While we can see sex’s significance at the level of narrative plot, sexual desire poses an equal if not more important aesthetic concern, in which cinematographic style is not merely a decorative flourish.
“There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.” —Leo Bersani
Leo Bersani begins with this seemingly paradoxical yet intriguing sentiment surrounding sex in his 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Though embroiled in the specificity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic at its peak, this statement points to a continued difficulty surrounding sex, the nature of its expression, the identities it produces, and the forms of control that attempt to tie it down. Most pressing for Bersani’s essay is how gay sex in the eighties was demonized for being non-biologically-productive, rampant, and therefore “unhealthy.” Rather than refuting the blatant homophobia of these assertions however, Bersani makes a radical move not to redeem sexuality for its power, but to deny the redemptive power of sex entirely, and instead wade in the chaos of losing control. To understand subjectivity as deconstructed, fragmented, and disoriented by sex is to rethink the role of power and its construction of the sexual relation.
I begin with Bersani to frame my thinking around film as a form, and how it incorporates the body into its aesthetic expression, made complicated by sexual tension and incompatibility. By this I mean that sex is mobilized here as an experience of destabilized power inter- and intra-personally, as well as an act that gets us to confront what is prior to signification in the formation of subjectivity. If sex and sexuality can be understood as an engagement with that which destroys or erodes the subject, how does it eventually make its way into the realm of signification and the image? Where and how do we see this form of erosion, not only in ourselves but in modes of expression, like film, that equally incorporate the energetic pulsions of the body?
Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers illustrates some of these effects by foregrounding an incompatible sexual relation, leading its protagonists down a path of self-destruction. For me, the centralized yet ambiguous love triangle at the heart of the film inadvertently embodies the anti-structural threat of sexuality and desire at large. Instead of something that one can master and control, Challengers mobilizes the chaos of sexuality as that which can destabilize structures of meaning. Further, the tension emerging from the rigid athleticism of tennis and its surrounding aesthetic language makes visual the horror of sex’s incompatibility with order, practice, expertise, and law. Each member of the love triangle’s pursuit of athletic success (and desire for mastery) conceals how their underlying sexual dynamic holds them back from such a goal. In turn, this tension ultimately exposes the goal itself as futile.
While we can see sex’s significance at the level of narrative plot, sexual desire poses an equal if not more important aesthetic concern, in which cinematographic style is not merely a decorative flourish. I suggest, rather, that the body as form comes to the surface in this film, making it an object of analysis itself that rests on equal grounds with plot, as both point to the fragmentary capacity of sex. The effect of this is conceiving of sexuality as a kind of methodology or prism through which different aspects of film form might be illuminated.
Sexuality as a form of signification starts to take shape by looking to Jacques Lacan’s notion of what he calls the impossibility of the sexual relation, elaborated upon by Luce Irigaray. Irigaray posits that our collective understandings of masculinity and femininity both hold unstable relations to the phallus—not the phallus as genitals, but as a master signifier of power and wholeness that we all strive toward. She suggests we can understand Lacan’s statement that the sexual relation is possible if we see sex as not separate domains for the masculine and the feminine, but instead as differing expressions of the oneness of sex, where masculinity is that which is, and femininity is that which is not.
As long as language exists as a phallic form of signification, providing the literal terms through which we define ourselves as subjects, a piece of the feminine will always fall out of its construction—the phallic cannot fully account for the feminine. This is not to say that the masculine is a diametrically opposed positionality afforded wholeness or mastery through language; the phallus as the master signifier cannot ever actually be reached, which registers as a failure, or, as Lacan and Freud so famously deem it—a castration anxiety. If the masculine experiences castration anxiety as a threat of loss, the feminine does so as an amputation already performed.
Challengers places its characters in various positions toward or beyond castration, which I think qualifies their persistent failures in both love and their professional tennis careers by a new metric. The film is presented nonlinearly, following childhood best friends Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) who win the boys’ junior doubles title at the US Open, where they meet Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), with whom they’re both infatuated. They invite her to their hotel room and eventually engage in a three-way kiss that gets cut off before it can escalate further. After their weekend together, Art asks Patrick if he slept with Tashi, which Patrick confirms non-verbally by mimicking Art’s serving tic—placing the tennis ball at the throat of the racket before an opening serve. A few years later, Tashi and Art attend Stanford together as varsity athletes, while Patrick goes professional and starts a long-distance relationship with Tashi. Upon one of his visits to campus, the couple gets into a fight before one of Tashi’s matches, where she incurs a severe knee injury, marking a shift in power as her playing career ends
Forced to stop playing tennis and subsequently breaking up with Patrick, Tashi becomes a coach and reconnects with Art years later, also marking the beginning of their romantic relationship. In 2019, now married, Tashi has coached Art to huge success, only one US Open title away from a Career Grand Slam. To boost his confidence, Art is registered in a small Challenger event in New Rochelle where he reunites with Patrick whose professional career has weakened over the years, scraping by on winnings from small circuits like this one. At their final set, Tashi watches the two compete until a tie break, crashing into each other in a tight embrace as the film closes.
The three protagonists fit squarely within failed positions of mastery, exacerbated by both the pursuit of professional tennis careers and the centralized non-reciprocal triangulation of desire between them, emblematized eloquently by Art’s serving tic. By this simple gesture, tennis becomes the structure through which moving toward phallic mastery is believed to take place, a faith in it as a passageway to becoming the master signifier through steady practice and rigor—here designated as the coveted Grand Slam title, or equivocal, reciprocated love from Tashi. But, if Lacan is right in saying that there is no sexual relation, and castration conditions the means by which subjects both feminine and masculine enter the logic of desire, desire is single handedly responsible for each of the characters’ inherent lack of wholeness or a tangible satisfaction of this pursuit, resulting in an essential sexual ambiguity that does not and cannot successfully come together.
At the beginning of the film, Tashi assumes the position of phallic mastery until she is effectively castrated by her knee injury. She is a rising tennis star at the peak of her career, and the object of affection for both Patrick and Art—she is the gateway through which they can see themselves acceding to phallic mastery. In the hotel room at the junior US Open as teenagers, we see this desire play out through lust and sexual longing, in their childlike excitement and combined idealization/sensualization of Tashi. Tashi kisses Patrick first before moving on to Art, the two flanking her in anticipation as she holds the power of their sexual intrigue. The kiss shared by two then evolves into one shared by three, until Tashi leans back to watch the two best friends kiss each other. She smiles coyly as if this was her plan all along, her position of mastery creating the conditions through which the boys fall into each other as they float within the failed remainder of desire’s pursuit.
But a switch takes place when Tashi becomes castrated, her injury now preventing her from fully acceding to the mastery of her sport. This now broken relation moves her from phallic jouissance to the jouissance of the Other, or what Lacan calls feminine jouissance—a subject who must accept the terms of castration rather than fearing its immanence as Art and Patrick do. Her inability to continue playing tennis leads her to coaching, which eventually translates into a quelling of castration anxiety for Art, who still believes in her non-castrated relation to the phallus as a result of both their romantic union and their even more imbalanced dynamic of coach and coachee. Tashi assumes a position of absolute power for Art precisely because her castration has already taken place, whereas he is marked by the paralyzing function of castration’s imminence.
All this to say: between them, there is no sexual relation. It’s not that the two aren’t having sex, but rather that their induction into the world as desiring subjects is characterized by an absolute barring from that which they desire. They are both prohibited from achieving satisfaction in incompatible ways that cannot reconcile each other, and yet, they nonetheless believe they can achieve their desires through the (perceived yet non-existent) reciprocity of their relationship. What Challengers continuously emphasizes, however, is that no combination of relationships between the three protagonists will effectively cohere into the achievement of desire. Their complicated desire for each other cannot bring what any of them truly want as individuals. This repetitive logic reveals the inherently destructive condition of desire.
But this interest in sex’s fragmentary capacity extends beyond the film’s central love triangle. Its emphasis on tennis’s formal sensibility also allows the film to equate the sport with sexuality—tight athletic gear wicked with sweat as bodies contort back and forth across a court, participating in the shared patterns of volleying (punctuated by gasps and moans) and vying for power until a point of rupture to complete a set. In fact, sexual desire and tennis almost become synonyms in this film—most aptly, in how Patrick’s mimicry of Art’s serve tic directly signifies sexual acts between Patrick and Tashi. (Notably, also, this gesture is only legible or meaningful when it occurs between Patrick and Art.)
I suggest that the synonymous link between tennis and sex begins to point to sex as a kind of formal language that ends up making the body into form as well. In other words, when sex threatens the stability of each of the film’s characters, we can see, at the same time, how the exigencies of film style overwhelm the representation of their bodies. Form, as such, jumps forward—sexuality is reduced to the simplicity of a visual gesture. The sexualized body is brought down to the same affective level as the lines that determine the bounds of the tennis court, the net that separates one from the other, the muscular expressions of two legs charging toward corners of the delineated box to keep a ball in play. When the body can no longer maintain the rally, it becomes a different kind of form—one that is broken and forced to signify something else.
There is a particular violence to the body becoming form as such, which Eugenie Brinkema repositions as the signifying potential of understanding the body as nothing but formal material. She encourages “treating it as a compositional aspect that is navigated by, intersects with, and interprets unfolding relations with countless other formal aspects that mutually interact, bearing out the potential for being otherwise.” The ways in which desire is expressed through sexuality (both pleasurably dislocating and aggressively driving) speaks to a confusion of the body’s goal, subsequently reducing it to a mass of contradiction that opens onto the other forms within the film to compose an overall aesthetic.
To Brinkema’s point, Challengers frames the body as an aesthetic piece of a larger formal whole, which I suggest can accurately represent the desiring subject as inherently fractured, perpetually held in a barred position toward the phallus. Tashi, Art, and Patrick’s bodies are foreclosed to the tennis court, abiding by its lines in an attempt to master it from within. But there is also an outside to the court in which Art and Patrick seek to make sense of their broken subjectivities—an openness of their bodies that asks to be reconfigured by Tashi, who has accepted her own castration as an already happened fact. As we come to see however, this is a false movement that leads the three of them to fold back into each other repeatedly in twisted knots of power, submission, pleasure, and jouissance.
Though lauded for the erotics of the emergent possibility of a successful threesome, Challengers doesn’t easily position homosexuality, bisexuality, polyamory, or any other form of non-heterosexual relation as a clear resolution to the destabilizing and contradictory nature of sexuality itself. Instead, it revels in the unseating of such totalizing labels, leaving audiences scattered in their understanding of desire’s conclusion. This instability, I think, is exacerbated by equating Art, Tashi, and Patrick’s bodies with the formal language of tennis, which becomes both the means through which they pursue mastery and metaphorically interface with sex and desire for each other. A discussion of instability as such represents the possibilities tethered to the radical formalist reading that Brinkema encourages, where stylistic choices can more generously bear upon the felt relations between characters on screen that often mirror our own. If the body becomes like the lines of the tennis court that determine what takes place within and beyond it, desire becomes the break point.
Marcus Prasad is a Ph.D. student at McGill University focusing on psychoanalysis, sexuality, and their relationships to film theory and form. He is currently interested in Gilles Deleuze’s late work on affect, and listening exclusively to Sabrina Carpenter.