“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The recently released “Fire Island”, a gay contemporary comedy, opens with its protagonist, Noah, quoting that line – the opening to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” – in an introductory voiceover. The moment establishes Noah’s literary interests but also his pointed resistance to what he calls Austen’s “hetero nonsense”. He continues: “I don’t know much about a good fortune but not every single man is looking for a wife.” The line is meant to elicit a chuckle (not all men are heterosexual, wink wink), but one minute in it made me immediately suspicious.
“Fire Island”, written by Joel Kim Booster (who also plays Noah), is a contemporary romantic comedy that parallels “Pride and Prejudice”. But rather than a Georgian romance about a harried mother trying to marry off her daughters to men with good fortunes, it’s about a group of friends who embark on a week-long vacation to Fire Island, a notable location for gay escapades. It’s also, specifically, about the ways that Asian men are othered in the gay community and what looking for love looks like in the superficial, racist, fatphobic culture of the island. Or so it claims.
Noah is a parallel to Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, whose sharp wit, intelligence and unwillingness to conform have made her one of the most beloved 19th century literary characters. Except, Noah’s opening line betrays a startling lack of shrewdness both on the part of him as a character and on the film he’s in. Despite enduring for more than 200 years, the opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” is more complex than it appears at first glance.
Jane Austen’s central conceit is her ironic gaze of the Regency world her characters inhabit. Although the narrator confidently tells us that every single man wants a wife (presumably want as in “desires”), the actions of the novel suggest otherwise, so much so that the “want” of the opening reveals itself as a clever bit of punning. Perhaps most men do not actually wish to have a wife, but they are “in want” (i.e. lacking) of one. And by the novel’s end, the women will convince them of that important lack. That Noah, for all his intelligence, seems to consider the opening line so superficially feels like a significant first misstep but an important clue of what is to come. This might seem like an unnecessarily pedantic critique for a light and easy comedy, and yet I think it’s instructive in interrogating the way that “Fire Island” is built on a shallow foundation that develops into a generally unpleasant experience.
Although Noah is introduced to us through his literary tastes, the actual film only shallowly engages with this quality. Who is Noah, actually? “Fire Island” offers only an inconsistent perspective of this. His bookishness, like many character traits, seems dependent on what plot-point is required. In a later scene with a romantic suitor, Noah is proud to declare his literateness to the incredulity of the suitor: “I didn’t know people read on this island”. But I found myself faced with two queries. Within the context of the film, surely someone who is so literarily inclined would know that the narrator of “Pride and Prejudice” is not representing Austen’s consciousness. And, beyond the context of the film, surely the savant team behind “Fire Island” ought to recognise that the economic concerns of matrimony in early 19th century England are not the sharpest parallel for queer, non-white concerns in 2022. So, if you are going to do a gay riff on “Pride and Prejudice,” it would likely mean deconstructing – rather than merely paralleling – its source. Alas, “Fire Island” will not (or cannot) dig beneath the surface for the kind of introspection that would require although it offers initial suggestions of something more interrogatory.
Noah is joined by four friends for the trip to the island, where they’ll be staying with Erin (Margaret Cho as an older and wiser lesbian figure modelled on Austen’s Mrs Bennet). Noah’s friends are modelled on the five Bennet sisters – Howie (SNL alum Bowen Yang), the flighty Luke and Keegan, played by Matt Rogers and Tomas Matos, and Max, their fat Black gay friend, played by Torian Miller. Noah and Howie’s shared gay-Asian identity has given them a strong bond in resisting the racism, and the specifically anti-Asian sentiments, in the gay community. Early on they commiserate about the ways that Fire Island problematises their (un)desirability in the toxicity of its debauched community. It’s an arc that is worthy of examination, even as it swiftly seems to undercut itself when Booster spends most of the film either shirtless, or in speedos, with the kind of sculpted body that makes the messaging of the film’s identity politics incredibly muddled. In an effort to counter Howie’s ambivalence about the trip, Noah commits to ensuring that his goal is to ensure that Howie finds a “hot” man, worthy of a tryst, before the week is out. Enter Charlie, gregarious and polite, and his group of hoity-toity friends, including Conrad Ricamora’s Will (Fire Island’s own Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy) and the clash of classes ensues. Charlie’s friends are suspicious of Noah and Howie and their embarrassing friend group. And Noah and Howie are, in turn, suspicious of the close-minded (and racist) aspects of the other group.
The fulcrum of “Pride and Prejudice” although often whittled down to a class distinction between the Bennets and their proposed suitors is more complex than that, and in trying to parallel those dynamics, “Fire Island” often finds itself floundering. Its most emotionally intelligent scene is a bathroom conversation where Howie and Noah have a tense discussion on the way that body-image disrupts their approach to sex and romance. Like the other (few and far between) sharp moments in the movie, it is completely divorced from its inspiration and is a scene wrought out of its own sense of self. But it’s more than the slavish adherence to Austen that disrupts much of “Fire Island”. As written, the script seems unable to determine whether it wants to be a purely licentious comedic romp or a social-realism fable about identity politics in its gay community. This complication explodes where a few scenes after a comedic instruction on what drugs to take on Fire Island, a subplot concerning sexual harassment while under the influence is treated with a jarring strangeness. “Fire Island” wants to centre an occasional indignance at the superficiality of the world these characters inhabit but also insists on hand-waving way the rougher edges of its characters, with a predilection to essentialism that counters its purported interest in living radically. Even as it suggests an approach that rejects body-shaming, it falls prey to that same superficial aesthetic when the lone fat friend of the group is consistently hidden in the frame or fully blocked by his peers in group shot. Late in the film, they go to an underwear party, where he is noticeably fully covered. It is as if the film wants to support positivity while also perpetuating the same prejudices its critiques. Would that this “Pride and Prejudice” riff had as firm a handle on its own pride and prejudices.
In line with its own lack of self-awareness, “Fire Island” reveals a startling conventionality, and even conservativeness to its political and aesthetic approach. Director Andrew Ahn’s last film was the warm and introspective “Driveways”, and beyond the brief glimmers of moments that are visually astute (an embrace under the dimmed lights of a party, a moment of accidental eavesdropping) the visual language in “Fire Island” feels more generic than specific. The spatial clarity of the island, or the houses the characters visit, feels consistently vague and even Ahn’s typical ability to eke out great performances feels lost in a film where the characters come across as sentient manifestations of a TikTok version of gay culture – good for a brief soundbite or quip, but more performative and superficial than substantial or lived-in. These are not so much characters, as they are types. Ricamora offers the closest thing to a natural performance but the script has no sense of why this Filipino man seems so devoted to a friend group that appears incredibly tiresome, and white. Mr Darcy has a reason for his aloofness in “Pride and Prejudice” but in “Fire Island”, he is aloof because the script demands it and his grudging infatuation with Noah feels inexact. Similarly, the earnestness of Scully’s Charlie reveals its own confusing idea of whether Howie’s concerns about being the object of white desirability are meant to be explored or not. But this is Fire Island. It’s about sex, more than romance. And the film’s unromantic countenance could be ignored if it at least had a handle on the erotic. But, even with the scantily clad bodies abounding, its sensibility regarding sex feels dated at best and problematic at worst. Sex, whenever it occurs, is mostly something to abhor, complicate or disappoint. It’s a quality which makes for a lot of cognitive dissonance in a film where characters keep saying how sexually liberated they are with little to show for it. The most extended sex sequence is centred on an unpleasant arc with two characters that interrupt the comedy, which the film uses as a punchline with little interrogation.
If “Fire Island” is a contemporary “Pride and Prejudice,” a lot of it pales because its authorial point-of-view is too shallow to touch the ironic gaze that’s so inherent to Austen’s novel’s critique. Elizabeth Bennet does not narrate Austen’s novel because Austen recognised that she would not have the emotional distance the ironic gaze requires. In “Fire Island”, Noah’s navigation of the story leaves the film lacking the awareness to recognise the deficiencies that abound. So, the wave of self-satisfied superficiality that washes over the film begins to congeal in muddled messaging which finds “Fire Island” railing at all that’s wrong with gay culture, while feeling jarringly unaware of whether it wants to be a mindless romp or an actual critique of these things.
And it returns me to my discomfort with the opening sequence of the film. Beyond its superficial reading of literature, the more central issue is the way that “Fire Island” feigns a version of defying the norm in its queerness but can simultaneously only imagine queerness as filtered through the structure of something that is not queer. The film spends so much of its time bending over backwards to invoke the ghosts of “Pride and Prejudice”, as if it’s the only way it can imagine performing romantic comedic sensibilities. And it’s a compulsion that suggests discomfort with its own approach. I kept waiting for Noah’s narration to come to a point where it could be comfortable in rejecting spectre of the Austenite concerns, ready to be completely unmoored from its heterosexual counterpart. But that would demand a level of intuitivism and awareness that “Fire Island” never reaches. It insists on itself as something outré, something daring and radical in announcing a gay romantic comedy that actually deigns to exist beyond the lily-white. This is a noble endeavour, but its intentions cannot counter its own formal and narrative crudeness, or the way it upends its own noble principles with a muddled approach to its characters and their goals. Whether as a surface-level rom-com or a deep assessment of culture, very little in “Fire Island” is novel, or searing, or thoughtful or engaging.
Fire Island is now available on streaming platforms
