‘Personal Best’ is the Original Sweaty Gay Sports Movie
But is it pervy, or poetic?
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It’s been a great year for sweaty, sexy, gay sports movies – for observing bodies in action. Love Lies Bleeding gave us a queer bodybuilder and a messy, visceral lesbian romance, and Challengers was the bisexual tennis love triangle we never knew we needed. But, despite their apparent novelty, these two films aren’t quite the first of their kind.
In 1982, a groundbreaking sports movie featuring queer protagonists premiered. Personal Best follows two women as they train in track and field and compete for a chance to be on the U.S. Olympic team. They also fall in love during this process, and their relationship complicates their athletic motivations.
Looking back, it’s kind of amazing the film exists at all. Personal Best came out a full decade or two before classic should-be-gay sports movies like A League of Their Own, Bend It Like Beckham, and Bring It On, eschewing subtext for the unadorned language of human bodies. Though the film has several things in common with Love Lies Bleeding and Challengers, we can also draw a line to the recent Backspot, which has a similar focus on the perils of competition, the power of the body, and the difficulty of maintaining relationships within this environment.
Personal Best was written and directed by Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind Chinatown. The film follows Chris (Mariel Hemingway), a young track star trying to improve in her sport. She meets the more established Tory (real-life track athlete Patrice Donnelly), who takes her under her wing. A sexual and romantic relationship quickly blooms between the two, and their coach, Terry (Scott Glenn), worries Tory is affecting Chris’ performance.
The film focuses intensely on the bodies of its characters – bodies in motion, bodies in relaxation, bodies in tension. Shortly after their first meeting, Chris and Tory engage in a heated arm-wrestling match. Towne hones in on their physical exertion. We see their veins popping, their muscles flexing, and eventually, sweat pouring down their foreheads and necks. The not-so-friendly competition turns sexual, leading to their first intimate encounter. In short, it’s the sweatiest, most intense, most erotic arm-wrestling match you’ve ever seen, and it exemplifies the film’s attitude about bodies.
Personal Best is beautiful to look at. The cinematography is languid and artful at every turn, and the editing approaches perfection. One stunning sequence depicts six different athletes competing in the shot put, edited in such a way that each athlete performs one step of the process until the put is completed. The film relies on close-ups to tell the physical story, zooming in on thighs and arms to emphasize these athletes’ graceful strength – and yes, perhaps their beauty, too.
Chris and Tory’s expression of sexuality feels just as natural as their athleticism. The scene depicting their first sexual encounter skips over the middle and instead lingers on the before and after, exhibiting their bodies in exertion (the arm wrestling) and then in leisure (the postcoital bliss). Though their coach is an asshole and certainly a sexist, he’s more concerned with their relationship interfering with their performance than he is with their sexual identities. (Identity, at least the way we speak about it today, is not a concern of the film at all.) While the relationship eventually breaks down, this development feels more like a natural outcropping of their personalities and circumstances than an attempt to devalue queerness.
Despite its groundbreaking nature, Personal Best is no longer on the radar of younger lesbians and queer women. This is a huge change from the 1990s, when the film was something of a cultural touchstone. Heather Hogan lists several instances of the film being referenced in other pieces of pop culture during the decade, including the famous “Puppy Episode” of Ellen, an episode of Friends, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, and the Lifetime-esque lesbian movie It’s in the Water. Though it didn’t do well at the box office, critics had good things to say. Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, and Pauline Kael, three of the most prominent critics of the era, gave the film positive reviews.
Perhaps the reason its influence has waned is its association with controversy. Many viewers over the years have criticized the film’s supposed embodiment of the male gaze, exemplified by the many close-ups of body parts and frequent nudity. One scene that stands out to critics depicts the women practicing the high jump, with the camera angled from below to capture the space in between their thighs. There are also several scenes showing the athletes lounging naked in the sauna, a display that some have read as objectifying or fetishistic.
Yet these distinctions – between objectifying and empowering, or objectifying and artistic – are not so easily made. To Towne’s credit, the film doesn’t fetishize the central lesbian relationship. The first time we see the women nude together, they are comfortably relaxing in bed after their rousing round of arm wrestling (and yes, sex). The film’s central preoccupation is with bodies, and sex is one of the acts these bodies are naturally equipped to engage in. As Ebert puts it in his review, the film “sees their sexuality as an expression of their true feelings for each other.”
Kael, perhaps best known for her biting criticisms, argued that the film actually steers clear of objectification. “This film celebrates women's bodies without turning them into objects; it turns them into bodies,” she writes. Later, she contends that “Everything in the movie is physically charged…Watching this movie, you feel that you really can learn something essential about girls from looking at their thighs.” This spotlight on the power of bodies is all the more persuasive due to the fact that most of the women featured in the film – apart from Hemingway, who trained for months for the role – were professional athletes themselves. You can’t fake that kind of strength, or those muscles. Whether or not you think the camera objectifies these women, there’s no denying that their bodies are good for much more than just sex.
To be sure, the film makes it clear that these athletes exist in a sexist, patriarchal society. Their coach frequently belittles and behaves sexually towards them, and it’s obvious he respects their athleticism less because they’re women. In one scene, Chris’ future paramour is swimming in the pool beside her and stares at her ass for the entire lap, clumsily hitting his head when he reaches the edge. Chris quickly proves herself to be more knowledgeable about fitness than he, and whatever assumptions men make about her seem to have little effect on her life. Indeed, the film is in part about how bodies overcome adversity – both internal and external limitations – to reach their full potential, hence its title. If these women are objectified, they don’t let it stop them from achieving excellence.
Of course, there’s also the question of what it means that a male director helmed a film about queer women and athletes. Is a man filming women in intimate encounters inherently fetishistic? This would be a hard position to maintain unconditionally, I think. One can certainly have their criticisms of a film like Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience, but finding fault with a man directing two women to spit in each other's mouths isn’t exactly solid argumentative ground. David Lynch directed a lesbian sex scene so legendary that Chappell Roan referenced it in a song, and though there’s much to discuss in terms of how he depicts ironic sensuality, few rebuke him for his artistic aspirations.
Ultimately, what the bodies on screen symbolize is up for interpretation. What’s hard to deny is how natural the relationship between Chris and Tory feels, and how surprising that is considering the time period. Sports and sexuality easily go hand in hand, as watching bodies in motion, at the height of their capacity, can be a sensual experience. Though the connection between women’s sports and lesbianism has long been denied or reviled, Personal Best doesn’t shy away from the erotic context of the athletic environment. The gaze of the audience can be erotic, too, though the orientation of this gaze depends on who’s watching. Either way, the film deserves a prized place in the canon of lesbian cinema, fleshy close-ups and all.
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