It’s a movie that confuses even YouTube.

Does it want to protect Chasing Amy’s rights, by displaying it at miniscule stamp-size, surrounded with an impossible to watch vertical frame with black and yellow danger zone stripes?
Which is what you will see if you try to watch Chasing Amy on your phone.

Or will it give the perfect wide frame?
Which is what you get if you watch in on desktop, although I don’t think that has been a word since 2001.

And why wouldn’t YouTube give us this entire 1997 Kevin Smith movie?
After all Chasing Amy is known for being perfectly capable of blowing up itself up, leaving viewers confused whether they just watched a daring piece of 90s cinema, or a most unwelcome homophobic movie.
It manages to polarize even 3 decades after.

Chasing Amy also manages to have me writing about it within 24 hours of rebooting my 2001 timeline.
{link to that post:  Desires of a time traveler part II | year 2001 behind the scenes 3 October 2026 }

After which I got to work living this 2001 timeline by watching the big 2001 movie Pearl Harbor, with Ben Affleck.

The sequence of things did get fuzzy after that!

All I know is that by the time the day was over, I had fallen deeply in love with Ben Affleck and had ran several analysis on how I had managed to miss him.
Most probable causes were I was already a fan of Brad Pitt which was pretty exclusive, and because one of the few occasions that barrier was broken it was by Jay and Silent Bob, who happened to appear alongside Ben Affleck , explaining why I may have not registered him because Jay and Silent Bob are in all of Ben Affleck’s 1990’s movies that were not Good Will Hunting.

By nighttime I had also created a 64 videos long chronologically ordered YouTube playlist with Ben Affleck videos, from which I regrettably removed Chasing Amy at 11 PM at night because I was unwatchable on my phone and I was unaware it would display perfectly the next day, on desktop. 

Like I said, it was a long day.

I promised myself I would make getting Chasing Amy on dvd a priority, because I had watched an entire skit presenting all Chasing Amy’s deleted scenes, as well as a 2026 in-depth review of Chasing Amy including how it had handled sensitive topics like bi- and homosexuality.
A video probably best described as a long love letter to Chasing Amy.
If the mixed tape was the love language of the 20th century, then making a YouTube analysis, in particular one this nuanced, is ours.

But even with those spin-off videos not being the real movie, something had started to shift.
A lot.
Everything affiliated to Chasing Amy was already so raw, interesting, enticing and alive, I felt a lost part of my sexuality return immediately.
A part I had managed to put words to, yes (link, for the thorough ones). I had managed to intellectually find it, but now I was actually feeling it.
It was back, and whatever it was it was as confusing as Chasing Amy itself. Probably because director and writer Kevin Smith had allowed himself to make a movie when he was still figuring all of it out.

The main character Holden, played by Ben Affleck, navigating the sexually conflicting 90s landscape, was a depiction of Kevin Smith himself.
And he basically screwed up.
Despite of what most of us will interpret as good intentions, it was not good enough to prevent him from losing the girl he loved.

Another scene where Kevin Smith plays silent Bob who gives advice to Holden, that is Kevin Smith giving advice to his younger self.
It is what he wished he had known.

The movie Chasing Amy is Kevin Smith still figuring much of it out. It is, in a way, Kevin Smith taking the risk of getting it wrong again. 
And many will say he did, and perhaps they’re right.

But I felt a visceral aliveness that all the intellectualization of my sexuality never brought. And it didn’t come from seeing myself as bisexual, but it came from the undertone of repressed male homosexuality between the male characters, and in the deleted scenes video, even between the actors.
And how it resulted in being translated to banter, to denial, and sometimes  to toxic situations.

Chasing Amy confirmed for me, that as cheeky and as cheap as I still think it sounds to say “I am a gay man in a woman’s body”;
It confirmed that at least for now, it is the most accurate description.

I recognized the dynamics between the men. Between Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky. Between Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) and Jay.
And between me and every man I’ve been in a relationship with, long or short, and how although I often felt forced to play a feminine role, it was always cannibalizing on what really mattered.
It took away from the loud, joke-filled dynamics where nothing about love or romance was said and yet everything was felt.

Maybe Chasing Amy made me realize I am not doing timeline projects, for nothing. I am not teleporting myself back to the post, out of nostalgia or escapism. I really left something back there, something that did not make it into the 21st century.

And Ben Affleck is there for me now, to give that timeline color. And I like the idea of reliving 2001 with a different idol. Ben Affleck, not Brad Pitt. 
And of integrating all those Kevin Smith movies, which he kept on making and although Ben Affleck and him stopped seeing each other for a decade or so, they too have found each other again.
And Ben Affleck reprised the role of Holden for Kevin Smith in 2019.

To close this post, I want to share a second revelation. Which is that I discovered Ben Affleck and me are almost the same age.
The same sun sign.
The same year of birth.
Born weeks apart.

And now that I seem to be in an era where the men I fall in love with are so much younger, it feels good to once again have someone my own age facing me. Even if it is from a Pearl Harbor dvd playing on a Saturday afternoon, a recent interview where he talks about his personal life, or a stamp-sized Chasing Amy from 1997. 

I have a test, before I classify my feelings for someone as genuine, which I started doing to correct for the age-differences of a man being younger.
The test is: “Would I still have these feelings, if he was 70?”

It feels so strange, this notion of Ben Affleck having lived on this parallel timeline. Obviously I would not have to ask him that question, because he has the same age and he’s a Hollywood star, so duh.

But it keeps being strange I never had feelings for him before, despite seeing all those Kevin Smith movies at the time.

Wrapping everything up, yesterday’s reboot of the 2001 timeline gave me a new actor, a new idol, within hours. And all those sexual nuances that were lost flooding back.

And maybe the question is not if I would still have feelings for someone if they would be decades older, but to trust that everything worth feeling is worth exploring;
That it’s never too late to reconnect and pick up what you lost;
And that even flawed, imperfect action, can turn out to be the most precious memory, thirty years from now.

Just like Chasing Amy.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

The story behind this time travel project has been adjusted to the 2001 timeline, and is included below..