Horny Tennis Movie Isn’t About Tennis
Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers tells the story of two childhood tennis partners, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O'Connor), who have been friends since boarding school. As they come of age, they cross paths with Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a player poised to dominate women’s tennis. So begins a decades-long competition, on and off the tennis court, for Tashi’s favor.
Central though tennis may be, Challengers is more of a film about swinging dicks than it is about tennis rackets, and that’s what makes it one of the only sports movies I’ll ever really care about.
Dripping with sweat and exuding intoxicating cinematic pheromones, Challengers is a bisexual fever dream of athletic and sexual competition that zeros in on the intricate, hollow nature of desire.
The ball is in your court:
Desire, Pursuit, Absence, and Competition
“Desire is desire for desire.”
-Natalie Wynn in Twilight | ContraPoints
Desire propels Challengers’ narrative forward, and its characters are in perpetual pursuit. Desire, often a conflicted emotion, is further complicated by Tashi’s singular relationship to tennis and grief.
As I watched Challengers, I kept thinking about Contrapoint’s recent video essay about The Twilight Saga. Part two of her comprehensive analysis grapples with the concept of desire and its relationship to absence.
“Absence is the essential nature of erotic love because … desire is lack… because desire is derived from lack, something has to separate the lover and the beloved for the desire to sustain itself.”
“In romance fiction, that something is the barrier… the third thing that triangulates desire.”
“When the barrier is overcome, when the two lovers unite, that is the end of your romance novel because the narrative is sustained by desire, and desire is sustained by separation.”
“It’s not easy to sustain desire over years… you have to keep inventing… new barriers that create the space for desire to continuously reignite.”
-Quotes from Natalie Wynn in Twilight | ContraPoints
In Challengers, the “barrier” that Art and Patrick face takes the form of a tennis match. Guadagnino brilliantly sustains the tension of their confrontation via the film’s non-linear narrative structure, cleverly and continuously reigniting desire in a story that spans thirteen years.
For Art and Patrick, the erotic paradigm of Challengers’ romance directly mirrors that of athletic competition. The erotics of sexual desire thus become inextricable from the pursuit of athletic triumph. Attaining their desire is predicated on competition where there can be only one winner. To lose is to lose desirability in Tashi’s eyes because, for Tashi, tennis is more than a sport.
Tashi: You don’t know what tennis is.
Patrick: What is it?
Tashi: It’s a relationship.
Partick: Is that what you and [your opponent] had today?
Tashi: It is actually. For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis, and we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It’s like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.
For Tashi, the ecstasy of love is entirely mediated by tennis. Competition is synonymous with intimacy. Off the court, it’s not clear that Tashi is interested in or even capable of experiencing “love” and its requisite interpersonal intimacy. When she is told that her boyfriend doesn’t love her, she replies, “What makes you think I want someone to be in love with me?” When her husband says, “I love you,” she replies, “I know.” In her emotional unavailability, Tashi is both the object of desire and a “barrier.”
For Tashi, desire is imbricated with competition and mediated through tennis, which is the only way she experiences “love.” Tashi’s interests do not lie in the bedroom. Rather, her desires live and die within the white lines of a tennis court. Her prodigious rise in women’s tennis is derailed by an injury, forcing her to shift into the world of tennis coaching. Her desires stem from grief, a loss of identity following her career-ending injury.
It isn’t the men vying for her attention that thrills her. Instead, it seems she desires a life of rigorous competition, the life of a professional tennis player. When she is rendered unable to pursue her own goals, her desires are projected onto Art and Patrick in a fascinating form of erotic transference.
Natalie Wynn’s analysis of desire draws a distinction between yearning and craving. A craving is something that we want, attain, and want again shortly thereafter. To crave is to lust, whereas to yearn is to experience desire akin to eros, a form of sensual or erotic love postulated in ancient Greek philosophy.
“Yearning, I think, is inherently erotic. It’s not necessarily sexual, but it’s erotic in the sense that unlike craving, which can be satisfied (though only for a moment), yearning is a desire that can’t really be satisfied at all. Like, you know how no matter what you accomplish in life, you can never really be satisfied because you always still feel the same void inside eating away at you all of the time? Well, this is the reason for that. We all have a black hole deep inside of us, and nothing can ever really fill it… Actually, I think the hole is flexible. It kinda shapes itself to whatever it is we think we’re missing. The things we desire become symbols of the hole, and we come to believe we’re yearning for this symbol.”
“The sweetness of yearning comes from anticipation. It’s the hope that, just maybe, you might finally grasp the thing you’re reaching for this time.”
-Quotes from Natalie Wynn in Twilight | ContraPoints
Tashi’s “black hole” is tennis-shaped, and so tennis governs her relationship with desire. Thus, competition and desire meld into an insatiable yearning for the life of an athlete perpetually going for the gold. Unable to compete herself, she willingly becomes the object of Art and Patrick’s competition but, crucially, she fosters competition on her own terms.
However, there is an emptiness at the core of competitive athletic desire and perhaps desire generally, as expressed in a quote from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, another example of a story that prominently features tennis but is only nominally concerned with it.
“…younger athletes who can’t help gauging their whole worth by their place in an ordinal ranking use the idea that achieving their goals and finding the gnawing sense of worthlessness still there in their own gut as a kind of psychic bogey, something that they can use to justify stopping on their way down to dawn drills to smell flowers along the… paths.
The idea that achievement doesn’t automatically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstraction, rather like the prospect of their own death—‘ Caius Is Mortal’ and so on. Deep down, they all still view the competitive carrot as the grail. They’re mostly going through the motions when they invoke anhedonia. They’re mostly small children, keep in mind. Listen to any sort of sub-16 exchange you hear in the bathroom or food line: ‘Hey there, how are you?’ ‘Number eight this week, is how I am.’ They all still worship the carrot… they all still subscribe to the delusive idea that the continent’s second-ranked fourteen-year-old feels exactly twice as worthwhile as the continent’s #4.
Deluded or not, it’s still a lucky way to live. Even though it’s temporary. It may well be that the lower-ranked little kids … are proportionally happier than the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small children) know it’s more invigorating to want than to have, it seems. Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion.”
-Infinite Jest (p. 693-4) by David Foster Wallace
Challengers highlights Luca Guadagnino’s remarkable talent for capturing the sensuality of the human form. Combined with solid performances all around and a pulsating score worthy of being blasted in the sweatiest of gay bars, Challengers is an electrifying cinematic exploration of the discontent that drives desire.
Its characters languish, sexually and athletically, in a world where wanting is perhaps more thrilling than winning because, as Contrapoints keenly points out, “desire prefers the hunt to the kill.”
As a study of desire, Challengers is an exhilarating hunt. If, however, you’re intent on just viewing Challengers as an exceptionally horny tennis movie, you’ll still have a good time.
Please share Acquired Tastes to help me expand my readership.
Until next week, sweaty film freaks.
I just came back from the film. It's an exceptionally horny movie, as much homoerotic as it is a love triangle. You're right about that pulsating score suited to a sweaty gay bar--you can feel Guadagnino lingering on the shots of the two male bodies (ideally sweating!). I didn't love the movie, perhaps because he plays to his Baz Luhrmann impulses, so there's a lack of subtlety to the whole affair. Zendaya's character is kind of enigma, while Faist's is just totally shut down so that leaves it to Josh O'Connor to do most of the mugging. But I have to admit that I'd watch Zendaya walk down the street or sit in a chair for two hours--he's made a beautiful perfume commercial with her. But as a tennis player, I missed the sense of real competition outside of just the romantic sphere.