Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Matt Connolly Revisits Kaboom

If I’m being honest, I haven’t thought much about Kaboom, Gregg Araki’s collegiate-sex-romp-cum-apocalyptic-cult-freakout since I saw and reviewed it in early 2011. I mean no disrespect by this. I’m a longtime Araki fan who teaches his work and delights when his movies return to the cultural conversation—including Kaboom, which, to my surprise, an undergraduate student recently brought up in class unprompted. Yet if the film had a low impact on me as an aesthetic experience, the act of reviewing Kaboom looms surprisingly large in my self-understanding as a “gay film critic,” a term that Robin Wood defined and dissected in his seminal 1978 Film Comment essay, “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic.” To look back on my Kaboom review for Reverse Shot is to consider how any piece of film criticism serves as both a declaration of conviction and an exercise in self-exposure. It’s an article I largely stand by, even if its value rests less in its particular insights and more in its subterranean mapping of my own evolving relationships to sexuality, cinema, and the limits of claiming any identity with certitude.

In his essay, Wood lays out two subcategories within the identity of the “gay film critic,” primarily as negative examples to contrast with his own more expansive definition. One type “resists the public revelation of his gayness,” contending that the acknowledgment of one’s sexual orientation does (and should) not affect one’s stance on film. The second type emphatically affirms their gay identity and focuses more or less exclusively on “works that have direct bearing on gayness, approaching them from a political-propagandist viewpoint: do they or do they not further the gay cause?” Wood’s objections to these positions—the former’s myopic and self-negating embrace of “objectivity;” the latter’s self-imposed aesthetic limitations and ideological brittleness—reflect the specificities of his social and political moment. At the same time, I cannot help to see within these descriptions a resonance with my own coming-of-age as a “gay film critic.”

The closeted and cautious figure described in Wood’s first type aligns with my earliest years in film criticism. Writing reviews for my local newspaper in middle and high school offered an opportunity to explore a genuine passion for analyzing movies, one that I wouldn’t reduce to a mere psychic defense mechanism against the revelation of my sexual orientation. At the same time, there is something about the position of the critic that can appeal to someone in the closet: a proclamation of one’s personal opinions and views that is also highly controlled, cloaked in the presumed distance of aesthetic judgement. I came out fully in college, following the social script of adolescent repression sloughed off within the cultural tolerance (and libidinal possibilities) of the university campus. Film criticism accompanied me on this journey as I wrote reviews for the school paper and majored in cinema studies. What I hadn’t realized was the extent to which “coming out” also implies a “coming into” a livable gay identity. I wasn’t hiding who I was anymore, but who exactly was “I”? This nagging sense of uncertainty, if not inadequacy, around queer identity and community found its way into my pieces of film criticism that did touch upon LGBTQ cinema or culture, whether it be in overly earnest praise (a paean to Brokeback Mountain whose “love is love” ethos is nothing if not an exquisite mid-2000s time capsule) or low-level anxiety (a description of a Rocky Horror Picture Show campus screening that feels written in a defensive crouch).

I graduated college vowing to change this: if not becoming Wood’s gay-militant film reviewer, at least opening myself up to a more relaxed relationship to queer film, sociality, identity. This led to some cringe-inducing attempts to shoehorn self-confessional musings into articles that didn’t warrant them. (I recall one editor noting their puzzlement at a lengthy digression about my sexual and cinematic coming-of-age within an otherwise straightforward essay on a classic Hollywood title.) So, when the opportunity to review a title like Kaboom came along, I jumped at the chance. The film’s plot promised queerly tinged, midnight-movie bacchanalia. Bisexual college freshman Smith (Thomas Dekker) and sardonic best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) each have various erotic and romantic encounters over their first months at the fictitious College of Creative Arts, while at the same time getting drawn into an increasingly apocalyptic conspiracy involving hallucinatory drugs, murderous assailants in animal masks, and ominous prophecies linked to Smith’s long-missing father. More to the point, Kaboom was directed by New Queer Cinema stalwart Gregg Araki. I may have felt lingering doubt about my qualifications to judge gay cinema, but I knew how to talk about directors, about style, about patterns across a career. That Araki’s output could be considered in this fashion offered me a critical glidepath to assess Kaboom, and I dove into Araki’s filmography in preparation for the screening.

It's obvious from reading my review how thoroughly auteurism shaped my reaction to Kaboom. It takes almost 500 words (in a roughly 1,700-word review) for me to directly engage with the film in any sustained fashion. Prior to that, it offers some reasonably articulate thoughts about Araki’s filmic trajectory and the question of how New Queer Cinema’s punk spirit had aged in the then-20 years since its founding. Reading it now, two things stand out for me. First, I’m struck by the confidence of my pronouncements about the shape of Araki’s cinematic output and the cultural meaning of his filmmaking and public persona. I had only seen one Gregg Araki movie prior to my month-long, pre-Kaboom binge. I had done my homework, sure, but I now nevertheless feel the striving for mastery, the desire to claim a proficiency with a director—and, by extension, a type of queer cinema—that I was in many respects playing catch-up with. How often in criticism do I attempt this simultaneity of breadth and depth, of projecting the sense that I’ve somehow both seen everything and possess special knowledge about each title? Second, I recognize the specific impulse to position Kaboom within the frame of directorial analysis when another route into the film seemed uniquely available. After all, I was a queer male film studies student roughly 18 months out of college reviewing a film about…a queer male film studies student just starting college. The thought of drawing upon any of my own experiences in assessing a film that was very much a heightened version of those experiences never crossed my mind.

In hindsight, I don’t think this overlooked connection between personal experience and on-screen representation was merely a missed opportunity for post-grad navel-gazing. It obscured my understanding of Kaboom. I should note that I rewatched Kaboom in preparation for this article, the first time that I had seen the film since 2011. My thoughts about it now are largely what my thoughts were then. Its shaggy-dog premise, episodic nature, and generally low-stakes attitude make it hard to dislike, even if those same qualities prevent it from lingering long in one’s memory. The aspect of the film I especially praised back then was its approach to sexuality, which it represents frequently and with great relish. Blissful threesomes, beachside hook-ups, tender pecks on the cheek, copulation enhanced by the dark arts: Smith and Stella experience it all while attending college in Araki-land, a place (as I wrote over a decade ago) “where sexual fluidity is the unquestioned norm and shacking up becomes the language by which individuals express not just lust, but kindness and joy.” No sooner did I praise the film’s spirit of randy generosity, however, than I turned to my chief complaint about Kaboom. “The real troubles begin when the focus increasingly shifts to the film’s conspiracy subplot,” I offered, further noting that “the creation of genuine anxiety requires some tangible link to the outside world, but Araki seems content to cocoon himself in an echo chamber of zanily inconsequential shenanigans that both highlight and declaw his indie-edge.” This bifurcation within the film is in turn replicated in my review, with one paragraph praising Kaboom’s naughty vigor between the sheets and the very next one lamenting its lack of seriousness outside of them.

Here's the thing: a clear split between the libidinal and the ominous is not really borne out in the film, or at least it wasn’t upon rewatch. Both Smith’s actual sexual partners (a married hunk he hooks up with on the beach) and fantasy objects (his dim-bulb heterosexual roommate, Thor, played by Chris Zylka) are revealed to be members of the homicidal cult attacking the campus. That all these men are invested in “no-homo”-ish closeted sexuality or normative ideals of masculinity hardly feels accidental in an Araki film, nor does the choice to make the characters battling against the group’s apocalyptic schemes overwhelmingly queers and women. And did I mention that the cult’s mysterious leader turns out to be Smith’s absent family patriarch? Far from depicting sexuality asa guilt-free respite, the film reveals the most ambivalent aspects of erotic desire as linked to betrayal, violence, and death. I was aware of this impulse in Araki’s work back in 2011. I observed then that “sex has always been a double-edged sword in Araki’s films,” adding that the “specter of AIDS hovers over most of the on-screen pairings, and the twisting of intercourse for corrupt and occasionally downright evil purposes can be seen throughout his work.” Here, the underbelly of desire is not tied to a particular illness or predation but to a more inchoate set of fears linked to the exhilarating and terrifying flux of youthful self-experimentation. And here is where I cannot escape autobiography. Watching Smith slip so effortlessly between partners, gender preferences, and physical/psychic experiences, I viewed it as a kind of utopian vision, one that felt just beyond my reach. Yet in leaning into romanticization, I missed the fuller and frankly more unsettling theme of Kaboom—that every high, every orgasm, every moment of self-discovery contains within it the seeds of its own undoing.

If there’s value in this excavation of old work, I don’t think it resides just in the impulse to self-flagellate over missed opportunities. Returning to Wood, it’s notable that the majority of “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic” is not about laying out prescriptions but rather re-evaluating his own prior writings (primarily his books on Ingmar Bergman and Howard Hawks) in light of his own coming out and subsequent shifts in thought. Chief among Wood’s eponymous “responsibilities” is to consider gay film criticism as a nonlinear process of reconsideration and revision, always in the hope of deeper understanding but never assuming a definitive state of enlightenment. Turning my writing inside out and tracing the seams of its construction allows for a similar consideration of the paradox of mastery and vulnerability, self-confidence and self-exploration that defines the identity of “gay film critic.” I can see in the cracks and crevices of my Kaboom article both the desire to and discomfort in determining what each of those three words meant and in what way they could be arranged to cobble together a coherent identity. For as much as the “gay” in that triad formed a central node of anxiety and possibility, “critic” was about to be upended as well.

By the time I saw Kaboom, I knew that I would soon begin graduate school in film studies. I started as a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about seven months after filing the review and made the decision early on that LGBTQ cinema would be my academic specialty. Over seven years, that happened. Seminar papers, literature reviews, and conference talks coalesced into something like an academic lane, and the very topic that once seemed so intertwined with personal uncertainty slowly became the stuff of professional identity. Teaching and writing about a subject I love is a position I take great pride in and feel enormous gratitude for. If there’s a twinge of ambivalence, it comes from the slow movement away from film criticism that the increasing responsibilities of academic work has necessitated. The norms of scholarship—its assumptions of tailored expertise, elongated publishing timelines, and largely set norms of writerly style—have pleasures all their own, but they’re simply different from the faster rhythms, variety of inputs, and looser combinations of the personal, analytic, historical, and psychological that comprise reviewing at its best. To look back on the experience of watching and writing about Kaboom from my current vantage point (one that, let’s be frank, is also tinged with the nostalgia of a late thirtysomething recalling his early twenties) is to feel gratitude for having settled into the role of “gay film scholar” and a bit of wistfulness for the productively unsettling experience of stumbling towards that seemingly elusive identity of “gay film critic.”

Because, truthfully, writing about Kaboom is only half the reason why the experience of reviewing it has stuck in my memory. I had seen the film at a public sneak preview at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a post-screening soiree had been announced at some bar in the city. It was exactly the kind of queer film gathering that I’d come to the city to dive into. The reality was far more earthbound: I came alone, knew no one, drank one too many gin-and-tonics, and felt myself once again sinking into a morass of self-doubt and anxiety. As I was contemplating my exit strategy, a familiar face slid into view. Not only was this person a fellow critic—one whose own gayness informed his work in ways that I respected and responded to—but a friend. He noted with a wink how forlorn I looked and steered me to the bar for a drink. Nothing spectacular happened over the next hour or so. We chatted, complained about movies, gossiped about mutual acquaintances, revealed a bit about our professional aspirations for the year ahead. It was, in its own way, exactly the kind of pleasurable serendipity that I had been envious of in Kaboom, except (as with most cine-fantasies) it was also nothing like it.

For all of Wood’s enduring insights, the quote I always return to in his essay is a seeming throwaway. Midway through a discussion of gay-liberationist ideals around the potentials of sexual freedom, Wood shows his hand: “I must stress that I don't wish to appear to speak from some superior ‘liberated’ position wherein I have solved all life's problems within my own life. On the contrary, I speak as one struggling and floundering frantically among the mess and confusion of sexual relationships as they currently exist.” It’s a small but extraordinary moment, an embrace of the contingent and ambivalent within the flow of seeming analytic certainty. More than anything, it’s this that I associate with Kaboom, with that night, with being (aspiring to be) a “gay film critic”—a dance between aspiration and experience, a state of becoming that continues long after the credits roll and the final draft is written.