Nowhere Film Club #3 - Splendor

Bizarre Love Triangle: Splendor

Directed by: Gregg Araki
Written by: Gregg Araki
Produced by: Gregg Araki, Graham Broadbent, Damian Jones
Cinematography: Jim Fealy
Edited by: Gregg Araki, Tatiana S. Riegel
Cast: Kathleen Robertson, Jonathan Schaech, Matt Keeslar, Kelly Macdonald, Eric Mabius

When Splendor first came out in 1999, it was the last thing people expected from punk provocateur Gregg Araki. He first gained notoriety for his AIDS crime film The Living End (1992), which cemented him as a key figure of the newly dubbed “New Queer Cinema”, alongside filmmakers like Todd Haynes and Derek Jarman. Araki followed The Living End with his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy – comprised of Totally Fucked Up (1994), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) – which shifted the focus towards teen angst, weird sex and nasty, brutal violence. In many ways Splendor – a light-hearted screwball rom-com – seemed like the most provocative film he could’ve made.

Araki, however, resisted the idea that Splendor was such a significant departure from his previous work. Of course, Splendor was different in that it didn’t deal directly in teen angst or queer fatalism, but he described how “a romanticism bordering on the naive” had been a part of all of his films, as well as there being an “aesthetic thread” linking Splendor to his previous films^[1]. It seems that to Araki, the idea that Splendor is a departure from his previous films came down more to misinterpretations of his prior work rather than any distinctive shift he had taken in his approach to making the film. He puts forward that the real difference is in the “musical soul” of the movie^[2], the shift in the soundtrack from the harsh industrial of The Doom Generation to the more mellow electronic music which scores Splendor. Araki’s soundtracks are meticulously constructed, relying primarily on needle drops rather than original scores. Music is perhaps the key aspect of Araki’s filmography, the driving force behind the aesthetic and emotional realities of all of his films.

Splendor also sees Araki playing in a different genre to his previous films, incorporating influences which had not been as apparent up to that point. Names like Godard came up regularly when discussing Araki’s influences, but Splendor owes much more to the 30s/40s screwball comedies of Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges than it does to French New Wave or American crime films, as Araki stated himself:

My desire was to remake screwball/Lubitschen comedy, but then to also revise it so as not to fall into the trap that so many of these films, like What’s Up Doc? [1972] or Forces of Nature [1999], fall into. Because those remakes are not of the period, they cannot capture the élan of those movies. Real screwball comedy definitely came out of a specific social and economic context^[3]

Ernst Lubistch in particular looms large over Splendor. His 1933 film Design For Living – based on the Noël Coward play – features an almost identical plot to Splendor, rendered through the politics of pre-code Hollywood rather than the turn-of-the-millennium context through which Araki interprets his throuple. That blending of the old and new – of the use of the conventions of older film genres to present the unconventional realities of post-modern romance – is perhaps the key to Splendor.

In Araki’s own words, Splendor is about “achieving conventional happiness in an unconventional way”^[4]. The happy endings of Old Hollywood screwball films were typically about restoring order through marriage, SPOILER#but the marriage at the end of Splendor defies convention. The emotions of the ending of the film are familiar – the relief that our protagonist ends up with the person (or, in this case, people) she belongs with – but we are at the same time confronted with a romantic arrangement which is odd and unfamiliar.#SPOILER Many of Araki’s films feature non-monogamous relationships, going back to his debut feature Three Bewildered People in the Night (1987). Araki states that the reason for this has more to do with his interest in “polymorphous sexuality” and the narrative possibilities which non-monogamous relationships create^[5], rather than any direct effort to highlight non-monogamy in his films. Nonetheless, with Splendor as well as his other films, Araki does present non-monogamous relationships in much the same way that he presents monogamous ones. He doesn’t seem to value any one relationship type over another, but is instead interested in how romantic and sexual relationships impact the people involved and how broader political power structures dictate what are and aren’t acceptable forms of love. Splendor does not necessarily read as a political film – particularly not in comparison to Araki’s prior films – but there is something very challenging in the way that it depicts its throuple without criticism or judgement.

Splendor was critically maligned upon release, dismissed as frivolous and lacking the edginess that Araki had been known for. Despite the resurgence of interest in Araki as a filmmaker, Splendor remains one of Araki’s most overlooked films. Araki said during press for Splendor that “there is a sort of prejudice, or misrepresentation, that because a film is optimistic or a romantic comedy or whatever, that it lacks certain seriousness”^[6]. Perhaps that’s what’s driving people’s perceptions of Splendor, that misguided belief that because it’s a rom-com, it can’t be “serious” in the same way Araki’s other films are. Regardless, Splendor is anything but frivolous, charting itself as a life-affirming ode to screwball comedies and unconventional love.