‘Bottoms’ Portrays the Real Lesbian Experience in a Very Unreal Way
By Anne Gregg
Spoilers for Bottoms
“Gay people are more acceptable if they are talented or conventionally attractive. The ugly truth of Bottoms is that everyone still judges everyone else based on how they look”
Bottoms is messy and that is what makes it perfect. While gay teens in high school movies are often either incredibly stereotypical or perfect activists, the teens in Bottoms are not. Bottoms follows PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) as they start a fight club at their school to get their crushes to fall in love with them. Speaking on behalf of all lesbians, we cannot simply ask our crushes out. PJ pitches the fight club as a way for women to defend themselves after hearing how scared some of her fellow female classmates are of boys from their rival school. Their fight club becomes a safe space for the girls that gives them a space to bond and the tools for taking back control of their lives. Unfortunately, PJ and Josie have little interest in the altruistic aspects of the club.
Bottoms is wonderful because the lesbian main characters in it are not. Most movies about queer characters try to show the audience that queer people are just like everyone else: They’re good, kind, and deserving of love. Having media that shows that we are people deserving of love is great. It normalizes our identity and provides comfort. But not every queer character should have to be a perfect person. PJ and Josie are not bad in a villainous way. They are not evil. They are just immature, self-absorbed teenagers. They aren’t making grand strides for women and queer people. While other characters, especially Hazel (Ruby Cruz), work to make the club empowering, PJ and Josie have a different agenda. They are not trying to be young feminist heroes. They’re trying to get girls.
Bottoms has to balance the modern genre conventions of high school media with its desire for having problematic queer female characters, making its world completely absurd. While the narrative follows the typical best friend coming of age story (the main characters are inseparable best friends; they decide to step out of their comfort zone and embark on a crazy adventure; they have a falling out, and then inevitably make up) the plots that surrounds those narrative arcs are always weird and unexpected. For example, the fight club kills a few football players — but not in a female revenge fantasy way — at the climax of the film. Most teen comedies have strange or absurd elements to heighten the comedy, but they usually don’t push it that far. By doing this, Bottoms absolves itself from having to stick to a code of morality or social sensibility. PJ gets to be messy, and so does Joise, although it is clear that PJ is uncomfortable with the lies she continues to tell to the members of the fight club throughout the film, despite continuing to tell them.
Bottoms’ comedic style is reminiscent of 2000’s high school movies such as Mean Girls and Superbad, which are notorious for their absurdity and comedic jabs at every social group. But Bottoms’ humor is done in a way that the viewer knows that its queer femme director, Emma Seligman, is not trying to put down women or gay people. The main characters are called slurs with reckless abandon. They are addressed by their principal as the “ugly, untalented gays.” In fact, one of the jokes of the show is that PJ and Josie have to be more than gay to be made fun of, they also have to be unexceptional. Gay people are more acceptable if they are talented or conventionally attractive. The ugly truth of Bottoms is that everyone still judges everyone else based on how they look.
Teen movies have hidden themselves in recent years. The characters are not cruel about each other’s bodies unless there is a mean girl around. Instead, everyone is attractive and no one comments on it. PJ and Josie constantly judge how they look and how everyone else looks. A lot of it is for comedy. At first they are upset that their club has not brought in any girls that they’re attracted to, and the main characters are constantly made fun of for their looks. But this is reality. Despite stereotypes, many lesbians care about what they look like and are still affected by conventional beauty standards. Because of its absurdity, Bottoms is able to create some of the most realistic young queer women portrayed in media. They are messy, awkward, self-conscious, and completely self absorbed. But they still have humanity. They still care about others and want to be decent people. PJ, Josie, and the rest of the characters of Bottoms are high schoolers coming-of-age in the chaotic and wild world of the 2020s. That chaos is just created by a teenage fight club and a football obsessed high school instead of by pandemics and politics.
About the Author
Anne Gregg is a poet and writer from Northwest Indiana. She is an English Writing major at DePauw University and is the editor-in-chief of her campus’s literary magazine, A Midwestern Review. She is a Media Fellow at her university and loves dissecting how LGBTQ+ people are portrayed in film and tv.
