On Chasing Amy

Apparently, liking Kevin Smith is now... out, or over (given the topic). It's not news to me, as even Smith and his View Askew monkeys revel in their 90's iconography, and have settled on making the Web their home. But while I enjoy the podcasts, I freely admit to enjoying Kevin Smith's older films. Jay and Silent Bob still make me laugh, even if I do so now with an eyeroll -- although Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back does not make me laugh, nor did it ever; Clerks remains one of my favorite films, though not "top ten" favorites, and Clerks 2 is far better than anyone is giving it credit for being (yet -- trust me); and I've watched Mallrats four or five times since it's been streaming. So it was that I went to Cinematical Movie Club to read some chick's review of Chasing Amy and figured out why no one likes Kevin Smith now:

He's a guilty pleasure many feel more comfortable dismissing as part of their errant youth, or the 1990s, in general. Recognizing Kevin Smith's cool as part of a bygone era is one of the steps to becoming an adult, I guess. Well, that and it's still the Wild, Wide Web in which anyone can become Somebody, if they just dream, and Kevin Smith is a threat to many in that regard. But that isn't what this post's about.

In her retro-review, this aging hipster says, as imperfectly as her grammar allows, "...consider Kevin Smith's audience. If not written by Smith and featuring the faces of View Askew, how many of them would have forked over the cash to see a film frankly discussing homosexuality, race, and tolerance?"

I find that derogatory to the point of incitement, but I can't really tell if the writer (is it writress?) meant it as such, or if she's just as clueless as her Engrish teacher most certainly were. Regardless, she does a decent job of pointing-out how sexually immature the 1990's male was, but she's a girl. Besides, her good points would fall flat even if she hadn't lead with such a ridiculous notion, so allow me to provide the real story of sexuality, both male and female, in the 1990s:

Comic books sucked, because all the good artists left Marvel only to learn they didn't know shit about business; movies sucked because Hollywood had developed a solid formula for every genre, brand, star, and idea, and refused to waver from it; and music sucked because some moron shot himself, so everyone on the radio was whining about that, while everyone else was raving til dawn because they might as well shoot themselves -- because life sucked, art sucked, and everything was just a big waste of time, anyway. "Whatever" was the catch-phrase, with the inflection on the first e -- as in, "Whatever!"

"That guy who sings that song about teen angst shot himself!"

"Whatever. I don't even know what that is."

Eventually, it became "Whatev," because life was that short! Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC and everyone was like, "Whatev." But I digress...

It all most certainly was immature, but everything was -- on every level, and by everyone -- and being gay was nowhere near as "normal," nor as complacent, as even the famously ribald Chasing Amy makes it seem. There was still a lot of prejudice toward homosexuality, but it was primarily aimed at gay men. Gay girls got a pass because it was hot. They kissed on TV and everyone tuned-in. "Whatev! Of course I watched it! What are you, gay?" Sexuality became the de facto way to rebel -- against your parents, against your social set, against society in general -- it's what made porn mainstream (well, that and the VCR). Before the 1990s, people who worked in porn were not bodybuilders and models. But being gay remained something most young people were flirting with well after the WWW made pornography a big whatev, because it was dangerous.

The '90s were a time of extremes and you didn't just do something -- you had to commit to it or you were a "poser" -- and after death metal, the Information Superhighway, gangsta rap, and Faces of Death, there wasn't a whole lot of extreme ground left to cover. But for as deadly as the Compton streets were, extreme sex and sexuality was not for posers; it was the time of AIDS, and all other STDs and sexually-related everything fell, not just to the wayside, but completely off the map.

Being gay wasn't just about flaunting your sexuality or sexual identity, nor about becoming an adult capable of making your own (bad, usually) decisions: It was about daring to be gay with AIDS. It was one way anyone could dare the world and face the worst, even if only in their own minds -- or that of their friends' and family's. This all resulted in a, hopefully, short-lived phenomenon called "bug-chasing." I'll let you look that one up for yourselves.

We can argue political climate, failing educational systems, and bullshit ourselves, but at the heart of it, we were a generation raised to believe we could be anything we wanted to be, if we just dared to dream.

Only to find out we could not.

So? So what!? Whatev! Sexuality became the one way to stand-out, to stand-apart -- you know, without having any discernible skills, talents, or ambition -- and being gay was just as much of a suburban 90's fad as those damn Beanie Babies. Take it from me; I run a blog on pop-culture!

I also happen to have been there (got the T-shirt -- yep, '90s), and I'm a decent critic, and Chasing Amy may have meant whatever that chick says to her, but it wasn't really about those things:

It was a frank discussion about what I've just told you, by way of those things; Chasing Amy was not about a lesbian finding love with a man, it was about a young girl who was confused by her own sexuality, and even more confused by her sexual identity. After all, how could she be a lesbian without all her lesbian friends; if no one recognized her as a lesbian, then who -- or what -- was she, exactly? And why, or to whom, did it matter? And did she still matter if her sexuality didn't?

That's what most of the 1990s was, part and parcel: A generation of young adults who learned that just really wanting to be winners wasn't enough, no matter how much they really wanted it. So we had to learn to be ourselves. The hardest lesson was learning that we couldn't just be astronauts or supermodels, but the biggest part of that lesson was learning that one drug-addict's suicide didn't define us artistically anymore than whom we slept with did socially (or sexually, when you get right down to it), and Chasing Amy was about that.

Cynics will say the 1990s were about "learning to settle," and maybe they were for some, but they were also about learning to let go of everything we'd been taught -- not what we'd been promised, so much as what we'd been told to expect -- what we had been told we could achieve without having the proper skills set, talent, drive, or money (mainly money). And politics, failing social and educational systems, and all manner of other factors most certainly did play into it, but defining what words like "sexuality" and "sexual identity" mean was what most people took from the 1990s -- not because of Anita Hill or Bill Clinton (though those were the headline acts), but because our sexuality was one of the few things we could control, despite lacking the money or ambition needed to develop a skills set.

Unfortunately, it became the thing by which far too many defined themselves; sexual identity soon took on too much weight, too much "meaning," and entire ideologies and social strata were developed around them, with damaging consequences. (Did you look-up "bug-chasing" yet?)

SPOILERS

Chasing Amy is not at all about a lesbian who finds True Love with a guy, then settles for a less compatible (but equally gay) mate; it's about the sexual journey of one girl. Plain and simple. That it ends the way it does is a fitting way of saying that said girl had not, at that point in her life, come to the end of that journey. Alyssa's failure wasn't that she'd found True Love with a man, nor even that she'd let it slip through her... fists; her failure was that she'd allowed her sexuality to become the thing which defined her -- the one and only thing. Her comic book was about gay love, all of her friends were gay, she sang and hung-out in gay bars, and she became a gay icon to her gay fans.

Except that Alyssa wasn't as gay as she was Alyssa, and she lost sight of that.

That Holden and Alyssa's relationship defined the people around them just as those people defined Alyssa and Holden's relationship and, in the end, all of the characters were changed because of it, is a story and structure thing, not a philosophical one. That no one took any drugs was most likely a studio thing, because everyone took drugs in the '90s.

How do you think the whole sex thing got started? Rebellion!? Whatev! How immature.

© C Harris Lynn, 2010