제목 없음

[mattys-marbles]

"That is a kind of almost sexual feeling." "Whoo!"

[bestfri3ndrice]

jay saying “oh look at the nice plane” like matt is a four year old interrupting an adult conversation to show them a toy

[readyforbread]

my first edit!

[been-thinking-a-lot-today]

As Katie and I explore deeper into Matt Johnson's filmography and all, it's been really interesting to see the surprisingly good portraits of like... the uglier sides of the possible psychology of being attracted to the same sex. There's this everpresent 'I'm attracted to you, my straight best friend, and I'll neuter myself for you but I want to be in our intense incredibly close male friendship forever in return.' I do kind of think Matt himself is like, genuinely bisexual, he just doesn't particularly care to be since he doesn't want to be /gay/ or lose this incredibly homosocial male environment he's cultivated for himself with his friends.

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?

Anyway, he gets to explore all that because of his engagement with the heterosexual world irl. His friends think he's all crazy and intense and a wild ride and all the gay jokes are par for the course because he's just like that, and we all go home to our heterosexually modeled lives at the end of the day, where the man spends his day emotionally invested in his fellow man, but returns home and fucks his wife. So no matter how close we joke and get it's fine. Even he doesn't know why he keeps putting gay songs on it all, he swears.

[readyforbread]

Finally, a greeting video to Korea 🥰❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

And this is my first post on Tumblr 😬 I'm actually sweating right now because English isn't my first language and I'm not used to international fandom culture… I’m so afraid I might write something wrong.

But I just couldn't resist posting right after watching this video! The question they asked the Korean fans in this video is so dumb lol The reason why we love this movie is simply because it's hilarious and touching. There's just something about this movie that connects people across different cultures.

Anyway, hope one day they actually visit Korea 🫶

[mattys-marbles]

when matt and jay finished filming the webseries, they didn't speak to each other for a year and matt went to make the dirties and jay played in a band. matt even said he deleted jay's number.

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-

[mattys-marbles]

when matt and jay finished filming the webseries, they didn't speak to each other for a year and matt went to make the dirties and jay played in a band. matt even said he deleted jay's number.

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-

[djdick]

it's really funny how both sides of the divide purposefully edit the way matt talks about the sexual and subtextual aspect of matt and jay for their own ends. if you don't like the shipping then it's "they are explicitly stated to be sexless and unaware of any sexual desires" and if you love shipping it is "matt has sexual designs on his best friend and that's the end of the quote"

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

i do admire matt's willingness to take on very earnest lenses of interpretation for overtly comedic characters and so the perspective that it is weird to also do that as a viewer of the show is bizarre to me. ntbts is a comedy show but it also is art. all art is filtered through someone's truth when being made but it also filters through our own experiences. it's okay to analyze something more seriously and expect the things that make us laugh to also have some deeper level, but i think being intellectually honest about the contextual elements at play is important too if you want to talk about it with any real truth

[jaredtime]

MATT: Here's what's so crazy, and it's one of the things that we... there's always been a- I wonder if I want to admit this? Well, I'll just tell you, there's always been a kind of conflict between the webseries and the TV show, because it seems as though, like it's kind of retreading certain things- like Matt goes blind twice but they never comment on it. At the end of the webseries, it seems like maybe they play a show at the Rivoli, and I'd always wanted to find a way to ret-con that, but of course you can't cause it's already done, and this movie was so valuable in allowing us to split the timeline in terms of what actually happened in 'Nirvanna The Band'. Because really, if you look at the timeline here, Matt and Jay in the future go back to the webseries in Episode 2. And they change something, they write on the board 'Play the Rivoli'. And so you can imagine that the webseries actually exists as an alternate reality to the TV series, because that timeline would have split off and become new. And so, although nobody would ever think of this or pick this up, this movie really did serve an amazing purpose for myself, selfishly. [...] So now the Matt from- the TV show is the real timeline, and it's only episode 1 and 2 from the webseries that happened in that timeline. And so now they never did do that show at the end, like, Matt never was with the Born Ruffians, like none of that stuff ever happened. Um, but that's the kind of thing I'm not expecting anyone to pick up on, ever.

From the NTBTSTM "Matt, Jay, Jared & Matt" commentary track

[mattys-marbles]

i am very into the multi-universe matt johnson, who plays a version of himself in every film, in every story, that is just looking for jay.

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.

[kingofallgirls]

i love the jokes about Matt chaining Jay to his radiator and stuff but I wanna say, a core part of Matt is that he doesn't actually want to totally take away Jay's autonomy. like he could if he wanted, I believe in his ability to. but what Matt wants is to be chosen by Jay over and over in the same way he chooses Jay over and over. he'll do stuff to manipulate this decision obviously lol. and argue. The Buffet was entirely an exercise in getting Jay to realize how much he needs Matt. and he doesn't stop Jay from getting a job. he even relents and apologizes for his freakout. it's not about the job interview, it's about Jay confessing that Matt doesn't fulfill all his needs and that feels like being shot with a gun. he didn't stop Jay from going to a party, he just turned up and made Jay choose him again, even if Jay wasn't aware of it. Matt presented a choice between him and Kayla and wanted Jay to choose correctly, he didn't block the exits. Matt just needs to be chosen and so Jay needs the freedom to choose and this is the Matt torture nexus because even as Jay will always come around, he will keep Matt doubting for the rest of their lives. it's great, it's really great stuff. that's why there's no radiators in Jay's future and why I'm less into the characterization of Matt as being that brand of controlling

[chaos-nr2]

jay mccarrol method of complimenting matt johnson's appearance is like the "wrap pill in cheese" way of delivering medication to your suspicious dog. if "dog" was an insecure contrarian. here is a genuine compliment matt needs to hear (the medicine), ie. "you are an attractive guy." but the only way he will even consider accepting this praise is if jay houses it within a semi-teasing delivery (the much more enticing cheese). meaning the vehicle of a joke allows for a plausible deniability that matt desperately needs—crucially, a joke is the only way matt will be comfortable hearing a compliment because jay provides a built-in escape hatch for him to use as a means of deflection and protection. on account of matt being an insecure contrarian. and even then this method fails basically all the time because matt makes use of that escape hatch faithfully.

matt johnson method of complimenting jay mccarrol's appearance is like he possesses a book containing The Only Real, True, and Indisputable Facts of Life as It Is Known and he's reciting "jay is a beautiful man" from said book because that's one of the few statements inside it alongside "grass is green," "all living things will die," etc. that's how certain matt sounds when he talks about jay's looks. he is adamant. unshakeable conviction. Jay is Beautiful is Objective Fact. which is saying something considering that is technically! a subjective opinion. coming from the man fixated on subjectivity and the thin veil between what is considered "real" and "not real."

[jaymccarroll]

love when they immediately resort to extreme violence <3

[ntbsideblog]

this is fucking crazy

[ntbsideblog]

this is fucking crazy

[flimsyhimbo]

Matt Johnson on the Epic of Gilgamesh / Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025)

guy who's thematically fixated on homoerotic friendships said he's always retelling the epic of gilgamesh i said Oh i'm sure