“She’s an icon. She’s a legend.” The alarm that rings out at the start of the 2022 film Fire Island positions Jane Austen as an icon and a legend, riffing on the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice before the narratorial voice of Noah, the film’s protagonist, dismisses them as “some hetero nonsense”:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” You know who said that? Jane Austen, the queen. Pretty dope way to start a story, right? Well, no offence to my girl, Jane, but that sounds like some hetero nonsense. Listen, I don’t know much about a good fortune, but not every single man is looking for a wife.
The camera focuses on a well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice in a pile of books by the bed of Noah, the protagonist, who also functions as the film’s synchronous narrator. While Noah’s characterization of the first line of the novel as “some hetero nonsense” appears to indicate that what Austen had to say about society and human relationships is no longer relevant to our lives today, Noah, we learn, does not believe this, and neither does Fire Island’s writer, Joel Kim Booster, who stars as Noah.1
Booster is a self-affirmed Austen fan, who has a tattoo on his left shoulder reading, “Of rears and vices I saw enough,” a reference to Mary Crawford’s pun on anal sex in the navy from Austen’s Mansfield Park (71). Far from dismissing Austen’s relevance today, Fire Island reimagines Pride and Prejudice as an unabashedly gay romantic comedy, lovingly and wittily updating Austen’s original novel. Booster plays the Lizzy Bennet character, Noah, whose narration is filled with catty and often self-deprecating asides. In this opening scene, in which he shoos a lover out of his bedroom as he packs to travel to Fire Island, Noah justifies his harshness towards this one-night stand, whose name he cannot remember, explaining: “He had boyfriend energy, and that is just not me.” Noah’s rejection of monogamy is a central theme of the film, as is his fear of making himself vulnerable to others, a trait immediately apparent in this opening scene.
Noah travels with his chosen family of queer “sisters,” as he calls them: Luke and Keegan (whose initials and behaviour align them with Lydia and Kitty), who met in theatre school and got kicked out but are, according to Noah, “still convinced they’re stars”; the uptight Max (Mary), who reads Madeleine Albright’s autobiography while the others take photos; and shy Howie, the Jane character. Fire Island immediately establishes the socioeconomic level of this group of friends. Due to his chronic tardiness, Noah must take a cab from Bushwick, where he lives, which his friends estimate would have cost him $300. When Howie asks how he could possibly afford it, Noah answers that he did so with a credit card. Howie points out “You’ve literally never made a student loan payment. Who would give you a credit card?” to which Noah answers, “Amanda at Forever 21.” Noah’s narratorial voice interjects: “So yeah, we’re poor. Not, like, poor-poor, but poor as in none of us have a chance in hell of buying property, ever.” And they are not the only ones who cannot afford property. Once they arrive at Fire Island, they are informed by Erin, the Mrs. Bennet character, that her house, which they visit every year, will be lost to the family due to her dwindling finances. Suddenly, the pressure is on to enjoy their last year together on Fire Island.
Noah and his friends welcomed by Erin. Fire Island © 2022 Searchlight Pictures.
Booster translates the marriage market of Pride and Prejudice to the frenetic dating scene of Fire Island, where not just sexuality and class but also race play a role. While Noah and his sisters met while working as servers at the same restaurant, he informs us that his bond with Howie “goes a little deeper than everyone else’s, for complex spiritual reasons”: the film cuts to a flashback of the two working at the restaurant, where a man refers to Howie who, like Noah, is Asian, as “Jackie Chan.” Although Noah characteristically jokes about it, the “complex spiritual reasons” that connect the friends are at least partly grounded in their experience of racist abuse. Although Noah’s athletic body conforms to the body standards of the queer community, Noah remarks that he is still “invisible to most of these people.” Keegan agrees, referencing prejudices against certain ethnicities and body types within the queer dating scene, saying, “No fats, no fems, no Asians,” and adding that Noah is still two out of three. Noah admits that he’s not wrong: “In our community, money isn’t the only form of currency. Race, masculinity, abs; just a few of the metrics we use to separate ourselves into upper and lower classes.” Noah’s commentary connects Fire Island to Austen’s novel not only through the shared deployment of irony but also in the interest in class conflict, shifting focus from Regency society to twenty-first-century gay culture.
Booster has written about his real-life experience of reading Pride and Prejudice on holiday at Fire Island: “All week, I couldn’t help but map Lizzy’s experiences navigating the limiting social conventions of her time onto the similarly tortured social conventions of gay male spaces.” To Booster, Austen’s characterization of Lizzy and Darcy’s relationship against a backdrop of a deeply entrenched class system does not seem like a far-away reality, as he reflects on a cursory relationship with a wealthy man of a higher social class: “He was hot and white and (later, after sufficient social media stalking, I would learn) rich. I was soft-bodied and Asian, two things that within the gay community divided Dan and I as much as Elizabeth Bennet’s lack of a title and land separated her from Mr. Darcy.” Booster concludes:
In the years following this first adventure, I would bring Austen with me to a new Fire Island house, then to Palm Springs, and recently an Atlantis cruise—basically any place where I’d be surrounded by gay men. No one understands gay social mores like Austen, and no one is quite as funny or exacting while sketching them.
Booster echoes critics like D. A. Miller, who connects Austen’s writing to gay culture, positioning Sense and Sensibility’s Robert Ferrars as a protohomosexual, infuriating Elinor by flouting heterosexual norms while maintaining patriarchal privilege (16–18). Queer readings of Austen emphasize alternative moments in Austen’s works that are resistant to heteronormative narratives, such as Miller’s analysis of Robert Ferrars and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s unveiling of an “alternative, passionate sexual ecology,” providing a counterweight to the spectacle of a girl being taught a lesson that normative critics find across Austen’s oeuvre (833–34).
In the film, just arrived at the island, Noah offers to be Howie’s wingman, vowing not to get laid until Howie finds a sexual partner. Howie falls for Charlie, a pediatrician from L.A., while Noah is at first snubbed and then pursued by Will, a.k.a. Mr. Darcy, a Filipino lawyer. The film not only successfully queers Austen’s original, bringing out an unheterosexual side to the writer that has been traced by critics like Miller and Booster himself, but it also places race at the center of the narrative in a way that brings out Austen’s kinship to what Manu Samriti Chander calls “brown Romanticism.”
Austen might be a canonical writer today, but at the beginning of her career she was a marginalized and anonymous author, and her novels center the experiences of the marginalized and excluded. Noah and Howie are Asian Americans, and their relationships with Charlie and Will are inflected with questions of race and class as well as sexuality. Rather than sending Charlie off to London (as happens in Pride and Prejudice), Fire Island’s Caroline Bingley character ships in one of Charlie’s exes, who is explicitly racist to Howie and Noah. Noah accuses Will of acting as a token brown character for his elite white friends. Noah repeats the same judgement to Howie, whose response—“Way harsh, Tai”—quotes Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), another modern reimagining of an Austen novel. These twenty-first-century tensions unearth the class conflicts in the original novel. As Noah’s narratorial voice says, as he and his group of friends arrive at a party hosted by Charlie, where they are immediately looked down upon: “A lot of people think you have to be successful, white, and rich, with seven percent body fat to vacation on Fire Island. Those people are all at this party.” Noah and his friends are no less at the margins of the queer society of Fire Island than Lizzy and her sisters are as comparatively poor members of the landed gentry, on the verge of losing the house in which they live, in Meryton society.
One of the joys of films like Clueless and Fire Island for Austen fans is mapping events from the novel onto events in the film. In its own queering of Austen, for example, Clueless imagines the Frank Churchill character not as engaged in an illicit affair with Jane Fairfax but instead as a gay teenager. Fire Island similarly reconfigures elements from Pride and Prejudice, transforming Wickham from a sexual predator of young girls into the creator of nonconsensual sex tapes, a reconfiguration first featured in the YouTube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012), another reimagining of Pride and Prejudice.
The overarching issue of vulnerability—what it feels like, how to manage it, and how to live with it—is central to the plot of Fire Island. In fact, Fire Island thinks explicitly about what it means to be vulnerable, reimagining Lizzy’s and Darcy’s attempts to protect themselves from vulnerability at the start of their relationship in the original novel into Noah’s and Will’s own initial rejection of vulnerability. This rejection of vulnerability is clear in Noah’s first conversation with Howie upon arriving at the island. Howie immediately regrets his decision to come, saying that, while they used to come there to be “gay and stupid,” he now feels “terminally alone.” When Noah points out that Fire Island is the perfect place to have casual sex, Howie replies that what he wants is a relationship. Noah retorts with his second dismissal of monogamy, yet another indication of Noah’s fear that his desire for a non-monogamous relationship will equal rejection and misunderstanding from others, who will not accept him for who he is: “Monogamy industrial complex rears its ugly head.” As Malika Amoruso argues, “Ahn’s adaptation turns on its head the monogamist romantic convention that permeates Austen’s novels by transforming Elizabeth Bennet’s character to Noah, a gay man with no plans to settle down with just one man.”
Amoruso also notes a key difference between Noah and Lizzy: his rejection of monogamy versus her need to seek a husband. Indeed, Noah, Howie, and their friends are twenty-first-century Asian-American gay men on a vacation that focuses on sex and hedonism. Transplanted to this world, characters like Lizzy and Jane Bennet would feel, besides intense temporal dislocation, shocked, confused, and perhaps a little titillated by the activities on Fire Island. Just as significantly, there are no characters who physically resemble Noah and Howie in the world of Pride and Prejudice. That Booster feels a kinship with Austen’s representations of social mores, class snobbery, sexual desire, and coupling suggests, however, that different though the worlds of Pride and Prejudice and Fire Island are, they are nevertheless connected. And, we argue, these connections go beyond Booster’s riffing on plot points from the original novel to a shared interest in style: sharp, ironizing, and finally interested in uncovering characters’ vulnerabilities.
One of our reviewers offered us a provocation, arguing that Booster had chosen to make his Lizzy avatar, Noah, more conventionally attractive than Bowen Yang’s Howie, although it is Jane who is described as the more beautiful sister in the original novel. Without litigating between Booster’s and Yang’s attractiveness, we will note that beautiful actresses have played Lizzy Bennet in “straight” period adaptations (though we similarly refuse to litigate between Keira Knightley and Rosamund Pike in the 2005 adaptation, for example). We also suggest that Howie is cute, and that cuteness aligns him with Jane. Finally, Howie and Jane, like Noah and Lizzy and Fire Island and Pride and Prejudice, share affinities that are more than skin deep—affinities grounded in their vulnerability. Howie’s and Jane’s cuteness prompts their friends and families to want to protect them (for example, when Jane falls ill at Netherfield and is tenderly taken care of by Mr. Bingley and Lizzy, a scene slyly transposed into a hungover Howie after a party at Charlie’s on Fire Island). This cuteness and habit of being protected also opens them up to a vulnerability and corresponding danger of being crushed (as in Darcy’s and Caroline Bingley’s separation of Bingley from Jane, transposed in Fire Island to the confrontation with Howie’s racist ex as a rival for Charlie’s affections).2
The stylistic vulnerability underpinning the relationship between Pride and Prejudice and Fire Island can be most clearly seen in the relationships between Lizzy and Jane and Noah and Howie. Lizzy and Jane share an intense sisterly friendship in which Lizzy is aware of Jane’s vulnerability and Jane attempts to bear up under the various embarrassments of her family, her seemingly unrequited love for Bingley, and the machinations of his friends and family. So, for example, after Bingley has been whisked away to London, Jane blames any pain she feels on her mother’s unthinking and repetitive attacks on the Bingleys rather than on his desertion: “Elizabeth looked at her sister with incredulous solicitude, but said nothing,” prompting Jane to protest, “‘You doubt me,’ cried Jane slightly colouring” (152). Elizabeth’s unspoken solicitousness and Jane’s spoken reply show the deep bond between the two women. When Bingley finally returns, Jane again attempts to minimize her feelings for him:
“Now,” said she, “that this first meeting is over, I feel perfectly easy. I know my own strength, and I shall never be embarrassed again by his coming. I am glad he dines here on Tuesday. It will then be publicly seen, that on both sides, we meet only as common and indifferent acquaintance.”
“Yes, very indifferent, indeed,” said Elizabeth, laughingly. “Oh, Jane! take care.”
“My dear Lizzy, you cannot think me so weak as to be in danger now.”
“I think you are in very great danger of making him as much in love with you as ever.” (375–76)
In the novel, Jane affects a stoicism that Howie explicitly eschews in the film. The two share an affinity, however, in terms of the open-heartedness and goodness that make them vulnerable, prompting the protectiveness towards them that Lizzy and Noah share.
Whereas Jane affects stoicism to attempt to hide her vulnerability, however, Lizzy jokes her way through embarrassments and humiliations. Lizzy’s sense of humor is celebrated throughout the novel. Although she is most open with her sister Jane, humor can be simultaneously protective and revealing. For example, when Jane asks Lizzy when she knew she was in love with Darcy, she replies: “‘It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began; but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley’” (414). In gesturing towards her realization of the significance of Darcy’s immense wealth as a reason for falling in love with him, Lizzy uses humor as a kind of shield through which she invites Jane to see and understand her admission of vulnerability: she really is in love with Darcy and this feeling is complicated by her grounded understanding of his wealth.
Like Lizzy, Noah hides his vulnerabilities through humor and, at times, aggression. When Noah confesses to having struggled with feeling invisible in the past, which ultimately led him to reject vulnerability to protect himself, he advises Howie to do the same: “You need to know how to protect yourself more, because all this romance bullshit is making you way too vulnerable, you’re like an open wound.” He concludes that his one mission for the week is to “make sure you’re happy, that you know I know everything, and that I’m always right.” Like Lizzy Bennet, Noah has his presuppositions proved wrong throughout the course of the narrative, as indicated by his own narratorial voice: “Yeah, that definitely won’t come back to fuck me.”
Howie and Noah talk about dating. Fire Island © 2022 Searchlight Pictures.
Regardless of Noah’s advice, Howie continues to make himself vulnerable throughout the course of his relationship with Charlie. In a true rom-com moment, he sings Britney Spears’s “Sometimes,” a song about being afraid of being vulnerable with someone you are falling in love with, to an audience that includes Charlie. After Howie feels abandoned by Charlie, he explains that those feelings are not just about Charlie but a “lifetime of Charlies”—that he’s thirty, has never been in love, and has never been in a relationship. Although Noah counters that “monogamy is a disease created by straight people to make us less interesting,” Howie answers,
You’re the only person I know who understands how shitty it can be sometimes to feel unwanted like this. I’m so glad you’ve found a way to feel good despite all the fucked-up shit we deal with. But you think if you’re vulnerable for just one second, that it’s all going to come crashing down. And maybe that’s true for you, but it’s not true for me. I want to be vulnerable. Even if it hurts.
Howie’s expression of vulnerability comes at a crisis moment as he runs from the pain of his seemingly unrequited feelings for Charlie. Bowen Yang’s performance balances Howie’s pain and fear with an inner Jane Bennet-like strength: his admission of vulnerability is not a weakness but an expression of what he wants from life and his relationships—a meaningful connection with others, which may be painful because of his very openness. Jane’s closeness with Lizzy, like Howie’s with Noah, depends on their shared experience of “all the fucked-up shit” they deal with.
At karaoke alongside Keegan and Luke, Howie sings Britney Spears’s “Sometimes.” Fire Island © 2022 Searchlight Pictures.
Howie also questions to what extent Noah’s seeming invulnerability is working for him: in Austenian terms, Noah’s pride and prejudices are stopping him from making the same meaningful connections that Howie seeks. As Noah’s relationship with Will develops, both need to learn to embrace vulnerability. The mixture of rage and sexiness inflecting Lizzy’s developing relationship with Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is perfectly encapsulated when Noah’s narratorial voice, after a heated discussion with Will about Alice Munro’s writing, comments, “somehow I’m mad and horny.” Although Lizzy might not use these terms in Austen’s novel, other adaptations draw on this mad/horny subtext in, for example, Keira Knightley’s dance with Matthew McFadyen in the 2005 Pride & Prejudice, in which verbal sparring combines with physical attraction until the camera shows how focused they are on each other by vanishing everyone else from the ballroom. But as Howie points out, Noah, like Lizzy in Pride and Prejudice, has some inner work to do. Will, like Howie, detects this need, pointing out that refusing to make himself vulnerable is not protecting Noah but is, instead, keeping him from getting close to people:
You think you’ve got the whole world figured out, but all you’re doing is assuming the worst. Makes it easier for you. You expect everyone to reject you, so when somebody comes along and actually does, it doesn’t hurt so much. The reality is, Noah, no one is thinking that much about you.
As Darcy does in Austen’s novel, Will needs to let go of his own prejudices, such as his admission to Noah, when he spots Noah’s Alice Munro book, that “I just didn’t think anyone would be reading here.” Will must show the same willingness to make himself vulnerable that he accuses Noah of lacking, which he does by accepting Noah’s challenge to take part in a dance-off, even though he is not comfortable dancing. Will’s embracing of vulnerability and willingness to make himself look ridiculous becomes, in the end, a moment of shared laughter between himself and Noah, bringing them together.
In the end, Howie, who loves “the romance bullshit, . . . the rom-com stuff, like, kissing in the rain, and standing outside my window with a boombox, or confessing things in a gazebo,” has his rom-com moment when Will helps Charlie borrow a water taxi to follow Howie after he has decided to leave the island. The film simultaneously revises this typical moment in romance movies as Noah challenges Charlie: “Okay, Charlie, this is your big rom-com moment, okay? You gotta do something big, something stupid.” To which Charlie reacts by telling Howie he loves him, only for everyone to react with, “No, too big, too stupid!” while Howie adds, “We’re not really there yet.” Will’s willingness to help Charlie chase after Howie reimagines Darcy’s support for Bingley and Jane’s relationship in Pride and Prejudice, after his original opposition.
Will helps Charlie get a boat so that he can follow Howie. Fire Island © 2022 Searchlight Pictures.
Much like Lizzy and Darcy, Noah and Will both learn to embrace vulnerability as they come together at the end of Fire Island. The final scene of the film sees Noah working through his prejudices with Will on the water taxi from which he and his Bennet sisters watch the sunset. Sitting next to each other, Will asks Noah what he wants—a question for which Noah does not have a direct answer, saying simply that, over the last few days at the island, he has had to confront being wrong about many things. He finally asks Will what he wants, reaching for his prejudices for one last time: “You probably want some gay marriage nightmare, joint Instagram account, a French bulldog.” To Noah’s visible surprise, however, Will says not only that he does not like dogs but also that he does not think monogamy is for him. Instead, answering the question of what he wants, he gestures ambiguously at a pair of gay elders dancing: “I want that.” Does he want a relationship extending into old age? Or does he just want to dance? In a reimagining of Darcy’s two proposals to Lizzy, Will states that he does not think his “pride would take it” if Noah runs from him a second time. When Noah confesses that he too is afraid of what might happen if their relationship does not work, Will reassures him that “it’s just a dance.” This conversation perfectly encapsulates the struggle at the heart of the original novel and Booster’s reimagining: the initial resistance and then acceptance of the risks and costs but also the rewards of embracing vulnerability. As Booster explains,
Austen detractors—sad, literary meatheads—have often complained loudly about a lack of real “conflict” in her stories. And bless them, but maybe what they’re not connecting to is that struggle. The long, arduous path that each of Austen’s heroes goes through to not only hold on to the love they’ve found but to believe themselves worthy of it.
Fire Island reimagines Pride and Prejudice as a brown gay romantic comedy, unshackling Austen from the marriage plot.
The kinship Booster sees between twenty-first-century homosexual experience and the intricate social mores dissected by Austen privileges the stranger, queerer modes of coming together running through her novels above the highly conventional happy endings of the marriage plot. Like Fire Island, Clueless plays with this conventionality, ending with a wedding scene that an unwitting audience member might mistake for Cher’s before her narrative voice cuts in with “as if!” In Cher’s adolescent lexicon, “as if!” dismisses a situation as impossible. We want to conclude our essay on Fire Island by appropriating Cher’s “as if!” to think through a series of alternatives: what if twenty-first-century gay Asian-American men can see themselves in Austen’s writing? What if Austen herself dismissed her climactic marriages as improbable or at least not worth writing about in detail? What if acknowledging our vulnerabilities, our need for other people, paradoxically made us into stronger individuals, more able to live together differently, like Austen herself, like Jane and Lizzy, like Howie and Noah?
Will and Noah share a dance. Fire Island © 2022 Searchlight Pictures.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding “The Romantic Ridiculous” Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellow project (2020–22), which made the work on this article possible.
NOTES
1This article substantively expands the opening gambit of the fourth chapter of our Reading the Romantic Ridiculous.
2This discussion of Howie and Jane’s cuteness draws on Sianne Ngai’s theorization of the cute in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.
