These scenes resemble 1950s B movies as remixed by Freud–sci-fi vignettes that complement the millennial characters’ hyperreal world of Tinder, vape pens and sexual fluidity. ![]() As the encounters grow more vivid, Uly discovers a lizard-people conspiracy theorist (played by punk icon Henry Rollins) on YouTube and starts to fear a cataclysm. The extraterrestrial in question is a sort of human-size Godzilla that Uly keeps seeing in sexually violent visions that could be nightmares, premonitions, real life or a side effect of too much weed. Araki doesn’t rip off David Lynch’s rural noir, like recent TV tributes such as Riverdale, which he’s directed he’s a stylist in his own right, and the show’s look draws on his own neon-lit, self-consciously trashy tropes. Though Now Apocalypse is sillier and less philosophically ambitious than Twin Peaks, its similar commingling of the soapy, the psychological and the supernatural justifies the citation. The pals’ mealtime chats are as rich in X-rated real talk as Carrie Bradshaw’s confabs–a debt freely acknowledged by Araki, who has described the show as “queer Sex and the City meets Twin Peaks. Uly’s best friend Carly (Kelli Berglund) pays for acting classes with sessions as a cam girl. who’s taken up vlogging because, he says, “movies are even more irrelevant now than books.” As he hunts for purpose and connection but finds only sex, mostly with men, his tragically straight roommate Ford (Beau Mirchoff)–a studly, puppyish aspiring screenwriter with a rich dad–romances an affectless rocket scientist (Roxane Mesquida). Uly (short for Ulysses, naturally) is the shaggy hero of this alterna-soap, an aimless postcollegiate stoner in L.A. With this show, he graduates to Melrose Place. Like a countercultural 90210, many of his subsequent films spin sex, drugs and teen angst into surreal black comedy populated by pretty pansexuals whose decadence befits the end times. Araki broke through at Sundance with the HIV-positive fugitives of 1992’s The Living End. Once associated with New Queer Cinema–the loose ’90s movement that launched Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant–he’s known for making campy, candy-hued pop art with undertones of paranoia. In fact, the show’s creator, cult filmmaker Gregg Araki, has been mining this headspace for most of his three-decade career.
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