Bottoms: The Ugly and Untalented Gay Representation 2023 Desperately Needed
In an in-depth internet dive, I was shocked to find how well this film was received by the public.
Gay women on screen are—more often than not—depicted as helplessly despaired and often in bustiers and crinolines. When you think film where relationships between women are front and center, you may think of movies like Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a period drama about a woman who falls in love with a client she is commissioned to paint, or shows like Apple TV’s Dickinson, a dramatic telling of Emily Dickinson’s life and often-glazed-over relationship with Susan Gilbert. The common denominator here is an incredibly sad ending and liability of the love interests to ever fully be with each other. Whether a result of the confines of their time period or the presence of untimely and tragic death that is often consistent with this genre of queer film, closure, and happiness are simply not given.
Cut to 2023; we receive Bottoms: directed and written by NYU alumesses Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, and Emma Selignman—an explosive game-changer. It centers around two lesbian characters—who are the losers or “bottoms” of their school—who seek to gain sexual experience and confidence before leaving for college. In an effort to escape expulsion, they devise a plot disguised as a female “fight club” to get their popular crushes to like and eventually sleep with them.
Bottom’s takes bawdy humor and sexual explicitness—often reserved for bro-comedies (of the Mark Wahlberg and Seth Rogan persuasion) —and spins it for a lesbian demographic that doesn’t often get to experience their identity outside the confines of being female. Take Greg Mottola’s Superbad, for example. The characters are incredibly flawed teen boys who are not only allowed to be this way but celebrated for their humor. Female characters are often not given this same grace. With female characters, it is often our nature to experience their humor, flaws, and personalities second and the fact they’re women first. This also brings out more critique of flawed female characters. However, with characters like Seth, Fogel, and Evan, what you see is what you get; there are no boundaries to connecting with them in all their misbehaved glory and laughing at their mildly misogynistic jokes.
When asked about the kind of depictions she and her fellow directors were going for with Bottoms, writer Emma Selignman said: “I think that when you’re setting up a ploy to have sex with people, and you’re lying, that will inherently make these characters flawed and shitty, and I don’t think we thought too hard about it, we just wanted them to be real and messy…” Co-writer Rachel Sennott then added, “We don’t want a movie that’s like, ‘hold on, is this the right thing to do?’ Like, just letting them feel and roll with their instincts.” Sennott and Selignman make very clear the equal playing field they are trying to create with this film. Although we may grow to hate some of these characters, the fact that they are so hateable—and at times misogynistic—is the very thing that makes this movie so equitable. These characters do the same things as Seth, Fogel, and Evan do, but the conversation was never about their gender, but rather, what do they do to resolve their errors in the end in their own ways, independent of their identities?
In an in-depth internet dive, I was shocked to find how well this film was received by the public, given our polarized political climate, especially on matters related to the rights and representation of the Lgbtq+ community. In fact, even critics of the movie seemed to still generally understand and agree with the function and purpose of this movie within its given niche. That being said, this movie caters to a niche audience—with limited showings and selective advertisement (i.e., predominantly social media-based advertisement) —and therefore wasn’t viewed by the demographics that might oppose it. Regardless, it speaks to the broadening horizons of film and TV that this movie has its own place next to other raunchy comedies. Perhaps moving forward, the lesbian and fem-presenting queer community can explore representation outside of the 18th century.
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