Chasing Amy (Re: butlering along)

Frances Bolton fbolton at chuma.cas.usf.edu
Sun Feb 7 11:07:30 PST 1999



>

Kelley writes:

So, if anyone has any
>thoughts I'd sure like a good spanking on this one.

Oh you know I have a good spanking for you, you nasty little thing:


>>Now a rilly rilly tangential issue, but one that might be really
>interesting is this: if it's the case that people are, more and more,
>recognizing the radical dynamism of sexual identities, then someone please
>explain the furor over Chasing Amy. Yes, yes I realize that the film came
>off as an adolescent buoy's fantasy. But you know, she didn't end up
>marrying the fellah living happily ever after in wedded het bliss, now did
>she. And, now that I think about, that ending may well conform to an
>adolescent buoy's fantasy in so far as now he can pine for her as his one
>true love for the rest of his life-->>>

Well, the pining wasn't so one-sided, was it? Remember that last scene, she's got the new girlfriend who is obviously the wrong woman for her (she doesn't like the comix scene and she isn't a hipster babe like the Joey L. character. The girlfriend is older, but all of the Joey L. friends and other lovers we see are her age and hip.) He brings her the comic, they talk briefly, he leaves. She is lost in a reverie until her girlfriend comes back and notes that she seems lost in thought or something. Girlfriend disses the convention, and they make plans for the evening, but the Joey Lawrence character still seems distracted by the memory of the "man who really understood her." It was also striking how tall and goodlooking Affleck was, and how dumpy, badly dressed, and unattractive the girlfriend was. I think the ending made it even more of a male fantasy--he changed the lesbian, she can't be with women in the same way again. He, the comic-loving boy from her home town of Red Bank, was what she really wanted and needed.

Incidentally, when I was 18 and my best friend from high school was 19, we went to a nightclub in Red Bank called The Garage.

frances



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