6 Apr 2023
Gregg Araki’s Closet Picks
The director of The Living End and The Doom Generation reminisces about writing papers on Bringing Up Baby in film school, defends one of David Lynch’s most polarizing masterpieces, and calls John Waters “the original godfather of everything.”
Gregg Araki: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest
Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com
This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Bringing Up Baby | Howard Hawks | 1938 | |
| 2 |  Something Wild | Jonathan Demme | 1986 | |
| 3 |  Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me | David Lynch | 1992 | |
| 4 |  Masculin féminin | Jean-Luc Godard | 1966 | |
| 5 |  Pink Flamingos | John Waters | 1972 | |
| 6 |  Stranger Than Paradise | Jim Jarmusch | 1984 |
How far across film history it reaches
The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.
How long this haul is
Its 6films run 10.6 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 106.5 minutes of film for each of its 6 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.
How unusual this haul was
Its 6 choices had been taken by 3.67 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Something Wild, taken by 2 visits in total.
This visit reached the work of Jim Jarmusch, through Stranger Than Paradise and John Waters, through Pink Flamingos, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.