Nowhere (1997 film)

Plot

The story follows Dark and Mel, a bisexual couple in Los Angeles with an open relationship. Mel is seeing a girl named Lucifer, whom Dark can't stand, while Dark has his eye on a mysterious boy called Montgomery. One day, the three of them gather at their usual café, running into other teens like Alyssa, Dingbat, Egg, and Dark's friend Cowboy. They talk about a party that night hosted by a guy named Jujyfruit.

Egg bumps into an unnamed TV star from Baywatch. Cowboy tells Dark his boyfriend Bart is hooked on heroin; Cowboy gives Bart an ultimatum to quit or lose him, but Bart refuses. Alyssa and Dingbat meet up with Ducky, Egg's brother and Dingbat's crush, before Alyssa goes to see her boyfriend Elvis. At a bus stop, Dark watches an alien kill three valley girls and tries to film it, but the creature vanishes.

At the Baywatch star's place, he and Egg watch TV, then he makes a move on her. She says no, and he violently rapes her. Later, Dark and friends play kick the can while high on drugs, and Montgomery gets snatched by the same alien. Dark later spots the alien in a locker room.

Back home, Egg and Bart separately watch the same televangelist, Moses Helper, who tells them to kill themselves to get into heaven. At Jujyfruit's party, Dark fails to convince Mel to be monogamous, so he steps outside with Dingbat. Ducky, having learned of his sister's suicide, jumps into a pool, and Dingbat gives him CPR. Dark goes back inside, finds the alien in the kitchen, and runs into Handjob.

He starts telling Handjob about his day when Alyssa and Elvis show up. Elvis accuses Handjob of selling him bad drugs and beats him to death with a can of tomato soup.

Release

In the summer of 1997, Nowhere got a limited release in North American theaters through Fine Line Features, the indie and arthouse arm of New Line Cinema, which was then owned by Time Warner. It also played at the BFI London Film Festival in the UK that October, and hit Japanese theaters on August 3, 1998. Critical reactions were split. Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle called it as "beautifully messy" as Araki's earlier films Totally Fed Up and The Doom Generation, but noted that this time Araki worked with a much bigger and more complicated set of characters. The Los Angeles Times praised it as "high energy," saying Araki skillfully juggles shifting tones and that the film, with its pop art look and real emotions, is a confident, intricate work. The Chicago Sun-Times labeled it Araki's priciest and most mainstream movie to date, while The New York Times dubbed it "California's version of Kids," adding that if it weren't so overcrowded and eager to shock, it could have worked as a mean-spirited, cheerful satire of Hollywood teens. Empire's Jake Hamilton was less kind, admitting there are some flashy moments—a cleverly cut sex scene, a death from a Campbell's soup can, and a ridiculous ending—but argued that compared to Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Nowhere is totally lost up its own backside. Canada's Globe and Mail suggested you could find more entertaining nonsense and thrilling nihilism in an average episode of Melrose Place or Beverly Hills, 90210. Araki himself described the film as "Beverly Hills, 90210 on acid," a line many reviewers used at the time. In a Nylon retrospective, Marie Lodi wrote that the movie's surreal, hyper-saturated visuals were as ahead of their time as its themes. In the US, Nowhere came out on VHS, and on December 10, 1997, Image Entertainment released it on LaserDisc.