college-age glums. Life is awful, so let’s go shopping, cruising, trashing. The movie’s presiding goddess is a trash totem–famously troubled ex-teen Shannen Doherty as the primary lust object. A ’50s teen pic for the ’90s, Mallrats focuses on the attempts of Brodie (Jason Lee) and T.S. (Jeremy London) to win back their girlfriends on–eek!–a game show. But plot be darned; it’s the texture, coarse but colorful, that counts–the pungent bustle of the action and Smith’s wackily convoluted dialogue. The humor is gross-out but inoffensive, since it’s rooted in whimsy, not malice. Smith finesses the sophomore jinx with sophomoric high jinks.

For all its shambly, incidental pleasures, Mallrats gives one the impression that as Smith ages, he isn’t going to get better–just more so–and that he’ll crank out more low-rent, easy-on-the-ears comedies. When Brodie walks into the mall, he exclaims, “I love the smell of commerce in the morning!” The joke refers to Apocalypse Now, but the bet here is that Smith does love the odor of deals. A film studio to him is just a giant convenience store where he can showcase his bright, disposable wares.

The Hughes brothers are up to more serious business. Menace II Society had a kinetic kick, but it was also heinous in its uninflected take on teen brutality. Dead Presidents, which spans the Vietnam decade and hip-hops from the Bronx to ‘Nam and back again, is expansive rather than explosive. Two friends (Larenz Tate and Chris Tucker) have troubles with deranged soldiers, possessive women, killer pimps and a society that won’t give them a break.

The point is that, ’70s or ’90s, nothing changes for the black underclass. And in Michael Henry Brown’s screenplay, nothing much is added to earlier work in these fields by Francis Coppola and Oliver Stone. Yet Dead Presidents is well worth watching for the Hugheses’ prodigal camera finesse. In some of their elaborate tracking shots (at a prom-night party, over a series of backyard fences), you get a hint that their art could mature quickly. Cinema needs the Hugheses at their best–which is yet to come.

Araki is the latest to emerge from the underground of gay filmmakers, after Todd Haynes (Safe) and Gus Van Sant (To Die For). But Hollywood will find it hard to assimilate him. The Doom Generation is Araki’s fifth feature, and his way of maturing is to get more ferocious, with a twisted smile on his face. The road-movie plot is similar to The Living End’s: a dishy, disturbed guy hitches a ride and raises hell with guns and other toys. The troublemaker is Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech)–call him X, as in sex–and when he hooks up with the rootless Amy (Rose McGowan) and Jordan (James Duval), severed heads and arms are strewn across the arid California landscape. But X is too hip to have a conscience: “Guilt–that’s for married, old people.”

Led by X, the three try every available erotic permutation–the movie isn’t that heterosexual. But as in all Araki films, the true, unbreakable love match is between sex and death. Signs in discos and delis announce: WELCOME TO HELL, SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE EXECUTED, PREPARE FOR THE APOCALYPSE. And the magic number for everything (the price of a burger meal, the address of a motel, even Amy’s cumulative SAT score) is 666, the mark of Satan in Revelation.

Not every kid may be as mad and morose as Araki’s lost boys–sophomores who can’t bear to live till junior year. But a lot are, and in this fevered fantasy of Armageddon, he’s got their number.