Half evil, half self-deprecating, there is a particular brand of humour that I can often only share among my queer friends. If I were to tell a stranger that I was going to wear my “hideous dyke shoes” to the function, for example, they might look at me like I were being needlessly cruel and inappropriate. If I were to say that same thing to my best friend, however, she’d recognise it for what it was: a compliment, or even just a statement of fact. I love my hideous dyke shoes. I love being a hideous dyke. Unless a man on the street calls me that. It’s complicated.
I thought a lot about queer humour – which can be weird, campy and frequently twisted (see: John Waters, the gay following behind Julia Davis' Nighty Night, the Mr G character in Summer Heights High) – while watching Emma Seligman's new teen movie Bottoms, released in the UK last week. The film is rich with off-colour silliness that frequently spills into the absurd (“Excuse me, could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principles office?” says the school principal via the intercom within the first few minutes). And there is very little curbing of this humour in hopes of appeasing a broader audience (“Just stay in your lane until you’re munching beaver at Wellesley!” the principle snaps at the two leads, PJ and Josie, played by Rachel Sennot and Ayo Edebiri respectively.)
It’s an irreverent weirdness that has baffled some critics. In a New Yorker review, Richard Brody admonishes Bottoms’ “lack of politics” despite the “sole novelty” of the film being its “gay-centric plotline”, writing: “The high school milieu of Bottoms is marked by a casual indifference to matters of gender and sexuality that passes for untroubled tolerance.” Audiences are used to seeing queer movies – especially movies about and starring queer women – that are stooped in abject misery, or in which the characters are constantly thinking about their queerness in regards to systematic oppression. But Bottoms is arguably a film for the gays as opposed to just about them. And many of us spend just as much time being disgusting little worms as we do thinking about queer oppression. And is that not also a political act? To speak or behave as freely in public as we do among our friends?
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It’s worth pointing out, too, that the film has an internet-brained, Gen Z flavour that might be what is confusing older audiences. Vibes are prioritised over intricate plot lines, and absurdity reigns supreme. “You’re skinny too as well,” Josie says to her crush Isabel (Havana Rose Liu). “You’re a real skinny-mini aren’t you? Probably should eat. Gonna send you to the hospital for how skinny you are.” The ad-lib comedy is often allowed to be quick and weird, like scrolling through the right side of TikTok, and the colour-saturated outfits and one-liners appear custom-built to be screenshot and circulated online. Just as memes fall apart when you try to explain them, so too does the film’s offbeat dialogue (“Who is bell hooks and why do we care?” demands Isabel).
The further the film goes on, the loopier it becomes, until the whole thing culminates in a gory fight scene involving pineapple juice, stabbings and lesbian snogging. It’s confounding, haywire, absurd and spectacular. As with John Waters’ 2022 fiction novel Liarmouth – which is about a sociopath called Marsha whose daughter is the leader of a trampoline park, and whose mother runs a cosmetic surgery business for pets – a tidy, well-sewn plot is besides the point. Those after something more steady or more serious would be better off watching Ammonite or Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Both excellent movies, with all of the grounding Bottoms lacks but none of its seductively off-kilter brilliance.
Bottoms has all the makings of a cult classic in the sense that it is beloved by many, and misunderstood or disliked by everyone else. When Jennifer’s Body first came out in 2009, it was absolutely destroyed by critics (The A.V. Club described it as “clever for its own sake, a showy piece of writing that doesn’t have that all-important ballast of sincerity”, while the Guardian dismissed it as a film that “doesn't really know quite what it wants to be”). Now, Jennifer’s Body is considered to be a definitive film in the schlocky queer canon. In a decade’s time, I have no doubt that Bottoms will similarly come out on top.
