Was It Good For the Gays? ‘Chasing Amy’

If you’re going to make a movie about queer people, you’re likely going to get a divisive response. Does it reinforce negative stereotypes? Does it provide an accurate cross-section of the diverse LGBT community? How many think pieces will it incite? In this regular column, we’ll look at depictions of queers in cinema and ask, Was It Good For The Gays? Here, we examine Kevin Smith’s irreverent romantic comedy, Chasing Amy.

Let’s get this out of the way now: it’s not wise to turn to Kevin Smith for a nuanced perspective about the queer experience.

Smith, of course, got his big break in the early ’90s when his breakthrough film, Clerks, hit theaters. Shot on a micro-budget (a paltry $27K), Clerks was immediately controversial for earning an NC-17 rating solely for its graphic language. Even though Miramax successfully lobbied to get an R-rating, the film is still known for its crude humor (as well as the introduction of Jay and Silent Bob, the dim-witted drug dealers played by Jason Mewes and Smith, respectively). It is, after all, a movie in which graphic pornography is described through dialogue, the definition of the sexual act known as “snowballing” was introduced into the American lexicon, and a female character unwittingly has sex with a dead man in a Quick Stop bathroom. Still, it was a commercial and critical success and established Smith as a budding auteur.

Mallrats, his ensemble-driven comedy that served as professional skateboarder Jason Lee‘s first major film role (and also starred Ben Affleck, Jeremy London, and Shannon Doherty, with Mewes and Smith reprising their Jay and Silent Bob roles), was not an immediate success when it was released a year after Clerks in 1995, but it did replicate his debut film’s propensity for potty humor and sexual gags. Smith clearly was establishing an oeuvre within the larger Miramax house of indie filmmaking: low-budget comedies that follow the banal, working-class experience (particularly within Central New Jersey) told through the vulgar vocabulary that once was transgressive (and probably helped reduce its shock-value).

Smith’s third film is definitely his most mature. Inspired, in part, by his relationship with Joey Lauren Adams (who appeared in Mallrats) and a passing line from Guinevere Turner’s Go Fish (in which a lesbian character fears of “selling out” for having sex with a man), Chasing Amy is a romantic comedy for people who hate romantic comedies — which is how I first heard the film described by Janeane Garofalo in her 1997 HBO comedy special, in which she admired the film despite commenting on “the baby-voiced lesbian” played by Adams (“These male movies with the lesbians that look like that…” she quipped. “Did you go to the Dykes on Bikes parade? I don’t think so!”).

Chasing Amy is very much focused on the ’90s wave of identity politics and political correctness, which is probably part of the reason why it still holds up. Its main characters, Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) and Banky Edwards (Jason Lee), are a pair of comic book artists behind the popular series Bluntman and Chronic (who bear a striking resemblance to Jay and Silent Bob). While they’re pretty successful, their work is more on the alternative side (appealing to stoners rather than teenage boys who are into the more popular Marvel comics). Banky is an aggressively offensive, defiantly un-PC kinda guy — the sort of man who drops certain hate-speech terms (the softer ones, never the N-word) for his own delight and bristles at anyone’s attempt to explain why others might take offense — while Holden is (per his namesake, most likely) the more sensitive and open-minded of the two.

Smith wastes little time to show us how sensitive Holden is when he meets — and immediately falls for — the plucky and charming Alyssa Jones, a fellow comic book artist whose work might be a little more on the feminine side but regardless manages to bond quite easily with Holden. They learn they’re from the same area of New Jersey (events in Clerks and Mallrats are discussed as easter eggs for Smith’s superfans), and they have an immediate chemistry that even Holden can’t deny — that is until he realizes that Alyssa is a lesbian (her voracious gay bar make-outs with actress Carmen Llywelyn — Jason Lee’s then-wife — are used to utmost comedic effect).

Holden is devastated and embarrassed, but Alyssa pursues a friendship with him anyway. “I haven’t liked a man in a long time,” she tells him, “and it’s not because I’m a man hater or something like that. It’s just been sometime that I’ve been exposed to a man that didn’t immediately live into a stereotype of some sort.” It’s through this relationship that we see perhaps a very myopic view of the queer experience — particularly the lesbian experience. Sure, we have an all-out asshole in Banky, who tosses around “faggot,” “dyke,” and more colorful cliches like “carpet-muncher,” but Holden’s view of the world is at best naive, at worst problematically ignorant. He all but requires Alyssa to explain the concept of lesbian sex to him, as he can’t grasp the concept in which “fucking” doesn’t involve vaginal penetration (to which in response she mimes fisting). What the film presents somewhat credulously is that there’s some sort of gay-straight binary, as it supposes that Holden’s love for Alyssa, which he reveals in a dramatic, rain-soaked scene, is so strong that he’s able to turn her straight.

But Chasing Amy isn’t really a film about lesbians told through the male gaze, but rather a film that focuses more on the perils of straight male bravado and insecurity (or, as Billy Eichner put it in a recent segment of Billy on the Street, masculinity can be a prison, baby!!!). Distraught over his best friend falling for this now-former lesbian, Banky digs up dirt on her from their high school days: a story about Alyssa having a threesome with two loser burn-outs who bragged about it to friends (and, nearly a decade later, are still boasting about it to old high school buds). At first, Holden shrugs it off as stupid gossip, but the notion of Alyssa’s past — which she was pretty blunt about earlier in the film when she competed with Banky over who had the most harrowing stories of performing oral sex on their exes — is enough to get under his skin. And he prods at her, and the two have their first fight in which Alyssa reveals that the story was true — that she did have the threesome, and had more sexual war stories to share that would make Holden wish he hadn’t opened the can of worms at all.

What’s actually refreshing about the film — and about Alyssa’s character – is that she doesn’t carry shame for her past (even if she admits she wasn’t completely open with Holden about her previous relationships with men). “Some of it I did out of stupidity,” she says to Holden. “Some of it I did out of what I thought was love, but — good or bad — they were my choices, and I’m not making apologies for them now.” The scene in question is so perfect because of Adams’ delivery — screaming and crying, trying to convince Affleck’s Holden that he’s focusing not on his feelings for her but about his feelings for something else. And he rejects her simply because of his own fucked-up personality that can’t stand the idea of her living a life with other men before him despite knowing full well she’d had numerous relationships with other women. (Cue Liz Phair’s “Jealousy”: “I can’t believe you had a life before me / I can’t believe they let you run around free / Just putting your body wherever it seemed like a good idea.”)

Holden has a change of heart after getting some much-needed advice from a suddenly talkative Silent Bob, who shares with him a story of his own insecurities about a former flame’s past. (“I felt small,” he relays, “like I’d lacked experience, like I’d never be on her level or never be enough for her or something. And what I didn’t get was that she didn’t care. She wasn’t looking for that guy anymore. She was looking for me.”) It’s what drives Holden to repair his relationship with Alyssa and his friendship with Banky with a two birds, one stone proposal: that they have a threesome, therefore allowing him to experience something outside his sexual comfort zone with his girlfriend and to acknowledge the homosocial boundaries with his best friend.

It’s a bold move, not just for Holden but also for Smith as a writer-director, to come very close to examining how sexual identity can be malleable. But it doesn’t happen; Alyssa refuses it, because the experiences she’s had in the past have taught her enough about the complicated emotional responses to sex. “I’ve had those experiences on my own,” she responds to Holden’s proposition. “I can’t accompany you on yours.” And Banky follows her out the door, severing his friendship with Holden, because he can’t accept it either. (Let’s be honest: as truly revolutionary as it would have been for Holden and Banky to have ended up together, it just wouldn’t be believable.)

I didn’t expect to feel the way I felt about Chasing Amy today as I did when I first saw it (and loved it) back when I was a 14-year-old. Honestly, I expected the 18 years since its release to have worn heavily on its message about intimacy and sexual identity — not to mention the fact that I’ve grown up and have learned a thing or two about those themes as well. I’m still so taken with the film, however, primarily because it is a messy attempt at defining something that is, quite honestly, undefinable — and that matches its indie sensibility (it’s quite evocative how the movie looks and feels so much like a film made for roughly $250K). Kevin Smith was not making any attempts to settle things one way or another, to explore lesbian identity in particular, or even to say something about the changing social mores of the ’90s version of the sexual revolution, which was slowly chipping away at the shame and silence tied up in queer identity. (I should note that 1997 was a big year for lipstick lesbians, with The Real World: Boston‘s Genesis explaining the concept to her roommates and Laura Dern‘s deceptively gay Susan dragging Ellen out of the closet on her ABC sitcom.)

Smith, instead, is trying to tell a story about two relationships, one that sees the familiar kinds of emotional pratfalls exhibited in most of our entanglements with people through our lives (both in romantic and platonic pairings). Yeah, we’re getting the white, straight, male look at identities he doesn’t quite know firsthand — nor should we expect him to. Many artists are often tourists, and Holden is somewhat of an extension of Smith’s interest in other identities — I could write a whole other essay on Hooper X, Holden’s effeminate gay friend who publicly poses as a militant black man in order to sell his comic books to a demographic who find his true self threatening to their sensibilities. But what Chasing Amy does so effectively is not try to nail down Alyssa’s experience, but rather show Holden and Banky’s failings as the men that they are, whose own identities are suddenly vulnerable because the world around them is changing, and the inevitable fracturing of their manhood is what they must learn to comprehend.

Previously in Was It Good For The Gays:
Milk
The Hours
My Own Private Idaho
Jeffrey
Heavenly Creatures
Gayby
Mysterious Skin
The Object of My Affection
But I’m a Cheerleader
Keep the Lights On
Philadelphia
The Birdcage
Brokeback Mountain
The Children’s Hour
In & Out
Cruising

Photos: Miramax