“Bottoms” top

Bottoms, a queer icon

BY CAROLINE RAY

A few weeks ago during a late night doom scroll, I happened across the trailer for “Bot- toms.” It opens with, “Warning! Three out of four people who have watched this film have turned gay.” That night I had a maze-like dream that I went to the theater to see it with my mom. Basically I was doomed to love this movie from the start.

“Bottoms,” starring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, is a high-school comedy so perfect that it may have killed the genre. The film feels like the final manifesto, where the high-school drama was always going to end: with a violent, ridiculous, all-female fight club murdering an entire football team. The whole movie is unexpected, and yet it just feels right. It never takes itself too seriously or loses its over-the-top charm. Sennott and Edebiri shine together, landing every line with heart and wit. The sup- porting characters are tenderly developed, and there are too many one-liners to pick a favorite.

However, most importantly to me, this movie is queer. Not just in the sense that the two main characters are lesbians, but in that the whole movie is extravagant and twisted to surprise. These are not two characters who could have been straight but were written queer for the sake of representation. Their personalities and the strange and violent world they navigate is infused with and defined by their queerness. They are awkward, naive, and sometimes intolerable; and yet I have never had such a euphoric experience watching two characters on screen. This movie was an untoppable joy.