You know the setup: one boy, the underdog, is forced to confront a boy with more social influence – and probably more muscle. They’re in the gym, in the hallway, or on the schoolyard, and by the time the final blow is delivered, the underdog, our hero, has taken his first steps toward manhood.
For decades, the school scrap was a prevalent coming-of-age trope in movies and TV. The ’80s produced some of the most memorable scenes, whether it was Clifford versus Moody in “My Bodyguard” or Ralphie versus Scut in “A Christmas Story.” Then in 1993, Richard Linklater gave us the memorable freshmen versus the paddle-wielding Fred O’Bannion and his cohort of sadistic seniors in ‘Dazed and Confused’; and in 2002, Sam Raimi offered Peter Parker decking Flash Thomspon in high school. Even SpongeBob has gotten into a scuffle with a classmate at a boating school.
But the on-screen teen brawls have since evolved into more than just a metaphor for boys on the cusp of adulthood and learning to assert their masculinity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the queer sex comedy ‘Bottoms’, which debunks and undermines the crass masculinity of the school struggle as a milestone in male development, ultimately becoming about young women asserting their identity and resisting the conventions.
PJ and Josie are best friends who start a women’s fight club at their high school, with the goal of losing their virginity to two popular cheerleaders. The entire premise of this wonderfully absurd offbeat comedy is based on two young women using a story often associated with masculinity to their advantage. PJ specifically models the concept of the extracurricular program on “Fight Club,” which also works as a meta-commentary: the girls in “Bottoms” change genders in the same way that “Bottoms” itself reworks the testosterone-pumped, fist-bumping, on men focused genre of fight films like that much adored film. (“I Love David Fincher,” one of the girls says casually about the director of “Fight Club” as she walks into the first club meeting.)
While that Brad Pitt vehicle rewards the cruelty of its virile men with sex, violence and destruction, and their aggression packed with homoerotic undertones, ‘Bottoms’ offers its girls the same satisfaction, but with more comedy and explicit strangeness.
PJ and Josie take the masculine attitude to the extreme and capitalize on a rumor that they are hardened juvenile delinquents. Even when it looks like their bluff will be called, they double down, as when, at the start of their charade, PJ gets Josie to punch her in front of the group of their peers and Josie is smiling and wearing streaks of blood lands on the ground. along her chin. The popularity of the girls is increasing. Their self-confidence too. Somehow, these girls aimlessly bruise and bloody each other, creating a sense of camaraderie and even newfound strength.
The film’s wry gender subversions extend to the ridiculous portrayal of PJ and Josie’s male peers, particularly the jocks, who spend the entire film in their football uniforms. Despite these guys wearing the armor of manly dudes – literally including protective shoulder pads – “Bottoms” often makes them effeminate. They fit better into the misogynist stereotype of women: they are petty, sensitive, conniving, and ultimately the ones who need saving at the end of the film. (The one notable exception is an example of the other extreme: masculinity gone wild in the form of a feral male student who spends his school days locked in a cage.)
Another recent film, “Miguel Wants to Fight,” on Hulu, also pokes holes in expressions of violent masculinity, albeit to less effect. Miguel is a teenage boy who doesn’t really fit the criteria for the uber-masculine Tyler Durden type either. He lives in a neighborhood where fighting is everything: children regularly get into fights, and boys who dominate in the boxing ring are revered as local heroes. Despite all this, and the fact that his father is a boxing coach, Miguel is the only one of his friends who hasn’t fought. When Miguel hears that his family is moving in a week, he decides he needs to get into a fight before he leaves.
But Miguel hesitates on the sidelines as his three friends get into a fight with another group of peers. The only scuffles he gets into involve more awkward hugs than punches. Miguel is more likely to befriend an opponent than fight him. Even his fantasy fight sequences, in which he imagines himself as the star of his own anime or martial arts film, sometimes end with emasculation. In one, he wears a yellow tracksuit like Bruce Lee’s in ‘Game of Death’ as he takes on a bully; Even after Miguel throws a fit, the bully just laughs and asks why he’s “dressed like the chick from ‘Kill Bill.'”
Rather than portraying the fight as Miguel’s major hurdle to self-confidence and maturity, the film shows how Miguel’s obsession with fighting is misguided, merely a distraction from the fear and sadness he feels when he moves away from his friends. The pressure Miguel puts on himself is entirely internal; he thinks his father wants a fighter’s son, while all his father wants is for him to be happy and safe. Each fight scenario either embarrasses Miguel or ends with him selfishly alienating his friends. And when Miguel finally gets into a fight, it’s not the heroic, cinematic experience he imagined. In fact, he tells his friend, “It sucked,” throwing in an expletive for good measure.
This is the ultimate subversion that the two films deliver: while ‘Bottoms’ ends with the female leads getting involved in a huge, bloody gladiator-like battle and emerging victorious, the coming-of-age film is Actually about a boy who gets into a fight, ends with a 36-second fight and a sweet reconciliation between brothers.
So maybe that old saying is wrong: fight is sometimes the answer. It just depends on who’s throwing the punches – and what’s at stake.
