Josie (Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (Rachel Sennott) inBottoms.
Photo:Patti Perret/Orion Releasing LLC
Almost exactly a year ago, the gay romcom Bros was released in the US and greeted in the LGBTQ+ community by open internecine warfare. After the film opened to less than stellar box office figures, lead actor and writer Billy Eichner blamed it on the straights. “Straight people, especially in certain parts of the country just didn’t show up for Bros,” he tweeted. “Everyone who ISN’T a hom*ophobic weirdo should go see Bros tonight.” But it turned out that people in the queer community, either, didn’t want to support a film out of a weird sense of duty, as if buying a cinema ticket were going to lead to deep-rooted societal change. Advertisem*nt
Bottoms, it seems clear from even the first five minutes of the film, is not interested in being a standard-bearer, a Gen Z Bridesmaids or any other kind of pioneering bastion of diversity – Bottoms wants to be, and is, funny. But in shrugging off all of those mantles, Bottoms ironically gets there: This is the foul-mouthed gay movie we needed, the casually excellent representation of crap, selfish gay losers that we had been waiting for. Advertisem*nt
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But where Booksmart was worthy and somehow grandstanding (the girls are intelligent –it turns out quite popular – and gratingly use “Malala” as a code word), Bottoms is puerile and goofy, absurd and often divorced from reality in a way that allows it to get away with some risky stuff. PJ and Josie are bleakly funny, but not whipsmart; they call themselves ugly and untalented, and the film never explicitly corrects that characterisation. In this, Bottoms is already far ahead of so many other recent queer comedies, such as Bros, Fire Island, or Love, Simon. Billy Eichner, playing Bobby Lieber in Bros, is presented to us as a sort of archly seething outsider figure, who is insecure and jealous and won’t allow himself to give in to love, though the film never quite allows that representation of him to materialise. Advertisem*nt
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Compare this with other recent queer misfires: In Fire Island, seemingly every character is lovable, smart, beautiful and witty, while Bros is so constantly aware of putting a foot wrong that it doesn’t put a foot anywhere. In Clea Duvall’s romcom Happiest Season, the heroine comes off as a monster who shoves her girlfriend back into the closet to appease her family – but the film isn’t even aware of how it comes off, so it arguably doesn’t count. Happiest Season sleepwalks into another queer film pitfall, which is playing to the straight gallery: making a parade of queerness and explaining it to heterosexuals in a way that others hom*os. Bottoms invests us fully in Josie and PJ’s world, taking a steer from their selfish and manipulative subjectivity as the two start up a fight club in their school in order to meet hot, popular girls. In other words, Bottoms takes gayness for granted – doesn’t apologise for it, doesn’t laud it or really even comment on it.Now, if Bottoms is able to take risks, that’s because it’s a comparatively small film, and Bros fell apart because it was aiming for box office domination. But that’s a problem inherent in queerness– namely, that it cannot ever be mainstream. Any project presenting queerness to a sizeable audience will necessarily diminish, dilute or otherwise betray that queerness: The film can be a kind of mirror image of heterosexuality, but it can never be queer, because queerness is about the sidelines, the in-jokes, the interstices.Bottoms is by no means perfect: it seems inconceivable, for instance, that both these two dyed-in-the-wool teen lesbians would be into the thin and popular girls at school rather than more obviously gay-coded women. But then again, Bottoms cultivates its own thrilling unreality – this is a film in which two 26-year-olds play teenagers without bothering to really age down, and where their teacher reads a magazine called Divorced and Horny in class. That enables Bottoms to play around with the teen film: These girls aren’t here to stand for anyone – they’re just there to make you laugh.
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