Challengers! If you haven’t seen it, go see it. If you have seen it — or if you don’t care about spoilers — please read on.
This past Saturday I was hanging out with my mom, working on a puzzle in the shape of the United States*, when I got a text from my good friend John deBary, who had an extra ticket to Challengers and wanted to know if I could join. As a Professional Bisexual™️, it was clearly my duty to see a movie about a love triangle from the filmmaker behind Call Me By Your Name — especially since, as you may well know, this movie is very horny.
Going into the film, I knew very little about it beyond “love triangle, tennis, horny.” I hadn’t even seen the trailer**. But I am pleased to report that I thoroughly enjoyed it — and, more to the point, feel like it offered another beautiful example of what bisexuality can bring to art; of how bisexuality can be, not just “representation,” but an essential plot point that enriches the depth of a narrative.
A quick plot summary, for those who need it: Challengers (which is told out of order, but I’m going to go chronologically here) is the story of three talented tennis players who meet one another as teens competing at the US Open. Patrick and Art are long time buddies and doubles partners who’ve trained together at a fancy tennis academy whose name I’m blanking on; Tashi is a rising tennis star who both of them are immediately drawn to. After a party celebrating Tashi, Patrick and Art lure her to their hotel room, where a very brief threeway makeout session occurs and Tashi offers to give her number to whomever wins their match tomorrow.
Tashi ends up dating Patrick (who chooses going pro over going to school) while attending Stanford with Art, who is clearly jealous. After a career ending injury, Tashi breaks up with Patrick and, years later, winds up with Art. Much of the movie takes place a tennis tournament thirteen years after the trio first united, where a down-on-his-luck Patrick is taking on millionaire tennis champion (and his now estranged ex-friend) Art, whom Tashi has clearly fallen out of love with.
What struck me as I was watching the film is that — while it is easy to reduce as the story of two men vying for the attentions of the same woman — what it actually is is a love triangle in the most literal sense. The purest form of the Tashi-Patrick-Art relationship is one that involves all three of them; when Tashi is forced to “choose” between Patrick and Art, all three of them lose out — and not simply because one of them gets the girl while the other is left on the sidelines.
Tashi and Patrick, for instance, are an explosively passionate couple — and yet that explosiveness is also part of their doom. Patrick chafes at receiving guidance from Tashi, who he sees as controlling and unwilling to treat him as the peer he considers himself to be. And when Art is sidelined by Patrick, he becomes manipulative and underhanded, doing his best to sow seeds of discord between the two in the hopes of driving them apart.
But Tashi and Art fare no better as a couple: although Art has the slavish devotion, the willingness to be coached, that Patrick lacks, he does not have the passion and ambition of his friend. To the extent that Art has drive, it is largely when he feels in competition with Patrick — and once Patrick is out of the mix, he becomes complacent and unmoored. Patrick, in this dynamic, fails as well: absent Tashi and Art, he becomes aimless and adrift, not quite failing, but never really approaching what one would think of as success.
What Tashi is attracted to, then, is not merely Patrick or Art, but Patrick and Art: the energy of their friendship, the way they competitively feed off of one another, and — notably — their sort of but not really repressed attraction to one another. It is notable that in the threeway make out scene I mentioned above, Tashi first kisses Art, then kisses Patrick, then engineers a kiss between the two of them — and then leaves. She’s clearly aware of the sexual energy that undergirds their relationship, and that, more than Patrick or Art, is what energizes her and draws her in.
You could frame this as a poly movie — and I do think that you would be correct to! — but I do think that the bisexuality aspect is an essential bit as well. You could, potentially tell the a lesbian or gay version of the same story, with all three players the same gender; you could also tell a hetero one that trades the homoeroticism for mere homosociality. But I think the bisexual one works best. The gender dynamics at play — Tashi, as a woman, the acceptable lust object for Patrick and Art to not just fight over, but explore their own attraction to one another through — simply would be as sharp in a monosexual version of this tale (and the heterosexual one, which would necessarily water down Patrick and Art’s connection, just sounds fucking boring).
And in a world where so much “bisexual art” happens to be a tortured coming out narrative turned Very Special Episode™️, or an incidentally bisexual character who is Just Like Everybody Else™️, I find it really invigorating to consume art where bisexuality is not just essential to the plot, but directly enhances it.
Because, hey, that’s kind of how bisexuality works in my life, too.
* Shockingly hard puzzle but we are muddling through
** I did watch the trailer after seeing the movie, as I sometimes like to do, and I’d recommend avoiding it, as I think it misrepresents the thrust of the film. The trailer makes the film seem like a simplistic “woman whose ambitions are thwarted amuses herself by playing men against each other,” which I think is… not at all what the story is, not really.
Leave a Reply