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“Dear diary, what a day. I swear I‘ve never been so depressed, miserable, and lonely in my entire life. It‘s like I know there‘s got to be somebody out there somewhere... just one person in this huge, horrible, unhappy universe who can hold me in their arms and tell me everything is going to be okay. And how long do I have to wait before that person shows up. I feel like I‘m sinking deeper and deeper into quicksand... watching everyone around me die a slow, agonizing, death. It‘s like we all know way down in our souls that our generation is going to witness the end of everything. You can see it in our eyes. It‘s in mine, look. I‘m doomed. I‘m only 18 years-old and I‘m totally doomed.” This film-concluding monologue seems to capture today’s signs of the times so well, it might come as a surprise that it is actually more than 25 years old. Delivered by James Duval in the final scene of Gregg Araki’s 1997 film Nowhere, nowadays the feeling of being “totally doomed” has become so widespread that it has not only crept into our small talk as a lapidary response but even gives political activists like the Last Generation their name. But how did we become so obsessed with being the last people to inhabit this planet? Although Araki’s final instalment of his Teen Apocalypse trilogy primarily deals with the coming-of-age of a group of L.A. teenagers, it uses imagery of the end of the world—aliens, explosions, but also abuse and suicide—along a hazy shoegaze soundtrack. In the characters’ frantic search for love amidst the pop cultural values of being rich and famous, the end of the world is suddenly within reach.
