Chasing Amy

Chasing Amy is a 1997 American romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Kevin Smith and starring Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, and Jason Lee. The third film in Smith's View Askewniverse series, the film is about a male comic artist (Affleck) who falls in love with a lesbian (Adams), to the displeasure of his best friend (Lee).
The film was originally inspired by a brief scene from an early film by a friend of Smith's. In Guinevere Turner's Go Fish, one of the lesbian characters imagines her friends passing judgment on her for "selling out" by sleeping with a man. Smith was dating Adams at the time he was writing the script, which was also partly inspired by her.
The film received mostly positive reviews, praising the humor, performances and Kevin Smith's direction. The film won two awards at the 1998 Independent Spirit Awards (Best Screenplay for Smith and Best Supporting Actor for Lee). Characters from the film would go on to appear in later Askewniverse films Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019), direct spin-offs of Chasing Amy, with Affleck, Lee, Adams and Ewell reprising their roles in cameo appearances; Smith described the characters' roles in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot as being an "eight-page sequel" to Chasing Amy.
Plot
Comic book artists and lifelong best friends Holden McNeil and Banky Edwards meet fellow artist Alyssa Jones at a comic book convention, where they are promoting their comic Bluntman and Chronic. A struggling writer, she is friends with an African-American writer and activist named Hooper who masks his flamboyantly gay personality with a militant image to promote his comic White-Hating Coon. Immediately attracted to her during a dart game at a local bar that evening, Holden soon learns she is a lesbian while attending a gathering at a bar she frequents.
The two begin spending time with each other, and a deep friendship soon develops, upsetting the homophobic Banky, who resents Alyssa for intervening in their affairs. The duo's business partnership also suffers, as they had been close to signing a lucrative deal to turn their passion project into an animated television series, and Banky feels that Holden no longer cares about their combined efforts or the TV show. Unable to contain his feelings, he eventually confesses his love to Alyssa. She is initially angry with him, but that night, they reconcile, sleep together and begin a romantic relationship, which worsens matters between him and Banky. An old friend of Banky's, who grew up with Alyssa, shares with him a sexual adventure story from her past, in which she participated in a threesome with two boys in high school, which earned her the nickname "Finger Cuffs". Holden is deeply disturbed by the eventual revelation, having believed that he is the first man Alyssa had ever slept with.
Hooper advises Holden that for his affair with Alyssa to work, he must be honest and truthful and ask Alyssa about her past, and also states his belief that Banky is jealous and in love with him, disguising his true feelings via his macho sexual banter. At a hockey game the following night, he clumsily attempts to bait her into confessing, which she eventually does, prompting her to storm out of the arena. In the parking lot, she angrily confirms the threesome but refuses to apologize for her past sexual experiences, wanting to continue their relationship. Holden leaves feeling unsure.
Later, at a local diner with stoners and drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob, who inspired the Bluntman and Chronic characters, Holden hands them their monthly residual pay for sales of the book and discusses his troubles. The normally-silent Silent Bob reveals that a couple of years earlier, he once had a relationship similar to Holden's. Though he loved his girlfriend Amy, his insecurities about her past promiscuity caused him to break up with her. Later regretting it, he says, "So I've spent every day since then chasing Amy...so to speak."
Inspired by Silent Bob's story, Holden devises a plan to fix both his relationship with Alyssa and his fractured friendship with Banky. He invites them over and tells Alyssa that he would like to get over her past and remain her boyfriend, while telling Banky that he realizes that he is in love with Holden. He proposes a threesome, which he believes will both end his envy towards Alyssa's broader experiences and resolve Banky's issues with them being a couple. Though initially shocked, Banky agrees to participate, but is relieved when an appalled Alyssa declines, reasoning that it will not save their relationship, and that the proposal is offensive. Alyssa and Banky both leave afterwards.
One year later, Banky and Alyssa are busy promoting their own respective comics, Baby Dave and Idiosyncratic Routine, at a convention. It is revealed that Holden and Banky dissolved their partnership of Bluntman and Chronic, with Banky now exclusively owning the publishing and creative rights. Banky smiles sadly at seeing Holden, who silently congratulates him for his own solo comic being successful, and gestures over to a booth hosted by Alyssa, encouraging him to speak to her. During their brief emotional conversation, Holden gives her a copy of Chasing Amy, his new comic based on their failed relationship. After he departs, Alyssa's new girlfriend arrives and asks about the person she was speaking to. Smiling and teary-eyed, Alyssa feigns indifference, casually tosses his comic on the floor behind her and replies, "Oh, just some guy I knew."
Cast
Production
Kevin Smith has said over the years that Chasing Amy was inspired by his brother being gay, his relationship with Joey Lauren Adams, whom he was dating during the making of the film, and a crush his producing partner Scott Mosier had on lesbian filmmaker Guinevere Turner. Turner met Mosier and Smith at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival where their respective films, Go Fish and Clerks, had premiered. After the festival, Mosier and Turner kept in touch, with Mosier developing unrequited feelings for Turner. Smith told Mosier to channel his heartbreak into a movie about a guy who falls in love with a lesbian, but the filmmakers felt it was too lean of a story, so Smith added his own experiences into the character of Holden. Smith wrote, "The character of Holden is the closest to me I've ever written (casting Ben was aesthetically wishful thinking perhaps)." Smith, who said he "didn't really know that much about gay culture, and specifically lesbian culture", had Turner look at drafts of the script for her input. Turner helped find the location for the bar scenes, which were shot at the since-closed Meow Mix in downtown Manhattan.
Reception
Box office
On a budget of $250,000, the film grossed a total of $12,021,272 in theaters. Chasing Amy played at three locations and earned $52,446 upon its opening weekend in the United States. The following week, the film was expanded to a further twenty-two theaters where it grossed $302,406. During the 18–20 April 1997 weekend, Chasing Amy was screened at a further 494 locations, where it earned $1,642,402 and moved into the Top 10.
Critical reception
Chasing Amy received positive reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 86% based on reviews from 87 critics, with a rating average of 7.30/10. According to the site's summary of the critical consensus, “Although Chasing Amys depiction of queer sexuality is frustratingly clumsy, it handles an array of thorny themes with a mixture of sensitivity, raw honesty, and writer-director Kevin Smith's signature raunchy humor." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 71 out of 100 based on 28 reviews. Audiences polled by Cinemascore gave the film a grade of "A−".
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, saying; "While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and Chasing Amy develops into a film of touching insights. Most romantic comedies place phony obstacles in the way of true love, but Smith knows that at some level there's nothing funny about being in love: It's a dead serious business, in which your entire being is at risk." Ebert believed the film was an improvement over Smith's previous effort Mallrats and he added that Adams was a discovery.
Charles Taylor, writing for Salon, quipped "Chasing Amy isn't going to single-handedly save romantic comedy, but Smith (Clerks) has made the only romantic comedy in quite a while that acknowledges, even celebrates, the fact that love and sex are emotional anarchy." Writing in Time Out New York, Andrew Johnston observed: "Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith's third feature, does to romantic comedy what Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man did to superhero comics in the '60s: It makes a tired genre newly relevant by giving its characters motivations and problems that seem real."
Quentin Tarantino considered Chasing Amy his favorite movie of 1997.
Analysis
In the book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire, Lisa M. Diamond cites the film as a notable example of female sexual fluidity in popular culture, writing that Chasing Amy "depicts a lesbian becoming involved with a man, contrary to the more widespread depictions of heterosexual women becoming involved in same-sex relationships."
Though the film has been praised as ahead of its time by some critics in its representation of sexual fluidity and the concept of the bromance, it also received criticism, particularly for its implication that a lesbian can go straight, even if just temporarily, as soon as she meets the right guy. The film was criticized by Judith Kegan Gardiner in the book Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, describing Chasing Amy as representative of a "fairly repulsive genre of films" that feature a "heterosexual conversion narrative" that is "set in motion by the desire of a heterosexual person for a seemingly unattainable gay person." The scene where Alyssa is shamed by her gay friends when they discover she is dating a man also received criticism from the lesbian community.
Smith later said, "For anyone who watches the movie now and goes, like, 'Ew, these sexual politics are ... not very subtle', you’ve gotta remember: It was made by a 26-year-old, 27-year-old guy, who really didn’t know anything and was learning in that moment. As much as it’s a movie that’s closely identified with the gay community, by virtue of the fact that the main character was gay, I really never think about it as such ... To me, it was about a boy who grows up to become a man but loses everything in the process — very bittersweet."
In 2023, queer filmmaker Sav Rodgers released the documentary Chasing Chasing Amy, which discusses the impact the film had on his life.
Accolades
Home media
Chasing Amy was released by the Criterion Collection, first on Laserdisc in 1997, then on DVD in 2000. It includes audio commentary from cast and crew, deleted scenes, outtakes, and a theatrical trailer. The DVD adds an introduction from Kevin Smith, apologizing for saying "fuck DVD" in the commentary. Later reissues by Lionsgate and Paramount are repressings of the Criterion edition.
Chasing Amy was released on Blu-Ray on November 17, 2009.
Novel
In Japan, the screenplay of Chasing Amy was adapted into a novel by Kenichi Eguchi and published by Aoyama Publishing. The unique concept of the book is that it is roughly half-novel, half-manga, with Moyoko Anno providing the art for the comic book pages. In an episode of SModcast, Smith revealed that while he was thrilled to have a manga based on his film, he was shocked when he read the novelization, as the characters' sexual histories, which are just mentioned in conversation in the film, are depicted in the novel's manga illustrations as sexually graphic flashbacks.
Smith had the original screenplay published along with his Clerks script from Miramax Books.
Soundtrack
The film had no soundtrack album released; however, many songs appear in the movie, including a cover of The Cars' "Let's Go" performed by Ernie Isley, "The Impression That I Get" by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, "Run's House" by Run-DMC and other songs by artists such as Public Enemy, The Hang Ups, Gwen Guthrie and Liz Phair.
Two songs by the band Soul Asylum are featured in the film: "Lucky One" and "We 3". The band had previously contributed the song Can't Even Tell to the soundtrack of Smith's 1994 debut film Clerks. Frontman Dave Pirner composed the incidental music for the film along with the film's theme song, "Tube of Wonderful", which plays over the opening credits. The song reappears in Smith's 2001 film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, as well as its 2019 reboot Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, both times introducing the character Holden McNeil.
The music video for the song "Have You Seen Mary", performed by the band Sponge, features several scenes of the film. In Chasing Amy, the song is played in the scene while Holden and Hooper are at Jack's Music Shoppe.
Cultural references
In a scene originally written for Mallrats, several principal characters share memories of sexual escapades gone awry. This scene reveals the character's own emotional "sex scars" and was purposefully created—down to the style of dialogue and set dressing—to mirror a scene from Steven Spielberg's Jaws in which Quint and Hooper share the physical scars they've both earned from encounters with sharks. However, in this film it's used with Alyssa and Banky.
References
External links
Chasing Amy at Lumiere (database)
Chasing Amy at The Numbers (website)
The Hows and Whys of Chasing Amy by Kevin Smith at the Criterion Collection
The Big I: Chasing Amy and the toxic "nerd masculinity" of the nineties at The Paris Review
Chasing Amy screenplay at DailyScript.com
1997 films
1997 comedy-drama films
1997 independent films
1997 LGBT-related films
1997 romantic comedy films
1997 romantic drama films
1997 romantic comedy-drama films
1990s buddy comedy-drama films
1990s sex comedy films
American buddy comedy-drama films
American LGBT-related films
American romantic comedy-drama films
American sex comedy films
1990s English-language films
Films about anti-LGBT sentiment
Films about comics
Films about fictional painters
Films directed by Kevin Smith
Films produced by Scott Mosier
Films set in New Jersey
Films shot in New Jersey
Films with screenplays by Kevin Smith
Homophobia in fiction
Lesbian-related films
LGBT-related sex comedy films
LGBT-related romantic comedy-drama films
Female bisexuality in film
Male bisexuality in film
Miramax films
View Askew Productions films
View Askewniverse films
1990s American films