Bottoms

An offbeat triumph, Bottoms is a film about two lesbian high-school losers who plot to seduce their cheerleader crushes by creating a fight club for girls. Celebrated for the casualness of its presentation of queerness, so different from earnest coming-out narratives, the film is also significant for the ways in which it sloughs off a constrictive preciousness about femininity. Conventional assumptions about feminine delicacy and decorum, and indeed, decency are gleefully mocked and subverted.

Wayne Koestenbaum describes femininity as ‘something that can be ruined, impeached, reproached, poached upon- a capacity or endowment vulnerable to smear and stain and scar’ (13), and this sense of vulnerability is countered by the film’s leads, Josie and PJ (played by Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott, respectively) in several different ways. The robust nature of their friendship is central: completely secure in their bond, they’re loving but mean (Josie dismisses out of hand PJ’s sudden interest in female solidarity: ‘you don’t care about feminism: your favourite show is Entourage’). Both freely admit that they’re unpopular not because they’re gay, but because they’re ‘ugly and untalented’, and sure enough, in the absurdist, exaggerated world of the film, the refrain is taken up by the principle himself, (“Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principle’s office?” he says via the intercom). Later, he snaps, “Just stay in your lane until you’re munching beaver at Wellesley!” There’s no offence caused, and no trauma inflicted.

The idea of feminine vulnerability is also questioned by Josie and PJ’s physicality; they both inhabit their bodies with a certain ease, and in PJ’s case, even a kind of swagger. Mismatched clothing, unkempt hair, their nonchalance is partially about their queerness: they are the butch ‘ugly’ girls in contrast to the ultra-fem, trussed and tottering cheerleaders. The most cherished body, though, is a male one: Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), the school’s much prized quarterback. In the scene that sets the plot rolling for the girls’ re-invention as virile [anti] hero types, we see PJ’s car very, very lightly graze Jeff’s knees: he crumples in an extravagant – and effeminate – display of pain, and his teammates come running, almost hysterical in their fear of the damage to his precious body. His best friend, Tim (Miles Fowler), tenderly fusses over him throughout the film, emphasising the gender inversion of the too-cherished male body – in a further maternal touch, he insists on calling him Jeffrey. Their pairing and Jeff’s infantalisation obviously intended as a contrast to Josie and PJ’s more robust friendship.

The director, Emma Seligman, talks of wanting in on the action of films like Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, ‘movies where a bunch of boys are getting together to be rambunctious and fight and do stuff’, wanting her characters to get the chance to be just as ‘powerful and hot’ (Olsen). Sennott spends a lot of the film with black eyes and a plaster over her broken nose and she does look pretty cool. The fight club conceit is obviously another way of rendering femininity less brittle and breakable, and interestingly isn’t the first time a hybrid self-defence/fight club scenario has served as the means to break out of the strictures of femininity. In Miranda July’s 2015 novel, The First Bad Man, the scenario is also used as a way for her protagonists to physically unlearn the decorum and diffidence required of women, and to learn instead the virility denied to them. (The absence of any direct equivalent for the concept of virility for women just one instance in which language reveals our skewed cultural values).

Another way in which the film subverts conventional ideas of femininity is through Josie and PJ’s horniness, and their blatant calculation in pursuit of sexual goals. Rachel Handler describes them as ‘Machiavellian lesbian incels’ and sees the film as ‘a fascinating counterpoint to the Hillary-core, girlboss feminism of its immediate predecessor, Barbie, challenging the idea that women are unilaterally good … or that this goodness means they deserve gender equality’. Unabashedly superficial and largely amoral, the pair actively exploit both feminist orthodoxy and therapy-speak in pursuit of their cheerleader crushes. When one of the meekest members of the fight club suggests the group might offer a ‘safe space’, and the chance to open up, PJ and Josie are delighted: ‘I love talking about my trauma!’ says Josie, while PJ, who ‘jacks off after every single therapy session’, recognises its erotic potential. Later, she instrumentalises the idea to deepen her intimacy with her crush, demanding everyone shares their deepest traumas, while barely hiding her boredom at the tales of harassment and stalkers, and only engaging once her crush starts talking.

Ad-lib and loopy, the film has a quality of messy randomness, but that in no way means a dilution of craft or political intention. Richard Brody argues the film demonstrates a ‘lack of politics’, largely because of its ‘casual indifference to matters of sexuality and gender’, but this ignores both the film’s determined side-lining of sexuality as in itself a political act, and the radicalism of what Seligman calls its ‘shitty, horny, queer girls.’

Brody, Richard (2023), ‘”Bottoms” is a Major Film But Not a Good One’, The New Yorker, 28 August
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/bottoms-is-a-major-film-but-not-a-good-one

Handler, Rachel (2023), ‘Power Bottoms The NYU classmates behind the year’s most delightfully dumb comedy’, Vulture, 25 August,
https://www.vulture.com/article/bottoms-emma-seligman-rachel-sennott-ayo-edebiri.html

Koestenbaum, Wayne (2011). Humiliation. London: Notting Hill Editions.

Olsen, Mark (2023), ‘Making the violent, funny and very queer ‘Bottoms’: “It’s radical to get to be ourselves”’, Los Angeles Times, 24 August, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-08-24/bottoms-emma-seligman-rachel-sennott-ayo-edebiri-interview