Franchise Friday: Chasing Amy (1997)
Kevin Smith talks about sex, and this time it's not just a joke.
There was a brief period of time when Chasing Amy was one of my favorite movies.
I didn’t see the film in theaters, but I’d heard the chatter. Kevin Smith had apparently rebounded from the critical and commercial debacle that was Mallrats and delivered something that built on the promise of Clerks, combining his wit and love for dirty jokes with a story that was personal, honest and actually had something to say.
I rented the film shortly after it was released on VHS. I’ve already written about how Clerks scandalized me with its graphic language, but it was possible that Chasing Amy made my ears burst into flames. I’d never heard sex discussed so openly and graphically in a film and, given the evangelical circles I’d grown up in, I’d never heard gay and lesbian issues talked about so much and without judgment. This movie was doing something that I’d never seen a movie do: talking about sexuality with wit, honesty and humor (I was only a senior in high school, so I was unaware that, actually, movies had been doing this for a long time).
But more than that, in my twenties, I identified with Ben Affleck’s Holden, who befriended a woman he had no hope of a relationship with, only to fall in love with her anyway. As someone who regularly derailed good friendships with declarations of love, I felt like Kevin Smith was a kindred spirit. Here was a film for us, I thought, the good friends without a shot. The nice guys.
Watching it 25 years later with the benefit of hindsight, I now see that the movie really is the portrait of a man who destroys two good friendships because of his assumptions, insecurity and pride. But unlike some of Smith’s other earlier work, Chasing Amy is totally aware of the kinks in its protagonist’s armor, and that’s the point.
Remember the Nineties?
Chasing Amy is a product of its time, a film that couldn’t feel more like a relic of the Nineties if it were blasting Smells Like Teen Spirit over footage of Friends. Its indie aesthetic is full of muted colors and static shots of people talking. Its characters are self-absorbed navel-gazers searching for meaning in every bit of pop culture. There’s, of course, an alternative rock soundtrack to propel the whole thing.
Affleck stars as Holden, a comic book artist who has a moderately successful book he’s created with his best friend, Banky (Jason Lee). During a convention, he meets fellow artist Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams). Holden and Alyssa hit it off while chatting over a game of darts, and she invites him to a party at a local bar. Holden thinks it’s a greenlight to pursue a relationship, but quickly learns that Alyssa’s gay. The two strike up a friendship, which soon blossoms into a case of unrequited love that eventually becomes requited, much to Banky’s chagrin. But as Holden learns more about Alyssa’s past, he can’t come to turns with the discomfort he feels about his lack of sexual experience.
In the Nineties, the film felt extremely progressive, and it’s proof of how far we’ve come that now some of it feels dated. Banky’s many homophobic slurs would get Jason Lee canceled these days, even if the entire point of the movie is not an endorsement of Banky but acknowledgement that he’s an idiot. There’s the treatment of the LGBTQ community as exotic and rare that feels quaint and short-sighted today. And the film’s racial politics, concerning a Black, gay comic book artist who puts up a façade as a tough-talking militant, are squishy; Smith brings up ideas we still wrestle with about identity and image, and Dwight Ewell is great in the role, but knowing this comes from the pen of a white man is a bit discomfiting.
Smith writes with a sense of curiosity, and watching it again I noticed how it’s Holden — who sees himself as a progressive ally but it still set in his ways — who is presented as an out of touch douchebag; Banky’s naivety and ignorance are both treated as such, but he has genuine curiosity. In the scene after Holden learns about Alyssa’s sexual identity, he broods in the corner of a bar while Banky questions her about it, sometimes uncouthly, but his questions lead to a genuine and funny dialogue, a frank discussion about sexual intimacy and war wounds framed as a tribute to the Orca scene in Jaws.
While some of Chasing Amy still feels dated, on this rewatch it struck me that while we’ve improved in our acceptance and openness toward LGBTQ issues (except for some that still throw a hissy fit when Disney tries to be inclusive), there’s still discomfort talking openly and frankly about sex, especially when it challenges our preconceptions. Smith’s film is frank and curious, and for the first (and last?) time, he writes a film that isn’t just full of sex jokes; it’s a movie about sex, sexuality and relationships. You can agree with it or disagree with it, but he’s not shying from the conversation. Smith’s film played a key role in helping me understand my own homophobia in my twenties, which is the first step toward moving beyond it.
The film is more complex than just “the movie about the straight dude who fell in love with a lesbian,” which it was painted as. It’s about the complexities of sexuality. Making Holden a bit of a jerk who assumes a single women is in to him, assumes friendship between a man and a woman should lead to romance, and then torpedoes the entire thing with his own feels genuine and insightful in a way Smith’s films hadn’t. And the friendship between Holden and Banky is one of the best Smith’s written, with genuine tension and stakes. Lee and Affleck have strong chemistry, and Banky’s platonic love for Holden means he’s aware of where Holden’s own stubbornness and pride could lead him.
Moving past Mallrats
It’s probably an understatement to say that Kevin Smith is not known for taking criticism well; the entire debacle following Cop Out, where he said critics should have to pay to review a movie, is proof of that. And he has a tendency toward the reactionary. When Jersey Girl, his big move away from the View Askewniverse, bombed, he retreated back to the familiar with Clerks 2.
With Mallrats, he suffered his first critical drubbing. I said in my look back at that film, not as a criticism, that Smith revealed he didn’t want to be the Linklater protégé many had figured him for, and had more in common with a raunchy John Hughes or John Landis. But Chasing Amy is very clearly a response to the criticism he received with Mallrats. Holden and Banky are at odds about selling the rights to their comic book to MTV, digging into that oh-so-’90s fear of selling out. There’s the constant fear of being known for “dick and fart jokes,” and even when Jay and Silent Bob show up, as the inspirations for the comic, they poke fun at “Snootchie Bootchies” and the silly caricatures that they had become.
Throughout, Holden confesses to Alyssa that he wants to have something personal to say. Smith uses Chasing Amy as a chance to make something personal; he’s written before that the film is him grappling with his own relationship failures and insecurities. And while the film is often very funny, there is a feeling of genuine confession and personal musing, as Smith looks back on his identity as an artist, his own preoccupations with sex and sexuality, and the complexity of human relationships. It’s easily his best script, even if at times he’s a bit too enamored with his own dialogue and too fond of his own insightful bon mots.
Affleck has always had a knack for creating nice guys who you also want to punch in the face, and that started with Holden. He’s funny and charming, but the film is also aware that he’s ignorant about the complexities of real relationships and set in his ways, the product of his Catholic background (Smith would dig deep into Catholicism in his next film, Dogma). When he delivers his declaration of love to Alyssa, 20-year-old me read it as honest and heart-rending; today, you can see the notes of vanity and narcissism as he tries to force a relationship he has no right to. Adams is also great, able to tap into Smith’s vulgar poetry with gusto while also creating one of the few fully formed female characters in his filmography. The film walks a tricky line in explaining why Alyssa would eventually choose a relationship with Holden, but I appreciate its sensitivity to what that would do to Alyssa’s own identity, friendships and community. The film may have dialogue and threads that have aged poorly, but much of it still feels relevant and progressive.
Smith’s biggest asset has always populated his films with great supporting characters. Lee once again nearly walks away with the film as Banky, who’s a bit more of an innocent and less of a total jerk than Brodie. The sequence where Banky goads on Hooper X during a comic con panel (and Hooper’s request) is still a brazen and funny bit of racial politicking, and Lee has several great lines (“what’s a Nubian?”). But there’s also real love for Holden, a willingness to do anything for his friend and a heartbreak when that partnership eventually deteriorates. Brian O’ Halloran pops up again as an MTV executive (and right over his shoulder is a very young Matt Damon, just on the cusp of Good Will Hunting, which Smith produced). Jason Mewes continues to impress me on this rewatch; I’ve always written him off as an amateur actor who got roped into his friend’s projects, and maybe that’s true. But in these first three films, he displays a real sense of comic timing and an infectious joy of performance.
Smith abandons the cartoon flourishes of Mallrats, and it can’t be said that Chasing Amy is a very visually arresting film. But the grunginess of its nightclubs, hovel-like art studios and city parks fits the no-pretenses approach to conversations and relationships, and it appears at this point that Smith is simply accepting his limitations as a visual artist and focusing on his writing; again, here and in Dogma, he’s at his absolute best as a writer, and I appreciate the focus.
The film builds to two big scenes. In the first, Holden sits at a diner with Jay and Silent Bob, and the former gets his rare moment to deliver a monologue about his own relationship history and how Holden is headed down a path to heartbreak that looks very familiar. There’s nothing wrong with Bob’s story, except that it reads as a moment for Smith, the director, to insert himself and say “this is what the movie is about; this is what I learned.” It’s not an awful sequence, but it feels overwritten and indulgent, even if I love the idea of Bob going on to become a Vegas dancer. It likely felt funnier in 1997, when it was the rare occasion for mass audiences to hear Silent Bob speak. But after two decades of Kevin Smith’s loquacious (and very funny) Q&A’s, it just feels like listening to the dude ramble.
The film’s climactic scene, in which Holden proposes a threesome in order to heal things between Banky and Alyssa, also lands flat. For one, it undercuts any use of Bob’s monologue in the previous scene, because Holden refuses to learn the lesson. It’s not a funny sequence, even though it’s very obvious Smith is aware that Holden’s request is asinine, wrong-headed and proof of his inability to grow. Adams sells Alyssa’s emotional retort with the right amount of power, but the rest of the scene feels stilted and awkward, a plot complication instead of a true moment of catharsis, which also leaves the film’s final moments of tentative reconciliation feeling hollow. It might have been wiser to swap the Holden/Banky/Alyssa scene with the Jay and Silent Bob once; narratively, there’s a much cleaner through line to Holden irrevocably screwing things up with his friends to getting the wisdom from Bob and then, one year later, trying to make amends. It leaves the final 20 minutes of the movie feeling directionless and the emotional punches Smith aims for never lands.
Still, I wish this was the type of film Smith had gone on to attempt more often. Dogma, which we’ll get to next week, is another creative step forward, but after that it’s back to the cartoon antics of the Askewniverse, a brief flirtation with horror comedy, and then right back to the world of Jay and Silent Bob. With Chasing Amy and Dogma Smith was a writer with something to say, and he knew it. Even with whatever flaws those two films had, it’s more interesting than even some of his more polished comedy efforts.
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Random Topics
So, I wanted to get one last Lent email out of the way, but as I wrote last week, closing things off at my job and some other obligations made that difficult. I did watch The Miracle Maker, which is streaming on Amazon Prime and would be a great Easter weekend movie to watch with the kids; coincidentally, Steven D. Greydanus wrote a fantastic piece about that 1999 film this week. On my end, I’ll link to one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written, for Christ and Pop Culture back in 2016, about a controversial Jesus movie, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.
Also, this weekend sees the release of the third entry in Warner Bros’ Fantastic Beasts saga. I hadn’t seen the first two films, so I binged them over the weekend. I think Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the best of the three, because it’s the most prone to whimsy and the Harry Potter universe stuff hasn’t overpowered it yet. The Crimes of Grindelwald is a dull slog, and I can’t fathom why this series thought overserious, dark bits of mythology building were the right direction to head. I do think this week’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is a slight improvement over Grindelwald; it’s a bit more focused and fun, and Mads Mikkelsen is a great substitute for Johnny Depp, who doesn’t appear because of his Johnny Depp-ness. But I’m still not quite feeling the magic. I might have more to write about this franchise next week, but for now, my thoughts on Secrets of Dumbledore are up at CinemaNerdz.
That’s it for this week! I hope all of you who celebrate have a great Easter weekend, and we’ll be back for more next week!