"Bottoms" Review: The LGBTQ+ Community Needs - And Deserves - Better

In this cheap aim at "representation," we learn it's time to take one giant leap for gaykind.

October 15, 2023

I’m gay.

It’s not something I discuss often because such discussion would mostly feel decontextualized and thus unnecessary.

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“Man, this O’s team has that classic Orioles magic. It’s amazing what Mike Elias has done with this organization: they have a bright future.”

“Yeah, thank God he drafted Adley Rutschman. Dude’s hot, and his ass is insane.” (This statement is true, but in the context of watching a baseball game, doesn't need to be said)

Or even something mild, like

“I think this is the best steak I’ve ever had. How’s yours?”

“It’s good, but not as good as the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun.”

Or perhaps something more direct, like

“I love long drives.”

“I’m gay.”

Like all sexuality, it’s something to address in context: this article is very much “in context.”

I experienced my sexual awakening thanks to Showtime’s groundbreaking series Queer as Folk, which chronicled the lives of gay and lesbian friends living in Pittsburgh during the early 2000s. The show featured a collection of graphic sex scenes that showcased just how gorgeous the human form can be and irrefutable proof that there is a God, because my God, Gale Harold.

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Seeing gay people on screen shamelessly embracing their sexuality and insisting on living the lives bigots sought to legislate out of legitimacy was enough to inspire interest and loyalty (except in watching anything to do with Melanie and Lindsey, because fuck me, find two more B-O-R-I-N-G characters ever on television).

Of course, Queer as Folk went off the air nearly 20 years ago, and its cultural relevance has evaporated in the face of all it helped further. Its impact is felt today, and its importance is impossible to forget, but it’s not enough anymore.

I’m 27. Before I blink, I’ll be at the big 3-0: if I still felt like simply seeing those like me doing what I want to do was enough, I’d feel like I failed by keeping myself emotionally trapped in a 2005 mentality. People are as they are; we can only do so much to help them. It’s our responsibility to grow, evolve, change.

As such, one must accept that Bottoms is nothing more than a reductive aim at exploiting many people’s lack of personal growth to go, “We’re doing everything you’ve seen in every teen sex comedy ever in a less funny, engaging, and insightful way, but we’re gay, so that means we’re awesome!”

No.

You can’t just show up, make a movie female-led and lesbian-themed, and bathe in the self-congratulations you extract from pressured film critics. It’s far past the time we commend art for its social relevance or because we know condemning it for its many deficiencies will elicit a visceral, negative response from those it represents. The LGBTQ+ community should have more self-respect than to settle for general representation and not challenge its artists to do more to solidify them as a viable group to represent on film.

It’s bad enough that the film fails in every conceivable way, representation aside. Bottoms doesn’t have the personality or creative force to meet its ambition, so it becomes a disjointed mish-mash of 2000s teen comedy satire and Tarantino gore-fests (the decaf version). The premise - that two lesbian teenagers start a fight club to manipulate their crushes into hooking up with them - invites (admittedly problematic) bonkers insanity, but the film never achieves it.

Its opening scene, where the sexist, philandering star quarterback for the school’s football team - the only thing the town cares about - gets lightly dinged on the leg before collapsing in laughable melodrama, hints at what Bottoms could have been in the hands of more caring creators. It could’ve consistently played up the lunacy but refused to commit.

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It’s why, at the very end, when the football field, feminist-uprising bloodbath occurs, it feels cheap and unearned. Despite being a focal point of the marketing strategy, the actual fight club angle gets underutilized: we rarely see any actual fighting, and even if we did, no one is qualified to train anyone in hand-to-hand combat (which is the entire point). How, then, do the girls give the villainous cross-town rival their bloody comeuppance while simultaneously shoving the town’s collective misogyny down its throat? As a justified climax for its story, it fails. As an earned genre-specific conclusion, it falls flat in the face of how little establishing was done to justify it.

Why, exactly, does Isabel reciprocate Josie’s affections? Not only does the film never hint at her sexuality, implying a dangerous validation of pursuing our “seemingly” heterosexual crushes, but Josie is a charisma black hole with no discernible personality and nothing of interest to say. She’s nice to Isabel, and for many that’s enough even deep into adulthood, but if it were true that simply being nice to someone was enough to get them to fall for you, half the threads on Reddit wouldn’t exist.

Movies like Bottoms are insufferable: unfunny, creatively vacant, derivative, poorly thought-out, badly acted, uninspired, and entitled enough to believe that being what it is earns respect it doesn’t deserve. Look no further than the montage that immediately succeeds the fracturing of PJ and Josie’s friendship, which exploits the millennial nostalgia of Avril Lavigne’s iconic debut single “Complicated:” it thinks its target audience’s long-standing adoration for the song will negate that it's a tacked-on, drawn-out, horribly-edited montage that ends as abruptly as it begins.

It’d be a lie to say few films are this lifeless: many creators lack the talent or integrity to make something worthwhile and settle for abstraction or topicality (or both) to placate those who use those to validate themselves. One doesn’t need a microscope to detect the flaws in this philosophy; its exploitative nature is blindingly obvious. So, at film’s end, its fans only have the conclusions they want to draw and none that are earned.

No, a romance that’s merely wish fulfillment for the ludicrous fantasy of adolescent homosexuals - their straight crush will love them within a purposefully vague elaboration on their sexuality - is not touching.

Are the football players representative of an oppressive patriarchal society? Sure, but the film refuses to commit to this allegory's ludicrous execution, so we get left with comedic promise but too much restraint to feel fully imagined.

Its supporters argue that the film’s queerness isn’t a defining characteristic, so the film deserves credit for portraying the hormonal chaos of adolescence in a way that feels accepting of its characters’ orientation without relying on it entirely, a claim that’s hair-brained at best and disingenuous at worst. Every choice made gets made for a reason, in life and thus in film. If the creators didn’t want the film's queerness to define it, the entire plot wouldn’t hinge on the girls’ primary reason for social ostracization being their sexuality (sorry, the incessant “show don’t tell" “ugly and untalented” reasoning is expository screenwriting at its worst).

The film wants to be gay because it knows that without that social context, it offers nothing. It pats itself on the back for acknowledging misogyny, rape, bullying, etc. but has nothing to say. Of course, many would argue that “not everything needs to be spelled out,” but just like in life, intent shines. No matter the words or actions, we can sense people’s motives, and the more discerning aren’t so reactive as to take something at face value because they want it to be or mean something for their sake.

Bottoms wants you to read into it more than it deserves, like when a woman says that despite having gotten sexually assaulted multiple times, she’s more frustrated with people’s unawareness of her intellect, which aren’t mutually exclusive and thus can either coexist or be two completely separate societal issues that adversely affect women. It’s a classic example of “Wow, I relate to that,” despite the actual content of the statement being significantly less impactful than if it had been fully realized and elaborated on as a tenet of the film’s thematics.

At some point, both as a community and as individuals, we need to become more self-reliant and thus challenge art to do more than exploit our inability to be self-reliant. It’s always fulfilling when a movie speaks to us, but praising movies for grazing the surface means letting art do the heavy lifting for us.

Bottoms is unfunny, creatively vacant, lacking in personality, derivative, badly acted, poorly thought-out, and exploitative in wrangling its marginalized target audience for a 91-minute self-love session, and thus signals that we must end this trend of releasing half-assed movies that appeal to a specific group of people and expect that existence equals meaning.

Audiences need to work on themselves so that “Chicken Soup For the Soul” type representation doesn’t satisfy, and we demand deeper exploration of what it means to exist as an oppressed group in America. Creators need to evolve beyond their self-consciousness and want to put themselves at risk, knowing that said deeper exploration might divide critics and lessen that mindless worship off which they feed.

Most of all, everyone needs to stop thinking that just because something is for them, it’s worth something. It’s the cycle that keeps us needing validation we could learn to give ourselves if we bothered to try. If not that, we could at least offer that general representation but with far more insight now than we got with Queer as Folk when it premiered 23 years ago, and make no mistake, Bottoms is no Queer as Folk in the representation department.

Bottoms is gay: no matter what its supporters say, it desperately wants that to matter. Sadly, it is a poorly executed movie in every way, from its commentary to its genre-specific aims to its required standards as an overall film: no amount of pearl-clutching over acknowledging its inadequacies will change that.

So, if you’re out there, you can’t use some idea of right-wing "woke"-hating to dismiss this because the person writing it is gay, liberal, and simply tired of seeing creators of any orientation churn out lazy, reductive garbage to exploit our collective need for validation. It’s time we progress as people and thus as creators and filmgoers: no more acclaiming movies just because you identify with the characters. It’s time to do away with the Bottoms and bring in the tops (or power bottoms).