-----Original Message----- From: d-m-c at worldnet.att.net <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>I hated it b/c of the female lead--her voice, ugh, it was awful. But none
>of the vehemence at the time seemed to have been directed at any of the
>things you mention, which were of interest to me --the het buoy fantasy of
>pining for one true love and, in general, the romanticization of love, i'm
>your one, true soulmate baby and all the other stuff doesn't matter.
While recognizing the het-boy fantasy aspects, I think that the movie got overly trashed by the hip cultural left. Yes it played to het boy fantasies, but it also trashed het boy attitudes and insecurities rather unmercifully - thus the unhappy ending. Movies like CHASING AMY are playing on the margin with heterosexual viewpoints in order to open mainstream audiences to different orderings of society; the prevalence of white stars in movies about civil rights and South Africa suffer the same issue.
I don't think the movie simply came out on the side of lesbians just need to meet the right guy; I think it too the bisexual argument very seriously - an argument that gets trashed by both straight and hardline gay communities. For a longtime, gay and lesbian activists refused to accept bisexuals - they saw them as dangerous to political identity for the reasons CHASING AMY gets attacks. It was only a few years ago that the Gay and Lesbian parades became Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual (with a whole other round of controversy for adding Transgendered to the list for some of the same problems of blurring the sharp political margins of identity.)
Aside from the subtler complications, there were some parts of the movie I just found hilarious. My favorite was the gay black character pimping Black Nationalist Gangster attitude off on credulous white comic book consumers. While you can argue that the movie was selling its own attitude to its own audiences, that's part of the point of the movie: people don't come in simple identity packages and there is a lot of simplistic posturing both for political reasons and for commercial reasons.
--Nathan