Challengers

It would be possible to interpret this film as using Zendaya as bait, or as a Trojan horse, to lure the audience into receiving its real message: that if only they could unrepress themselves, men would recognise that behind their fierce competitiveness lies the simple truth that what they love, and what they desire, is each other (and where this realisation would in fact allow women to achieve their own liberation – from men). Grounds for such an interpretation can undeniably be found, and are the reason for the feeling that the ending is “confusing” or “ambiguous”. But this interpretation really stems from the sole major change to the screenplay insisted upon by the director: that the two boys should kiss (and no doubt the addition of some other, more subtle hints in that direction). This, however, is not what the film is really about, irrespective of the degree to which the filmmaker is aware of it.

So how best to describe the film’s real theme? Perhaps to ask why a sport like tennis can be so massively and globally popular, and to suggest that the answer is that men exist to compete (even if they can also wish to withdraw from this competition, which is to say, to lose courage and belief in their ability to compete), and to suggest that the reason they love games and sports and every other kind of rivalry is, at bottom, because they know that they are in a competition to be selected by a woman. Deep down, they know that they are involved in a perpetual game of sexual selection. The tension this rivalry involves is a source of true enjoyment and love, and the spirit of emulation it generates means that this tense – and intense – rivalry can become the basis of admiration, friendship, and yes, a kind of desire and a kind of love. But it can also very easily regress – into bitterness, withdrawal, resentment, conflict and war.

And women, too, love the intensity of this rivalrous situation, and this is why they can become so intensely attracted to watching tennis players or football players compete. Even though Tashi is herself a player, and apparently an even fiercer competitor than the men vying for her attention and affections, and even though we might therefore easily imagine that what she lives for is to actualise her own competitive spirit, it seems as if the film is set up to gradually lead her to more openly acknowledge (mainly, to herself) how much what she truly loves is above all the triangular tension of two boys competing to impress her, to attract her, and to seduce her. And this means that, in a way, rather than loving either of them, she loves both, and she loves both insofar as her true love is for the competition between them itself.

This is how they and her begin, the film seems to be saying, and the excitement of that beginning leaves an indelible mark on all three of them. Life, in other words, is less about unrepressing male desire than it is about struggling against the regressive tendency that allows this equilateral tension to fall into mutual conflict. But men and women both find it difficult to recognise and acknowledge what they truly want, and first of all because it is hard not to be weighed down by conventional notions of sexual morality (a conventionality that also leads to interpretations of the ending as being about “forgiveness” and so on), so when they finally achieve this “return”, after years of struggle, the result is an absolute explosion of ecstatic relief. So yes, this rivalry involves the cultivation of a very long and difficult process of sublimation, binding the drives and thereby turning them into desire (tennis, after all, being perhaps the most competitive form of rivalry in the whole world, and thus demanding from players an almost unbelievable willingness to bind one’s existence towards a single aim), and thus involving a great expenditure of libidinal energy. But this does not mean that the existence of such a powerful circuit of libidinal energy between these male rivals implies that what they are actually struggling to liberate is some level of suppressed homosexuality.
What it does mean, again, is that what all three of them love, and wish more than anything to regain, is the beautiful three-sided tension that formed the initial stage for the theatre of their individual and intertwined desires. What they long to return to is the improbable possibility of regaining their places on that stage. This is the idea that makes this movie truly interesting and enjoyable, and what the film really does, through its screenplay, and perhaps against its director’s own preferences, is to induce an inner struggle among audiences to recognise the significance of this kind of tension and this kind of theatre. It’s a shame the director mangled what I take to be the writer’s intention, but for this viewer it wasn’t enough to fatally damage the movie.