Welcome back, Unicorn readers! I hope everyone is happy, healthy, and ate their Wheaties. 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.
Over the years I’ve noticed that each generation loves to get nostalgic about the pop culture of its youth. I’m not guiltless in this — I love a good 80s reference, and have been known to make Journey songs my go-to karaoke music. 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 — filmmaker Kevin Smith. Today we’re gonna focus on his third major cinematic outing, Chasing Amy (1997).
Before I get too deep into this obscenity-laced romantic dramedy, I should bring up a few disclaimers. In order to discuss the queer themes at play, this review will contain SPOILERS. 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. You can also check our Media Entry page here.
We good, snootchie bootchies? Let’s do this.
Chasing Amy is a 1997 romantic comedy that focuses on Holden (Ben Affleck, before his Good Will Hunting fame), a comic book artist who, along with his writing partner Banky (Jason Lee), writes stories about pothead crime-fighters. One day at a small comic book conference, Holden meets Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), a whip-smart comic book writer in her own right. But while the sparks start to fly for Holden, he soon discovers that his gorgeously delightful new female friend considers herself a lesbian.
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 (1999) led me to go on my own personal, spiritual search for a religious home. Clerks (1994) showed me that with enough grit, luck, and credit card debt, maybe, just 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 film holds up bi representation, for its own time and beyond.
So I’ll start with what I love — and I love Alyssa. She’s exactly the kind of cool, nuanced, and brilliantly written character that’s both easy for audiences to root for and dynamite for actors to play. Smith wrote the part specifically for Adams, and that care and attention detail shines through every time she’s on screen. Without chewing the scenery, Adams delivers an achingly articulate performance of a queer woman in crisis.
As romance blossoms between the two writers, Alyssa has a lot of patience for her friend-turned-lover, but also 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 makes some 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.
At one point, Alyssa has a long monologue about how she fell in love with Holden and how she came to her sexuality on her own terms. She rejects the heteronormative paradigm offered by society, and by doing so and going through sexploration, she finds Holden — an arrangement 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 these themes were discussed even in the independent cinema of the time. Her monologue is heartrendingly relatable to listen to, even more than 20 years later.
It was also refreshing to see a character like Hooper (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 (1998–2020) by a handful of years. Hooper is a type of out, intersectional character 90s indie cinema could sneak in but which the rest of the industry took a good decade to begin casting. There’s a whole lot in Chasing Amy — even down to the church molestation jokes — that’s far ahead of its time.
What I Didn't Like:
“Bi”. This word takes up practically zero room on a screenplay page. The entire premise of Chasing Amy rests on the fact that Alyssa is bisexual, and yet, we never hear the word once in the whole film.
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 romances despite established platonic boundaries.
Holden takes no responsibility for his actions or consequences, but beyond that — beyond his slut-shaming and biphobia, he tries to manipulate and gaslight Alyssa up to and including what he thinks is a decent proposal of a threesome in the climax. He is a noxious character constantly in need of validation (“Why me? Why now?”) who only thinks of how his actions will benefit himself, 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.
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, remarking how he doesn’t believe in femme queers. And yet he 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 cinematic 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.