Surprisingly, Challengers Is Challenging To Watch
And Not In A Good Way.
It feels like the times could not be much more grim. The news from college campuses, I have to say, is utterly dispiriting. When we live in a world in which you cannot have a civilized, safe exchange of ideas, especially on university campuses, it’s deeply troubling.
You are going to be hearing a lot more from me on this topic.
Meanwhile, I’ll give a gentle plug to my Audible podcast, Pipeline to Power, which I launched in the fall, and is all about the struggle around the First Amendment on college campuses. Please take a listen.
As for something completely different - that I banged out last night because I was somewhat exercised, as you will see - here are my thoughts on Zendaya’s new movie, Challengers, which I wasted three whole hours Saturday watching. (I’m including the minutes spent on popcorn-buying and previews.)
I’m writing this so you don’t make the same mistake.
Which you could do, easily, if you read the reviews in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and the FT. If you read these, you’d think Challengers is a ground-breaking, fun, erotic suspenseful sizzler about a love-triangle, sex, and tennis.
Who wouldn’t want to see that to decompress?
Plus it’s centered around Zendaya, a 27-year-old phenomenon, who can sing, act and model the heck out of couture. Whatever she wears, no matter how complicated, how many buckles, zips, and patterns, I’ve noticed that, unusually for a small, slender person, she always manages to wear it, and not vice versa.
Challengers is reportedly the vehicle she chose for herself to transition from a child star to a serious, grown-up one. The movie was supposed to come out last year, but suffered delays, which is why you’d have to have been living under a rock not to know it’s just been released. On Saturday afternoon the movie theater I was in was mostly full.
Spoiler alert: Don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens.
Broadly, for the very few who don’t already know, the movie is centered around a tennis match between two guys, professional tennis players who were once tennis doubles partners and best friends (maybe more). They are now estranged and their current match, we learn through flashbacks, is about much more than just tennis. For the past 12 years each has been obsessed with Zendaya’s character, another tennis player Tashi - and, it’s suggested, but not spelled out - each other.
There’s a premise and pattern that most psycho-analysts might not consider too healthy or balanced: whoever wins on court, wins Zendaya/Tashi. No matter if that involves her leaving a marriage, a kid…those things are small potatoes.
We learn, piecemeal, that initially, Zendaya’s character, Tashi, is the best tennis player of the three when they meet in their late teens, and, probably not coincidentally is the one who remains most focused on the sport, which consumes her. She makes it clear from the get-go to the smitten guys that she’s more focused on the sport and winning than on having sex with either of them.
She makes her point by leaving their introductory bedroom menage-a-trois mid-action, because she tells them, she’s more interested in the outcome of the tennis match between the two of them the next day.
She tells them that whichever one of them wins the match, will win her number.
That’s because, she explains to the crest-fallen guys, that, to her, tennis is sexual. That’s what turns her on. “It’s a relationship”. That’s why, she explains, she screams after she’s hit a winner. The metaphors are obvious.
So, with that the stakes are set.
You don’t need to go to an Ivy League school to guess what happens.
Tashi gets injured, and she becomes a coach. She oscillates between which of the two guys to coach/be with and the lines between life and tennis stay blurred. If the guy she’s with stops winning on the tennis court, she loses interest in him sexually.
The triangular battle is played out over 12 long years while the boys grow into men and come to realize, in the course of their final epic tennis match, that their sexual, tennisual (new word!) tunnel-vision has come with a price, that may not be worth it.
Which is, of course, losing each other’s friendship - maybe more.
All of this might be interesting material for analysis on the shrink’s couch - except that the movie doesn’t suggest Zendaya’s character is looking for a shrink, or thinking about anything outside of tennis and sex, other than which outfit to wear.
There’s no suggestion that Tashi starts to self-reflect, to wonder if she’s got her priorities all wrong: should she care about winning at tennis more than sex? Should one’s life be about anything more than simply tennis, sex and a wardrobe?
The movie doesn’t go there.
Yet, not one of the reviews I’ve read mentions the very jarring fact that, even after Tashi gives birth to a daughter, she doesn’t evolve. Granny, mostly, looks after the kid, whose development many mothers might worry about. One time Tashi puts her kid to bed, dressed only in the kind of negligee you’d wear if you were posing for the cover of Playboy.
You could argue that one ought not to dwell on this pernickety stuff and one should just watch the movie, because, well, Zendaya is Zendaya.
Maybe I am just cranky or suffering from some sort of myopia that the critics at the New York Times, The Guardian, The FT, the New Yoker are not - but I discovered that hotness, even Zendaya’s hotness, can get really boring, discomfiting even, when it’s shoved in your face again and again, and nothing else interesting happens.
It’s almost as if the audience is being tacitly coerced into some sort of sexploitation of a young woman who I’m fairly sure wants to be known for more than just her body.
But in Challengers, all we get from Zendaya is frame after frame of her looking smoking hot.
There’s Zendaya in very short tennis shorts. Zendaya in even shorter tennis skirts (I actually didn’t know they made tennis skirts that short. I don’t think they sell them in the places I buy mine, but I will now enquire. Though, I suspect if I wore one that short, it might not have the same effect as when Zendaya wears it). Zendaya in silk underwear. Zendaya in lacy underwear. Zendaya in a strapless dress. Zendaya in high heels and a mini skirt. Zendaya in a thong…..Zendaya….ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz
Yep. That’s me nodding off…..
But, seriously, what’s up with the nation’s movie critics?
The first thing I did after leaving the movie theater was to google as many reviews of Challengers as possible, because I wondered why I’d ever had the impression that this was a great movie.
I noticed that, thankfully, if you dig, you’ll find there are a couple of reviewers who think like I do.
Kyle Smith of the Wall Street Journal complained about the lack of substance, and Candice Frederick in the Huffington Post felt confused by the endless shots of Zendaya wearing almost nothing.
Now that I’ve thought about it - and you can tell, that I have thought about it! - I could cope with Zendaya wearing nothing, or almost nothing for two and a half hours. What I’m struggling with is that her character seems to be thinking nothing, as well.
In 2024, don’t we want to write women characters who have more to them than that?
I write this next part a little nervously: I’d like to know what you all think!
Thank you! I will read it immediately
Phenomenal- looking young woman.