Bottoms (Emma Seligman, 2023)

SPOILERS (although the film is so baffling I'm not sure what exactly I'm spoiling)

For the record, I adore Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham, 2018), Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 2019), and Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (Josh Greenbaum, 2021) and I think The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961) is one of the greatest films ever made. So comedy (or even satire per se) has never been my problem, hence why I feel comfortable deeming Bottoms a disaster of tone and comedic structure, the biggest disappointment of the year. 

The story concerns PJ (Rachel Sennot, who co-wrote the screenplay with Seligman) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri, terrific), two lesbians at Rockbridge Falls High School trying to get laid before graduation. Both are infatuated with cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber) even though both are apparently straight. At the local fair, Isabel has a fight with her boyfriend, hunky quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), and she hops in Josie's car to escape him. Jeff refuses to move from the front of the vehicle and Josie drives forward, lightly tapping Jeff's knee. But Jeff reacts as if he's been rammed at full speed. It looks as if he's about to lose consciousness as his team runs to his aid and Josie drives off with PJ and Isabel. 

OK a little odd. But here, not even ten minutes into the film, is where the film starts to lose its grip on comedy. In school the following day, Jeff is on crutches and the entire school (even the queer kids for some reason) is mad at Josie and PJ for "maiming" Jeff. But after class, Jeff, out of focus in the background, walks perfectly well with his crutches in his hands. Two scenes later in a long shot, he comes out to the football field on crutches and then casts them aside, presumably cured.

Questions: Wiki (which I had to turn to for basic narrative assistance) says he was "feigning severe injury." Why? What is Jeff's motivation? The "injury" serves the narrative purpose of causing PJ and Josie to get in trouble. The principal calls the duo into his office and castigates them for maiming the star quarterback. They convince him that they were merely practicing for a female empowerment fight club which gives them the idea to make the club a reality in the hopes of getting closer to Isabel and Brittany, a ploy which takes up much of the remaining film. But what purpose does it serve Jeff to have feigned severe injury? Most importantly, why is this funny? And why is Seligman relegating her putative jokes to long shots and out-of-focus backgrounds? It bespeaks a lack of confidence in the comedy rather than any absurdist quirks.

Even more confusing (and equally unfunny) is the climactic football game. Josie learns that Huntington, the rival team, is planning to murder [sic] Jeff by spraying the field with pineapple to which Jeff is allergic. Josie and the club members cover the sprinklers. But Huntington starts to attack the girls. An all-out fight breaks out. But for no discernible reason, the Rockbridge players fall back leaving the girls to battle on their own. Presumably (an adverb which should have no purchase in a mainstream narrative film), the girls are no longer covering the sprinklers and, in a long shot (yet again), the team seems to be caught in a mist of pineapple juice. 

 

Because this is a long shot, it is difficult to tell if the sprinklers have indeed been uncovered. Josie has carried Jeff off the field. But in this shot, we see a player pass out. Is the entire team now allergic to pineapple too? The other players seem to be recoiling in terror. Are they suddenly scared of Huntington even though the teams were taunting each other a few moments prior? And presuming any of this is funny, why is it in a long shot where the details and chain of cause and effect are difficult to make out? The only indication that the sprinklers may be engaged is an occasional mist on the field. But then, after the girls have laid out the entire Huntington team, the sprinklers turn (back?) on. 

Some will chalk up these inconsistencies to absurdist humor. But there are more effective and sure-footed ways to situate absurdity in comedy. Lewis' The Ladies Man doesn't even tell a story and manages to exploit the film medium more totally than any film extant. The funniest moment in Barb and Star occurs at the climax when the titular duo needs a jet ski to throw a mosquito-attracting homing beacon into the ocean. The owner of the jet ski absurdly tells them they can borrow it because he needs no further information. This one line makes hay of cause and effect but still allows the story to continue. And it's not hiding in the background like some wallflower of a joke. The humor (such that is) in Bottoms is just sloppy and uncertain.

Worst of all, Bottoms traffics in a conventionality that undercuts its celebrated queerness. There are tortured narrative reasons why the film centers on football even though sports are the source of so much queer pain. But however much logic (or humor) those reasons lend the story, they nevertheless compromise the film's queerness. When Josie goes to visit Rhodes (Punkie Johnson), a lesbian elder, for advice, the scene posits queerness as a melancholy lot in life, a stereotypical, if not homophobic, narrative structure.* Rhodes confesses that she never had many friends in high school and as she's "gotten older in this world, it's just gotten more sad." Why precisely she's sadder now is left unexamined. And while we know little about Rhodes' queer present, Rhodes somehow knows a great deal about football. She informs Josie about the longstanding rivalry between Rockbridge and Huntington and that impels Josie to convince PJ to save Rockbridge in the film's climax. But why, in a film that supposedly performs a queer spin on the high-school comedy, does the writer/director privilege knowledge of football history over even the briefest exploration of a lesbian present, and an elder lesbian present at that? For what it's worth, in over two decades of schooling, I never once attended a football game and thus knew nothing about any rivalries, no matter how longstanding or murderous. I do recall, vividly, being made to feel improperly socialized for failing to take up a traditional masculine role in playing sports and caring about them.

When Josie explains to PJ why they should save the football team, it does indeed make narrative sense. The entire school has learned about Josie and PJ's ploy for using the club as a way to get laid. Josie reminds PJ of this betrayal and convinces her that saving Rockbridge would be a good way to win back their trust and show off what they learned in the club. But it makes no thematic, much less emotional, sense. When PJ retorts, "Sorry, you're saying you want me and then you and then all the girls that fuckin' hate us to get together and save some fuckin' football player, who we hate? Circle of bad vibes," that's precisely the response I had. And Josie's narratively coherent explanation fails to negate that, the circle of bad vibes and past humiliations in gym class washing over the remainder of the film.

Grade: C

*For more on this aspect of queer representation, see Richard Dyer, "Coming Out as Going In: The Image of the Homosexual as a Sad Young Man" in The Culture of Queers (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 116-136.