'Bottoms': Comedy is now legal at AMC

"Umm, it's giving funniest movie of 2023" - Me, in my Gen-Z era

I didn’t want to like ‘Bottoms’. We’ve been over this so many times, most recently last week, but I am a Type 1 Contrarian who zigs when everyone zags but will get into zagging the moment everyone starts zigging. This is my gift; my curse. Who am I? I’m Henning, man.

New York Magazine blessed ‘Bottoms’ with a whole-ass COVER story last month, a well-reported piece that nevertheless annoyed the shit out of me for preemptively canonizing a movie opening in like four theaters its opening weekend. “Finally, the horny, bloody lesbian incel comedy we’ve been waiting for” the cover touted, first cousin to “the [blank] we need right now.” ‘Bottoms’ wouldn’t just be funny; ‘Bottoms’ would be TIMELY and TRANSGRESSIVE and NECESSARY.

Which — listen, I wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before yesterday. It’s not lost on me that, especially in these apocalyptic media End Times, entertainment journalism is as much a form of entertainment marketing. Sometimes you just gotta say shit for clicks! (A click that worked, by the way, considering it got me to one of those four theaters opening weekend to see the movie.)

‘Bottoms’ is transgressive, but less for what it depicts on screen than what it says about a culture of moviemaking that’s grown so timid, we think “gay female ‘Fight Club’” might as well be a premise for Gaspar Noe. The story’s ultimately pretty simple: two high school seniors, desperate to hook up with their crushes before they all graduate, start a “female empowerment” group (read: fight club) to win their affections. Things, as you might imagine, get out of control from there.

If you read that setup and thought “sounds a little like ‘Super Bad’ — you’re right! Think of Rachel Sennott (‘Shiva Baby’) as the wild n’ crazy Jonah Hill-type, with Ayo Edebiri (‘The Bear’) carrying Michael Cera’s anxiety mantle. These broads will stop at nothing to get some! ‘Bottoms’’ DNA also includes a bit of ‘The Breakfast Club’¹, ‘American Pie’, early Apatow. No one’s really breaking the teen — or teen-adjacent — comedy mold here. But that’s also the movie’s primary strength, is the way it trades in archetypes with which we’re all already familiar and then, you know, gays ‘em up². The most radical thing about ‘Bottoms’ is just that it allows itself to be fucking funny.

For too often this past… let’s say decade, we’ve been subjected to “comedies” that barely crack a joke, that seem skittish to even be making them in the first place, whose characters serve mostly as vessels for some larger sociopolitical ideology. Ideologies I usually agree with, but still!

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SIDEBAR: If I really wanted to get into it here, I’d tell you how the national decline in both religious practice and governmental confidence has resulted in Americans now looking toward entertainment as a form of moral instruction, re-casting TV/film characters as teachers we should be following, and not fallible dramatic creations (YES, I’m talking about ‘Ted Lasso’. I’m always talking about ‘Ted Lasso’). But I wont!

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If ‘Bottoms’ slots neatly into a queer Gen-Z neoliberal framework, it’s only as a matter of fact. That’s the world these characters inhabit. That’s the world director Emma Seligman (‘Shiva Baby’) inhabits. Beyond that, I’m not so sure the movie cares? Any statements it might be making about The World Today™️ are mediated through character and story, and not the other way around. It’s sort of like — and I say this with love for both the movie AND the moment, in a vacuum — the anti-”it’s impossible to be a woman” speech from ‘Barbie’. Roast me in the comments if you must but ‘Barbie’ grinds to a halt as America Ferrera, an underdeveloped character, unloads a beautifully written list of very true things that, while relevant to the movie, also seems to exist entirely outside of it. The characters in ‘Bottoms’ would have listened to that speech and kept interrupting it with fart noises, and a broken nose or two, in their own equally valid examination of modern feminism.

Most of my favorite comedies aren’t actually about anything. ‘Step Brothers’ — that’s just two guys goofing around, basically improv battling each other. ‘Dumb & Dumber’ is a series of physical comedy vignettes disguised as a road trip movie. I suppose ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut’ is about censorship, but it’s probably more about Satan’s toxic romantic relationship with Saddam Hussein.

‘Bottoms’, a worthy successor to this great comedy lineage, seems proud to be dumb, to revel in the weirdness and myopia of its characters, each of whom is allowed to be as flawed — even terrible — as we’ve allowed male comedy characters to be, you know, forever.

My personal hope is that we’re finally turning the corner on… let’s call it over-sensitivity in comedy, returning the reins to writers and performers and filmmakers who are actually funny, and not just using the concept of humor to teach us how to Be Better. We undermine comedy when we demand it also validate and/or promote a particular worldview! And we also make it harder for me and Clay to — post-strike — sell our hard-R Christmas comedy, ‘Sleigh Queen’. There’s a Santa sex scene in there that really demands a certain cultural chillness.

1. Maybe I’m brain-dead, maybe ‘The Breakfast Club’ just wasn’t part of my formative movie diet, but someone had to point out the poster homage to me. A real Magic Eye puzzle moment when I finally saw it

2. “Gay” is of course not an Insta filter but an identity, specifically one I do not share, and it’s not lost on me that a straight white elder Millennial man might be underplaying the social significance of a movie like ‘Bottoms’. There remain far fewer queer shows and movies than FOX News would have you think! Still, I maintain that ‘Bottoms’’ “this story just happens to be about queer girls” energy is very much by design