I'm watching Chasing Amy for the first time in what seems like years. Once you make allowances for the inexperience of pretty much everyone involved, it still manages to be somewhat enjoyable. Until Dogma it was the best quality Smith production made. It's truthful in a way that Mallrats isn't and it's narrative driven in a way that Clerks isn't. If Smith has any strengths as a director, all of them were on show here.
But I'm not writing a review. Not of the movie.
I first saw this movie, I mean really watched it, at a fairly impressionable age, around 14 or 15. Before I had any serious experience with girls. It's fair to say it left an impression. It was the first thing I've ever seen that had any sort of discussion of gender politics at all. It was the first movie that could possibly be classed as a "romance" that I actually identified with. It was the first movie with a character that I could see some of myself in, in terms of what choices he made and what he wants.
A lot of Holden and Alyssa's relationship has echoes throughout relationships I've had with women over the years. Not so much in terms of the 'convert the lesbian' angle, but at the very least in the sense of someone unattainable or somehow or other misfit for the purpose of a relationship with the type of person that I am. Also in the fact that he falls hard and fast for a girl that shows no clear indication of reciprocating.
I mean I know this isn't unique to me. Fuck if there's ever anything universal about the human condition it's the desire to partake of forbidden fruit. What's interesting is how rare this trope is played out in as complex and intriguing a way as this movie does.
But my real point is that I might have been some sort of half proto-Holden when I first watched this movie, but watching it sealed my fate. What I guess I'm saying is that Kevin Smith has had an indelible influence in the type of man that I have become.
If I met him I don't know if I'd hug him or punch him.
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