breadbaker

they're childhood friends, sure, but why do they stay as they are? the most obvious thing here being that they make each other laugh. they're simply comfortable in and enjoy other's company, and they play that SO well. you really feel a mutual love when watching them interact.

they make each other feel loved and safe, and the fact that the latter point is intentionally considered through how the crew choose to light and shoot their home to separate it from the outside will never stop driving me crazy.

Jay, I got a feeling things are going to work out okay for us.

my unplanned contribution to mattjay week 2026

But like other things, film is an opportunity for him to freely explore things about himself taken to excess or in hypothetical. What if I was only attracted to the same sex? What if I couldn't get an acceptable level of heterosexual cred when everyone started building theirs, and my straight best friend started rejecting me because of how strange and obsessive I was being? What if I fed that classic dysphoric gay impulse that wonders if I could have my straight best friend if only I mimicked what he desired? What if, in a different scenario, I managed to get us suspended forever as the most important relationship in each others' lives, for the small price of desexing myself and him still always trying to leave me? Do I resent and mock when he shows his own desire? What if my best friend was complacent enough to consider all my overtures jokes without me needing to be with a woman to give me deniability?

He's got this thing going on where like many men, he's blatantly homosocial and kinda misogynistic and these things wrap in on themselves plenty of times, sure. And honestly, it's /possible/ he's not attracted to the same sex and instead he's got this deep deep tendency towards caring about his male besties to such a degree that the closest possible comparison is literally repressing love for them — and that's possible but I do tend to consider the occam's razor that plenty of people are bisexual, and plenty of bisexuals kind of decide to just ignore it because they like the access to the heterosexual world, they don't want to lose the things they have there — especially their place of standing with their straight besties, and they CAN be attracted to the opposite sex, so if they can have the occasional outlet for their intensity regarding the same sex, then why even bother if they don't care about engaging with being Gay?

The tragedy of being bi, I think, is that you can sublimate your issues all you want because you don't have to face them. It's literally optional. Being homosexual, like, you do have to face it eventually, even ten steps into delusion and trying to imagine a world where you can slot into heterosexuality somehow, you know something has to be fundamentally different to allow it. Whereas it's not true if you're bi.

Plenty of people make a whole host of different decisions as a result, but a lot do the Matt Johnson thing where they reject the conundrum in favor of the status quo, especially men who benefit from a world that encourages them to value their relationships with other men most of all. It creates an environment where the capitulator can have his cake and eat it too, as long as he gives up sex. But nevertheless, unless one is very very good at denial, you end up wondering. Maybe kind of resentful.

And it's that complicated homosexual push and pull between jealousy, resentment, dysphoria, etc, that are kind of well painted and explored in his work. What if I'm attracted to the same sex but I want the sliver of what I can get from my specific straight best friends more than some promise at random gay depth. What if I could just wish myself into their dating pool. What if I could jokingly be the smoking dragon keeping all suitors away, and they just accept it. What if one of them finally catches on and drops me?

years later when they filmed the vice series they did interviews where they made jokes that matt left jay to make movies and he was sick of jay. except that can't be true cuz on the dirties commentary he says he originally wanted jay to play owen in the dirties, which he repeated like over 10 years later at a dirties q&a.

then at a NTBTSTM interview in 2025 jay said he was navigating things from his own life through the movie's narrative (where jay abandons matt to become famous but eventually choose matt over success) then in a little movie promo short matt makes a joke that owen is his best friend and jay gets upset/jealous as a "joke"

then in another interview-

years later when they filmed the vice series they did interviews where they made jokes that matt left jay to make movies and he was sick of jay. except that can't be true cuz on the dirties commentary he says he originally wanted jay to play owen in the dirties, which he repeated like over 10 years later at a dirties q&a.

then at a NTBTSTM interview in 2025 jay said he was navigating things from his own life through the movie's narrative (where jay abandons matt to become famous but eventually choose matt over success) then in a little movie promo short matt makes a joke that owen is his best friend and jay gets upset/jealous as a "joke"

then in another interview-

i think divorcing ntbts from it's basis in the homosocial roots of a lot of close platonic male friendship (either in divorcing it from the homosexual aspect or divorcing it from the friendship aspect) is a disservice to what the show is actually about. these guys are each other's whole lives but that's partially because the default expectation for men is to see other men as the only people worth investing time and care into but that too much closeness between men is taboo and strange. it creates this push and pull in these friendships that can create a desperation for intimacy that feels like it can't be found anywhere else but also contains a deep aversion to any real vulnerability. there is a truth that this dynamic gets more complicated if it is compounded by unexplored homosexuality, which i appreciate matts willingness to engage with as a concept in his work, but the level to which that is explicit in ntbts is debatable

the web series doesn't plant the seeds for these young male neuroses because it is exceptionally queer but more likely because it's made by young men in the 2000s who have been impacted by this idea that women do not have the same sort of rich inner worlds. women become an abstract prize to be won rather than people to invest time into. true and real relationships can only be forged with other men but they can never become truly intimate or honest. but then as time goes on and they continue with this premise, they become two single men in their 40s who live together and have a deeply codependent relationship and that does imply something about these characters and what exists within them that would lead to this life. to pretend that either aspect doesn't exist feels strange and is probably why i can never seem to get into either the overt shipping aspect of the fanbase or the other side that refuses to even acknowledge the dynamics at play. matt and jay do not hold the capacity to ever have a romantic part of their relationship unless something drastically alters them to the point that they wouldn't really be the same characters. but they also do not live typical heteronormative lives

to bring up sex (even with other people) within their world means bringing into question why they aren't having it and why they exist in this bubble with each other at all. it becomes so pushed from their reality because it explicitly threatens what currently exists. but it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist at all within them. they are externally sexless but there is this sense of a purposefully unexplored depth. in the buddy, you see jay bring back that element of misogynistic perversion that existed in him in the webseries because for once he is outside the context of his friendship with matt. he is able to unearth that part of him that he usually cannot because it is a destabilizing element in their friendship.

and even beyond that, a lot of this whole undercurrent exists within the show as a joke. jay flirting with matt's brother in hobbies is a pretty homophobic joke with the way that he is depicted in that moment. jay is constantly trying to push matt away with homophobic comments about their perceived homosexuality. even the burger is about jay not wanting to kiss matt and matt trying to strongarm him into doing what he wants. but if you want to look at it through the actual text of the show, their life and dynamic is atypical to the extent that it rules them. weirdly the peanuts feels like one of the most earnest expressions of this subtext when matt says the line about how jay is supposed to be on his team and not kayla's team. or the buddy, when matt shows a deep vulnerable fear about losing jay when he is found out. it's complicated to try to figure out where the line is between analyzing something within the fiction of the show and analyzing something as the choices that matt and jay are making in it's creation because of how blurry that line can be with this show specifically. part of the whole comedy of ntbts is that it is "strange" for two men to be as close as they are but the show is also willing to grapple with the real emotions that come from that closeness

to view them as exclusively heterosexual or homosexual is just uninteresting and flattening to me. you can find those dynamics in a million other stories. where else are you going to get a two decades long treatise on the complicated social and sexual dynamics of male friendship though. matt and jay can have sexual designs for each other, whether born out of genuine homosexual desire or as a product of valuing each other more highly than anyone else, but they do not have the emotional ability or even willingness to identify or acknowledge that. they are so focused on maintaining the status quo of their friendship, a very common perspective in male friendship, that they are happy to live in this unquestioning, tension-filled, sexless cognitive dissonance

the question also becomes "how much intention went into creating this subtext" and i really think the answer is almost none. i don't think they set out to make this story for these characters but that time and comedy sort of forged this interesting dynamic. i don't think matt is being dishonest about discussing the characters this way in interviews but i think it's easy to forget that this subtext wasn't born from a necessarily queer writing of the show but closer to a misogynistic and homophobic one even as the show tries to shed those roots a bit

resulting in the main conflict being driven by the realization that he can't find him.

and in the one universe where he does, the reality is so rooted in fantasy and childhood that it translates to an unattainable romance, platonic or not.

i can only find you when i bend reality back so far it threatens to break.