Trent Reznor has always been serving queer icon, but the Challengers score is game, set, match
His music for Luca Guadagnino's movie has taken over gay culture — and brings a long queer legacy full circle
Queeries is a column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.
An unlikely challenger has emerged as the gay soundtrack of summer 2024. The music you'll be hearing at every queer bar, beach and backyard BBQ for the next four months. No, it's not Beyoncé. It's not Taylor Swift. It's not Dua Lipa. It's somehow not even music by an iconic woman (audible gasp!). It's Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score for the new Luca Guadagnino film Challengers, and I for one could not be more pleased with this radical twist on what we all assumed would dominate the gay playlists of the season.
For those unaware, Reznor and Ross created the collection of propulsive techno compositions for the soundtrack to Challengers. The film itself is exceptional in so many ways, but it's hard to imagine any of them really working without its score. The synths on the dozen or so tracks are as throbbing and horny as the film itself, which follows a decade-spanning love triangle between three wildly attractive tennis players (played by Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor). Guadagnino is clearly as in love with what Reznor and Ross have created for him as he is with Faist and O'Connor's thighs and torsos, allowing the music to aggressively set his film's pace. Sometimes he even lets it overpower the dialogue — a bold choice that pays off in large part because the music is just that good.
Within days of Challengers opening, discussion of its score — and of the film in general — overpowered something else entirely: gay culture. For example, that Monday, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang dedicated an entire special episode of their podcast, Las Culturistas, to the film (in which they playfully demanded queer nightlife immediately welcome its soundtrack). The platform formerly known as Twitter became (at least on my heavily curated feed of queers) a destination purely for memes with the Challengers score playing over other content, like the Top Gun volleyball scene.
This was all the more impressive given the zeitgeist. Over the past few months, a parade of staggeringly famous women (whom gay men are obsessed with) have been releasing albums every other week — Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Kacey Musgraves, Ariana Grande etc. But Challengers nearly brought discourse on Swift's The Tortured Poets Department to a complete halt a week after the album came out, which is no small feat.
For me the ultimate serve of CHALLENGERS is how it completely shifted gay conversation on + offline away from whether a Taylor Swift album is good or bad weeks earlier than would have been the case otherwise. Thank u love, thank u life, thank you Luca G
—@peterknegtI have found all of this thrilling, and not just because it allowed us a break from endless — and often kinda toxic — conversations about the pop girlies (some of whom I have been very happy to have new music from!). What's been truly joyful for me is seeing this seemingly unanimous gay embrace of someone who has long been my number 1 when it comes to the music I most associate with my queerness: Trent Reznor.
I first came across Reznor sort of by accident. When I was about 12, I ordered his 1994 Nine Inch Nails album, The Downward Spiral, (from one of those Columbia House "deals" with the little stamps) without really knowing what it was. Initially scandalized by its sexual energy — this, of course, is the album with "Closer" — I slowly allowed its hooks to unravel something in my own psyche. It made me feel virile and alive and definitely a little gay, much like seeing Challengers did nearly 30 years later. By the time I was 15, I owned a closet full of NIN T-shirts and was sleeping outside a record store so I could be the first person in my town to own their 1999 album, The Fragile.
At the time, most of my peers were obsessed with the surge of late '90s, early 2000s teen pop (see Britney, Christina, Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync etc.). But I was too deep in the angsty hole Reznor had created for me to notice much. I was particularly obsessed with NIN's 1989 debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, which I was convinced was full of lyrics about Reznor's queer sexual experiences (something I still maintain about "The Only Time" and "Kinda I Want To"). Whether that was true or not, it was certainly an outlet for my own burgeoning queerness. I even went so far as to spend my downtime from high school writing a (very, very bad) musical set to songs from Pretty Hate Machine. It was about the sexual awakening of a gay teenager — not so loosely based on what I wished was happening to me.
Now obviously I am not the only person with some version of this narrative. Reznor has amassed an army of queer fans over the course of his career. And though he has never publicly declared himself as LGBTQ (and is now hetero-married with five kids), he has definitely alluded to it, whether in lyrics, interviews or music videos. At the very least, he has warranted queer icon status through his allyship alone. In a 1994 Rolling Stone story I cherished as a closeted teen, he said that when a recording studio employee made a homophobic joke, he retaliated by buying dozens of gay porn magazines, clipping out photos and hiding them all over the studio. Taylor Swift could never.
Of course, Reznor has come a long way from those early days of Nine Inch Nails. Alongside Ross (who became the only other permanent member of NIN besides Reznor in 2016), he has evolved into one of the 21st century's great film and television composers. Together, the pair has scored 14 films (including Oscar-winning work for both The Social Network and Soul) and the HBO miniseries Watchmen (which won them an Emmy and was my personal soundtrack to the first few months of the pandemic). It's a stunning career evolution if you think about it, and one that I have watched with what can only be described as pride. But what I've felt about their Challengers score is on an entirely different level.
In Guadagnino, Reznor and Ross have been given their first opportunity to collaborate with a queer filmmaker and, with Challengers specifically, to work on a film that has a frenetic bisexual energy that harkens back to early Nine Inch Nails. What it has offered Reznor's queer fans is something we've never really got a chance to experience: his music channelled through the queer gaze (unless, of course, you count Lil Nas X's sampling of Nine Inch Nails in "Old Town Road"). Clearly that's proved to be a very suitable match, which makes sense given that Reznor — whether he was aware of it or not — spent a lot of his career making ideal music for the queer experience, whether it be our agony or our sex or our nightlife. Challengers pushes that to its full potential. And what's more, it's only the first of two Guadagnino-Reznor-Ross collabs being released in 2024. The next? It's coming out this fall, and it's aptly called Queer. Our autumn soundtracks have never been more preordained.
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