“I Wanna See Some Really Good Tennis”: Bisexual Triangles and Queer Mess in Challengers (2024)

This article explores the affordances of the bisexual triangle trope in two films: Design For Living (Ernst Lubistch, Citation1932) and Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024). Scholars remain skeptical of the bisexual triangle’s limitations, but we argue that the notorious triangle presents an opportunity to open up a queer relationality that stretches beyond normative, representational confinement and allows for the enacting of messy, queer intimacies. In particular, we argue that the women represented in each film can be understood as equal subject-objects that are constitutive, and even instigators of, mmf (male-male-female) throuples, rather than passive mediators of male homosociality. Through our analysis of these films, we explore what becomes possible when we move beyond hetero- and mononormative considerations of relationship instigation and consummation. Like Design For Living’s “gentleman’s agreement,” we argue that the three protagonists in Challengers pursue alternate ways of modeling erotic, bisexual relations through looking, touching, distance, and via their agreement to “see some really good tennis.”