Heaven, Hell, and Nowhere: Gregg Araki’s Changing Los Angeles

As a longtime fan of Gregg Araki, I was caught off guard by how, frankly, ugly I found I Want Your Sex. Even at their most sordid and grimy, Araki’s earlier films render Los Angeles beautiful: The camera lingers over bare skin, cheap motel rooms, fluorescent convenience stores, cigarette smoke. Lights pulse in nightclubs, shadows expand in the middle of the night, and beautiful young people dream and experiment, seeking transcendence through drugs, alcohol, sex. Where his earlier films make cheap motels and marginal spaces feel charged with possibility, I Want Your Sex makes even expensive interiors feel thin, lifeless, claustrophobic.

“LA is like nowhere.” So says Dark, the disaffected protagonist of Nowhere (1997). Indeed, during Araki’s seminal ’90s arthouse run, Los Angeles often conjured this feeling of the liminal: dark alleyways, decaying punk houses, anonymous motel rooms, convenience stores, highways, and unexplained dead zones. His characters pass through urban spaces that feel disconnected from the “real” world of work and school. These films feel beamed in from the underground, documents of a counterculture in which young people were free to follow their appetites and urges. Violence erupts randomly, sex happens wherever it can, often unexpectedly. Adults and institutions remain at the edge of the frame, and what we see feels secretive, private, even illicit.

Nearly thirty years later, I Want Your Sex places its young protagonist in a very different Los Angeles. Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), a gallery assistant, becomes entangled in an affair with Erika Tracy, his older, wealthy artist boss (Olivia Wilde), only to find himself implicated in her apparent death. The characters are interrupted by texts and calls while masturbating (or record themselves masturbating for an installation). They’re secretly filmed for monetary gain. They’re interrogated by the police about their erotic experiences. Rather than the Los Angeles of underground parties and hedonistic road trips, where individuals seemingly have total freedom, this Los Angeles feels floodlit, the characters like ants under a giant microscope. Everything is brightly illuminated, categorized, narrativized, and increasingly public, especially experiences that once belonged to the murky realm of private desire. 

As social historian Mike Davis writes in City of Quartz, “The ultimate world-historical significance—and oddity—of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. The same place, as Brecht noted, symbolized both heaven and hell.” Araki’s Los Angeles has always embodied this contradiction, depicted as a site of both menace and freedom. At the beginning of Doom Generation (1995), the characters dance and fight at a party beneath a fiery “Welcome to Hell” sign. When Amy and Jordan leave, Jordan asks, “Can we go to heaven?” Heaven turns out to be his car, washed in soft blue light with Jesus dangling from the rearview mirror.

The drifters and artists of Araki’s early films live at the margins of capitalist society, largely detached from work and school. They live exposed to violence, but also free from the structures that organize adult life. Capitalism has an absurd, arbitrary logic. In Doom Generation, at convenience stores, every item rings up at $6.66. In contrast, in I Want Your Sex, the characters live inside capitalism’s institutions: workplaces, luxury homes, police stations. Unlike any of Araki’s other young protagonists, Elliot is defined by his need for income. His erotic life is framed by work—Erika is his lover and boss. 

The film makes that difference clear almost immediately. Elliot first appears bloodied and dressed in pink lingerie, stumbling toward a swimming pool where he discovers the naked body of his boss, Erika. The film flashes back nine and a half weeks to Elliot in a prim button-down shirt working as a gallery assistant in a bright white space, chewing pink gum and sticking it onto a crude drawing of a vagina. In this “hipster sweatshop,” as his co-worker calls it, Erika summons Elliot into her office and questions him about himself. He stumbles through his answers until she bluntly proposes that they have sex. The film then cuts to a grey, noir-lit interrogation room, where two detectives (Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho) ask Elliot to reconstruct his relationship with Erika from the beginning. In Araki’s earlier films, desire precedes explanation; characters act first and rarely have to account for themselves afterward. Here, Elliot’s desire is almost immediately turned into testimony. 

The detectives quickly turn the interrogation into a commentary on the relationship itself. They employ the language of sexual consent and boundaries, which would have been anathema in his earlier films. “So you were obsessed with her.” “She was your employer.” “She took advantage of you.” “Grooming.” They ask who held the power, who pursued whom, and what kind of relationship this actually was. Elliot’s experience may be messy and contradictory, but the investigation keeps pushing it toward legal clarity. Araki satirizes a contemporary tendency to moralize and categorize sex, though his argument is oddly muddled. The language of grooming and power imbalance does not come from Elliot or his peers; it is imposed on him by older authority figures. The film wants to mock young people for overthinking sex while simultaneously portraying them as subjects of an institutional vocabulary they did not create. Araki has said that Secretary (2002) was an inspiration for I Want Your Sex, but the contrast is revealing. That film allows its power imbalance to remain part of the relationship’s strange erotic logic, while I Want Your Sex immediately surrounds a comparable dynamic with a vocabulary of consent, exploitation, and abuse, much of it grafted onto the characters from the outside.

Authority figures certainly appear in Araki’s earlier films, but they remained outside the intimate lives of his protagonists. Here, the cops are brought directly into the sexual narrative, enlisted to question and interpret it. Their role becomes even more absurd when it is later revealed that Erika manipulated Elliot into involving them in the first place, using their authority to help make her staged death convincing. Araki’s earlier characters hardly understood what was happening to them, and there were few adults around demanding that they do so. In I Want Your Sex, private experience is surrounded by systems for describing, evaluating, and reproducing it. Every confusion must eventually be made legible. That insistence on clarity extends to the film’s visual language. Instead of handheld 16mm textures and saturated colors, I Want Your Sex feels more digitally sharp and exposed than anything he has made before. Its images are clean to the point of harshness. Some of the sets are shockingly ugly: the tacky, thin-looking walls of the interrogation room; the grotesque Nickelodeon-ass orange, yellow, purple of Elliot’s apartment; the porn-y white and grey apartment of Elliot’s equally soulless girlfriend; the garish white leather couches and chrome accents of Erika’s mansion. The film’s bright, flat lighting and conspicuously artificial interiors give it the visual texture of a sitcom or a commercial. The effect makes this version of Los Angeles feel exposed and synthetic and underlines the fact that we’re in a world in which sex, fantasy, and transgression are immediately legible. Whether Araki is parodying that visual language or has simply absorbed some of it is harder to disentangle.

Part of this new look comes from a notable change in Araki’s filmmaking process. On I Want Your Sex, he used two cameras for the first time, a practice common when directing television. Speaking to IndieWire, Araki says: “As an editor, having two cameras is this amazing tool because you always have a perfect cut. The hair is exactly the same, the gesture…it’s so freeing.” Coming from Araki, the enthusiasm for the “perfect cut” is striking, even off-putting. His early work drew much of its energy from roughness, discontinuity, and an indifference to conventional polish. Now, a problem his earlier filmmaking seemed largely unconcerned with has become something his process is specifically tailored to solve. The industrial method and the world being depicted begin to resemble each other. Araki seems to recognize and dislike the world of legibility, categorization, professionalization, and surveillance, but his own filmmaking partially absorbs those same values. This makes the film less a clean critique than a conflicted artifact of the world it depicts, critical of its values but still caught in its logic.

That resemblance produces one of the stranger contradictions in I Want Your Sex. On his press tour, Araki has repeatedly described the film as “a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z,” a plea for young people to explore their sexuality more freely. But Elliot and the other young characters are not especially unwilling to experiment; they are constrained by work, money, school, unequal power, and the possibility of constant surveillance. Even the sex itself is comically unerotic, staged in bright, artificial spaces that make intimacy feel exposed rather than liberating. Perhaps that is Araki’s point. But if so, “a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z” feels less descriptive than aspirational—a statement of what he hopes the film might inspire, rather than what it actually depicts.

Against a harsh visual world, the film’s rare moments of beauty and lyricism occur in fantasy, like when Elliot imagines Erika in costume, surrounded by blue smoke and soft light. That beauty seems increasingly disconnected from the city itself, which makes one wonder whether I Want Your Sex might represent a moment in which Araki is falling out of love with LA. Despite his free-love messaging around the film, one scene in particular seems to contain its dark heart. Erika tells Elliot that she wants to give him as a sexual offering to her friend, a fellow artist played by Araki mainstay Roxane Mesquida. But when Elliot arrives at her hotel room, she seems appalled that he has come here to offer himself as a gift. The scene revels in its sheer awkwardness, but the joke sours. For a moment, the flimsy fantasy collapses and what was supposed to be erotic and transgressive is exposed as transactional, even a little gross. I admired Araki for taking it there, for letting the fantasy curdle into something unpleasant and prickly.

The film reaches its bleakest—and funniest—point in the final act. Erika reveals that she faked her own death in order to create a scandal around her work and drive up its value. The scheme succeeds. When Elliot is horrified that she used him, she tells him that one day he will thank her: The experience will become a story he can sell. Two years later, Erika appears on Elliot’s seemingly successful podcast. They speak comfortably about what happened. The affair, the manipulation, and even Elliot’s humiliation have all been transformed into content. The joke is almost too perfect: The endpoint of all this supposedly dangerous erotic experience is a podcast. In Araki’s present, today’s sex-positivity is converted into something banal and marketable. 

But Araki thankfully provides one last twist. Rather than end on the podcast, he injects a dose of his signature surrealism and returns to that state of menace and ecstasy. Two more years pass, and Elliot and Erika find themselves at their own wedding, standing before James Duval, the central face of Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy, dressed in priest robes. The image delights in its own perversity as the old Araki world suddenly intrudes on the new one. Duval smirks as his long hair falls over his face, large earrings peeking through. Not even for a moment does he make for a believable clergyman. As Duval reads the marital rites, Erika and Elliot smile cheerfully at one another and say “I do.” They kiss, and Erika’s face suddenly warps into a shriek and begins to melt. Her features sag and contort as her mouth gapes open, rupturing the glossy fantasy in an instant. Light beams through cracks in her skin. It’s strange, creepy, and somewhat beautiful. In its last gasping seconds, the film feels out of control and poetic. Elliot and Erika then wake in separate beds, gasping for breath. Araki presents them in split screen with the same head-on composition, the same sudden movement, and the same expression of terror. 

The ending plays like an exorcism of everything the film has spent the previous hour and a half smoothing over. The story appears resolved: Erika’s scheme succeeds, Elliot uses his experiences to launch his career, and the two of them can sit across from each other years later and process the experience tidily and amicably to the public. But in their dreams, none of it is settled. They are still haunted by one another.

Seen this way, Araki’s “sex-positive love letter to Gen Z” begins to make more sense. Perhaps the invitation shouldn’t be seen as simply to have more sex, but rather, to risk experiences that exceed your ability to explain them. The prize for surviving a messy relationship isn’t wisdom, money, or a successful podcast. It should be something much more worthy: an experience vivid enough to invade your dreams years later.