David Fincher’s Fight Club only ever had one rule. It’s a well known one. Emma Seligman’s 2023 high school update doubles the number. Rule one of Bottoms’ ‘gay, untalented, and ugly’ Fight Club is straightforward enough. Listen. Always and to everything. The second is more flexible: never ever – ever! – be late. Unless, that is, you’re a smoking hot cheerleader, who may or may not be an as-yet-undiscovered lesbian. Let’s add a third. The third rule of this Fight Club is that all members must spread the word. Talk about it! Bottoms is a blisteringly funny new elementary comedy and right up there in the pantheon of genre classics.
In the stead of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, Rachel Sennot – who co-wrote the film with Seligman – and Ayo Edebiri play childhood BFFs PJ and Josie. They do so with such natural chemistry and conviction that you will believe Sennot and Edebiri have been inseparable since birth, never mind just real life friends. Each girl is steadfastly single and a grudging virgin. Both are unpopular. This is not owing to their sexuality – Rockbridge Falls High School is painstakingly liberal – but their supposed lack of talent and good looks. That and a penchant for word vomit. When faced with her cheerleader crush – Kaia Gerber’s entirely heterosexual Brittany – PJ stumbles into a cringy monologue about eating disorders. So far, so fetch. There’s certainly something of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart to the set up.
It’s a few scenes in that sees Bottoms finally exposed as the deliciously surreal satire that it really is. Flares of the parodic ricochet off the poster-strewn walls of Rockbridge Falls. Here is a school in which lessons clock out at around two minutes. Teachers procrastinate, flicking through mucky magazines, while their students reenact the Treaty of Versailles, in a history lesson ostensibly about the Holocaust. There’s a caged jock at the back of class. Nobody mentions him, you may miss the gag entirely, but the pay off later on is a doozy. In the canteen, meanwhile, carnage ensues. As a rogue fruit medley lands upon the curly locks of one outsider, he promptly sacks off his homework in favour of a plot to blow up the school. Pineapple chunks are, he declares, the last straw.
Bottoms wears its flights of the fantastical with a pleasing lightness. The film is daft as a brush but deftly shot by Seligman, never resorting to garish post-edit effects to hammer home the inherent absurdities. Neither does it depend on an excess of self-aware characters to unpick its points. Indeed, it is with a total lack of any such self-awareness that PJ dismisses the notion that her self-defence club could foster a community in need of social unity and feminist inclusion. That’s the point. Likewise when Marshawn Lynch’s Mr. G – a hapless, out of his depth “ally” – compels class to essay on how “feminism” is the reason there have only ever been male US presidents. Bottoms is, perhaps surprisingly, remarkably on message in its engagement with contemporary discourse. Subversive, smart and thunderously satirical.
There’s also something deeply cathartic about the film’s increasingly violent proclivities. The Rockbridge Falls fight club is born in the wake of a minor skirmish. Josie taps the very tip of her car against the knee of the school’s premier jock. When things get going, however, there’s nothing held back. While the first two acts play like John Hughes has been stuck in a blender with Edgar Wright, a remarkably bloody final act steers things into almost Tarantino territory. Seligman handles such set pieces masterfully. The best of the best sees a, frankly pathetic, revenge attack go explosive to the tune of Bonnie’s Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. It’s majestically silly stuff.
