The Unicorn Scale: Chasing Amy

By Jennie Roberson

October 09, 2019

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Photo credit: Image/Miramax Films

Welcome back, Unicorn readers! I hope everyone is happy, healthy, and wise, ate their Wheaties, all that jazz. Unless you have a gluten sensitivity, then maybe reach for the Honey Nut Cheerios instead. No judgment here — I always preferred that bee as my cereal pusherman over the athlete du jour.

So as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that each generation loves to get all kinds of nostalgia about the pop culture that it grew up in. I’m not guiltless in this situation — I love a good '80s reference and have been known to make Journey my karaoke song of choice. So these days, it’s all about the '90s resurgence — Doc Martens, flannel, and Rugrats references abound. I’m not throwing shade — there were some seminal features on the pop culture landscape that have an awfully long reach. So it’s with this I look back to one of the more irreverent auteurs of that age — Kevin Smith. Today we’re gonna focus on his third major cinematic outing, Chasing Amy.

Holden Banken sit on the couch playing a videogame while Alyssa is sitting behind them watching them play.
Image/Miramax Films

Before I get too deep into this obscenity-laced comedy-drama, I should bring up a few disclaimers. In order to discuss the queer themes at play, this review will contain SPOILERS for this 1997 flick. And if this is your first time around these parts — or you’d just love a refresher on the metric I’ll be employing in this review, feel free to head over to this page right here.

We good? Snootchie bootchies. Let’s do this.


Chasing Amy is a 1997 romantic comedy that focuses on Holden (a pre-Good Will Hunting Ben Affleck), a comic book artist who, along with his writing partner Banky (Jason Lee), bases his pothead crime-fighting characters on some acquaintances whom he pays off for their likeness rights. One day at a small comic book conference, Holden meets Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), a whip-smart and attractive comic book writer in her own right. But while the sparks start to fly for Holden, he soon discovers that his delightful new female friend identifies as gay.

What I Liked:

I’m gonna be honest: I had to fight nostalgia hard on this one to try to stay objective. From the first tinny strings of the opening credits, I realized I still knew sections and phrases from this movie by heart. I was obsessed with Kevin Smith movies when I was a teenager. Dogma led me to go on my own personal, spiritual search for a religious home. Clerks showed me with enough grit, luck, and credit card debt, maybe-maybe-MAYBE I could make it in Hollywood as an auteur (though I wanted "actor" to be at the top of my job hybrid description of actress-writer-director).


But this movie isn’t about me going down memory lane. It’s about how the movie holds up bi representation for its own time and beyond.

So I’ll start with what I love. And I love Alyssa. She is the cool, nuanced, brilliant type of character that is easy to love (and dynamite to play). Smith wrote the part specifically for Adams, and the love and attention shown to the writing for sketching her character shows every time she is on screen. Without chewing the scenery, Adams delivers a painfully articulate performance of a queer woman in crisis.

Smith also puts together a character who has a lot of patience for her friend-cum-lover, but enough self-respect to not be slut-shamed for her past or to prostitute herself in order to aid Holden in his sexual hang-ups. She does make mistakes, but her boundaries are clear and freely expressed — something that isn’t often seen in movies from this era, when all too often the girlfriend role was subservient to the male character’s arc.

Alyssa has a long monologue about how she found Holden and came to her sexuality on her own terms. She rejects the heteronormative paradigm offered to her by society, and by doing so and going through sexploration, she finds Holden — a set-up that satisfies her. I can understand the appeal of this and how brave it is for a character like Alyssa to state as much, knowing how the gay community operated during the 1990s and how little something like this was talked about even in the independent cinema of the time. Her monologue is heartrendingly relatable to listen to, even 20+ years later.

Alyssa, her girlfriend and the boys sitting at a table together near empty plates, while the girls are only interested in eachother.
Image/Miramax Films

It was also refreshing to see a character like Hooper (played by Dwight Ewell), a gay black comic book artist posing as a Black Panther-inspired militant in order to sling his wares. His niche character, as “swishy” as he self-describes, pre-dates the groundbreaking work of Sean P. Hayes in “Will and Grace” by a handful of years. Hooper is a type of out, intersectional character independent cinema could sneak by but took the rest of the industry a good decade to even start to represent. There is a whole lot in Chasing Amy — even down to the church molestation jokes — that is far ahead of its time.

What I Didn't Like: 

“Bi." This word takes up like zero room on a screenplay page. This entire premise rests on the fact that Alyssa is bi… yet we never hear the word in the movie.

And oh, man, Holden. Holden, Holden, Holden. It’s a strange sensation to go through expunging your internalized homophobia and slut-shaming to see that when you were younger, you felt more like Holden declaring his love — but as an adult, you identify with Alyssa and have dealt with a mountain of “nice guy”  Holdens who aggressively pursue people despite established platonic boundaries.

Holden takes no emotional responsibility for his actions or consequences, but beyond that, beyond his slut-shaming, beyond his biphobia, he uses gaslighting techniques up to and including what he thinks is a decent proposal of a threesome in the climax. This is a toxic character constantly in need of validation (“Why me? Why now?”) who only thinks of how his actions will benefit him, with no emotional follow-through…which leads to devastating consequences for everyone involved. It’s jarring to watch since Alyssa won’t fit into his queer-ified mold of a manic pixie dream girl.

Alyssa and her girlfriend sitting at a booth together with beers nearby. Alyssa is waving to someone off camera while her girlfriend is holding her.
Image/Miramax Films

Unfortunately, his jealousy is not the only form of bi-erasure or dismissal on display. Hooper also chimes in with queer infighting commentary in scenes, commenting how he doesn’t believe in femme queers. And yet still counts Alyssa as a friend? Not only that, but Alyssa basically gets shunned by her lesbian friends in the city, socially isolating her and showing zero support in a one-dimensional scene about queer friendships. 

The Rating:

Despite all of these trappings, if I look at Chasing Amy as a tale of biphobia, I can find a lot of charm and entertainment value in it. But that doesn’t mean it was an easy walk down the cinematic version of memory lane. Alyssa has a lot of nooks and crannies as a character and her own emotional arc — I just wish she got a redux in a movie with more acceptance and less queer-as-conflict. At the very least, since Holden decided to capitalize on their relationship and make it into a comic, I hope she got likeness rights.

2.5 Unicorns
Alyssa and Holden sitting on opposite sides of a couch looking annoyed at eachother.
Image/Miramax

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