Bottoms (2023)
Directed by Emma Seligman
Yes — Bottoms is woke, scoring 66 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Emma Seligman's Bottoms arrives with a premise that reads like a dare: two unpopular lesbian seniors, PJ and Josie, fabricate a feminist self-defense club to meet cheerleaders, then watch the lie metastasize into a genuinely violent after-school institution.
Consciousness Markers
The plot centers on two lesbian teens starting a fight club to hook up with cheerleaders, with multiple queer characters and relationships treated as normal and central.
The cast is notably diverse and queer, with leads Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott, plus Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, and Marshawn Lynch, though the film does not foreground identity as a message.
The film's premise revolves around a self-defense club framed as female empowerment, satirizing and celebrating feminist solidarity, though it is more comedic than didactic.
The film delivers its queer and feminist themes through absurdist satire and comedy rather than preachy monologues, though the premise has a message.
The cast is diverse, but race is not a thematic focus; characters' racial identities are largely incidental to the plot.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No critique of capitalism or wealth inequality; the film focuses on teen social dynamics.
No body positivity themes or messaging.
No neurodivergence themes or characters.
No historical revisionism; it is a contemporary fictional satire.
Why it received this score
Emma Seligman's Bottoms arrives with a premise that reads like a dare: two unpopular lesbian seniors, PJ and Josie, fabricate a feminist self-defense club to meet cheerleaders, then watch the lie metastasize into a genuinely violent after-school institution. The film is a satire of victimhood, of violence, and of the earnest language of empowerment that teenagers deploy when they want something. It is also, at nearly every turn, extremely funny. The comedy is absurdist and blood-soaked, closer to Heathers than to any after-school special, and it never pauses to explain itself.
The queerness here is not subtext or garnish. It is the engine. The protagonists want girls, the supporting cast includes girls who want girls, and the film treats all of it as ordinary high school business, which is the quiet radicalism on display. The casting is diverse and casually so: Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott lead, Ruby Cruz and Havana Rose Liu orbit them, and Marshawn Lynch, a former NFL running back, plays the club's bewildered faculty advisor with a sincerity that borders on the sublime. Race is present in the ensemble and absent as a subject. Nobody delivers a monologue about it. The self-defense club is framed as female solidarity, and the film alternately celebrates and skewers that framing, which keeps the feminist content lively instead of pious.
What the film does not do is lecture. Its progressive commitments arrive through jokes, gore, and adolescent horniness, not through speeches, and the closest thing to a sermon comes from a teacher who promptly renounces feminism altogether. There is no climate anxiety, no meditation on wealth, no body-positive arc, no neurodivergent subplot, no revisionist reading of history. The film has other business. It wants to be a campy, nasty, exuberant teen comedy, and it succeeds on those terms. We are left with a movie that is socially aware without being tiresome about it, which in this cultural moment is a rarer achievement than it ought to be.
THEMATIC_TAGS_PLACEHOLDER
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Unpopular best friends PJ and Josie start a high school self-defense club to meet girls and lose their virginity. They soon find themselves in over their heads when the most popular students start beating each other up in the name of self-defense.
Questions about Bottoms
Is Bottoms woke?
Yes — Bottoms is woke, scoring 66 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Woke.
What makes Bottoms woke?
3 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by LGBTQ+ Themes (95), Representation Casting (85) and Feminist Agenda (80). On LGBTQ+ Themes: The plot centers on two lesbian teens starting a fight club to hook up with cheerleaders, with multiple queer characters and relationships treated as normal and central.
How does Bottoms compare to other 2023 movies?
It ranks #9 of the 200 films from 2023 we've scored; their average is 24. The wokest is Origin (84).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.