Flying Without a Map: Chasing Amy and the Quest for Satisfying Relationships
JERRY L. WALLS
When I heard Kevin Smith speak at the University of Kentucky, he was introduced as “the King of Postmodern film.” Well, I am not interested in the politics of who should be recognized as King of this domain, but if it were decided by election, I’m sure Smith would get a lot of votes. He is an astute observer of contemporary culture and his films are as rich with insight as they are laced with racy humor. Moreover, he has a remarkable ability to probe issues of perennial and passionate concern, and to do so in a way that resonates with the postmodern pursuit of purpose.1 In this essay we will look at one of his films that portrays the moral ambiguities of postmodernism, and explore some important connections between the nature of morality and meaning of life.
While Smith’s best known work is probably Dogma (1999), his irreverent look at religion, his own favorite is Chasing Amy (1997), a warmly personal movie inspired by his real-life relationship with Joey Lauren Adams, the female star of the film. He makes no secret of the fact that their relationship was threatened by his temporary inability to deal with her past. In his previous relationships, he was used to being the one who had done it all, the ultra-liberal who could teach any girl some new tricks. Then he met Joey.2
Why It’s Called “Chasing Amy”
But enough about Smith himself for now—let us turn to the story he tells on screen.
Chasing Amy begins with all the main characters attending a comic book convention in New York as celebrity guests. Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky (Jason Lee) are authors of a hit comic series called Bluntman & Chronic, which features crude sexual humor. Their fellow comic writer and friend Hooper (Dwight Ewell), a black homosexual, introduces them to yet another comic artist, Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams). Holden is intrigued by her smart-talking personality, and the two hit it off immediately. The next day, Hooper invites Holden and Banky to a nightclub on Alyssa’s behalf, and Holden smells romance. Alyssa is called up to the stage to sing and she performs a throaty rendition of a love song, apparently aimed at Holden. But things are not always what they seem. Pushing through the crowd and in front of Holden is a blonde. Yes, a female blonde. And when the song is through, she and Alyssa begin kissing. Indeed, lesbian couples all over the bar are moved by Alyssa’s performance and begin making out. While Holden is stunned, not to mention deflated, Banky soon finds delight in the situation, and revels in the opportunity to watch such things live and up close for free.
The next day Alyssa shows up at their apartment, and they begin talking about his feelings about what happened the night before and about the whole matter of what defines appropriate sexual behavior. They also learn that they both grew up in neighboring towns in Jersey. Despite Holden’s initial misgivings, they are soon hanging out together constantly. While Alyssa seems to be just enjoying the friendship of a guy who can accept her for who she is, Holden is developing feelings that seem destined for disappointment. He is falling helplessly in love with her, and one night he tells her so in a speech that would do any “chick flick” proud. But Alyssa is not your typical chick, and she reacts first with shock and then with anger because Holden has simply failed to understand and respect who she is. She is outraged at his selfishness and insensitivity in thinking she can just change who she is because he has a crush on her!
But the scene has a happy ending. After getting out of the car into the pouring rain and telling Holden where he can get off, to put it nicely, she runs back to him and falls into his arms. Heterosexual kissing follows, and Alyssa seems just as passionate as she was in the lesbian bar. The romantic highlight of the film occurs a few scenes later when Alyssa tells Holden why she fell for him, breaking her previous pattern of female lovers. Her speech is as emotionally appealing as Holden’s earlier one to her. She explains that she found him on her own terms having already explored the other side of the field. Holden is feeling pretty good that he has gone where no man has gone before in finding his way into Alyssa’s heart.
Banky, however, is not pleased. Not only does he harbor anti-homosexual feelings, but he is jealous of the time Alyssa is taking with Holden and he fears it will ruin the career they have built as comic collaborators. Immediately after this scene, he drops a bomb, in the form of a high school yearbook, in front of Holden and instructs him to check out page forty-eight. There, we see Alyssa’s senior picture with her nickname “Fingercuffs” printed underneath. Banky has been doing a little detective work and he has learned that she earned that name because she participated several years ago in a threesome with two guys, one of whom Holden and Banky remembered from their high school. (If the meaning of the nickname is not obvious, it is explained in the movie!)
This is more stunning to Holden than his initial discovery that Alyssa was a lesbian and he denies it vehemently, insisting that she had never been with a guy. But the hard truth that he wants to deny cannot be avoided; Holden confronts Alyssa about Banky’s allegations while they are at a hockey game, a scene that is very cleverly choreographed. The exchange that follows is intense with raw emotion, as Alyssa confesses the incident, plus more. Indeed, she identifies herself as the “queen of suburban legends” because of her previous sexual adventures. Holden is crushed as well as indignant that Alyssa had misled him about her past. While apparently not bothered by her numerous lesbian encounters, he saw her colorful heterosexual past as cheap and degrading.
Enter Jay and Silent Bob. While Holden is still reeling and confused, he meets the odd couple of Smith’s films in a diner. Dispensing advice as only he can, Jay counsels Holden to dump Alyssa and forget her. But then Bob breaks his characteristic silence with two momentous words: “Chasing Amy.” That is his diagnosis of what is going on with Holden. Silent Bob goes on at some length explaining that he had had a similar relationship with a girl named Amy, and he had pushed her away because he didn’t know how to handle her past. He has come to realize she was the one, but now she is gone. Ever since, he explains, he has been “Chasing Amy . . . so to speak.”
All of this brings us to Holden’s ingenious solution to his quandary. This scene is very important to my analysis of this film and we will come back to it shortly. Before we proceed, however, let me state my central thesis. I believe “Chasing Amy” is a vivid picture of what happens to us emotionally, morally and relationally when we try to revise morality in some fairly radical ways, while still holding onto selected parts of traditional morality.
Morality and the Meaning of Life
Broadly speaking morality has been understood, in modern and pre-modern times, as something to which all human beings are accountable. It makes certain demands on us and prescribes how we ought to live our lives. However, morality has not been understood as a list of rules or obligations that are imposed on us as a burden. Rather, the rules of morality are the formula for true human fulfillment and flourishing. It is in following the moral way that we fulfill our nature and achieve lasting satisfaction.
Much of morality obviously pertains to relationships. The essence of morality is a concern to relate to other beings, and even things (such as the environment), in the right way. Persons have intrinsic value, and should always be treated with love and respect. In one of the most famous passages in the New Testament, Jesus says that the Ten Commandments could be summarized as two: We should love God with our whole heart and we should love our neighbor as our self.3 So morality at its best provides direction for treating others, as well as our selves, in a truly loving fashion.
Now it is not easy to summarize the meaning of life in a sentence or two, but let’s hazard this much: The meaning of life is loving relationships. It is what Alyssa, Banky, Holden and all the rest of us are looking for. And morality is about governing relationships and treating people in a truly loving way. Satisfying relationships depend, then, on proper moral guidelines to keep them on track. So there are obvious and important connections between morality and the meaning of life.
The connection is even stronger when we press on to ask one of the most basic of all philosophical questions, namely, where do our moral standards come from? What is the source or ground of morality? As we will see in a moment, this issue is raised rather pointedly in the movie. This is hardly surprising, for not only is this a longstanding philosophical issue, it is also a hot topic at the forefront of the so-called culture wars that currently rage in our society. Indeed, E.O. Wilson, a prominent socio-biologist, has stated that the dispute between fundamentally different views of morality is the twenty-first century’s “version of the struggle for men’s souls.”4
According to Wilson, centuries of debate have left us with basically two different options. Either moral principles exist outside of the human mind and are independent of human experience, or they are the inventions of human minds. Those who hold the first view believe that morality is grounded in the eternal nature or will of God, or at least in self-evident moral principles that any rational person should be able to see as clearly true.
By contrast, people who hold the second view believe moral principles are the products of biology and culture. Moral demands are really nothing more than the principles we have hammered out over the years as we have made agreements and contracts with each other to govern our life together. Over the centuries of social and cultural evolution, these principles have hardened into requirements and obligations. On this view, a statement about what we “ought” to do is just shorthand for what society first chose to do and then later hardened into a moral code.
At the foundation of morality then, according to this view, lies human choice and experience, including the choices and experiences of Holden, Alyssa, and their friends. Understood this way, morality is open to our revision if it no longer seems to us to meet our needs or fit with our experience.
As Wilson, a proponent of the latter view recognizes, this dispute has great implications for religion and also for the quest for human meaning. Human beings, he admits, are incurably religious. They seek immortality and eternal significance for their lives. They hunger for communion with God and even to be united with him in a relationship of perfect love. Without such hope, human beings tend to feel lost in a universe that is ultimately without meaning.
Unfortunately for us, Wilson believes our deepest longings and hopes are destined for disappointment. Religion, like morality, is a human invention and has no independent reality. It is our misfortune that we have evolved with desires and aspirations that do not fit reality. The ultimate Lover we seek is a product of our creative imagination.
But maybe our misfortune involves even more than this. Perhaps even our quest for human love is a misguided one that will inevitably be frustrated. Jay suggests as much in the encounter with Holden in the diner. When Holden explains that he can’t just dump Alyssa because he is in love with her, Jay replies: “Ah, there ain’t no such thing. You gotta boil it down to the essentials. It’s like Cube says—life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.” If these really are the essentials of our world, Jay may be right that love is an illusion.
Standard Without Substance
One of the most interesting scenes in the movie for moral analysis is the conversation that occurs after Holden has first discovered that Alyssa is gay. She opens the door for him to ask questions about her sexual preferences and the following exchange occurs.
ALYSSA: Why men?
HOLDEN: Because that is the standard.
ALYSSA: If that’s the only reason you’re attracted to women—because it’s the standard . . .
Holden goes on a bit later to add that, “Girls feel right.” Alyssa says the same is true for her. Holden then infers that she is a virgin if she has only been with girls and has never had intercourse with a member of the opposite sex, again appealing to the “standard definition.” And again, Alyssa proceeds to punch holes in his definition.
Now this is very telling. While Holden keeps appealing to the “standard” account of things, it is rather clear that he has very little sense of how to defend his convictions or any convincing reasons why his standards should be accepted.
Consider now Alyssa’s explanation of why she was attracted to Holden, despite her previous history of lesbian relationships:
I came to this on my own terms. You know, I didn’t just heed what I was taught. Men and women should be together, it’s the natural way—that kind of thing. I’m not with you because of what family, society, life tried to instill in me from day one. . . . So here we are, I was thorough when I looked for you, and I feel justified lying in your arms—’cause I got here on my own terms, and I have no question there was someplace I didn’t look. And for me that makes all the difference.
This brings into sharper focus why Alyssa feels no obligation to accept the standard account of things. The standard is based only on what family, society, and the like tried to instill in her as the natural way we should behave. In doing things on her own terms, she is merely preferring her own way instead of what she sees as the rather artificial demands of others, demands that have no real authority over her.
Alyssa’s moral outlook is also clarified in the scene outside the hockey arena when Holden asks her how she could have done some of the outrageous things she had just confessed. She replied as follows: “Easily! Some I did out of stupidity, some I did out of what I thought was love, but—good or bad—they are my choices, and I’m not making apologies for them now—not to you or not to anyone!” Alyssa goes on to point out that Holden also had sex in high school, to which he replies that there is a world of difference between “typical high school sex” and having sex with two guys at once. A bit later, she describes herself as “an experimental girl” trying to figure things out on her own. Contrasting herself to Holden, she says she was not given a “map at birth, so I tried it all.”
Now, in view of Wilson’s two basic views of morality, cited above, Alyssa seems to hold a version of the second view. She sees the “standard” view of morality as resting on a very flimsy foundation that cannot really bear the weight placed upon it. It may make grand claims, but it really amounts to nothing more than what parents or society have told us about how we ought to behave. Alyssa feels perfectly free to reject this and figure out from her own experience how she ought to behave.
But what about Holden? What is his view? While he appeals to the “standard” he hardly has a well-thought-out or consistent view on the matter. He apparently sees nothing wrong with sex outside of marriage, as long as it’s “typical” sort of stuff. He even comes to the point that he is untroubled by Alyssa’s lesbian past. He only draws the line, so to speak, at more unusual practices like sex with multiple heterosexual partners at the same time. Alyssa challenges the inconsistency in Holden’s views when she puts the following question to him: “Do you mean to tell me that—while you have zero problem with me sleeping with half the women in New York City—you have some sort of half-assed, mealy-mouthed objection to pubescent antics that took place almost ten years ago?”
In one sense then, Holden’s problem is caused by his moral standards. He has revised the “standard” account of morality to a large extent, but he still holds to certain parts of traditional morality. He is caught in a dilemma because he loves Alyssa, on the one hand, but he also holds certain moral convictions that she finds silly and “mealy-mouthed.” His dilemma is a variation on the conflict we feel anytime we find ourselves at odds with our moral standards. This produces a tension that we need to resolve if we are to have emotional peace and personal integrity. The question, which is one of the truly fundamental issues human beings have struggled with as long as there have been human beings, is how to do this.
This brings us to Holden’s solution, which he unveils in a meeting he has arranged with both Alyssa and Banky. He arrived at his solution, he says, after dissecting the whole situation and looking at it a thousand different ways. When the answer finally came to him, he says everything made sense and “a calm came over me.” If they will agree with him, not only will the tension be relieved between him and Banky, and Banky and Alyssa, but most importantly, he and Alyssa will be able to get past the wall they have hit in their relationship and go on to be stronger than ever.
After this buildup, he announces “We’ve all got to have sex together.” While at one level this sounds so preposterous that you want to laugh, Holden makes the case so earnestly that the scene is actually charged with vulnerability and poignant emotion.
Don’t you see? That would take care of everything. Alyssa, with you I wouldn’t feel too inadequate or conservative anymore. Because I’ll have experienced something on a par with all your experience. And it’ll be with you, which’ll make it that much more powerful. And Banky—you can take that leap that everyone else but you sees that you should take. . .. And when it’s over, all that hostility and aggression you feel toward Alyssa will be gone. Because you’ll have shared in something beautiful with the woman I love. It’ll be cathartic. This will keep us together.
Now the irony here is truly remarkable. What Holden viewed before in another context as the insurmountable stumbling block to an otherwise wonderful relationship has been transformed in his mind into a virtual sacrament. What he saw before as cheap and degrading and scandalous, he now describes as simply another level of experience, a level that he suggests is higher and richer than his own experience. To engage in three-way sex is now seen as something beautiful, as emotionally cathartic and as the means to true communion.
In short, Holden’s solution to his dilemma was to further revise his moral views, to erase the line he still wanted to draw as a limit on acceptable sexual behavior. Once this offending “standard” was eliminated, the tension between him and his moral convictions would be resolved, and he could experience peace again.
Not surprisingly, Banky is blindsided by Holden’s proposal, but he reluctantly agrees to go along with it. Alyssa, however, rejects the proposition firmly, but with feeling (to which Banky breathes a sigh of relief, and says “Thank Christ”). Holden seems truly perplexed, given her previous willingness to engage in such activity, but she insists that his solution will not solve anything, but only create more problems. She elaborates:
Maybe you’ll see me differently from then on, you know? Or maybe you’ll despise me for going along with it, once you’re in the moment. . . . Or what if—and God I sincerely doubt it, but what if—I saw something in Banky that I’ve never seen before, you know, and fell in love with him and left you? I’ve been down roads like this before; many times. I know you feel doing this will broaden your horizons and give you experience. But I’ve had those experiences on my own. And I can’t accompany you on yours. I’m past that now.
This exchange represents a sort of reverse in their roles, with Alyssa now drawing a line that rejects three-way sex. However, her reasons for declining this encounter are much the same as her explanation for why she earlier participated in such behavior. She is still taking an experimental approach to morality, and her reasons for declining Holden’s proposal can be summed up in the fact that she personally has already had those experiences and is now past them. But it is unclear what she means by this. The fact that she keeps open the possibility that she could fall in love with Banky and leave Holden suggests she is still following her feelings and doing things on her own terms, wherever that may lead in the realm of romantic relationships. The conclusion of the movie is also interesting in this regard, although ambiguous. In the final scene Alyssa is again at a comic convention with one of her female friends. Has she returned to the lesbian lifestyle? All that seems clear is that Alyssa has been down many roads in her experimentation and is unwilling to accompany others who feel the need to go where she has already gone.
So we are left with the suggestion that Holden’s solution for resolving the moral tension he was feeling is not a satisfactory one, that he would probably not find the peace he thought he would achieve by engaging in forms of sexual expression he previously viewed as wrong or inappropriate. But Alyssa’s refusal is finally only a statement that she cannot accompany Holden. It is not really a statement that Holden should not go down the roads she had already explored. On Alyssa’s own terms, she must leave open the possibility that Holden might indeed find satisfaction in a threesome, just as she might find it in Banky, at least temporarily.
Another Option for Chasers Everywhere
So much for the attempt to resolve the moral tension by making more changes in one’s moral standards. There is, however, another profoundly different way of resolving the tension that is never explored in the movie. In short, instead of changing one’s moral standards, one can change one’s behavior to bring it in line with the standards. This approach would require one to own up to the fact that any behavior that violated those standards was indeed wrong and should be recognized as such.
But this approach raises a huge question: what would moral standards have to consist of in order for us to be able to take them that seriously? If moral standards have nothing more behind them than society’s expectations, parental authority and the like, then it is hard to get too worked up about violating them. Alyssa’s attitude is perfectly understandable if “standards” amount to nothing more than this.
Recall Wilson’s claim that “the battle for men’s souls” in this century is being fought over just this question. Recall also that one of the sides in this battle holds that morality does indeed have a much more substantial foundation than human authority and consensus. Indeed, according to the view that has been dominant in Western culture for the better part of two thousand years, morality has as strong a foundation as can be imagined, namely, God Himself. There are various ways of spelling this out this in detail, but the basic idea is that morality is not an arbitrary matter at all, nor is it merely the product of human thought and experience. Rather, it is a reflection of God’s nature or an expression of his perfectly wise and loving will.
It is this belief about the nature of morality that gives solid content to the traditional idea that the rules of morality are the formula for fulfilling our nature and achieving the satisfaction we all crave. Since God is perfectly wise and loving, he not only knows what is best for us, but also desires it. He has not left us on our own to experiment and figure out for ourselves how we ought to live. Rather, he has given us direction and guidance to help us find the satisfaction and happiness all of us are looking for.
Now all of this can sound rather theoretical or even stuffy. In reality, however, these ideas can help us avoid negative and heavy-handed notions of morality, particularly, the notion that it is just a legalistic matter of following certain rules for the sake of the rules. For if morality is rooted in the will of a personal being who is truly loving and good, then when we do what is wrong, we are not just breaking some impersonal rule. Rather, we are disappointing God and damaging our relationship to Him.
So when we acknowledge we have done wrong, and aspire to do what is right, we are ultimately acknowledging God and expressing our trust that He truly loves us and knows what is best for us. In following his rules for human behavior, we not only enrich our relationship with God, we also pursue the most promising route to satisfying relationships on the human level.5 All of this helps us maintain the personal touch and the concern for happiness that morality at its best is all about.
Now Smith, the writer and director, is a practicing Catholic, so it would not be unthinkable that he might explore this option. In fact, however, no one in the film ever brings God into the picture or gives any consideration to the possibility that He might be relevant to sexual morality. Some of the characters refer to their Catholic upbringing, and there are a few jokes with Catholic references, but Catholicism comes into play in a serious way only as the source of whatever conservative moral instincts remain with them. For instance, when Silent Bob is describing his relationship with Amy, and says that it blew his mind when she told him she had participated in a threesome, he explains that he reacted that way because he was raised Catholic. But none of the characters seem to take their Catholic upbringing seriously, so the guilt feelings and other moral reactions that remain are experienced as a sort of emotional hangover that serves no positive purpose.
Whether or not this is part of Smith’s intention for this film, I believe he has portrayed for us in a powerful way the sort of quandaries that inevitably result for people who live in a postmodern, post-Christian world and who still retain shreds of traditional morality, particularly sexual morality, but have no idea why those “standards” should be followed. Those remnants of traditional morality are relics from a worldview they no longer hold with real conviction, and those moral judgments often make little sense outside the worldview that originally gave them life. As such, those standards often leave the persons who must deal with them feeling deeply confused and bewildered.
To put it another way, Chasing Amy illustrates for us the inevitable difficulties for those without a map, who fly by the front of their pants, or who fly with only shreds of a map they have discarded long ago.
Making moral sense without God is not easy. It is hard enough with God, but harder still without him. If there is no God to whom we are accountable, morality certainly does not have the same sort of authority over us as it would with his existence. Alyssa’s refusal to apologize to “anyone” for her past behavior makes a certain amount of sense if there is no God to whom we are accountable, and morality is a human creation. If we feel guilty or ashamed of our choices, but there is no God, then there is no one to forgive us and make us right again. Indeed, there is no need to be forgiven, at least on any grand scale, for our moral and relational failures.
If there is no ultimate relationship to give our lives meaning, if the hope for this relationship is an illusion, as Wilson believes, then we are on our own to do the best we can to find satisfaction in human relationships or wherever else we may. But if our lives do have ultimate meaning, we also have help and guidance for those relationships, as well as the prospect of forgiveness where we have gone wrong. Certainly this is not the only reason to believe in God, but the fact that belief in God helps us make sense of our deepest longings for morality and meaning is one powerful consideration in deciding this ultimate question.
Perhaps then Chasing Amy is an image of an even larger quest. If He is out there, maybe we will find her too.6
1. Does a meaningful life have to be a morally good life? Is it possible to separate out questions of meaning from moral issues?
2. Many thinkers have claimed that a morality grounded in God would make morality objective. In what sense does it make morality “objective”? Does this just present us with one more moral viewpoint?
3. What does the movie say about our ability to choose whom we fall in love with?
TO READ NEXT
John E. Hare. The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
Alasdair MacIntyre. Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
Basil Mitchell. Morality: Religious and Secular. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
Jerry L. Walls. Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
1 Postmodernism is the widely discussed and analyzed mindset that has become pervasive as the ideals of the modern period have lost their hold in western thought and culture. Postmodernism is very skeptical about the moral convictions that were largely a matter of consensus in the modern and pre-modern periods.
2 For Smith’s own account of this, see “The How’s and Why’s of ‘Chasing Amy’” at http://www.viewaskew.com/chasingamy/index.html
3 See Matthew 22:34–40.
4 Edward O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality,” Atlantic Monthly (April 1998), p. 54.
5 I have defended in more detail the claim that God is the ultimate ground of morality in Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 161–197.
6 Thanks to Dave Baggett, Yukie Hirose, Bill Irwin, Tom Morris, and Pat Wilson for helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to the students in my class on Postmodernism and Pop Culture, and to Jonathan Walls for insightful discussion of the movie.