'Bottoms' Draws on a Legacy of Lesbian Camp

From cheerleaders, to super spies, to lesbian losers

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The lesbian comedy is still a rather novel idea, all things considered. Lesbian cinema – and lesbians in general – tend to be associated with seriousness as opposed to frivolity. Though lesbian comedians seem almost over-represented in the stand-up comedy space, gay men are more closely linked with humor on screen going all the way back to the Golden Age of cinema. Indeed, the ironic aesthetic notion of camp is assumed to be a gay male sensibility best illustrated by filmmakers like John Waters. 

The new teen comedy Bottoms, directed by Emma Seligman and co-written by one of its stars, Rachel Sennott, marks a new era for lesbian comedy. Recent years saw the release of Booksmart, a classic teen comedy in which one of the leads is a lesbian, along with Crush and Do Revenge, both of which added lesbian elements to classic high school movie formulas. Booksmart was a relative success but doesn’t depart much from teen movie conventions, and neither Crush nor Do Revenge had theatrical releases, thus limiting their blockbuster potential. 

If the fanatical thirst for the film online is any indication, Bottoms has all the makings of a lesbian comedy classic, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. Like the aforementioned films, Bottoms references teen movies of the 1990s and early aughts, injecting queerness into the straight high school settings of films like Not Another Teen Movie and Bring It On.¹ The film follows PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), two loser lesbian BFFs who start a fight club at their high school in order to get the attention of two popular girls whom they have crushes on. It’s raunchy, over-the-top, and surprisingly violent. Bottoms emerges as part of a legacy of lesbian camp, following in the footsteps of two films that share this absurd sensibility. 

Though the term dates back to the 17th century, the contemporary understanding of camp comes from Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” The term is hard to define, especially because Sontag’s essay takes the form of 58 notes (essentially a wordy listicle) and doesn’t include a precise definition. According to Sontag, the essence of camp is “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp traffics in irony and hyperbole; it “sees everything in quotation marks.” It produces aesthetic for aesthetic’s sake, rather than for beauty. Moreover, “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.” 

Sontag refused to claim any inherent connections between camp and queerness, but this affiliation has only solidified over the years. While women and lesbians are often left out of this history, such omissions aren’t the end of the story. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes that camp is best described as a “reparative practice,” a form of appropriation that purposefully misreads dominant culture. Elly-Jean Nielsen argues that lesbian camp does exist and defines three different modes: erotic, classical, and radical. Mikaella Clements proposes the term dyke camp to describe a new mode of expression, “a love of the ultra-natural” that “takes the real and magnifies it, so that it becomes absurd or funny or simply attractive in its own right.” 

The two films that best exemplify the possibilities of lesbian camp came out around the turn of the century. The first is Jamie Babbit’s 1999 film But I’m a Cheerleader. The film stars Natasha Lyonne as Megan, a high school cheerleader forced into conversion therapy camp when her family and friends suspect she’s a lesbian. Her time at True Directions has the opposite of its intended effect, as Megan becomes more comfortable in her lesbian identity and starts a romance with her fellow camper, Graham (Clea DuVall). While the film’s dramatic moments could easily take on a horrific sheen, Megan’s moment of queer revelation – the uproarious “I’m a homosexual!” scene – is played for laughs rather than tragedy.

The film pulls off an incredible feat, taking a humorous stab at a devastating situation without getting too dark or discounting how terrible these real-life circumstances would be. It points to queer cinematic tropes and exaggerates them to a hilarious degree. As Katrin Horn writes in The Great Dyke Rewrite: Lesbian Camp on the Big Screen, “Such moments of meta-awareness are presented in the context of a John Hughes inspired narrative and a John Waters inspired visual style.” Though referencing straight American norms, the film’s campy aesthetic coupled with the central narrative of queer empowerment produces a unique cinematic language. Despite middling reviews at the time of its release, the film has since become a cult classic. 

In 2004, Angela Robinson’s camp masterpiece D.E.B.S. premiered. A parody of both spy films and teen movies, the film follows Amy (Sara Foster), the star member of the D.E.B.S., a paramilitary organization that recruits college-age girls into their ranks. Amy and her fellow agents set out to monitor acclaimed criminal Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), but Amy falls in love with Lucy instead. D.E.B.S. is sometimes read as a commentary on the U.S. military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, but for the most part, it’s a goofy film about star-crossed lesbian lovers. 

Angela Robinson expected the film to do better than it did. “It was supposed to ‘cross over’. Teenage girls, short skirts, light-hearted comedy, what could go wrong?” she wrote in 2006. The film was a commercial and a critical failure, though it eventually found a small but passionate lesbian fanbase online. It’s hard not to love a film that contains the line: “They’re calling you a hero, when really you’re a slut. A gay slut.”

As in But I’m a Cheerleader, homophobia is the primary threat to our protagonists in D.E.B.S., but it’s overcome by gay ingenuity and passion. Lucy and Amy outsmart the U.S. military because they are brilliant and hot, while Megan wins Graham back by performing a cheer at graduation. Sontag writes that successful camp, “even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.” Despite their satirical tone, both films are decidedly earnest and intent on bringing joy to audiences. 

But I’m a Cheerleader and D.E.B.S. were not conceived out of thin air, and two cultural moments were most influential in their creation. The first development was lesbian chic, which Horn calls “a camp take on lesbian representation.” This was a moment when lesbians were suddenly seen as cool (and even profitable) to a particular liberal audience – as long as they fit certain standards of palatability.² The 1990s also saw the emergence of New Queer Cinema, a movement first coined by lesbian film scholar B. Ruby Rich. Rich defined a “holy trinity” of New Queer Cinema: “pastiche, irony, and the reworking of history informed by deconstructive theories.” Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, Gregg Araki, and Cheryl Dunye are some of the filmmakers associated with the movement. 

Queer outsiders created New Queer Cinema, while lesbian chic was defined by the mainstream. One moment is political, the other lacks a political thesis. But I’m a Cheerleader and D.E.B.S. combine these social and aesthetic movements in order to produce something pleasurable for viewers. The two films move lesbians from the margins to the center, working to “canonize the uncanny by making the subtext maintext and by literalizing the coded depiction,” Horn writes. 

Instead of continuing to exploit lesbian sexuality, these examples utilize the structure of a romantic comedy to illustrate how lesbian love is distinct from straight love because of social norms. This romantic narrative grounds the films’ more exaggerated elements. “At the films’ core there is sincere sentiment—love and heartbreak—as this is precisely what makes them camp rather than merely  “campy,” Horn suggests. While the mainstream aspirations of But I’m a Cheerleader and D.E.B.S. may be to blame for their less-than-stellar reception, they also account for the strength of their camp interventions. 

Seligman’s Bottoms is not so much true camp as it is pure satire; a high school movie pastiche. But the two modes are closely related in this case, and the movie draws on this lineage of lesbian camp. As in the two films that came before it, lesbianism is central to the film’s major critique (if you can even call it that). The queerness of many of the movie’s main characters makes the sendup of American high school culture all the more incisive. 

Think of teen movies like Cruel Intentions, American Pie 2, John Tucker Must Die, and Wild Things, all of which include lesbian kisses as a titillating sidebar to the actual plot or a diversion tactic. Bottoms also includes a lesbian kiss that’s used as a distraction, but the difference here is that these characters are canonically queer and the kiss creates an emotional connection between them. 

While homophobia was a villainous – albeit wacky – force in But I’m a Cheerleader and D.E.B.S., homophobia doesn’t factor much into the plot of Bottoms. A repeated mantra between our two BFFs is, “No one hates us for being gay — they hate us for being gay, untalented, and ugly.” PJ and Josie’s self-conscious loser attitude is a rejection of the representational politics that tends to define queer media these days. “True representation, part of it, is like making stuff that’s totally wild and free and free from ‘meaning’ and deep analysis,” Seligman explained, describing the film’s purposeful stupidity. PJ and Josie are not admirable, “good” queers, though many viewers have found them relatable. 

This anti-righteous stance is very camp. Sontag writes that camp “incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy.” According to Sontag, camp is also “anti-serious” and works to reverse the dichotomy between gravity and frivolity. The campiest part of Bottoms is the violence, a mode of action usually associated with danger or urgency. While Mean Girls describes high school using the metaphor of the African Savanna, in Bottoms, high school becomes a literal fight club – bloody noses, black eyes, and all. The violence is visceral, going further in the third act than viewers might expect. This embodiment of violence recalls Clements’ theory of Dyke Camp, which “creates an artificial physicality via exaggeration.” PJ and Josie’s fight club is not a metaphor; it’s an over-the-top mode of reality. 

Speaking with Vulture, Seligman predicted, “There’s a rabid audience that has not been served that will come to the theater.” Seligman was right, as the film had a better per-screen average than Everything Everywhere All At Once – the indie hit that went on to win Best Picture – in the first weekend of its limited release. Further proving Seligman’s point is the discourse about the film online, as lesbian and queer fans have been chomping at the bit to see the movie ever since the trailer dropped. Many users are already calling themselves fans of the movie without having seen it, and viewers outside of the U.S. are praying for international distribution.

Despite the obvious fervor for the film, it’s still somewhat controversial. Seligman revealed they weren’t able to get any product placements from the film, even from companies that present themselves as progressive. These corporations were “too offended by the content,” Seligman noted, even as they sponsored Pride floats.

Nonetheless, a promising box office debut and non-stop chatter about the film online provide hard evidence that lesbian films can be successful. Bottoms evokes the history of lesbian camp, eschewing the serious and instead focusing on the carnal pleasures of laughter and violence. Here’s a confirmation that a lesbian perspective is worth something, whether it’s insightful, funny, or just plain stupid. Lesbian losers are finally enjoying their time in the spotlight and getting the girls in the process. And that? That’s camp.

1. I hesitate to call Bring It On a “straight” film because of Eliza Dushku’s (gay as hell) presence in it, but you know what I mean.

2. Though k.d. lang’s 1993 Vanity Fair cover with Cindy Crawford is often seen as the kickoff of lesbian chic, the dominant aesthetic very quickly became femme-centric after that.