In 1997, director Kevin Smith told a story about a comic book artist, played by Ben Affleck, who falls in love with a lesbian, played by Joey Lauren Adams. The film, “Chasing Amy,” became a cultural touchstone for indie filmmaking as well as LGBTQ+ representation at the time. But in the 26 years since its release the movie has come under scrutiny by LGTBQ+ critics and audiences and inspired the new documentary “Chasing Chasing Amy.”
For filmmaker Sav Rodgers, “Chasing Amy,” for better or for worse, was the film that not only sparked his desire to be a filmmaker but made him feel seen in a time when representation was so meager. “I got older and I went to college, and people ask you when you go to film school, ‘Hey, what’s your favorite movie,’” Rodgers told TheWrap. “I would get in these spaces with other queer people specifically where they would be surprised that that was my favorite movie.”
But how to reconcile with a feature that, in hindsight, is now problematic? That’s at the center of “Chasing Chasing Amy,” Rodgers’ debut documentary, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival today. The documentary not only attempts to corral Rodgers’ own thoughts about the film and its placement in the queer canon of cinema, but how the movie is representative of the 1990s — and all the homophobia and misogyny that ensued.
“The initial instinct was to exclusively do a documentary, almost anthropologically, about the queer community and ‘Chasing Amy,’ and what it means,” he said. “What good representation looks like. What bad representation looks like. What the stories we respond to tell us about ourselves.” Rodgers and producer Alex Schmider went on to discuss problematic content and what they uncovered while chasing “Chasing Amy.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What does make good representation and how do we reconcile with past problematic films?
Alex Schmider: I’m gonna turn it back to a phrase that the disability community coined, and that applies to many communities that have been missed or underrepresented have talked about is “nothing about us without us” and therefore nothing without us because we are a part of every community … as someone that works at GLAAD, who does a lot of work looking at the quantity and quality of representation, something that has me really excited about any kind of project, and particularly resonated with me hearing from Sav [was] his hopefulness, his idealism for what our stories can be, and that he’s just a deeply imaginative and visionary director.
I saw in him the potential to stretch beyond the stories that we’ve seen before. And so often when I’m defining great representation versus representation that ages is where does it land in the culture? What is it saying in the current moment, not just of itself, but of the collection of stories that surround it? And how it will have consequences and impact on the communities who are represented now and hopefully also in the future? Because I think what often can happen is that we, as trans people, there’s a burden of representation that’s almost foisted upon us if we are the one or the only.
So how do we say something new and different about an experience that may be shared across different people? What have we not seen before? Both Sav and I having the benefit of both being trans and getting to argue about the merit of representation is something that we don’t often get which I think is really exciting. And so, to your question, I think it changes. What great representation is in 1997 when “Chasing Amy” came out is different than what representation is when “Chasing Chasing Amy” comes out.
Sav Rodgers: I also think we can look at films of the past and really see the progress that’s been made since then. If you look at “Chasing Amy” you’re seeing what one straight says guy’s opinion on what queerness looked like from his point of view and his lived experience. I don’t know if movies are meant to hold up forever. They’re indicative of the time in which they’re made, in the context in which they’re made. So in 20 years, 30 years after “Chasing Chasing Amy” comes out I have no idea what things will look like. Maybe the word trans will be considered outdated. Nomenclature changes, culture evolves.
But I would like to think that we can look back at a piece of work, regardless of when it was made, [and] realize if something isn’t perfect — which nothing is no matter how much we like it — there’s no objective sense of perfection in cinema, right? You can look at the masters like Martin Scorsese and say, “Okay, he made some perfect movies,” but at the same time not everybody agrees on that. We can look back and see how much progress has been made since then, and see what new filmmakers are arising out of the current moment that we’re in and be excited for that.
Well so often we see any attempts to interrogate problematic movies as a form of “wokeness.” It becomes politicized.
Rodgers: We’re in this time of self-reflective filmmaking, some would call it meta in a lot of ways. The things that means something to us are often not perfect. Nothing that Kevin [Smith] says or does, or has said or will do, will change how a 12-year-old version of myself felt about “Chasing Amy” or the journey that I’ve been on with this documentary. I’m not interested in unnecessarily holding that version of Kevin Smith to account for things that he didn’t know in 1997 because culture has changed so much, there’s been so much educating, and what matters to me is what people do now.
What I love about this current moment is so many trans creatives can now tell their stories and be themselves in public in a way that was unheard of to a lot of people back when “Chasing Amy” was made. Even if “Chasing Amy” isn’t a perfect movie it’s the movie that made me want to make movies and now I can move forward. “Boys Don’t Cry” was the movie that made Alex want to make movies. These are not perfect works by any stretch, but it’s what we had and it’s what we were able to take meaning away from.
How do you look at the fact that you [Sav] were inspired by Smith’s film and now a new generation of trans film lovers will see your movie and be inspired?
Rodgers: It doesn’t feel real to me.
Schmider: Sav had mentioned the movie that I clung to when I was growing up was “Boys Don’t Cry,” and for anyone who knows that film it’s not much of a hopeful future. That being said, as Sav mentioned, it was a bittersweet relief that I wasn’t the only person in the world experiencing what I was of my gender, and horrifying simultaneously.
Sav and I come from these places of having movies change our lives in the most dramatic and life altering ways, so my hope, regardless of how the film is critiqued or known out in the world is that, hopefully, maybe “Chasing Chasing Amy” can be a life raft for somebody else who needs it when they need it. To have more representation that people can cling to in those moments when they feel like they’re alone, and that there isn’t hope and a future for them. We’re more than the worst things that have ever happened to us.
