Matt Johnson recurring theme of same sex relationships being anchored in the past and his characters feeling desperately left behind in a way they just can't match somehow when their best friends start demanding to grow up and engage in heterosexuality and abandon the freedoms of youth wherein they're able to be uncritically homosocial. The societal association of homosexuality with a refusal to grow up and take your expected place in the heterosexual world. Feeling trapped in some way because you just can't and everyone sees you as a child for it.
The thing about being attracted to the same sex is it's seen as a rejection of normative adulthood in a profound way that disrupts people's ability to see you as a fully functioning adult, even when you are. You are much less likely to have kids, it's less likely you explored your sexuality until later in life, you probably didn't date in high school. In a very real way, being homosexual automatically locks you into a lifepath that, in the heterosexual world, is considered underdeveloped. Lacking. Childish. You're in your 20s and 30s and 40s and the most important people to you are still just your friends. Or worse, your friend. This is seen as something wrong with you. This is seen as refusal to grow up and participate in society. Even if you never engage with homosexual desire at all, a lack of heterosexual desire leaves you tagged. Unsettling in some way.
It incentivizes you to long for being young, when a strong homosocial bond with your best friend is uninterrupted by the heterosexual regime. It takes the natural sense of nostalgia and turns it into a bottomless pit. It means as you grow up, you resist it. You don't know why, but the idea terrifies you. It feels like an ill-fitting glove. You want your friend to stay here with you, where it's comfortable and you can be safe together.
This is a tension that gay people feel, that isn't discussed much, but is somehow a central tenet of most of Matt Johnson's discography.
The thing is is nostalgia and longing for your childhood or being young and having a Best Friend in the simple, child way, a time when everything seems eternal; that's normal, or it's something everyone will flirt with in some way. Nostalgia bait exists for a reason. Everyone can relate to it, everyone has a way they feel they struggled with growing up. This is why his movies, broadly, work. But there's a time limit that isn't as much of an issue if you're straight. There is a point where it starts becoming weird that you've not become interested in the opposite sex. It's an important step for starting on the expected path of opposite sex relationship, spouse, kids. Refusing to engage with even the first step for too long? This is when your focus and dedication to your best friend starts being seen as suspect. This is when you cling to staying the way you both were before, because growing up means your friend leaving you in a way you do not understand why you can't follow, means the way you are becomes increasingly suspicious and penalized in a way it didn't used to be.
In an ideal world, you come to accept that your friend is straight, get over your crush but fossilize that important, deep relationship into something more like family. If your friend is receptive. If you can let go. If you can accept that you're growing up, whether you're doing it well or not. Maybe this ideal is reality. But what happens if we do not live in the ideal? What would happen if it couldn't be figured out?
Matt The Dirties, Matt OPAV, Matt NTBTS, all desperately try to cling and hold their best friends within a childish orbit, trapping them with nostalgia and youth. And they all try to grow up and they leave him by engaging with the opposite sex (or markers of growing up are treated as equivalent to completely abandoning him, breaking the homosocial relationship with an expectation of heterosexuality in the world beyond). They become people that he does not understand anymore.
It is part of these characters, that they can't engage with heterosexuality, in a way that keeps them childish. It is part of these characters, that they have sublimated desires they have no idea how to act on, clinging to the magic of youth to keep the world as it was. Before the outside world reaches in and rips it all apart, starting with the best friend. Starting with the part that has always had the ability to leave. Starting with the part that really matters, is the reason they shy from it in the first place.
There's an undeniable homosexual tint to the characters especially as they age. As it becomes more and more infeasible for the thing that makes them desire keeping their friend trapped with them to be anything but a stunted love they don't know how to comprehend, but fear society for anyway because they know society will demand it end. Matt jokes about this, or doesn't joke about it and just says it. Whether it's intentional or not, though I do think it's intentional, this is a throughline for his characters.
Developing a strong desperation to stay in that youthful mindset and keep your friends there and bask a little longer in freedom because it means something so great to you that you can't put into words and being rejected in a deeper way when said friends demand to widen their world and follow their heterosexual desire and they naturally are seen as growing and becoming a part of society and they get really mad at you for being the sticky wheel on that. Bullying aimed at the kid that refuses to grow up becoming inherently homophobic in nature. Creating an elaborate playworld for you and your friend then having the bubble burst when he starts wanting to have a kid with his wife. Trying to smooth out any desire for women in your best friend so he stays focused on you, massaging it with nostalgia and fond memories of just being kids together. Getting a job, growing up being equivalent to wanting a divorce from you. Dedicating your life to making your friend smile.
It's just interesting. This isn't really a feeling that's talked about much I think. So much of his characters rely on it. I think, what makes the representation of this work is he understand that it's tragic. It's tragedy. He understands it can warp you and it is unhealthy and it is hard to deal with. He shows that. None of his characters have happy endings. They're all afraid of the inevitable, and it's not death they're scared of. They're all the fools of their stories. The closest we get is Nirvanna, where Matt is able to keep Jay with him through careful manipulation and constant showmanship, achieving the eternal friendship and childishness in exchange for becoming completely desexed and unknowing of any of his own desires beyond "I need him with me." It's a fun exploration of asking if you could be content with that, for sure. Imagining a world where you both could be okay with that. But even then, Matt's always afraid of being unable to pull Jay back into his slumber. This central tenet can be defined by fear as much as it is by love.
Everybody else is waking up. You'll be forced to, too. But you can't. What does that leave for you?
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