Sav Rodgers weaves personal and pop culture history together as he unpacks the legacy of Kevin Smith's 1997 romantic comedy.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the least gay sport is ice hockey and the least gay ‘gay’ movie is Kevin Smith’s loved and hated 1997 indie rom-com Chasing Amy. Take this pivotal scene: in an ice hockey stadium parking lot, a man with a goatee, sporting a plaid-shirt-over-white-tee combo is slut-shaming a woman with a pinned-up blow-dry and a leather jacket. Today, this couple seem to have no erotic chemistry or date-appropriate clothing. But this was the 90s – when representations of ‘youth’ were dominated by the super-clean fantasies of Friends and Sex And The City.
During this lovers’ row, cis-het Holden (Ben Affleck) harangues queer Amy (Joey Lauren Adams) over her past threesomes with men and women until she cries out that she was “an experimental girl” until he “sated” her. This is one of many lines marking Chasing Amy as written by a cis-het man with a saviour-dick complex. Watching it, you wonder what Smith (who also made the 1994 cult film Clerks), a trailblazer of mumblecore, stoner comedy, could have been thinking. In a new documentary superfan Sav Rodgers – a trans male filmmaker – tries to find out. Or rather, he tries to try. As Sav examines the original movie’s controversial power over his life, Chasing Chasing Amy emerges as a baggy, amiable yet frustrating film, with a sting in its limp tail.
The form of Chasing Chasing Amy – memoir meets fan film meets cultural history – is promisingly novel, but suffers from too much artless truth on the one hand (Sav’s love story with girlfriend Riley) and Kevin Smith’s disingenuous ‘I’m just a bro’ act on the other. The problem lies partly in its premise, for Sav was saved by watching Chasing Amy, back when he was a suicidal teenage girl, and partly it lies in the decision by Sav, a bright, gentle person – but not a scintillating character per se – to put his own life on film. The talking head interviewees can’t pull apart Chasing Amy without seeming to give Sav a kicking. This is a film that suffers from too much sensitivity and no attack – until it explodes from an unexpected quarter.
Everyone in the film appears gagged by anxiety around LGBTQ representation, except Sav’s hero, Smith. One claim Smith makes is that he wanted to “whip in some gay content for my [gay] brother” – casually betraying his sense of entitlement. The mouthy, chaotic charm of Chasing Amy places it alongside Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and the lesbian Go Fish – films famed for voicing alternatives to dominant white and straight culture. But scenes like the one where Holden and Amy compare dick versus tongue penetration, and Amy demonstrates a bizarre, spread-fingered form of fisting, are written from a profoundly hetero imagination. Sav, however, is far too awed to query Smith’s prurient ham-fisting of the queer experience. Nor does he offer nuanced, detailed insight into why Amy’s fluid sexuality offered him a framework for his identity.
The only eloquent and critical voice, here, is Go Fish writer Guinevere Turner, whose “emotional romance” with Kevin Smith’s creative partner, Scott Mosier, inspired Chasing Amy. Turner is a gem and a highlight is listening to her talk about the beginnings of lesbian indie movie-making, but Turner’s closeness to Mosier and Smith appears to have dampened her “decades of dyke rage” against the film. However, all is not lost, for, finally, in true indie spirit, the very hesitancy of Sav’s interview technique allows an ugly truth to emerge.
Subtext has a funny way of insinuating itself into a gap. Much of the film’s unintentional entertainment comes from watching Smith’s friends stepping around the turd of Smith’s icky immaturities. But it’s with the arrival of ‘Amy’ – Joey Lauren Adams – that we slide beneath Smith’s baseball cap-wearing, puppy-eyed mea culpa schtick.
Once Adams is seated beside Smith, tilted away from him, her mistrustful body language tells a different story to the one she once spouted for the original movie’s publicity about him loving women. Without spoiling anything, it’s sufficient to say that ‘Amy’ herself exposes the sickness of the straight white male ‘chase’. Hers is the flaming torch that any non-cis-het person might be expected to take up. Instead, Sav switches focus to Harvey Weinstein, who selected Chasing Amy as a Miramax film. Weinstein becomes a convenient monstrous shadow, dwarfing revelations about Smith’s behaviour. He is the bête noir that allows Rodgers’ film to end in a vaguely victim-y, vaguely hopeful space.
By making this film about his identity, Sav Rodgers is obliged to dish the truth. There’s no one definitive queer person or queer movie, but an LGBTQ perspective can include humour, irony, empathy and rage against hypocrisy, heteronormative or otherwise. It’s hard to take down your heroes, but it’s disappointing that Rodgers never once raises his fist.
Published 12 Oct 2023
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