"Challengers" is about tennis, but what's tennis about?
Also some thoughts on I Saw The TV Glow (2024) and The Beast (2023)
In the 2016 film Arrival, Amy Adams's character is on a mission to communicate peacefully with aliens and becomes frightened when she learns others are using mahjong tiles to try to speak to them:
Let’s say that I taught them chess instead of English. Every conversation would be a game. Every idea expressed through opposition, victory, defeat. You see the problem? If all I ever gave you was a hammer… Everything’s a nail.
You can't use competitive language for everything, or else, everything would be competitive! You could get hurt. It would be dangerous, violent, ridiculous!
Challengers (2024) imagines three friends who use intense competition as the basis of their romantic and sexual relationships. For Tashi, Art, and Patrick, tennis and tennis-based excellence is the foundation for how they talk to one another, judge one another, and choose which words to speak.
Early on, during a scene where Patrick visits Tashi at college, they go to her dorm to have sex. Even as they undress and get onto the bed, they ceaselessly talk about tennis. The first time Art and Patrick see Tashi, defeating a rival at a tennis tournament, the script notes that "as Patrick and Art watch, both of them are steadily growing boners under their shorts."
Everything personal, sexual, or intimate comes back to tennis. In what is maybe the climax of the story, the night before Art is set to play Patrick in a tennis game, his wife Tashi, the woman who has been with him for decades, someone who has a child with him, sits down with him and tells him that if he doesn't win tomorrow against Patrick, she will leave him.
The film is so clear in tennis's central role in the psychology of our protagonists that the few moments it strays feel totally thin. For example, Art has a tension in the sections that take place in 2019 in which he wants to retire from tennis to spend more time with his daughter. But this daughter is not a character, we rarely see her, we do not really know her name or anything about her, and the only time we see any real example of Art's love for his daughter is a brief glimpse of him having fallen asleep putting her to bed. When we see them, the two are not even conscious.
Similarly, we meet Patrick in 2019 as a broke loser sleeping in his car trying to get together any amount of money. What is Patrick doing when he's not playing a tennis tournament? We see him on Tinder, going on dates, sleeping in his car. This is not a realistic set of activities that could fill a decade of his life.
I'm also thinking of Tashi's parents, both of whom appear in the movie, people who she clearly is meant to have some kind of relationship with. But we see and know nothing about them.
None of this is a criticism. It's an observation about the movie's priorities. Everything not related to tennis (and the protagonists’ relationships to each other, through tennis) is peripheral. We aren't meant to see it. It's not important.
Why does Challengers do this? If it's all about tennis, what does tennis mean to these characters and what should it mean to us?
We get a good sense of this in an early important speech by Tashi, the first time she meets Patrick and Art, where they take her to the beach and she explains what it was like to be playing "real tennis" during her last match:
It's a relationship... For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis. We understood each other completely; so did everyone watching. It was like we were in love. Or like we didn't exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.
Here is a thesis about what the film sees as the role of tennis. It's about forging a relationship, understanding someone, communication. Doing something physical with your body (playing the game), responding to the partner, tennis is a way of showing someone who you are and getting back a sense of who they are in return.
This is an important nuance. Note that Tashi doesn't say that victory is the ultimate goal of tennis. It's not that one can become a champion and that winning makes one into the person they are meant to be. Tashi notes it's the play, the middle part, the actual game that has the value. Tashi Duncan is not Ayn Rand.
That said, tennis is different than other physical activities, like dance, used to similar effect in Luca Guadagnino's other film Suspiria (2018). There, like tennis is here, dance is a medium of communication, moving one's body alongside partner(s) as a way of expression and communion. This is close to what Susan Sontag asks for at the end of “Against Interpretation”: an “erotics” where art is created to be felt, not interpreted (future post coming with more on Sontag’s essay)
But tennis has winners and losers, unlike dance, and so so do the lives of Art and Patrick and Tashi. Tennis is like sex, sure... but like Amy Adams says, it's got a competitive twist, an instability baked in. There isn't an umpire or a scoreboard.
The tension between the pleasure of the game and the instability of the loser/winner dynamic is the main tension of the movie; not "can you win" but "can you sustain playing." Tashi says it: she wants to play tennis. She says it on the beach. She demonstrate it during sex with Patrick as she quits their foreplay to go play instead. It's why it's so tragic when she has her injury; she doesn't suffer defeat, it isn't being "bested" that is the ultimate loss for Tashi Duncan. It's the idea of not getting to play at all. Similarly, she's threatened again when 2019 Art says he wants to retire. Here is her tie to the competitive game of tennis threatened again.
What Tashi wants is to prolong the experience of the play, to stay in the play of the game as much as she possibly can.
The film agrees with Tashi. Her speech is given a unique ethereal score, and in shooting, the setting is changed from the script's tennis court to a more existential looking beach in the final film. It's one of the only times in the movie when a character expresses a deeper emotional desire in such an explicit way.
Additionally, Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor do a great job with the score emulating Tashi's view of what tennis is. The opening track is a high intensity combination of synths, beats, and vocals, which come to an abrupt stop by a literal iPhone alarm (in the film it's Art waking up from a dream). Over the course of the soundtrack, we hear each of those elements again, brought to more and more intensity. But it isn't until the final track, played during Art and Patrick's reunion on the court after a decade, when those sounds come back together again. The harmony and synchrony only happen when they're on the court, when they're in the middle of play. This is Art and Patrick and Tashi actually understanding and knowing one another, it's the dream that Art was awoken from at the start of the film, now actualized.
Another way the film centers Tashi's view of tennis is with dialogue. I was reminded of David Foster Wallace's essay about the articulation of athletes. Wallace, famously a "tennis guy", says the following about athletes:
Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere—fastest, strongest—and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way... Plus they’re beautiful... So we want to know them, these gifted, driven physical achievers... We want to hear about humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain. We want to know how they did it.
But, Wallace notes, they rarely have anything interesting to say about their talent.
Turn on any post-contest TV interview: “Kenny, how did it feel to make that sensational game-winning shoestring catch in the end zone with absolutely no I mean zero time remaining on the clock?” “Well, Frank, I was just real pleased. I was real happy and also pleased. We’ve all worked hard and come a long way as a team, and it’s always a good feeling to be able to contribute.” “Mark, you’ve now homered in your last eight straight at-bats and lead both leagues in RBIs—any comment?” “Well, Bob, I’m just trying to take it one pitch at a time. I’ve been focusing on the fundamentals, you know, and trying to make a contribution, and all of us know we’ve got to take it one game at a time and hang in there and not look ahead and just basically do the best we can at all times.” This stuff is stupefying, and yet it also seems to be inevitable, maybe even necessary. The baritones in network blazers keep coming up after games, demanding of physical geniuses these recombinant strings of dead clichés, strings that after a while start to sound like a strange kind of lullaby, and which of course no network would solicit and broadcast again and again if there weren’t a large and serious audience out here who find the banalities right and good. As if the emptiness in these athletes’ descriptions of their feelings confirmed something we need to believe.
Here is why Challengers tells its story though the soundtrack, and why film (with its ability to do things like the excellently fun and much discussed camera shots of the camera moving like the ball, or appearing underneath the court itself) is a good medium to tell this story. Less wordy!
I do like the words though too. In the final match, the one where Tashi's hope of transcendent communication through gameplay comes to life for Art and Patrick, the words of our protagonists becomes crystalized. A story beat in this episode if Patrick's rude unprofessional outbursts, a confrontation with the umpire. Here is one man Patrick, playing for his sanity and his masculinity, and Art, playing a totally different register, Mr. Professional, all calm and cool. Patrick has talked a lot in the 2019 scenes, Art has said very little. He's been a stoic little robot.
Even earlier, Patrick went to Art in the steam room with hope for reconciliation. Art rebuked him.
But here on the court, finally, after something happens which I'll get to soon, Art explodes. He yells:
Fuck off.
Now he's on the same wavelength as his friend. Now they're both playing together. It took tennis, the on-the-court game, to unblock what the two of them in the steam room couldn't.
That simple "fuck off", married with all the grunts and breathing, is the exact kind of inarticulate phrases that Wallace is talking about. Words that are not interesting in their semantic meaning. It's not that they communicate something directly that we can write down literally, but the way that those words express something physical, non-lingual.
We get this too from Tashi. Earlier, on the beach, Art notes:
You screamed when you hit the winner. I never heard anything like it before.
It's her sound, inarticulate scream, that communicates something interesting about Tashi to him.
In addition, she does yell words, and those words back when she first met Art and Patrick, when they were sitting in the stands with boners, during the match which she on the beach described as transcendent communication, were: "Come on!" This is what she yells again at the end during Art and Patrick's match.
Even more of this: tennis is a literal communication for Art and Patrick. Early on, they establish a code together based on their play. It starts with Patrick noting that Art has a tick in his serve, already demonstrating the two men have a unique understanding of one another built through tennis. And then Patrick twists it, by saying that when he serves a game like Art does, he's using it to tell Art that he slept with Tashi.
There's two interesting things here. The first is just another in the list of examples of how tennis can communicate something non-verbally. The second is that this is what it takes to get Art to the same wavelength as Patrick in the final match. In the steam room, when Patrick shows up open palmed, wanting connection, he's rebuked. But then that night, he sleeps with Tashi. And when he tells Art on the court, by doing the special serve, Art unlocks. Both of these validate Tashi's view of competitive gameplay as central to a sense of knowing other people. Art isn't fully playing tennis until Patrick scratches deep enough, raises the stakes high enough, gets real competitive about it.
So there's that thesis: that the beauty is the game not the victory, the competition itself and not the conclusion. So what of Amy Adams's tension, the idea that if you want to play competitive tennis, someone is going to have to win and someone is going to have to lose, and that this will collapse your beautiful equilibrium?
More than "who will win Tashi's heart", as I said, the question the movie is invested in is: can they sustain the passion?
Because the passion does die. Tashi's castration with her leg injury which coincides with Patrick's exit from Art's and Tashi's lives changes things. When we meet them in 2019, Art is a dull robot, Tashi is seething with resentment, and Patrick is a limp loser.
And even more, Art knows that his proclamation of retirement is going to make everything worse.
So slowly, over the course of the 2019 plotline, we see each of the characters awaken to the idea that they need this competition. Patrick begins the tournament planning to forfeit to get his money faster, but doesn't. He begins to needle Tashi and Art (in the steam room, and with Tashi in the hotel and later in the alley). Tashi, at first resistant to the idea of sparring with Patrick in those two scenes, finally makes two decisions. The first is to raise the stakes of her marriage to an absurd degree by threatening to leave Art if he loses. The second is to sleep with Patrick the night before the match. And then, all this already mentioned, it takes Patrick's special serve to finally wake Art up. Another sign: both Patrick and Art are "all in" in the match, we see them perform the same risky slide that broke Tashi's leg earlier in the film. They're putting everything they have into the game. By the end, we get smiles and an embrace. They've found their passion again.
But Amy Adams: isn't this doomed?
I'm thinking about two movies with similar tension. The first is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), in which we see two lovers' passion and anger and fighting as the cause of their painful breakup. At the end of the movie, aware of the pain they've caused each other, they commit to do it again, to get back on the cycle even if it means probably more pain and suffering.
Moreso I'm thinking about Phantom Thread (2017), Paul Thomas Anderson's strange love story about a pretentious control freak Reynolds Woodcock who marries his meek subordinate Alma. Reynolds is lonely and his love for Alma is genuine, but he's terribly rude and controlling to her and it's clear that this crushes her spirit. There's love, but he is obstinate and broken and mean, and tragically he cannot help but be cruel.
Then he is accidentally poisoned and falls really ill. While incapacitated, he is nursed back to health by Alma. He's lost control and she's gained it, and it's exactly what their marriage needed. They find intimacy, love, and depth in her tender care for him.
But he heals and reverts back. He becomes cruel again.
The twist of the movie, which feels so grand and subversive, is the ending scene in which Alma prepares dinner for Reynolds. Things lately for them have been bad. As he eats, she tells him, plainly, that she has put the poisoned ingredient into his meal. He will fall ill again, she will nurse him back to health. This will be good for them, they will experience love and she will have the control she needs, again. He looks at her, then eats the entire meal.
This is a strange and beautiful moment. It's two people committing to do something untraditional and violent in order to preserve their love. The right word for what it is is kinky. But it's so full of compassion, care, and love.
This is what I think Challengers achieves with its final scene. Because on one hand, the last hour has demonstrated actions that are counter to tender "real" love. Tashi has staked her entire marriage on a tennis match. She has cheated with her husband's friend. She told her lover to kill himself. And then that man taunted his friend on the court by bragging that he slept with the man's wife. These are not actions that one would say are part of a traditional healthy relationship.
But we have seen over the last hours that this is not a traditional relationship. These people want competition. And so the higher the stakes, the more prolonged the drama, the more the passion returns. This kinky arrangement is what they want.
So the world turns inside out. Everything that seemed to doom them, that seemed unhealthy, is revealed to be affirming sustenance. They embrace on the court, and we don't even see who won.
Just like we are meant to assume that Reynolds and Alma will continue their game of poison and recovery, I think we are meant to assume that Art, Patrick, and Tashi will continue their game of betrayal and competition. I think the text of the film suggest Art will retire after the season, and Tashi will leave her husband to coach Patrick. But I think we are also meant to assume that there will be more, that Art will find his way back to Tashi and raise the stakes again. And then it will happen again, as long as it can, over and over.
This is, like Phantom Thread, kinky and beautiful.
One last question: why? “Let’s treat sex and romance like tennis” is a consistent idea in the film, okay. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good one! This is crazy, why are we considering this wild idea?
What we see of them: Tashi is obsessed with tennis to an extreme degree, Patrick lives for ten years doing nothing of substance except thinking his high school friend and girlfriend. On one hand, I buy that two real teenage boys could develop lifelong sexual proclivities based on experiencing Zendaya sitting on a bed and asking them to make out. On another, no, these characters are a bit more two-dimensional than flesh-and-blood people. Surely there are some moments in life not about sex, tennis, power, or some combination?
One answer to this question comes from Roger Ebert's review of David Cronenberg's Crash (1996). The film is about a group of people sexually excited by car crashes and who engineer complex vehicular destruction as a way of sexual release. Ebert compares it to pornography:
"Crash" is about characters entranced by a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has. Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result. Take out the cars, the scars, the crutches and scabs and wounds, and substitute the usual props of sex films, and you'd have a porno movie.
When a college president makes dirty phone calls, when a movie star or a TV preacher picks up a hooker in a red light district, we ask: What in the world were they thinking of? The answer is, they are thinking (a) I want to do this, and (b) I can get away with it. "Crash" is a movie that understands that thinking. One of the characters speaks of "a benevolent psychopathology that beckons toward us." It is a strange and insightful film about human sexual compulsion. By deliberately removing anything that an audience member is likely to find even remotely erotic, Cronenberg has brought a kind of icy, abstract purity to his subject.
Tennis, then, acts as a way to explore the abstract purity of desire. Characters need not be three dimensional audience analogues, but instead just interesting figures to explore concepts : allegory, in the Brechtian approach to characters like in films like Barbie (2023). Rather than an authentic love story, where you relate to the yearning of the characters because you yearn for the same things, you relate because you yearn as intensely as they do, though not for the same things. A more pure way of looking at desire. We don't have to be a gambling addict to relate to Howard in Uncut Gems (2019), we just have to know what it feels like to want something as badly as he does.
But there's something bigger than just Brecht at work in Crash, Phantom Thread, and Challengers. It's what I said earlier, the kink of it all. Celebrating unique strange alien ways of loving as meaningful valid ways of loving. That your love can be different, incomprehensible to others, queer, kinky and strange. And if it works for you, you can find a path through it.
Quick thoughts on two other recently watched films:
I Saw The TV Glow (2024) is an excellent and surreal story about growing up with gender dysphoria. Told tightly following our main character, the movie emphasizes the visceral feelings of alienation and yearning without vocalizing its themes in words.
That's not to say the film is subtle. Though we never get a title card that says, "Our main character wants to transition," we get the overwhelming emotional sense of what's going on, and even more explicit moments like seeing them wander under a parachute in gym class colored with the trans flag, and dream-adjacent scenes of them cross dressing. The movie is pretty straightforward with this: here is a socially awkward teenager, policed by gender norms, feeling trapped in their reality.
This emotional story is what I found special. Three moments stand out in particular:
(1) An early scene in which our protagonist Owen encounters Maddy on the bleachers in an otherwise empty football field. So far, everything Owen has ever wanted and cared about has been funneled through Maddy, she is the most central figure to Owen's life ambitions in every way. But teenagers don't have the guts to approach anyone head on, and we instead watch this pained forced walk up next to her as if it was just luck to select this random spot to sit, just a coincidence. It's such a good distillation of that awkward way teenagers manifest insecurity and prioritize "playing it cool." You want to see them hug and appreciate one another; both just have to play it cool, it's great.
(2) Late in the film, with all the gender dysphoria simmering for over an hour, the movie plays a trick and speeds up the passage of time. Suddenly, Owen is aging and dying and you feel the sense of a life wasted. It's a tactic stolen from Rick and Morty but it works, it makes life feel weak, fickle, and overcoming problems feels impossible. Then, in the pit of that despair, it shows this simple, much-posted-about image with a blunt message of hope: there is still time. If the movie had not invested in the horror of life moving by so quickly, or it had given you any real moment of hope so far, this would feel trite. Instead, it feels enormous.
(3) The climax of the movie, before the time speed up, is Maddy's return to their hometown to confront Owen with a discovered truth. Their reality, the suffering they have been experiencing, is not real, she says. All this is a dream. And to wake up, all Owen must do is commit suicide. It's a really nasty horrific moment because you feel the terror of the only person you ever trusted, the only queer person you know, saying something like this, but you also understand that emotionally, she's right. His clinging to the reality of this town, to the identity it gave him, is more horrific than ending this life entirely. He needs to "kill" Owen so he can wake up as someone new. And if you're on that side of a transition, looking at the big gap of work left to do to get to the other side, emotionally it is going to feel like someone telling you to kill yourself.
So the movie really effectively works on the emotional level, and that's really all a movie needs to do. Cinema is the delivery of ideas and feelings through light and sound, nowhere in that equation does it say every element has to bend to realism. That said, there is another layer of this movie, a very superficial one, which is interested in fandom, the aesthetics of 90s TV shows like Buffy, and above all, creepypasta. Would this movie, without the emotional story, be interesting? That's kind of a silly question, but I don't think you would call this an effective creepypasta story. There's part of me that thinks it's trying to be mid here, that like how the video game Neon White leans into bad anime-inspired Hot Topic dialogue, the creepypasta elements of this movie recognize that most creepypasta is dumb. I think the movie nailed something really emotionally impactful and amazing, but this lesser layer isn't as clean.
I think The Beast (2023) is a good film to compare here. Just like I Saw The TV Glow, The Beast has an emotional story to tell that it prioritizes above every surface-detail "making sense." Ostensibly, the story follows a woman in the far future who is undergoing a "cleansing" of her past lives in order to become more rational. The less she carries of her previous lives, a robot tells her, the easier it will be for her to behave rationally, and consequently she'll be eligible for higher paying jobs. Those two past lives are: a courtesan in the pre-WW1 France who falls for a man who is not her husband, and a model in 2010s Los Angeles who is being stalked by an incel. Both the love interest and the incel are the past lives of another man who is also going through the cleansing procedure, and so in all three stories it's the same two actors interacting. It's really silly when you lay it out like this, and so is I Saw The TV Glow.
But whereas I don't think I Saw The TV Glow is a great creepypasta story, The Beast is both an excellent period romance and an excellent 2010s era thriller. The costuming in the courtesan era is really stunning, and the colors of their world, the careful slow dialogue, the sincere romantic performances from both actors makes it an effective great story even without the contrast to the other two time periods. Likewise, the incel storyline uses great digital camerawork to capture that Instagram-era feeling of Los Angeles, the tension in the air around growing misogyny, and the way digital changes have brought about changes in economic conditions. In both movies, the sum is greater than the parts, but in The Beast, the parts are really excellent too.
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