Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television 9780814338988, 0814338984

Citation preview

Reading the Bromance

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne Frances Gateward University of St. Andrews California State University, Northridge Caren J. Deming University of Arizona Tom Gunning University of Chicago Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute Thomas Leitch of Chicago University of Delaware Peter X. Feng University of Delaware Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh

Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

Reading the Bromance Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television

Edited by

Michael DeAngelis

Wayne State University Press Detroit

© 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2013954413 ISBN 978-0-8143-3898-8 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8143-3899-5 (ebook)

For Andrew

contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction  1 Michael DeAngelis

I. Anticipating the Bromantic Turn 1. Second Bananas and Gay Chicken: Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now  29 Jenna Weinman 2. Grumpy Old Men: “Bros Before Hos”  52 Hilary Radner 3. Fears of a Millennial Masculinity: Scream’s Queer Killers  79 David Greven

II. The Contemporary Cinematic Bromance 4. I Love You, Hombre: Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance  109 Nick Davis 5. From Dostana to Bromance: Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered  139 Meheli Sen

viii

contents 6. From Batman to I Love You, Man: Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre  165 Ken Feil 7. Rad Bromance (or I Love You, Man, but We Won’t Be Humping on Humpday)  191 Peter Forster 8. Queerness and Futurity in Superbad  213 Michael DeAngelis

III. Bromance and Television Narrative 9. Becoming Bromosexual: Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV  233 Ron Becker 10. The Bromance Stunt in House  255 Murray Pomerance 11. “This ain’t about your money, bro. Your boy gave you up”: Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire  274 Dominic Lennard Works Cited  295 Contributors  309 Index  313

acknowledgments

It has been a privilege, an honor, and a joy to work with such a talented and dedicated group of authors on this project, and I feel lucky to be associated with all of them. I offer special thanks to Barry Keith Grant and Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press for their confidence in this project as well as their consistent encouragement and support. At Wayne State I am also most grateful for the knowledge and expertise that Tracy Schoenle, Emily Nowak, and Kristin Harpster have provided in bringing this project through its various stages and to completion. The two anonymous manuscript readers offered thought-provoking and insightful comments and suggestions that helped strengthen this book in a vast number of ways. I feel quite fortunate to be connected with my colleagues at DePaul University, and I thank Kelly Kessler, Kimberlee Perez, Paul Booth, Blair Davis, Luisela Alvaray, Lexa Murphy, and Carolyn Bronstein for providing me with such a welcoming academic environment in the College of Communication. Dusty Goltz’s work on queerness and futurity inspired me to discover another side of Superbad, and I am especially grateful for Dusty’s insights, wisdom, and friendship. I am also very grateful for the leadership and support that Jackie Taylor and Bruno Teboul have offered me and so many others in our college. My dear friends Carol Coopersmith and Susan McGury consistently help me feel confident and excited about my work, and I love them for this and so many other reasons. Alex Doty and I discussed bromance and this project numerous times over the past several years, and Alex’s encouragement has meant the world to me. It still seems entirely unreal that this lifelong friend and groundbreaking scholar is no longer with us. He lives on in my heart.

x

acknowledgments

To say that my partner Andrew Ramos is a true prince seems like an understatement. I cannot imagine my life without this wonderful man who extends his love, support, and wisdom unconditionally each day for what is now coming very close to thirty years. To the stars that aligned themselves so that we could meet each other, I cannot thank you enough.

Introduction Michael DeAngelis

August 2011 marked the release of a new iPhone and Android app designed for straight males in major metropolitan areas who were searching for opportunities to connect, meet, and hang out with other straight men. App users could develop personal files in which they indicated common interests to be shared with potential contacts. According to Kira M. Newman, Tech Cocktail app co-developer Jeffrey Canty suggests that the app “was partly inspired by his own experience: he had endured a breakup, a death in the family, and a move to a new city, and he found himself ten pounds over his target weight but without a workout buddy to motivate him.”1 The use of “Bromance” as the name of this convenient app marks the ubiquity of a term that has been circulating in popular cultural discourse since the middle of this century’s first decade. Skateboard magazine editor David Carnie is often credited with having originated the term in the 1990s,2 but “bromance” did not begin to appear regularly in American media until 2005, around the time of the release of Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. “Bromance” has come to denote an emotionally intense bond between presumably straight males who demonstrate an openness to intimacy that they neither regard, acknowledge, avow, nor express sexually, and this definition already begins to point to some of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the phenomenon: bromance involves something that must happen (the demonstration of intimacy itself) on the condition that other things not happen (the avowal or expression of sexual desire between straight males). Accordingly, as the phenomenon is presented to audiences, bromance depends upon an elegant yet complex play with what popular media

2

Introduction

culture has consistently posited as the anticipated and desired outcome of intensifying interpersonal intimacy in heterosexual relationships. In popular relationship discourse, the progression from “just friends” to “lovers” has become such a naturalized “given” in culture that its absence is seen as either a mark of failure (“What prevented the couple from taking it to the ‘next level’?”) or the cause for sorrow or regret (“If only it had happened”). Bromance’s manipulation of this progression is evident in many of the phenomenon’s earliest manifestations in which the perception of the “bromance”-defined relationship as inherently asexual was not always assumed to be a “given” by those who applied the descriptive term to other samesex pairs—or even sometimes by the bromancers themselves. For example, when popular media reports about the close relationship between the “suddenly single” Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConaughey began to develop into rumors that the men were gay, the media introduced the term “bromance” in an attempt to secure the nonsexual nature of their relationship, providing both the celebrities and the media with a means of dispelling sexual intimacy while also highlighting the “innocence” of the male-male bond. “I mean, we all have buds,” Armstrong explained, “we all take guy trips, but you take something very normal and you put in a magazine, and people start talking.”3 It was not long before the term “bromance” captured widespread public attention through its suggestion of an edgy and risky version of same-sex social intimacy, playing with sexual distinctions between “is gay/is not gay” that remain so ripe for gossip and scandal. The phenomenon rapidly spread across media boundaries, and by 2006 the term was already being applied to relationships between characters of several dynamic duos on network and cable television, including Alan Shore (James Spader) and William Shatner (Denny Crane) in Boston Legal, Drs. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) and Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) in House, and Drs. Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) in Nip/Tuck.4 In 2008 MTV released the short-lived reality television series Bromance, in which a group of men competed for the chance to become host Brody Jenner’s Number 1 Bro, with weekly elimination ceremonies held in a communal hot tub.

Introduction

3

Even the arena of professional sports has not been exempt from the bromance phenomenon. The year 2008 witnessed the rise of the “Tom Brady Man Crush,” with (presumably) straight male football fans blurring the lines between identification and desire in expressed fantasies of hanging out with the handsome and charismatic New England Patriots quarterback. The Brady bromance would soon find additional outlets of expression through YouTube videos and the website Mancrush.com, where fans were invited to vote for and comment upon their male role model of choice.5 In 2009, the David Beckham/Tom Cruise bromance reiterated the sports star + movie star formula that the Armstrong/McConaughey connection had originated. The world of professional basketball has become the setting of yet more curious intermale connections, with a number of celebrity bromances played out in the stands at Los Angeles Lakers home games, and pairs such as Jason Bateman/Dustin Hoffman and longtime friends Will Farrell/John C. Reilly comfortably exploiting the sexual ambiguities of intermale bonding through blatant, high-profile, on-the-mouth kisses captured on “kiss cams.”6 If bromancers are close friends who are always more than “just friends,” their relationships are neither sexually nor procreatively goal oriented, and in this sense they complicate the expectations inherent in representations of heteronormative relationships in popular media culture. With the friends-into-lovers model remaining such a familiar relationship dynamic, however, bromance sustains its identity from the anticipation of a sexual “something” that will never happen, thereby becoming a phenomenon that depends upon the audience’s acknowledgment and disavowal of sexual possibilities that the bromancers themselves never acknowledge—a fascinating variation upon the notion of “I know very well, but all the same . . .” that comprises such an essential characteristic of the suspension of disbelief. Popular cultural awareness of the complications and contradictions of this dynamic are perhaps nowhere more overtly expressed than in the Nigahiga song “Bromance” that went viral on YouTube in 2012, with its refrain of “Bromance, there’s nothing really gay about it/ Not there’s anything wrong with being gay/ Bromance, shouldn’t be ashamed or hide it/ I love you in the most heterosexual way.”7

4

Introduction

It could hardly be argued that the notion of an intimate yet nonsexual male bonding, or even of an intimate but nonsexual male bonding that insists upon drawing attention to its own sexuality, is what makes the contemporary bromance a unique or distinctive phenomenon. Ancient Greeks considered bonding friendships between men—those based upon the Aristotelian concept of virtue— to be among the highest and most fulfilling forms of human interconnection, and Platonic friendships were considered an aspiration to a spiritual ideal. The notion of friendship as the active pursuit of an “other self” as well as open, intimate expression is one that has been explored across narrative forms and genres over the centuries, having become an object of “speculation” or concern only after historically recent scientific and psychoanalytic discourses began to isolate and denote homosexuality as a form of identity, as some “other” in itself. As Leslie Fiedler suggests in Love and Death in the American Novel, the concept of “otherness” also serves as a central component of an American literary tradition traceable to the early 1800s. Faced with the burden of functioning as both “the ruined and redeeming virgin-bride” and “the forgiving mother,” women come to embody the contradictory and irreconcilable representational demands that the American cultural consciousness placed upon them.8 In the American literary tradition, Fiedler explains, man’s eroticization of woman—especially of the adulterous sort—inevitably comes into conflict with his desire to maintain her in the image of the innocent maternal figure whose primary focus in life remains the child (which the male figure himself continues to desire to emblematize). As a result of this paradox, the notion of maturity becomes repugnant to the American male, since maturity comes to represent both an irretrievably lost childhood innocence and “an acceptance of responsibility and drudgery and dullness.”9 Fiedler connects the flight from maturity and responsibility to an inclination in American literature for the male to desire to escape both the confines of the marital relationship and civilized society itself, rejecting woman as the “feared and forbidden other” and acting in accordance with a narcissism that manifests as a bond “with the comrade of one’s own sex, the buddy as anima.”10 Through this schema of flight, the American literary protagonist also embarks

Introduction

5

upon a “search for an innocent substitute for the adulterous passion and marriage” through “a sentimental relationship at once erotic and immaculate, a union which commits its participants neither to society nor sin,” and that can only be provided by a relationship between men.11 Fielder argues that these male-male relationships are perceived as innocent and harmless, perhaps because they did not constitute “homosexuality in any crude meaning of the word, but a passionless passion, simple, utterly satisfying, yet immune to lust— physical only as a handshake is physical, this side of copulation.”12 While noting a critical and cultural tendency to insist that such a relationship “does not compete with heterosexual passion but complements it,” Fiedler maintains that the preponderance and intensity of male-male relationships in American literature signals “a general superiority of the love of man for man over the ignoble lust of man for woman.”13 Fiedler and other literary critics provide ample evidence of the flight from civilization and embrace of male-male intimacy across the American literary canon, including the relationship between white woodsman Natty Bumppo and Delaware Indian chief Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1827–1841). D. H. Lawrence, author of Women in Love (1920), a novel that depicts an intimate relationship between men that at one point manifests itself in a nude wrestling match, says of Cooper that “he dreamed of a new human relationship . . . of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than love.”14 In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1885), Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer provide another example of the phenomenon, as does the relationship between Ishmael and the whale harpooner Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). “Marriage to a woman would have seemed to Melville’s hero intolerable,” Fiedler asserts, continuing that “only through the pure wedding of male to male could he project an engagement with life that did not betray the self.”15 Descending from these traditions, several American cinematic genres have accommodated or relied upon the development of close intermale relationships, including the war film, the Western, and the male melodrama. The intimate homosocial connections evidenced in comedy duos including Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello,

6

Introduction

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and 1950s stars Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis should be especially considered as precursors to the contemporary bromance. Yet placing bromance in a broader historical context of the history of the production and reception of homosexuality in America helps us identify both its connections to its predecessors and its own uniqueness. For decades of American cinema, at least until the widespread circulation of gossip and scandal magazines in the 1950s, male sexual difference among screen performers and the characters they portrayed was constructed either overtly, through the production of recognizable, stereotypical representations of gayness, or covertly, through “alternative” or marginalized audience reception strategies that in many cases remained unauthorized but that Hollywood studios actively managed and attempted to silence through their promotional and publicity units. Mark Rappaport’s film Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) serves as a suitable reminder of the extent to which Hollywood in the golden age of the studio system “protected” its stars from accusations of sexual deviance, as its eponymous postmortem narrator reflects in wonder upon the effectiveness of such strategies in managing audience reception practices.16 By the 1960s, such management of the star image became less feasible and more complex because of both the decentralization of the studio system and the industry’s weakening and eventual abolishment of restrictions on the representation of homosexuality. It is hardly coincidental that Hollywood narratives exploring the parameters of nonsexual intermale intimacy began to appear at the end of this decade. Three films released in 1969 were especially influential: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (directed by George Roy Hill), Easy Rider (directed by, co-written by, and costarring Dennis Hopper), and Midnight Cowboy (directed by John Schlesinger). Robin Wood links the appearance of these highly successful malemale dramas to a “crisis in ideological confidence” rooted in the nation’s disillusionment with the Vietnam War.17 Certainly the films offer deviations from the classical Hollywood model, focusing upon homosocial rather than heterosexual bonding in narratives in which protagonists reject the prescribed life paths of heteronormativity by remaining rootless, socially and culturally marginalized, and often engaged in criminal behavior (train and bank robbery, drug dealing, or sexual hustling). The films’ pervasive nihilism concerning

Introduction

7

the ideologies of the American Dream is evidenced by a departure from the traditional happy ending: bank robbers Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) meet their end with a freezeframe of the two protagonists charging out through a door in Bolivia as the gunshots that will end their lives dominate the soundtrack; cross-country motorcycle companions Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) are senselessly shot by rednecks at the end of Easy Rider; and male hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight) witnesses the death of his ailing companion “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) on a bus headed to the warm, sunny Florida that they will never reach in Midnight Cowboy. In addition to the political climate that enabled such journeys, in different ways all three of these films are products of less restrictive historical practices in the film industry’s regulation of content. Each appeared within a year of the advent of the rating system implemented in 1968 by the Motion Picture Association of America, after the 1967 abolishment of the restrictive Production Code to which the industry had adhered since the early 1930s. The effects of the lifting of these restrictions are evident everywhere—from the emphasis upon the bodies of Butch/Newman and Sundance/Redford as objects of desire, to the LSD-induced sexual escapades in Easy Rider, to the still highly stereotypical yet more developed representations of homosexual identity and behavior in Midnight Cowboy, still the only winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture ever to have been rated X upon its release. Wood suggests that these three films comprise the historical roots of the “buddy film” that became so prevalent in Hollywood in the first half of the 1970s, and a comparison of the themes, structures, and historical/cultural contexts of the buddy film and the bromance reveals some notable similarities and important differences. Wood argues that the appearance of buddy films correlates with the Watergate scandal that dominated the American political scene from late 1972 to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, extending the “crisis of ideological confidence” precipitated by the Vietnam War18; indeed, the sense of disillusionment pervades what has been described as the American Renaissance in a number of film genres, perhaps most prominently in political/conspiratorial thrillers such as The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

8

Introduction

and The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), and even in Robert Altman’s dark bicentennial musical Nashville (1975). Wood defines the buddy film as a genre with six distinctive components: 1) a “journey” in which cities serve as points of arrival and departure; 2) a “marginalization” of female characters; 3) the absence of any identifiable “home” to which the male protagonists are anchored; 4) a “male love story” that subverts the classical Hollywood cinema’s narrative trajectory toward a union of the heterosexual couple and the integration of the nuclear family; 5) the presence of an “explicitly homosexual character”; and 6) the death of at least one of the protagonists, required in order to preclude any possibility that the relationship will be “consummated.”19 While Wood focuses his analysis upon Michael Cimino’s 1974 drama Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, other buddy narratives of this period evidence most or all of the generic elements that he marks out, including Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973), Bang the Drum Slowly (John C. Hancock, 1973), and California Split (Robert Altman, 1974). The central protagonists of these films interact in exclusive male communities either as drifters (Scarecrow, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot), gamblers (California Split), or baseball players (Bang the Drum Slowly). Whether or not one accepts their designations as male love stories, it is indisputable that the narratives comprise character studies that focus almost exclusively upon the relationships between the central male protagonists, whereas female characters figure into the stories only tangentially, as needed to relieve the men’s sexual tensions (Scarecrow, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot); indeed, many critics have claimed that the buddy film represented a backlash against feminism and the women’s liberation movement.20 Extending from the representational liberties of the rating system that had already affected their 1969 predecessors, the 1970s films also evidence an increased prevalence of the previously unrepresentable “homosexual element” in American culture, an element that had already been gradually made more culturally visible in the news media since the 1969 Stonewall riots, with prominent news weeklies often devoting cover stories to the phenomenon.21 But in order to argue that this increasing visibility rendered the American public more sensitive to, or accepting of, homosexuality during this time, one would have to ignore the blatantly, stereotypically homophobic representations of such characters in buddy films of this

Introduction

9

era. And when death is not deployed as a means of curtailing the development of the male-male relationship as it does by disease (Bang the Drum Slowly) or the results of assault (Thunderbolt and Lightfoot), the rendering of one of the male characters as catatonic will suffice, as it does with Lion (Al Pacino) in Scarecrow. While death and the onset of such illnesses provide narrative closure in the 1970s buddy film, it is the generic element of the absence of home that effects the most remarkable structural deviation from the classical Hollywood model. Films such as Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and California Split deny their central characters the sense of any domestic grounding or anchor point whatsoever; the protagonists encounter one another by chance, destined to interact over the course of a series of episodes before one of them moves on, the relationship ending within the diegesis. While Scarecrow adds the trajectory of the search for the mother of Lion’s child, this goal turns out to be little more than an excuse for the two men to play out their mutual encounter. Like the figuration of Florida in Midnight Cowboy or America in Easy Rider, the goal of buddy protagonists remains much more elusive than the certainty of death. Bromance certainly shares some thematic similarities with the 1970s buddy film and its predecessors, yet there are important points of distinction. First, as Ron Becker discusses in his contribution to this volume, the historical/cultural shift that enabled the eventual rise of the contemporary bromance involves the considerable degree to which both post-millennial homosexuals and homosexuality itself have recently established and sustained a more visible presence in American culture, resulting in a noticeable lessening of the social stigmas attached to homosexuality, which is evidenced in part by a growing national acceptance of gay marriage. This presence has created a discursive proliferation, one that has profoundly worked its way through the popular media industries; as Becker explains, “the bromance discourse appropriates cultural codes connected to homosexual bonding as a means of acknowledging the possibilities of homosocial bonding” (236). This cultural shift has undoubtedly signaled a broader acceptance of nonheteronormative cultural expressions as well as the prospect of a same-sex intimacy that transcends matters of sexual orientation, yet it would be problematic to posit such acceptance as

10

Introduction

an indication of any broad-based, unqualified panacea to a lingering cultural homophobia. This is because discursive expressivity itself has also become a source of new anxiety for the prospective “new intimates” of straight male culture—an anxiety that demands to be addressed and managed—and this uneasiness further characterizes the contemporary bromance as a cultural form and a way of being in the world. A culture that speaks is a culture that must also acknowledge what is being spoken. And as this volume will demonstrate, a culture that opens up to straight males new possibilities of relating to other men actively tests the limits of that same culture’s level of acceptance of sexual difference. The 1970s buddy film immerses its central characters in a discursive silence about the larger purpose or “meaning” of the intimacy that they experience together, about how much or how little their interconnection approximates a homosexual relationship; steeped in a much more prevalent and explicit discourse of homosexuality, the contemporary bromance engages its characters in a more extensive and extended deliberation about such matters of meaning. If homosexual intimacy is now so much more pervasive and “open” and seemingly less culturally impalatable than it was in the early 1970s—at a time when homosexuality was just being removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders II—bromance finds the ways in which this intimacy can be both appropriated by and spoken about in mainstream culture to be ripe for exploration. Curiously, the relationship between the buddy film and bromance in some ways parallels the 1970s genre’s relationship to the wave of early 1980s gay films that followed on its heels. Wood suggests that mainstream films like Making Love (Arthur Hiller, 1982) reflected “the growing acceptance of gayness” in American culture and writes that “the background of the 70s buddy films was . . . the collapse of the concept of home, with all its complex associations; the background of 80s gay movies is, precisely, its restoration and reaffirmation.”22 Indeed, the appearance of such gay-themed films as Partners (James Burrows, 1982), Personal Best (Robert Towne, 1982), Victor Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982), and Lianna (John Sayles, 1983)23 during this brief pre-AIDS period of American history reflected the increasing visibility and eventual cultural and fiscal empowerment of the sexually “deviant”

Introduction

11

classes of American culture, when agents and publicists began to explore the possibilities of strategically marketing stars, characters, and narratives to both heterosexual and homosexual audiences.24 Bromance may not be actively marketed to homosexual communities or audience sectors, but the phenomenon owes its emergence to its facility in appropriating the cultural codes of homosexuality. As such, its narrative goals and audience strategies are unique and complex. The buddy film and the bromance are certainly similar in that both feature a homosocially grounded “male love story,” but in bromance this designation of “love story” is always bracketed by scare quotes, signaling a romance that is never actually or intentionally romantic but that gains cultural currency by adopting the pretext. The most prominent contrast between buddy films and bromances is in their relationship to home: instead of any “disintegration” that might indicate what Wood describes as an “absence of normality,” bromance enables and requires home to become a defining, stabilizing space. And whether or not bromance’s male characters spend much time there, domestic space figures as a conspicuous narrative presence. The first part of The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009) rushes its fiancé and groomsmen through a series of goodbyes before they set off for a bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas, but the narrative trajectory is from the outset one of an anticipated and timely return home (preferably, with the lost groom) where the wedding is scheduled to take place immediately afterward. Humpday (Lynn Shelton, 2009) begins with its married couple, Ben and Anna (Mark Duplass and Alycia Delmore), comfortably settled in bed, bemoaning the fatigue that has once again subverted their plans to conceive a child that night, only to be interrupted by the unanticipated, late-night arrival of Ben’s friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard) who, over the course of the next several days, lures Ben away from the domestic space before what turns out to be his requisite return, when, presumably, he and his wife can get back to the business of starting a family. In I Love You, Man (John Hamburg, 2009), which merits distinction as the quintessential model for the cinematic bromance, domestic space creates an even firmer anchoring, and “girlfriend guy” Peter (Paul Rudd) loves being there so much with his fiancée, Zooey (Rashida Jones), that he manages to tear himself away from its comforts only when the lack of a close male friend to select for his best

12

Introduction

man (not to say anything about additional groomsmen) begins to mark him as strange and possibly too “clingy” in the eyes of Zooey’s female friends. If bromance narratives feature journeys, they turn out to be short trips to the market in comparison with the more aimless wanderings of the 1970s buddy film. And on these bromantic trips, no one ever needs to die. Female characters do occupy less prominent positions than males in the bromance in terms of screen time, but because of the centrality of home they remain central to the genre’s structure as a motivating force that regulates male protagonists’ actions in often stereotypically depicted ways—setting deadlines and putting into question the assumed security of the marriage contract. If women in the buddy film were virtually absent, women in the bromance narrative are often represented misogynistically as loving yet controlling and annoying interferences whose demands must always be “dealt with.” Or disavowed, as the case may be: in Humpday, after Ben insists to Andrew that his wife will have no objection to the two men having sex as long as he is open about it with her first, he lies to her by suggesting that his involvement with the porno film will be limited to getting coffee for the actors. Aligned with the discursive openness concerning the subject of homosexuality in the contemporary era, and strongly contrasting with the buddy film, what remains equally unique about the bromance is the extent to which male characters are not only permitted but required to talk about their intimacy. Centered upon the separation anxiety that ensues in the weeks before graduating seniors Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) must part ways on their routes to college, the bromancers of Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007) have one final “sleepover” in which they celebrate their relationship and repeatedly affirm their love for one another. The prospect of performing together in a gay porn film becomes the pretext for Ben and Andrew, the two straight males of Humpday, both to analyze and testify how truly comfortable they are with themselves and one another. Yet such discursive openness never comes without a price or a consequence: Ben and Andrew struggle to understand how their mutual openness dovetails with their sexual identity; “the morning after,” Seth’s self-consciousness and discomfort with the intimate admissions of the previous night force him into an awkward,

Introduction

13

self-correcting proclamation of how much he loves his friend Evan’s mother’s breasts. This same discursive openness differentiates bromance not only from the 1970s buddy film but also from previous genres that so actively relied upon the intimate interaction of two central male protagonists in American cinema. In his analysis of male comedy duos from the silent era to the 1950s, Mark Simpson emphasizes that the humor developed by such comedians as Laurel and Hardy depended upon a curious mix of innocence and queerness that was certainly recognized as such throughout the course of their career together but that was largely capable of being disavowed because the queerness still “remained unnamed.”25 “Now that homosexuality is much more visible, and thus much more in the front rather than the back of people’s minds,” Simpson explains, “this disavowal is no longer sufficient,” such that both producers and audiences must now overtly anticipate the potential cultural naming of such homosocial relations as queer or homosexual.26 Bromance thus maintains a dual ideological function: its mythical meaning-making strategies provide a way for straight men to be intimate, and its narrative structure serves to contain and direct this intimacy in ways that ensure its accessibility to its mainstream and heterosexual target markets while also refraining from alienating viewers who do not identify as heterosexual. As a vehicle for such intimacy, the phenomenon functions largely as a discourse, or, as Ron Becker suggests in his chapter of this volume, “a way of talking and thinking about male friendships that helps produce specific ways of feeling and experiencing homosocial intimacy and masculinity” (235). As a discourse, it operates across the narrative media formats of cinema and television. Through a variety of vehicles including media criticism, commentary, gossip, and promotion, the discourse of bromance also extends to such nonnarrative arenas as politics, sports, and sports fandom. To this notion of bromance as discourse, however, it is important to add another productive way of thinking about the phenomenon, one that incorporates how Hollywood and other prominent mainstream cultural institutions process homosocial intimacy in a way that retains the phenomenon’s potential for widespread marketability. Here it becomes essential to consider bromance also as a genre,

14

Introduction

as a flexible yet recognizable system in which the goals are both to retain intimacy and to contain or delimit the ways in which this intimacy may be disseminated. The semantic/syntactic/pragmatic approach to genre that Rick Altman has theorized seems especially relevant to the treatment of bromance. Altman identifies the semantic elements of genre as “common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, [and] set,” while the larger structures and relationships within a narrative comprise the syntactic elements of genre.27 The semantic and syntactic elements of such films as Humpday, Superbad, The Hangover, and I Love You, Man—including the firm ideological grounding of the protagonists in the institution of home, the plot trajectories that trace the routes away from and back to this institution, the complications that ensue on this journey, and the role of women within it—certainly support a common premise that identifies male homosocial intimacy as an issue that needs not only to be explored but also to be both managed and resolved through the narrative. At the same time, however, the presence of these semantic and syntactic elements does not in itself account for the various ways in which genres function, and here Altman’s notion of the “pragmatic” aspect of genre analysis becomes useful: “Always assuming multiple users of various sorts—not only spectator groups, but producers, distributors, exhibitors, cultural agencies, and many others as well—pragmatics recognizes that some familiar patterns, such as genres, owe their very existence to that multiplicity.”28 Such a pragmatic approach thus strives to account for the various conditions of production that participate in the shaping and sustaining of a genre as well as for the spectrum of diverse responses to the genre that audiences might formulate; in effect, then, such an approach would help illuminate the reasons why the efforts of such “multiple users” are sometimes in alignment and other times not. Such an approach also provides the space for an assessment of the ways in which the experience of film viewing becomes integral to the understanding and appreciation of generic functions.29 As a discourse that manifests itself through genre, as both process and product, bromance provides a litmus test for discerning not only the extent to which homosexuality has been assimilated in contemporary culture but also the degree of comfort (or discomfort) that this culture actually experiences with such assimilated

Introduction

15

homosexuality. If a goal of this genre is to make sense of a contemporary discursive manifestation, bromance can best be considered as a means of navigating the possibilities of male-male intimacy, of making sense of these possibilities in ways that both engage audience interest and that vow to operate within the parameters of heteronormativity. Yet it is the attempt to “manage” this intimacy that reveals one of the richest and most complex aspects of the phenomenon: the fact that the process of policing the implications of homosocial intimacy never fully succeeds. Tensions erupt and ideological leakages form, and many bromance narratives evidence a version of relationship anxiety that situates compulsory heterosexuality as both a goal and a symptom of malaise. Bromance narratives certainly do seek to provide a secure and nonthreatening space for straight men to connect with one another in intimate relationships similar to those in which they see their female friends, partners, and fiancées so freely engaging. Curiously, however, bromances are also constructed as “problem” narratives that sustain audience interest by thematizing the difficulties of creating and sustaining such close male-male relationships and that often simultaneously construct heteronormativity and its social and cultural expectations as part of the “problem.” As such, in addition to the buddy film, bromance also shares certain attributes with two film cycles of the sexual revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the problem marriage cycle, exemplified by such works as Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971) and The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (Lawrence Turman, 1971), and college campus films such as Three in the Attic (Richard Wilson, 1968) and Getting Straight (Richard Rush, 1970). Exploiting contemporaneous discourses of sexual liberation, but most often limiting the celebration of such freedoms to heterosexual men, these film cycles generally ended up vilifying the same freedoms that they set out to celebrate, marking men’s resistance to relationship commitment as aberrant and often as something that might be perceived negatively, as a type of “queerness” that is consistently coded as pathological. In the realm of the contemporary bromance, one that owes its very existence to the proliferation of homosexual discourse in mainstream popular culture, however, queerness is no longer “written off” as an aberration; instead, it becomes something that must be

16

Introduction

investigated—at least up to a point. In Humpday, for example, Ben tells his wife that their hetero-marital relationship has prevented him from avowing other aspects of his identity, and he vows to start “exploring” himself before it is too late. After his undeliberated acceptance of the challenge to have sex on film with his best male friend, he is jolted back to a hyperawareness of his responsibilities the next morning by his wife, Anna, who mounts him in bed as a sharp reminder of his having missed their optimal conception time the night before. I Love You, Man plays similar games with the marriage contract: the ideal man-man relationship is framed not so much by what Peter feels that he needs as by what he is expected to have for the sake of a healthy marital relationship. While the film begins with a marriage proposal and concludes with a ceremony, I Love You, Man also identifies intermale closeness as healthy, especially in the sense that it can foster or renew manliness. Originally just a means to a marital end, Peter’s relationship with Sydney ends up making him feel liberated and more confident, and it even teaches him the value of intimacy. But the film also suggests that the path of the self-defined Sydney—his apartment equipped with his own masturbation station—leads to a dead end because of his refusal to commit to a heterosexual relationship. Clearly, then, the various aims of bromance are quite often at odds. Bromance facilitates intimate bondings between heterosexual men—bondings that are enabled by a newfound heteronormative comfort with a more-present-than-ever homosexuality, and that manage this comfort and this homosexuality by attempting to align both of them as closely as possible with the workings of heteronormativity even as they simultaneously reveal the instability of heteronormativity itself as an identity or a practice. In contending with these issues, the analytical treatment of bromance in this volume has three primary aims. First, it offers a range of critically productive ways of thinking about and talking about bromance—not only as a genre or discourse but also as a code of friendship, a social behavioral pattern, a marketing strategy, and a specific form of “taste.” Second, the book situates contemporary bromance in the context of a number of generic traditions in order to reveal its roots and antecedents and to illuminate the historically specific conditions under which bromance narratives are produced and received by audiences.

Introduction

17

Third, the book analyzes a wide range of examples of the contemporary bromance in popular American cinema, world cinema, and television, in the process revealing how bromance both represents and responds to cultural definitions of “normal” sexuality and gender identity. The first of the book’s three parts is devoted to an examination of a set of films and genres that prefigure the inception of the bromance genre in American cinema. In “Second Bananas and Gay Chicken: Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now,” Jenna Weinman effects a cultural/historical comparison that identifies the roots of bromance’s treatment of the immature and uncommitted male heterosexual in the romantic comedy cycle of the early 1960s. Through an analysis of such contemporary bromances as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and I Love You, Man, and in light of the romantic comedy genre of the early 1960s and that era’s representative films Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), That Touch of Mink (1962), and Send Me No Flowers (1964), the chapter assesses the extent to which both genres privilege heteronormativity as an ideal. Weinman conducts a close examination of the playboy and breadwinner phenomena that had so directly affected historical constructions of masculinity by the early 1960s, and she proceeds to show how issues of relationship commitment have continued to inform definitions of masculinity in the contemporary period. Weinman ultimately examines how bromantic comedy elevates the pleasures of homosocial relationships such that the genre seems unable to redeem or correct male immaturity solely through promises of heterosexual romance and patriarchal responsibility. In “Grumpy Old Men: ‘Bros Before Hos,’ ” Hilary Radner demonstrates how the contemporary bromantic tendency of deploying a female character to mediate the relationship between two closely malebonded men is prefigured in this successful 1993 comedy, which draws upon the already long-standing personal and professional relationship between costars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Through a contextual and discursive analysis of a wide range of star texts including promotional and publicity documents, interviews, film reviews, and a textual analysis of the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple (which would secure the “couple” status of the two actors), Radner discusses the ways in which Grumpy Old Men discharges

18

Introduction

male anxieties about the public perception of their homosocial relationship as homosexual, even as the film evidences a nostalgia for a pre-feminist era in which (to men, at least) gender roles seemed more stable and less conflicted. The era immediately preceding the inception of the contemporary bromance featured experiments with male homosocial bonding in several genres, including the horror film. As David Greven shows in “Fears of a Millenial Masculinity: Scream’s Queer Killers,” many of these experiments associated male homosocial intimacy with forms of psychopathology. A close examination of Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) illuminates ideological connections with the triangulated male-male-female structures that would soon become central to bromance, with intimate relationships between men misogynistically “complicated” by the presence of a largely vilified female protagonist. Citing immaturity as a common element of the slasher film and the beta-male bromance, this chapter demonstrates that the relationship between the two homoerotically encoded teen killers of Scream anticipates the fusions of horror and comedy that would inform the bromance genre of the next decade. While the chapters of Part I focus upon manifestations of bromance that precede the circulation of the term in popular culture, Part II features the treatment of a set of films that have come to occupy more conspicuous positions in the bromance canon within and beyond the American film industry. Although the term “bromance” originated in relation to American popular cultural discourse, key cinematic narratives produced outside of the Hollywood film industry both pre-dated its formal inception and contributed to its generic development nearer to the start of the first decade of this century. Nick Davis examines the narrative, historical, and industrial contexts of one of these seminal precursors in “I Love You, Hombre: Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance.” Alfonso Cuarón’s 2002 Mexican drama anticipates the contemporary Hollywood bromances that would begin to appear shortly after its release. Its remarkable American success compelled Hollywood studios to take note of the marketing potential of male homosocial narratives, even while Cuarón’s extension of the bonding relationship into an actual homosexual encounter would remain off-limits in Hollywood’s take on the genre. This chapter explores the ways in

Introduction

19

which the conflicted affiliation between the American and Mexican film industries mirrors the bond between the male protagonists of Y tu mamá también. The complicity of the film’s strong female protagonist in activating male eroticism renders this relationship yet more complex and serves to differentiate the film even further from Hollywood bromances in which female figures traditionally assume more marginal roles. The next chapter accentuates both the continuum and the historical breaks between past genres and present-day bromances outside of Hollywood. In “From Dostana to Bromance: Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered,” Meheli Sen traces a development within Hindi commercial cinema since the 1970s of a type of narrative of male homosocial bonding narrative that centers upon a specifically masculine code of friendship called dostana. This chapter offers a historical analysis of the dostana narrative from its inception in the “Angry Young Man” films of India’s political emergency years of the mid-1970s through the contemporary period. Focusing upon the films of superstar Amitabh Bachchan and his cinematic descendants, this analysis illuminates the ways in which changes in the dostana genre correlate with the transformation of Hindi cinema into a more urban, contemporary “Bollywood cinema” whose themes and productions have become increasingly global. The study demonstrates a parallel between dostana’s evolution and the progression from the male buddy film to the bromance narrative in Hollywood cinema, illuminating how recent discursive proliferations surrounding homosexuality have transformed both of these national cinematic traditions. The subsequent chapters of Part II continue the investigation of bromance’s narrative and representational strategies by focusing upon contemporary Hollywood manifestations of the phenomenon. In “From Batman to I Love You, Man: Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre,” Ken Feil explores the operations of bromance as genre, lifestyle, and taste that strategically deploy a form of male vulgarity—a “gross-out” version that marginalizes and objectifies both female and gay male characters—in order to offset another kind of “vulgarity” that threatens heterosexual masculinity through male bonding and the feminizing and eroticizing of the male body. Contextualizing vulgarity as a definitive aspect of

20

Introduction

masculinity in teen “gross-out” comedies as well as gay and straight camp, the chapter offers a detailed analysis of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and I Love You, Man, focusing upon how, in a “metrosexual” era, vulgarity strives to bolster homosocial intimacy even as it negates homosexuality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Jackass films, in which masculinity is consistently humiliated and vulgarity remains expressly eroticized. Must the “bro-” ultimately be separated from the “-mance”? In his chapter “Rad Bromance (or I Love You, Man, But We Won’t Be Humping on Humpday),” Peter Forster examines this question through a close analysis of these two seminal works of the canon— one Hollywood, the other independent. The chapter treats the interaction between two overlapping issues that the genre confronts. The first of these involves the anxieties elicited by the proximity of homosociality to homoeroticism, and the second involves the conflict stemming from the freedom that homosociality offers to its bros even as this freedom remains constantly at odds with heterosexual romance. Forster examines bromance’s management of the potentially queer component of its close relationships between heterosexual men, illuminating a dramatic narrative structure that urges its protagonists to deviate from the demands of heteronormativity even as they are ultimately called to reclaim this normativity by narrative’s end. While evidence of “queerness” in cinematic narrative has traditionally been determined by the presence of homosexual characters or relationships, several influential queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, Jose Esteban Muñoz, Judith Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman have attempted to expand the definitional parameters of queerness so that they do not lie so exclusively within the domains of representation and characterization. In “Queerness and Futurity in Superbad,” Michael DeAngelis explores both normative and potentially queer manifestations of narrative itself. The chapter examines the ways in which some bromances construct a queer temporality that draws audiences’ attention to what might seem very strange about the “normal”—meaning “hetero-normative”—experience of time. DeAngelis notes an especially clear opposition between what might be called “queer time” and “straight time” in the bromance Superbad, and he investigates this opposition to discover

Introduction

21

what it reveals about the political strategies that bromance uses in its embrace of homosocial bonding. The third and final part of the book comprises three analyses of bromantic relationships on network and cable television. In a historical examination titled “Becoming Bromosexual: Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV,” Ron Becker describes bromance as a discourse of human relationships. Becker posits that the increasing gay visibility of the 1990s evidenced an anxiety in the depiction of male-male friendships that was largely surmounted in the shift to bromantic discourse in American television in the first decade of the 2000s. This initial anxiety is evident in “mistaken identity” plots in series such as Seinfeld, Frasier, and Friends in which male protagonists contend with others’ perceptions that they might be gay. In a discussion of MTV’s reality series Bromance and ABC’s sitcom Happy Endings, the author demonstrates how television now more freely adopts the cultural codes of homosexual bonding in the bromance narrative, even as effeminacy has come to replace homosexuality as the primary threat to such homosocial bonding. In “The Bromance Stunt in House,” Murray Pomerance identifies bromance as a cultural/behavioral pattern in which participants play out romantic encounters while always regulating the social and interactional distance between them. The ability to sustain a working bromance becomes a form of homosocial interaction that toys with but never commits itself to homosexuality—a “stunt” that demands skillful performance. After exploring this notion of the stunt in several cultural contexts, the chapter analyzes bromantic stuntwork in the relationship between Drs. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) and James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) in the Fox series House, focusing upon a story arc in which both characters are (mis)perceived as gay by a female suitor. The final chapter of Part III moves the study of bromance outside of the familiar arena of comedy. In “This ain’t about your money, bro. Your boy gave you up’: Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire,” Dominic Lennard examines intense and intimate male bonding rituals in this critically acclaimed HBO crime drama that almost exclusively concerns male-focused events and character development. With few female characters of significance, relationships between women and women—or between women and men—are

22

Introduction

consistently eclipsed in interest and dramatic force by homosocial (or homosexual) relationships between male characters, including a plethora of “bromances” of varying intensity and stability. Unlike the comic versions of the bromance, which demonstrate some resistance to or “overcoming” of homophobia, The Wire is steeped in a discourse of hyper-heteromasculinity in which homophobia itself is formulated as a device of male intimacy. The Wire abounds with intimate male partnerships, including the centrally and critically celebrated relationship between drug kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his second-in-command Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). Lennard explores the various intimacies and tensions played out between the show’s male characters in connection with discourses of masculinity, class, and childhood. From historical analysis to discourse analysis, from sociology to queer theory, this volume provides a broad range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the bromance phenomenon. Given that bromance both affirms and problematizes the centrality of heteronormative relations, it is most appropriate that many of the authors of this volume invoke queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s treatment of male homosocial relations as a useful point of reference in their analyses. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Sedgwick posits a “continuum between homosocial and homosexual” that ultimately renders sexually ambiguous the normative rituals of heterosexual male bonding.30 Bromance plays upon these same ambiguities through narrative and marketing strategies that flirt with the notion of such a continuum even as they disavow such flirtations with a convenient recourse to homophobia, as in Ben and Andrew’s growing discomfort at the sight of each others’ bodies as they shed their clothing in a claustrophobic hotel room at the end of Humpday, the smoky-stale kiss on the mouth that Peter receives from a man-date who has gotten the “wrong” idea in I Love You, Man, and the steady stream of “gay” jokes that punctuate the narrative of Superbad. If, as Sedgwick articulates, the fusing together of “homosocial” and “desire” in the title of her book oxymoronically highlights a set of “both discriminations and paradoxes,”31 bromance dramatizes similar paradoxes. The relevance of Sedgwick’s analysis of homosociality also extends to the matter of the treatment of women in the bromance. Some of the chapters that follow note that although

Introduction

23

bromance often confines female characters to secondary roles, their narrative function is actually quite central. Women in bromance narratives serve as a reminder to the male protagonists that their feelings and expressions of homosocial intimacy must remain within heteronormative parameters; at the same time, women serve a catalytic function in triangulated relationships of desire, with the female character relegated to the sole function of enabling or strengthening the bond between the two men.32 Several chapters in this volume address issues of the function and representation of women in bromance, from Hilary Radner’s analysis of the trafficking in women that transpires in Grumpy Old Men to Dominic Lennard’s discussion of the conspicuous absence of female characters in the world of The Wire. Nick Davis’s analysis of the triangulated male-male-female relationship in Y tu mamá también suggests, however, that bromance’s relegation of female characters to such catalytic roles may not be a transnational or universal phenomenon, and this “deviation,” combined with the fact that the two male leads of Y tu mamá también are the only bromancers who actually engage in a sexual act together (awkward aftermath notwithstanding), clearly suggests the importance of further research on the operations of the bromance phenomenon outside of the American mainstream context. One domain that especially warrants exploration in future studies is boys’ love manga, a genre that has been popular in Japanese culture since the 1970s but that also enjoys fan communities in countries ranging from Germany to Indonesia.33 Boys’ love narratives are in many ways distinct from bromances: most of the stories are written by women; their audiences primarily though not exclusively comprise heterosexual women; and the tenderness and emotional intimacy of their teenage male protagonists regularly extend to explicitly sexual intimacy. Like the phenomenon of slash fiction, in which female authors accommodate their own pleasure through the construction of idealized emotional and sexual relationships between the male duos of television narratives, boys’ love becomes a vehicle for the expression of identification and desire in the contexts of both media production and reception.34 If the American bromance attempts to provide a space for heterosexual male characters to experience forms of intimacy that are already accessible to their female friends and lovers—an intimacy that often brings its protagonists close to

24

Introduction

“forbidden” territories of intermale interaction—the narrative tensions of boys’ love manga rely upon similar formulations of an intimacy that struggles to survive and be expressed against all odds. A final matter that many of the chapters open up for debate and further exploration is the question of whether or not bromance can be considered as “queer.” Whether or not the phenomenon’s targeted audience is primarily heterosexual, bromance certainly opens up a space for queer readings of heterosexual characters and their homosocial relationships, especially if queer readings are defined as what queer scholar Alexander Doty has identified as nonheteronormative readings that may be adopted by viewers of any sexual orientation.35 Bromance qualifies as queer in that it renders heteronormativity strange, placing the familiar in an unfamiliar light so that it is no longer comfortably situated as the “given” or default mode of cultural perception. While self-identified homosexual audiences may be more attuned to such renderings, bromance continues to serve as a more broadly accessible popular cultural means of interrogating both the discomforts of compulsory heteronormativity and the pleasures of boundary crossings. Notes 1. Kira M. Newman, “Let the Bromance Begin: App for ‘Bros’ Launching Today,” Tech Cocktail (24 August 2011), accessed 25 May 2012, http://techcocktail. com/bromance-app-launching-today-2011-08#.T85vhnZwdFQ. 2. See, for example, Kevin Arnold, “On Masculinity: A Brief History of the Bromance,” Guyism (1 June 2011), accessed 22 May 2012, http://guyism.com/lifestyle/ on-masculinity-a-brief-history-of-the-bromance.html. 3. Stephen M. Silverman, “Lance Armstrong & Matthew McConaughey: We’re Not Gay,” People (October 18, 2006), accessed 12 May 2012, www.people.com/ people/article/0,,1547724,00.html. 4. Ann Olderberg, “Comedy or drama, show plays it straight,” USA Today, 26 October 2006, Life section, p. 1-D. 5. As of June 5, 2012, votes for the top five crush-worthy candidates on mancrush.com were as follows: (1) Jesus Christ, (2) Ernest Hemingway, (3) Henry David Thoreau, (4) Bill Murray, and (5) Richard P. Feynman. 6. Emily Green, “A History of Celebrity Bromance at Lakers Games,” Guest of a Guest, 3 May 2011, accessed 14 May 2012, http://guestofaguest.com/los-angeles/ celebrities/a-history-of-celebrity-bromance-at-lakers-games.

Introduction

25

7. Ryan Higa (nigahiga), “Bromance,” released March 21, 2012, accessed January 4, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJVt8kUAm9Q. 8. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), 337. 9. Ibid., 338. 10. Ibid., 348. 11. Ibid., 339. 12. Ibid., 368. 13. Ibid. 14. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin, 1971), 59–60. 15. Fiedler, 348. 16. Richard Meyer presents an engaging analysis of studio attempts to manage and control the reception of Rock Hudson. His analysis also illuminates the historical specificity of reception practices. See “Rock Hudson’s Body,” in Inside Out: Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 259–90. 17. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 204. 18. Ibid., 204. 19. Ibid., 203–4. 20. See, for example, Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 362. 21. See, for example, “The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood,” Time (October 31, 1969): 56, 61–67. 22. Wood, 211–13. 23. It should be noted that not all of these films represented gay or lesbian sexualities in a positive light. In Windows (Gordon Willis, 1980), Elizabeth Ashley portrays a psychotic lesbian stalker; the representation of gay cops in Partners is highly homophobic; and the controversy surrounding the release of William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) prompted a backlash by the gay community. 24. An especially relevant means of targeting audiences across the lines of sexual orientation in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the phenomenon of “window advertising,” described by Karen Stabiner as “addressing the homosexual consumer in a way that the straight consumer will not notice” (82). See “Tapping the Homosexual Market,” The New York Times, May 2, 1982, Section 6, 34+. 25. Mark Simpson, “The Straight Men of Comedy,” Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics, and Social Difference, ed. Stephen Wagg (New York: Routledge, 1998), 138. 26. Ibid., 137. 27. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 219. 28. Ibid., 210.

26

Introduction

29. For a treatment of the integral role of experience and viewer interaction with the genre text, see Barry Keith Grant, “Experience and Meaning in Genre Films,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 133–47. 30. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1–2. 31. Ibid, 1. 32. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles,” in Between Men, 21–27. 33. Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliasotti, eds., Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre (London: McFarland, 2008), xiii–xiv. 34. Henry Jenkins, “ ‘Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk’: Slash and the FanWriting Community,” in Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 185–222. 35. See Alexander Doty, “Introduction: What Makes Queerness Most?” in Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

I Anticipating the Bromantic Turn

chapter 1

Second Bananas and Gay Chicken: Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now Jenna Weinman

After a frenzied marital dispute over accusations of infidelity, George finds himself soaking wet, pajama-clad, and locked out of his home. Still clutching the bottle of champagne that had been intended for a romantic evening with his wife, George offers it to his next-door neighbor and friend, Arnold, in exchange for a place to crash. Conveniently, Arnold’s wife and kids are out of town, leaving the sizable suburban home to the two temporary bachelor-husbands. While Arnold is delighted by the unexpected visit, the soggy and besmirched George darts up the stairs, heads straight into the master bedroom, and plops himself down at the foot of the rumpled bed. As George begrudgingly explains his domestic dispute, Arnold offers his only clean nightshirt and the two men begin to disrobe. In the foreground, George casts off his wet shirt, exposing his muscular torso as he squeezes himself into Arnold’s tiny garment, which is at least two sizes too small. In the background, the comparatively puny Arnold removes his outer robe, wedges the champagne bottle between his legs, and excitedly pops the cork as George approaches him, the borrowed shirt still halfway up his back. George first suggests that he sleep in the kids’ bedroom, but because it is being repainted, Arnold insists they have no choice but to share the master bedroom. Without pausing to consider the alternatives such a spacious home could afford, George agrees. In between heavy swigs of champagne, Arnold assists George in pulling the shirt down over his bulk and offers his wife’s side of the bed. As they nestle into their respective sides, more swigs of

30

Jenna Weinman

Send Me No Flowers (1964), directed by Norman Jewison, Universal Pictures.

champagne and quips about their wives temper their bickering about one another’s cold feet and jagged toenails. The next morning, however, the men appear soundly asleep. An empty champagne bottle and midnight snack remnants litter the nightstand; George’s ample body is haphazardly sprawled across the mattress; and though Arnold is left pillowless, blanketless, and contorted into a fetal position, he nonetheless appears rather content curled up beside his dear friend. In a twenty-first-century context, the above description likely reads as an extraction from any number of contemporary comedies directed or produced by Judd Apatow, which contain no shortage of insobriety, domestic disputes, and, most of all, man-love. However, this delightful sleepover scene between two married men belongs to the 1964 comedy Send Me No Flowers—the final installment in a trilogy of dizzying sex comedies starring Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, and Doris Day. As a phenomenon now enthusiastically and pervasively labeled “bromance,” the comedic treatment of queer antics between purportedly straight men is often conceptualized as unique to twenty-first-century romantic comedy, and, increasingly, popular culture more generally. However, queer-straight male pairings between a fetching male lead and a neurotic sidekick, also known as a “second banana” (e.g., Hudson and Randall, respectively), were

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

31

a prevalent, albeit nameless, narrative fixture in the Hollywood sex comedy, a fairly short-lived cycle of the romantic comedy that thrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although Send Me No Flowers represents a particular, suburban variation within the mid-century sex comedy cycle, many sex comedies worked to fashion sex and marriage from the vexing struggles between dapper, free-loving playboys and prudish career women who were afforded little currency in the period’s sexual economy besides their virtue—or a carefully guarded semblance thereof. The couple’s long-awaited sexual union, then, was made possible by the bachelor’s last-minute resignation to marriage, breadwinning, and, sometimes, imminent fatherhood. Although a half century or so has passed since the sex comedy’s heyday, many of its instabilities, excesses, and complaints curiously anticipate the dominant mode of the romantic comedy in the twenty-first century: the millennial “brom-com.” The two cycles’ shared conventions most expressively coalesce around the narrative privileging of the immature male, his homosocial bonds, and his strained trajectory into proper adulthood—the markers of which have ostensibly remained the same despite decades of irrevocable change, though their exact sequence has become less important. As a romantic/raunch comedy hybrid, the brom-com slathers the outrageous perversities of the teen or male-buddy comedy onto a more tame and familiar romantic comedy plot structure. No longer the debonair playboy, the hero is now more of a schlubby, infantile slacker reveling in his arrested development; and though the heroine’s ambition, beauty, and self-reliance remain intact, she is no longer bound to the rigid sexual mores of her mid-century predecessors. While both the sex comedy and brom-com initially celebrate the debaucherous and peculiarly queer thrills of the bachelor life, as well as dabble with the possibility that women might also enjoy similar pleasures and freedoms, these lifestyles are eventually reframed as dysfunctional, or at least deeply unsatisfactory. Given that the romantic comedy genre is very much bound to the social mores and intimate culture of its historical moment, why would these similar rom-com cycles emerge in such dissimilar and distanced contexts? This chapter compares the structuring parallels and differences within a selection of films from these two cycles—primarily Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964),

32

Jenna Weinman

along with That Touch of Mink (1962) and the landmark brom-coms The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Knocked Up (2007), and I Love You, Man (2009)—as situated in relation to their respective historical contexts. This comparative engagement first demonstrates that while the specific figurations of the immature male, the heterosexual couple, and the broader social landscape may change, the cycles’ overlapping thrills, anxieties, and limitations present a similar set of intimate expectations that consistently privileges white, middle-class heteronormativity as both the norm and ideal. Such a comparison, however, also suggests that the romantic comedy genre, and, more specifically, its powerful fixture of the heterosexual couple, is losing its formidable ability to assuage the contradictions that have long underpinned our intimate culture, such as that between romantic love as an intense, fleeting emotion and its status as the cornerstone of lifelong marriage.1 Significantly, the brom-com has grown lax in its efforts to remedy the immature male through heterosexual romance and patriarchal responsibility. This recent slip in generic convention is especially evident in the brom-com’s celebratory, albeit still palpably nervous, indulgence in the queer-straight conviviality of bromance; these curiously mainstream yet thrillingly excessive relationships come across as more sincere and pleasurable than the heterosexual options and the state of maturity those heterosexual options necessarily impose. Bromancing a Genre Though the romantic comedy is often considered and consumed as frothy, frivolous entertainment because of its stubbornly close associations with straight female audiences, its easy emotional rewards, and its relentless predictability, the genre has, in fact, always performed important work in its quest for cultural relevance. Indeed, the remarkable consistency of the rom-com’s “couple meets, breaks up, makes up” formula is, in large part, attributed to our culture’s unchanging myth of romantic, monogamous love as a panacea for all personal, and even social, problems. However, the rom-com’s tenacity is also very much dependent on its ability to engage our culture’s fluctuating attitudes toward gender roles, sexuality, the family, and the larger discursive webs in which these ideologies emerge and

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

33

function.2 For instance, in writing about women’s sentimental culture, Lauren Berlant conceptualizes the romantic comedy as a “complaint genre,” in that its narratives routinely marshal the heterosexual love plot to blame individual personalities and flawed ideologies for women’s emotional suffering, all while maintaining “fidelity to the world of distinction and desire that produced such disappointment in the first place.”3 Berlant thus contends that the love plot remains a site of “disappointment, but not disenchantment” for women, who must at least entertain believing in the transformative myth of romantic love, and, more importantly, heterosexual coupledom, if they hope to achieve a deep and meaningful sense of “okayness.”4 It is indeed surprising, then, that such a powerful vehicle for heteronormative narratives with strong ties to women’s culture could provide a most productive outlet for “bromantic” activity, as male intimacy and homosocial bonding are, for instance, more immediately and comfortably familiar to the locker-room and battlefield dynamics associated with sports and military culture. The sex comedy and brom-com cycles, however, not only seem to extend the rom-com’s taxing ambivalence to male characters and audiences but also appear to complicate Berlant’s notion of the heterosexual couple as the primary means through which audiences “wish for an unconflicted world.”5 One of the most striking similarities between these two cycles is that they are less interested in the sentimental and mutually transformative capacities of heterosexual romance and coupledom most fondly associated with the genre and more concerned with enforcing acquiescence to socially constructed, gendered standards of maturity.6 The heterosexual couple thus becomes reframed as a primary means of recognizing, more so than absorbing or resolving, conflict and disappointment. This strength in recognition and expression actually stems from the romantic comedy’s melodramatic underpinning. Like film melodrama—a contentious term that is most comprehensively defined by Linda Williams as a “leaping mode” of American popular culture, one that informs multiple film genres7—the romantic comedy struggles to articulate intimate desires, expectations, and disappointments, siphoning off that which cannot be explicitly presented, satisfactorily resolved, or fully understood into narrative and stylistic excess. Though romantic comedy shares many of the

34

Jenna Weinman

same traits that have made film melodrama a darling subject of critical inquiry, namely its privileging of intimate and everyday life, its strong emotional registers, and gender troubling, the rom-com exhibits significant points of departure from its melodramatic base that have opened up spaces for bromance’s escapist and erotic thrills. For instance, Williams and others have noted that in its grand quest to force a visceral moral legibility through tears, melodrama has historically operated through moral polarization,8 or by the logic of the “excluded middle.”9 Romantic comedy, however, thrives on ambiguity and “middle-ness,” which muddies not only its distinctions of villainy and virtue but also provides opportunities to revel in transgression within the flexible safety net of the joke and, even more crucially, within the guarantee of the heterosexual couple’s eventual and decidedly happy union. Judith Roof’s examination of secondary female characters in Hollywood cinema is especially useful in this regard as she figures the narrative middle (and its sidekick denizens) as an inherently queer space and sensibility that offers “perverse alternatives of non-marriage, independence, and business success,” which frequently haunt the compulsory heteronormative resolutions.10 The flourishing middle-ness of the romantic comedy thus offers an avenue to explore the complexity of meaning and pleasures that these two romantic comedy cycles, and their bromantic indulgences more specifically, afforded within such different historical, cultural, and institutional contexts.

The Sex Comedy: Bedtime Stor ies for Adults Before marriage, a man is like a tree in the forest, he stands there, independent, an entity unto himself. Then he’s cut down, his branches are cut off, he’s stripped of his bark and thrown into the river with the rest of the logs. Then this tree is taken to the mill. And when it comes out, it’s no longer a tree. It’s the vanity table, the breakfast nook, the baby crib and the newspaper that lines the family garbage can. Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk (1959)

As cultural objects, popular texts emerge and function within a web of historically specific processes and thus engage a multiplicity

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

35

of meanings and (dis)pleasures. The sex comedy cycle peaked, in terms of both its prolificacy and popularity, toward the latter end of the “fifties”—a period in U.S. history (spanning from approximately 1947 to 1965) characterized by myriad and considerably rapid transformations following the end of World War II. Crucial among these transformations was the era’s pervasive construction of the suburban-dwelling, white, male breadwinner family as a market, government, and culturally sanctioned ideal. This idealized family unit, perhaps most popularly epitomized through 1950s television sitcoms such as Father Knows Best, has been repeatedly exposed as a fantasy powerfully disconnected from most people’s experience at the time, yet this consensus ideology presented a much needed sense of security for people who had endured the travails of the Great Depression and World War II.11 The fifties marked a truly exceptional period in U.S. history when more families than ever before, especially those headed by white, male G.I. Bill recipients, could achieve at least some sense of this ideal. The historical phenomena that solidified this overwhelming consensus around the idea that every person should marry and raise a brood of children at a young age—and thus subscribe to the breadwinner ethic, the rigidly structured gender and sexual norms in which it was rooted, as well as the consumerism it made possible—were manifold and formidable but also deeply conflicting for Americans.12 While the postwar era is most immediately associated with the overlapping “golden ages” of marriage and capitalism in the United States,13 it is worth stressing that this long decade was also teeming with sex (and not just the baby-booming kind) and complaints, especially against the kind of domesticity postwar breadwinning was expected to sustain. Although the steadily waning Production Code Administration continued to prevent Hollywood productions from featuring frank discussions or portrayals of sex, the sex comedy cycle consistently grappled with the era’s dominant ideological codes and modes of resistance through playful excesses, bizarre love triangles, piercing rants, and notable adult stars, who were often well beyond the era’s average marrying age. As the anti-breadwinning, castration-fearing diatribe from Pillow Talk in the above epigraph suggests, the contemporary anxieties, contradictions, and thrills that these films engaged were most salient and contested at the site of

36

Jenna Weinman

white heterosexual masculinity. In his comprehensive analysis of performances of masculinity in mid-century American film, Steven Cohan points to a number of prominent factors that contributed to the era’s masculinity crisis. In tandem with the broadly felt pressures of Cold War and corporate culture, more specific events such as the publication of the Kinsey Reports on male and female sexual behavior in 1948 and 1953, respectively, challenged the long-standing assumption that monogamous heterosexuality was necessarily “normal” sexuality. Also, the debut of Playboy magazine in 1953 gave rise, as well as a sense of legitimacy, to an alternative adult lifestyle and mode of heterosexual masculinity that rejected not only the drudgery of breadwinning but also granted straight men access into ostensibly feminine and/or queer realms of domestic spaces and the indulgent consumption of art, design, cuisine, and fashion.14 Although all unmarried adults were treated with glaring, if not severe, suspicion during this period, the playboy’s single status signaled “a fundamental ‘immaturity,’ ‘irresponsibility,’ ‘insecurity,’ and ‘latent homosexuality’ ”15—a particular set of threats that did not necessarily apply to the “old-maid,” which, at the time, could have meant a woman as young as twenty-one years old.16 As a symptomatic figure of the historical moment, the era’s tensions around white straight masculinity were most effectively and problematically collapsed onto the playboy, who at once demanded “correction and expression.”17 The sex comedy cycle pivoted around the impossibility of this task. While a strain of sex comedies, such as The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Boys’ Night Out (1962), explored the stubborn bachelor urges that lingered beyond marriage, domestication, and child rearing, the cycle’s most prominent films took place in relation to the trials and punctuated delights of heterosexual courtship. As Tamar Jeffers McDonald observes, the sex comedy is structured by a historically grounded and seemingly irresolvable clash between the sexes. While the promise of the couple’s erotic fulfillment propels the narrative action, the “timing and legitimacy” of this goal differs between the male and female characters, as women ostensibly desire sex after marriage (or at least within a committed, marriage-bound relationship), and men typically seek casual sexual encounters without, or even outside of, marriage.18 This overarching dynamic reflected postwar courtship practices, which were hinged on a sexist,

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

37

market-driven logic that encouraged men and women to treat themselves and one another as merchandise.19 In this market, women were allotted little to work with besides a very precarious degree of sexual permissiveness, for as Rock Hudson explains to a young Sandra Dee in Come September (1961), “when you go shopping in a market, you don’t buy anything that’s been handled too much.” Also through the lens of this logic, the bachelor was viewed as a commodity of less importance than the material goods and social capital he would make possible through breadwinning,20 or as Debbie Reynolds less than gently reminds Glenn Ford in It Started with a Kiss (1959), “a woman looks for a nice set of things to marry.” Indeed, the market-driven logic of postwar courtship conventions certainly informed, yet did not always seamlessly translate into, the sex comedy’s narrative action. Inconsistencies occurred in part because the lead characters were usually well beyond the juvenile stages of dating and also because the heroines were rarely put in a position of being desperately in need of a man; they proved remarkably self-sufficient across a wide range of working, living, and social situations. The sex comedy’s primary and supporting female characters were in fact considerably more complex and varied than the cycle’s portrayal of the playboy, who was consistently handsome, urbane, almost always artistic but always financially successful, and, of course, complacent with the parade of beautiful, sexually available women coming and going from his sleek and well-equipped bachelor pad. Despite the playboy’s curiously intimate knowledge of women and their desires, his usual seduction tactics fail to impress the heroine, but this is certainly not for lack of her desire. Although the sex comedy cycle grappled with the disconcerting catch-22s inherent in contemporary sexual conventions, the films tended to unravel around the problem of female sexuality. They served up an assortment of confused representations that routinely called attention to the risks associated with pre-pill and pre-marital sex, all while bemoaning the heroine’s varying degrees of restraint and mocking whatever attempts she did make to act on her desires. Doris Day, one of the era’s most popular performers and the sex comedy’s queen, provides an ideal case study for exploring the varying roles and dispositions of the sex comedy heroine, for the presumed air of wholesomeness around Day’s star persona

38

Jenna Weinman

enabled many of her comedies to push the boundaries of acceptable taste (as they were defined by other popular media and the weakened Production Code). Not only do Day’s characters range from an unemployed forty-year-old virgin in Touch of Mink to an exceptionally successful and happily single interior designer in Pillow Talk to a Manhattan advertising executive in Lover Come Back but they also refuse assimilation to the hackneyed labels of virgin, whore, gold digger, and spinster. Even when playing an unsophisticated, middle-aged virgin in Touch of Mink, Day’s characters were not prudish but rather discriminating,21 as her sex comedy universe was always teeming with overbearing neurotics, sexist executives, grabby teenagers, and scheming wolves. When traces of her desires did emerge, they were contained and defused in a number of ways. For instance, her sexuality was often displaced onto elements of the films’ luscious mise-en-scène, such as the mink-lined coat that wears down her inhibitions in Touch of Mink or the racially charged fertility goddess statue she prominently displays when redesigning Rock Hudson’s bachelor pad in Pillow Talk. Moreover, her attempts to act on her desires are thwarted in the knick of time: she breaks out in hives (Touch of Mink), falls under the humiliating influence of alcohol (Touch of Mink; Lover Come Back), or comes to the shocking realization that the gentle and suspiciously effeminate man she desires is actually the deceitful playboy she loathes in disguise (Pillow Talk; Lover Come Back). Regardless of the erotic impulses or opportunities that inevitably come into play, the heterosexual couple’s sexual union is never consummated prior to the bachelor’s surrender to marriage, and this male epiphany is almost always delivered through a patriarchal structure of rescue: Day is either hauled off to the marriage bed, or in Lover Come Back, carted off to the maternity ward as she renews her marriage vows. The playboy was thus more likely to find himself ensnared in the breadwinning trap not through force or coercive manipulation at the hands of the heroine but through his own recognition of guilt, shame, and the profound meaninglessness of his alternative lifestyle. Indeed, as Tony Randall’s thrice-divorced character says in response to Hudson’s nature-themed anti-marriage rant in Pillow Talk: “[with the right woman] you look forward to having your branches chopped off.” These popular films suggest, then, that the sex comedy’s most

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

39

pressing dilemma was not exactly “will she or won’t she?” surrender to the playboy’s predatory sexual advances but rather a far less titillating question of “will he or won’t he?” submit to the package of monogamy and domestic entrapment the heroine had unfairly come to depend on or, in the case of Day’s characters, symbolically enforce. This exaggerated fixation on the bachelor’s dilemma echoed prominently across publicity materials and popular press reviews at the time. For instance, one poster for Lover Come Back features two images of Day yanking at a distressed and impassive Hudson as the text promises “a riotous new twist in the gentle art of persuasion.” What is likely unbeknown to potential viewers, however, is that these featured images are not of Hudson playing a devastatingly beddable bachelor but of his masquerade as an eccentric, impotent misfit with which he hopes to seduce and humiliate Day, his most formidable competitor in the advertising industry. The sex comedy cycle may have privileged the playboy’s knowledge, scheming, and the heady happenings of his domestic space; the heroine may have fallen prey to his insults and masquerades; and unabashedly brazen heroines—such as Julie (Debbie Reynolds), a frighteningly determined virgin who bullies the bachelorhood out of Charlie (Frank Sinatra) in The Tender Trap (1955)—may have been rare within the cycle. The general manner in which these films were promoted and received, however, inferred a besieged bachelor at the hands of aggressive, cunning and—in the most rancorous scripting, publicity, and criticism—sadistically prudish women out to bait “the marriage trap.” This misguided resentment toward women that underpinned the sex comedy’s diegesis pulsed throughout 1950s culture and when taken to its most extreme, provoked the irrational, though not uncommon, fear that men were increasingly scared into homosexuality because they were unwilling and unable to meet the demands placed on them by aggressive women.22 In its consistent privileging of a particular, male-dominated trio of characters, the sex comedy gestured toward an additional albeit understated quandary for the heroine: on the one hand she threatened to scare the playboy into homosexuality, and on the other hand, she threatened to disrupt his homosocial, and always potentially homoerotic, bonds. While the social and political panic that developed around homosexuality during the Cold War and the severity of the efforts

40

Jenna Weinman

to diagnose and purge this perceived threat cannot be understated, male homosexuality lurched between the marginal and the mainstream in the fifties. The sex comedy’s narrative middle, as most enthusiastically and conspicuously represented by the male second banana, openly toyed with this vacillation. A nearly identical construction of a neurotic third term circulated within the sex comedy cycle, blocking and facilitating the heterosexual union, deflecting and accentuating the playboy’s never-so-latent homosexuality, and playfully resisting the era’s conventional categories of masculinity. Since, as Barbara Ehrenreich has adroitly argued, the playboy’s lifestyle and compulsive heterosexuality were never about eroticism or sexual prowess but ultimately about escape from breadwinning and the emasculation it implied,23 the second banana presented an alluring albeit precarious alternative—one free from the dreadful risks and pressures that inevitably came from dealing with women but not from the looming suspicions over the playboy’s homosexuality. The steadily amplified queerness between Hudson and Randall in their three films together had a great deal to do with the puzzling status of Hudson’s closeted homosexuality as an open Hollywood secret and the careful construction of his star persona, which, as Cohan, Richard Meyer, and others have brilliantly argued, presented him as a refreshingly “normal,” healthy, and nonthreatening model of masculinity.24 In tandem with Day’s wholesomeness, Hudson’s ostensibly natural, impeccable masculinity (and to a slightly different extent in Touch of Mink, Cary Grant’s time-honored epitomization of the Hollywood gentleman) allowed for a mélange of queer play, which often took place at the level of the playboy’s body—a favorite reservoir of sorts for the sex comedy’s excesses. Significantly, for instance, the playboy’s exceptionally robust masculinity is usually revealed in the presence of the admittedly physically and sexually inferior second banana who observes and/or assists the playboy in his varying states of undress, as in the tender scene from Send Me No Flowers described at the opening of this chapter. The homoerotic undertones of these recurring locker-room type scenes are tempered by the second banana’s neurotic whining about his embarrassing failures with women and failure to be properly masculine more generally, for despite his ardent support of the breadwinner ethic, he struggles to meet these expectations.

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

41

However, as much as the sex comedy exploited the playboy’s handsome, and at times half-naked physique, it was more interested in making these mythical bodies strange, or rather, feminized: in Touch of Mink, Grant’s untouchably beautiful face breaks out in a hideous rash at the thought of consummating his marriage to Day; in Lover Come Back, Hudson parades around in nothing more than a woman’s mink coat; and in Send Me No Flowers, his body eerily connotes fears of a nameless, terminal illness and death. This feminization of the playboy, however, is taken to perverse extremes in Pillow Talk and Touch of Mink, which both conclude with a male pregnancy gag: in Pillow Talk, an obstetrician and his nurse are convinced that Hudson is a pregnant man; in Touch of Mink, Gig Young’s psychiatrist believes that Young and Cary Grant are not only having a steamy homosexual affair but that their trysts have produced a child. In inevitably slipping into excessive silliness, the sex comedy’s queer male pairings, and homosexuality itself, served as fodder for what was at the time considered a more cosmopolitan type of dirty joke. Though these queer male pairings were never intended as a viable alternative to the status quo, they did not allow it to materialize comfortably.25 Whatever pleasures and erotic thrills the heterosexual couple’s antagonisms and eventual sexual union had presented were not only soured by the aftertaste of duty and compromise but were, to varying extents, haunted by the rousing perversities of the narrative middle—where one’s branches were more likely to remain attached. The Brom-com: Stor ies about how Grownups are Born Marriage is like that show Everybody Loves Raymond, but it's not funny. All the problems are the same, but instead of all the funny, pithy dialogue, everybody's just really pissed off and tense. Marriage is like an unfunny, tense version of Everybody Loves Raymond. But it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever. Paul Rudd in Knocked Up (2007)

Considering that the sex comedy could only offer the reformed playboy as a flimsy compromise to the raging contradictions that plagued the era’s intimate culture,26 the cycle steadily fizzled out by

42

Jenna Weinman

the mid-1960s, along with the Production Code, whose oversight had in part necessitated the cycle’s conventions and zany sensibilities. Although it could hardly be considered an accurate reflection of life and love in the fifties, the sex comedy cycle was unable to weather the forces of change that gripped society after 1965, including the mainstreaming of the birth control pill, the erosion of the postwar breadwinner ethic, and the emerging pull of feminist, gay, anti-war, and civil rights activism. And yet, despite the multiple clusters of change that have marked the public and private lives of Americans since the long decade of the 1950s, the millennial brom-com reprocesses many of the sex comedy’s intimate expectations and discontents therewith through a wearisome, reconfigured struggle between male regression and female resolve. This surprising echoing can be explained in part by the ideological tenacity of the postwar breadwinner ethic. While the family wage suffered a widespread collapse in the 1970s and has grown increasingly unattainable in the bleak economic climate of the twenty-first century, the postwar breadwinner ethic nonetheless continues to influence dominant conceptualizations of male maturity, as well as institutional policy.27 Moreover, the unfair association of women with this mode of domestic entrapment has proven regrettably persistent, despite drastic shifts in the makeup of American households. For instance, in writing about the beginning of the twenty-first century, family historian Stephanie Coontz has noted that there were more single-person households than those with a married couple and children for the first time in history; of these married households, male breadwinner families only predominated at the bottom and the very top of the income distribution bracket.28 In addition to these important shifts in the family and the family wage, white straight masculinity found itself at the nexus of phenomena that powerfully marked the first decade of the millennium, including a catastrophic terrorist attack, two subsequent and ongoing wars, a zealous re-energizing of the religious right, a resurgence of debates regarding same-sex marriage and the repeal of the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, unprecedented levels of corporate power and global outsourcing, and an increasingly bifurcated economy that gave way to the financial collapse of 2007.

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

43

Unsurprisingly, these phenomena were accompanied by an onslaught of statistics and popular literature insinuating that men were underperforming in education and the workforce, as well as falling short of—or simply rejecting—their traditional responsibilities as fathers, partners, and citizens.29 While the propensity to frame male immaturity as pathological and hazardous, especially to future generations,30 is nothing new, its figurations and the anxieties they engage are historically specific. The mid-century playboy, for instance, may have been considered immature because he rejected the breadwinner role, but he was still more or less self-sustaining, aimed for upward social mobility, and strived for social relevance. The most salient model of male immaturity in the first decade of the millennium, which historian Gary Cross has dubbed the modern “boy-man,” is routinely figured as a puerile, basement-dwelling underachiever who strives for perpetual adolescence over social relevance.31 Similar to the sex comedy’s relationship to the playboy, the brom-com has preoccupied itself with a lovable version of the modern boy-man, his male pack, the perpetual middle-ness of their “treadmill” lifestyles,32 and the anxieties and thrills they engage—all while leaving the sense of privilege (read: whiteness) that preconditions such manifestations of retreatism and sustained immaturity conspicuously unexamined. As Cross argues, the boy-man’s desire to prolong the middle-ness of adolescence speaks to a much broader cultural sensibility fixated on short-sighted thrills and puerile pleasures.33 It is, for instance, worth noting that the brom-com cycle emerged in relation to the contemporary mainstreaming of raunch culture, for in addition to its sex comedy lineage, this cycle is very much the heir of what William Paul describes as “animal comedy”: popular male-centered comedies from the late 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Animal House, Porky’s) that prioritized male homosocial bonding over heterosexual relationships and upward social mobility. The driving force in animal comedy is quite simply sex—sex that is never romanticized but conflated with a drive for power, which gives these films a much higher degree of aggression than even the most sexually explicit of romantic comedies.34 Though it may draw its sense of misogynistic and homophobic humor, as well as its gross-out excesses, from the animal comedy tradition, the

44

Jenna Weinman

brom-com cycle retains strong ties to the rom-com because the narratives are at least superficially propelled by the redemptive promises of the heteronormative paradigm—indeed, despite their raunch content, proponents of the religious right, including former senator Rick Santorum, have praised brom-coms such as Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin for their family values.35 Moreover, the bromcom posits a more gentle and endearingly self-deprecating type of masculinity than its animal comedy predecessors. In fact, the bromcom heroes are portrayed as insufficiently aggressive—their threat and appeal instead lies in their very boyish insouciance. In keeping pace with the shifting figuration of the immature male, the glossy “bedtime stories for adults” of the 1950s have regressed into something more like—as the theatrical trailer for the quintessential brom-com Knocked Up put it—“stories about how grown-ups are born.” Though the brom-coms are variable in the kinds of quirky situations and characters they present, Knocked Up pithily elucidates that the fundamental structure of gender difference the cycle must overcome is not between playboys (or frat boys) and virgins but between funny guys who “don’t give a shit” and the serious women who “care” and desperately want, albeit hardly need, men to “care more.” As David Greven notes in his analysis of the closely related contemporary teen comedy genre, these heroines are “symbolically powerful and narratively powerless”; positioned as “remote goddesses,” they smugly preside over the reluctant proceedings of masculine redemption.36 The brom-com’s tendency to hollow out and water down the primary heroine evinces what Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra have called the “post-feminist double-address”: popular culture’s token acknowledgment of wellassimilated markers of feminism and its simultaneous repudiation of an active, progressive feminist agenda.37 Indeed, the post-feminist sensibility overwhelming the brom-com—and twenty-first century popular culture writ large—is at times uncomfortably reminiscent of the proto-feminism that informed the sex comedy. However, in serving up men that are actually more akin to slobbish children, the heroine is obliged to perform as more of a parent than a partner; sex becomes more of a laborious problem than a flirtatious promise; and as the above epigraph from Knocked Up suggests, the “trap” feels more tense than tender.

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

45

For instance, The 40-Year-Old Virgin takes male infantilism to absurd extremes with Andy (Steve Carell) who, unlike Day’s fortyyear-old virgin from Touch of Mink, is practically sexually latent. His bachelor pad resembles a child’s playroom, replete with action figures and video games, which he enjoys in sexless solitude. The film guards Andy’s virginity as obsessively as Day’s, thwarting his every opportunity to get laid, needlessly insisting that he save himself for marriage. These ridiculous protection efforts, however, are not set on preserving Andy’s sexual innocence per se but rather the blissful state of arrested development—the middle-ness—in which it allows him to dwell. Until, that is, an attractive grandma (Catherine Keener) with a convenient penchant for taking on men as projects and a curiously saintlike sexual restraint guides Andy through his arduous trajectory from man-child to breadwinner and stepfather. After depriving Andy of sexual desire and prowess and repeatedly subjecting him to nauseating forms of humiliation, the film also manages to deflate the thrill of his long-awaited deflowering, for the consummation of his marriage is quickly eclipsed by a bizarre closing sequence that features Andy and the reformed members of his dysfunctional male pack performing an exuberant rendition of “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.” This splattering of the narrative middle’s bromantic excess onto a closing credit sequence—a trend currently taken to its most bawdy, phallic extremes in Superbad (2007) and The Hangover (2009)—allows the brom-com to disavow the tacked-on heteronormative endings from a safe position beyond the diegesis. In contrast, Knocked Up’s closing montage—a sappy collection of baby snapshots and footage from the cast and crew—offers no disavowal. Instead, it marshals an excessive celebration of heteronormativity as a last-ditch attempt to assuage its dismaying textual labor: forcing a painfully incompatible couple into marriage and parenthood for the imagined sake of their unborn child (or, put another way: the sex comedy’s worst nightmare). Ben (Seth Rogen), a schlubby, happily unemployed stoner, is figured as more of an adolescent than infantile hero, yet throughout the film he is closely aligned with a fetus. Knocked Up’s association of the hero with pregnancy, however, takes on a strikingly more somber tone than the sex comedy’s male pregnancy gags. After Ben knocks up Alison

46

Jenna Weinman

(Katherine Heigl), an up-and-coming TV personality way out of his league, she is quite literally reduced to a vessel for his redemption; she becomes a screen for the immensely powerful image of the fetus, whose development marks the terms of Ben’s maturation.38 In subtly recalling Lover Come Back, the couple reconciles just in time for a grotesque baby-crowning shot. Despite the raging arguments, regrets, and disappointments that led up to this point, Ben cradles his newborn child in his arms and declares that not putting a condom on was the best thing that ever happened to him. This attitude marks a sharp reversal from an earlier scene, when Ben and Alison’s brother-in-law, Pete (Paul Rudd), wish they could travel back in time, “maybe put a condom on,” and pursue completely different lives. In response, Alison’s refreshingly sharp-tongued and witty sister, Debbie (Leslie Mann), suggests that the two reluctant fathers “go back in their time-machine and fuck each other.” (They don’t, of course.) But for all its raunchiness, sex is curiously absent from Knocked Up, save for a punishable, sloppy one night stand, followed by a disastrous attempt at pregnancy sex. Moreover, when Ben and Pete receive lap dances in Las Vegas, they mostly stare at each other during the performance, and when Debbie expects to find Pete cheating on her with another woman, she instead discovers him in a room full of men playing fantasy baseball—a revelation she finds even more shocking and hurtful than her original suspicion. While Knocked Up does make the desire to escape available to both sexes, it does not make the modes of escape equally available. For example, as the guys enjoy lap dances and hallucinogenic drugs in Vegas, Debbie and Alison are refused entry into a nightclub on the basis of being pregnant and “old as fuck.” Just as the sisters are given no chance of escape, Alison is given no choice when it comes to her unwanted pregnancy—for despite their filthy mouths, the characters refuse to even utter the word “abortion” (the closest they come is “schma-schmortion”), let alone consider it as Alison’s reproductive right. And although the sex comedy and brom-com may cautiously entertain (but never narratively privilege) the possibility of close, even desiring, female partnerships, their narratives eventually dismiss or condemn these partnerships as an inconvenient source of panic. Indeed, in addition to finding a job and an apartment, smoking less weed and reading more parenting books, Ben’s

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

47

final and most important task in his transition to mature adulthood is to rudely expel Debbie from Alison’s delivery room, thus successfully thwarting the underlying threat of the two sisters raising the child together. In the afterbirth of Knocked Up, women continue to find themselves shoved to the wayside, reduced to empty shells, or forced into excessively maternal roles while bromance flourishes. For instance, more recent brom-coms such as Superbad (2007), Pineapple Express (2008), Step Brothers (2008), The Hangover (2009), and Funny People (2010) are notably less prescriptive in regards to male immaturity and far more caught up in the promise of bromance. As Ron Becker has suggested, this recent media proliferation of queer-straight masculinity has to do with the “straight panic” that emerged during a multicultural shift in the 1990s, when the routine scrutinization of sexual categories forced heterosexual culture to acknowledge its existence and privilege.39 This shift has contributed to an increasingly widespread post-closet logic: “the naïve belief that gay men can be out becomes the reassuring assumption that they are out.”40 Indeed, unlike the sex comedy’s male stars, whose public personas worked to at least superficially deflect suspicions of homosexuality, a number of prominent brom-com actors, especially Paul Rudd and Jonah Hill, readily exploit their prowess at the juvenile game of “gay chicken”—a contest of sorts in which straight men/boys engage in various degrees of homosexual activity until one of them expresses discomfort41—across a number of media platforms. While straight guys may feel more liberated to “play gay” and perhaps live out a desire to recapture a boyish homosocial closeness of middle school locker rooms or summer camp, this does not automatically imply progress or understanding—hence the homophobic humor and routine degradation of token gay characters that still permeates the brom-com cycle. Similar to the wave of gay-themed network television programming that preceded it in the 1990s, the brom-com speaks to the current state of heterosexuality and its desires more than it likely ever will concern itself with gay America.42 In light of this far-reaching post-closet logic that Becker describes, queer-straight masculinity is no longer relegated to a sideshow or subtext, and while male second bananas still tend to linger in the middle, they are no longer confined to the role of disposable,

48

Jenna Weinman

I Love You, Man (2009), directed by John Hamburg, Paramount Pictures.

neurotic sycophants. I Love You, Man is an interesting case study for exploring this more recent propensity toward the centralization of bromance and its liberating potential for straight white masculinity. In striking contrast to the conventions of the sex comedy and previous brom-coms, the narrative actually posits bromance as a marker of the central character’s mature masculinity; indeed, as one poster for the film bluntly puts it: “are you man enough to say [I Love You, Man]?” In addition, the film also posits bromance as an ancillary to heterosexual marriage, which remains the official stamp of adulthood. In the film, Peter (Paul Rudd) is portrayed as insufficiently masculine because he is so enthusiastic about getting married to his unsurprisingly vacant fiancée, Zooey (Rashida Jones). In contrast to previous brom-com heroines, Zooey actually sets up “mandates” for Peter in hopes that he will find a suitable best man or at least form a relationship with someone other than her. Peter starts exclusively man-dating Sydney (Jason Segel), a likable slacker who spends most of his time jerking off and jamming out in his “mancave” and occasionally bedding rich divorcées. As Sydney schools Peter in his loutish version of what it means to be a real man, the two grow inseparable. In the film’s final scene, Zooey stands at the

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

49

altar in a white dress, but there is little doubt that the real love and commitment being consecrated at the ceremony is between the two “bros.” While there is still temptation and reason to dismiss the contemporary bromance craze as little more than a bunch of schlubby, straight, white guys playing a feature-length round of gay chicken, there is nonetheless a palpable, sincere tenderness—even a possible twinge of melodramatic “if only” yearning—between Peter and Sydney that elevates the pairing to something more than a dirty joke or cheap escape. Furthermore, I Love You, Man’s only effort to mollify Sydney’s immaturity is to reveal that he is not, in fact, a complete bum but a successful investor who simply chooses to live like one. A similar token of redemption occurs in Knocked Up when Ben manages to land a hip design job of some kind despite his lack of work experience and marketable skills, as well as in The 40-Year-Old Virgin when Andy not only makes half a million dollars selling his toys but puts the money toward starting up his own business. While the sex comedy more or less secured the playboy as a self-made beneficiary of postwar prosperity, the brom-com’s last-minute economic redemption for the white male lead has become as routine, necessary, and seemingly implausible as the heterosexual coupling. The social panic regarding male immaturity in the twenty-first century, then, is more likely to be expressed in terms of capital and citizenship and less in terms of sexuality. These categories, however, are inextricably linked within the logic of the breadwinner ethic, which, despite its looming extinction, at once remains the elusive conflict and resolution in the brom-com. As Ehrenreich rightly insisted, however, “we cannot go back to a world where maturity meant ‘settling,’ often in stifled desperation, for a life perceived as a role.”43 Granted, mainstream genre films cannot be expected to radically critique or dismantle the heteronormative paradigms that so fundamentally structure our political and intimate culture, but the relationship between the brom-com and its sex comedy predecessors presents one possible way to reconsider our modern notions of maturity, intimacy, and citizenship, as well as the potentials and limitations of the heterosexual couple.

50

Jenna Weinman

Notes 1. Virginia Wright Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 8. 2. Frank Krutnik, “Love Lies: Romantic Fabrication in Contemporary Romantic Comedy,” in Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s, ed. Peter William Evans et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 16. 3. Lauren G. Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 2. 4. Ibid., 9. 5. Ibid., 21. 6. Significantly, the genre has not always gendered immaturity male, nor has it always been posited as an obstacle to the couple’s union. For instance, screwball comedies from the 1930s, such as Bringing Up Baby (1938) and It Happened One Night (1934), often figured immaturity through madcap heiress types and presented the heterosexual union as contingent on the couple’s ability to learn to play together like children. See Kathrina Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union 1934–1965. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 7. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 8. Ibid., 300. 9. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 18. 10. Judith Roof, All about Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 10. 11. Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2. 12. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005), 229. 13. Ibid., 226. 14. Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 58–60, 266–72. 15. Ibid., 268. 16. Coontz, Marriage, a History, 227. 17. Cohan, Masked Men, 268. 18. Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 38. 19. Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 57–76. 20. Ibid., 75. 21. McDonald, Romantic Comedy, 51.

Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

51

22. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 105. 23. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 51. 24. Cohan, Masked Men, 290–303; Richard Meyer, “Rock Hudson’s Body,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diane Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 265. 25. See, for example, Cohan’s close reading of Pillow Talk’s coda in relation to Rock Hudson’s star persona. Cohan, Masked Men, 290–303. 26. Cohan, Masked Men, 267–68. 27. Coontz, 299–300. 28. Ibid., 294. 29. See, for example, Kay S. Hymowitz, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women has Turned Men into Boys (New York: Basic Books, 2011). See also Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012). 30. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 31. Gary S. Cross, Men to Boys: the Making of Modern Immaturity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 32. Ibid., 6. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. William Paul, Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 31–32. 35. Rick Santorum, “5 Characters Reject Abortion in a Cultural Shift in Movies,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 3, 2008, http://articles.philly.com/2008-01-03/ news/24988807_1_pop-culture-movies-abortion/2. 36. David Greven, “Dude, Where’s My Gender? Contemporary Teen Comedies and New Forms of American Masculinity,” Cineaste 27.3 (2002): 18. 37. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, “In Focus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies,” Cinema Journal 44.2 (2005): 107–32. 38. For more information on the power of the fetal image, see Lauren G. Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 39. Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 4. 40. Ron Becker, “Post-Closet Television,” Flow 7.3 (2007), http://flowtv.org/2007/ 11/post-closet-television/. 41. The indie brom-com Humpday (2009) attempts to take gay chicken to its logical conclusion when two straight friends decide to record themselves having sex in hopes of winning an amateur porn contest. 42. Becker, Gay TV and Straight America, 5. 43. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men, 182.

chapter 2

Grumpy Old Men “Bros Before Hos” Hilary Radner

Film reviewers, and more recently film scholars, have popularized the word “bromance” as referring to a recent spate of films, such as I Love You Man (John Hamburg, 2009), that center on the relationship between two men while depending upon an impending wedding and heterosexual union for plot and conclusion, leading Newsweek’s Ramin Setoodeh to “officially declare that bromance is the new romantic comedy.” Setoodeh admits, “Buddy comedies are nothing new, but the bromance shows us that straight guys, even without the aid of a high-speed car chase, can bond almost as strongly as heterosexual lovebirds.”1 Another reviewer describes, with reference to Hollywood films, what she calls in 2009 “the hot new bromance” as “the male equivalent of the chick flick.”2 Film fans have become more adventurous in their usage of the term, considering a bromance any film that deals with the representation of “a close non-sexual friendship between men,”3 reclaiming what had been typically categorized as “the buddy film” for the purposes of creating a history of the genre, with film scholars following suit.4 The contemporary cinematic bromance has specific characteristics largely deriving from its greater degree of openness about the range and nature of male-to-male relations resulting from society’s more pronounced comfort and ease with matters of homosexuality; however, the impetus among fans and scholars alike to re-read “the buddy film” in the light of this openness suggests the importance of the contemporary formulation in inspiring a reappraisal of the past. The contemporary bromance makes explicit something that

Grumpy Old Men

53

was always implicit in the buddy film, most notably the intensity of the masculine bond, something that was left unsaid at the time but now can be discussed overtly.5 The rising popularity of the term “bromance” as describing an already well established narrative formula (the buddy film) suggests that it adds something to our understanding of what is at stake in the intense man-on-man relations depicted by these films. If the relationships themselves are not new, the degree to which they are finding cultural acceptance is. The term “bromance” highlights this new visibility and legitimacy. In particular, the term brings together two words: “brother” or “bro,” the vernacular, hipster salute (with its hyper-masculine associations and trendy aspirations), and “romance,” an atavistic feminine concept, which was rejected by second wave feminists, associated with “hanky pics” and supermarket novels. The melding of these two opposing terms implies a certain knowing and self-reflexive irony about contemporary gender politics and the implications of seemingly chaste same-sex relations between men. Similarly, the shift in nomenclature from buddy to bromance, encouraging a fresh perspective on male bonding, suggests the dubious status of mateship, or what sociologist Michael Kimmel has called “Guyland,”6 and the need to mask its role (through the introduction of the feminized term “romance”) in promoting behavior that is no longer acceptable according to current social norms. Sociologists David Hansen-Miller and Rosalind Gill, using Hollywood films as their prime exemplars, note that what they call the “new laddism” of the twenty-first century is “distinct from the ‘traditional’ or ‘unreconstructed’ version of masculinity associated with a prefeminist era” because it “is not ignorant but entirely aware about how it offends against contemporary norms of probity, good taste and ‘reasonable’ attitudes toward women.”7 The rise of the “bromance” may generate new films, but it also, less obviously, offers a template for contemporary viewers through which to understand the relevance of films from the past. The specificity of the contemporary bromance derives, perhaps, from its status as an updated version of the buddy film that responds to changing gender roles while maintaining strong links to that earlier formula. Notably, Stephen Farber in the Hollywood Reporter describes I Love You, Man (usually posited as a paradigmatic contemporary

54

Hilary Radner

bromance) as continuing a traditional popular formula: “From Laurel and Hardy to Butch and Sundance, Hollywood movies often have relied on the interplay of buddies who play together with the cool precision of a jazz duo.” For Farber, Paul Rudd and Jason Segal, the stars of I Love You, Man, provide “a neat contemporary counterpart” to these “classic teams.” Farber evokes “Neil Simon’s classic pairing of a fussbudget and a slob” referring to the film version of Simon’s play The Odd Couple (Gene Saks, 1968), starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, in his assessment of the two actors who “strike the right physical contrast for comedy.” He thus sums up I Love You, Man as a “shrewd new variation on the theme.”8 This new variation evokes what marketing researchers Douglas L. Fugate and Joanna Phillips, writing in 2010 about global consumerism, call “gender complexity,” a current trend characterized by “non-transvestite feminization”—that is to say, “the willingness of men to abandon many conventional masculine norms in order to embrace more conventional feminine norms.” They note that “ ‘Metromale’ and ‘bromance’ are two other terms found in current parlance that suggest that traditional gender roles are shifting.” They conclude that “the maturation of the feminist and concurrent movements has removed many of the cultural distinctions between appropriate male and female behavior and has had a profound impact on what it means to be a man or woman in modern American society.”9 Given these trends, it would follow that what is now commonly called the “bromantic” plot—that is to say, a film in which one of the primary conceits that informs its intrigue derives from a close, if often fraught and usually chaste, relationship between two men— may be a vehicle for a number of often contradictory social messages about gender. On the one hand, this plot may serve as a plea for the legitimation of male friendship and the close emotional and (usually unspoken) bonds that it generates, a sort of reclamation of “mateship” in a post-feminist context (as in The Bucket List [Rob Reiner, 2007],10 or, more poignantly, The Shawshank Redemption [Frank Darabont, 1994]). On the other hand, the bromantic plot, particularly in its later incarnations, may lend a coy hipness to an attitude that is largely based on good old-fashioned homosociality and a consequent exclusion of women from the arena of what really counts in life (as in I Love You, Man).

Grumpy Old Men

55

Not coincidentally, Philippa Gates characterizes the post-1980s buddy film, in particular, as reacting “to the perceived threat of women.” This genre, according to Gates, “celebrated male bonding in a resistance to feminist empowerment.” She continues, “In these films, female characters played a minimal role, being present only to assure audiences of the hero’s heterosexuality.”11 The appellation “bromance” has, then, further, perhaps more unsavory, connotations, recalling what sociologist Michael Kimmel called in 2008 “the motto of Guyland,” “Guyland” being his description of the buddy phase in contemporary masculine development, which he locates between the ages of 16 and 26. Guyland’s rallying cry, according to Kimmel, is “Bros Before Hos.”12 “Bros Before Hos” emphasizes that in Guyland male friendship takes precedence over other relations but also signals the low status that is accorded women in the “bro” relationship. In Guyland, all women are “hos,” prostitutes available as sources of a purely physical pleasure and as objects of male disdain who must be suitably humiliated and derogated. Like “Bros Before Hos,” “bromance” also suggests that meaningful relations exist only between men. In Michael Kimmel’s words, “Just about every guy knows this—knows that his ‘brothers’ are his real soul mates, his real life-partners.”13 Among the list of classic “bromances,” formerly known as buddy films, Grumpy Old Men (Donald Petrie, 1993) holds a significant place because, unlike many buddy films, it was initially classified as a romantic comedy marked by ribald humor and thus might be considered a direct forerunner of the contemporary bromance. In the words of newspaper writer Jeff Stickler, “It’s a romantic comedy about a pair of neighbors, life-long fishing buddies, who find their loyalties tested by their competition for the attention of a beautiful woman who moves into the neighborhood.”14 The now iconic Grumpy Old Men, through its emphasis on its two male leads, “John” (Jack Lemmon) and “Max” (Walter Matthau), and their ongoing rivalry, highlights the multivalent function of the bromance as a plot device. The film follows the classic structure of the romantic comedy, “with more than enough sex to go around,” culminating in a wedding, the union of the hero and his chosen one, “Ariel,” played by Ann-Margret and described as “a frisky femme fatale.”15 The role accorded Ariel in the film’s narrative, in which she

56

Hilary Radner

both serves to bring the two protagonists together and to keep them apart, preserving an appropriate physical distance between men, illustrates an important element in the formula that links buddy film and bromance: while the woman may be a source of conflict between the two “bros,” she is essentially passive, if ultimately enabling, or catalytic. As film reviewer Patrick Goldstein points out, “Many of the best buddy films spring into high gear when the filmmaker introduces a dramatic irritant, usually in the form of a beautiful, free-spirited woman who sparks the flame of romantic conflict.”16 Indeed, until the very last moments, the audience is left guessing as to the identity of the groom. Is it John or Max? In fact, Max, learning of his “frenemy’s” desperate personal and financial straits subsequent to John’s heart attack, contrives this happy ending, exemplifying both the importance of male friendship and the secondary status of the woman herself. Her own desires are so unimportant that she allows a man (Max, in this case) to make the important decisions, such as choosing her husband for her. Though Ariel had previously professed a preference for John because of their common interests in the arts (John is an accomplished pianist) and their bond as retired teachers, it is only at Max’s urging that she acts upon this preference. Similarly, her initial affection for John transferred easily to Max when John broke up with her to compensate for the fact that he “stole” Max’s high school girlfriend May from him some forty years earlier. That John endured a largely unhappy marriage to May, especially in comparison with Max’s happy years with Amy, whom he meets on the rebound, makes no difference in terms of the feud that both divides and unites the two “bros,” suggesting their affinity with later Guyland priorities. The film is situated on the eve of what is now known as “the New Girl Order,” exemplified in television programming such as Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2006) that promotes a female equivalent to “Guyland,” revolving around romance, fashion, and female friendships rather than alcohol, sex, and male bonding.17 As such, Grumpy Old Men testifies to the larger anxieties associated by Hansen-Miller and Gill with “lad flicks”18 concerning the social changes brought about by the sexual revolution and second wave feminism, which in this movie are incarnated by Ariel, the liberated and arty former

Grumpy Old Men

57

college professor. While the potential disruption that she represents is contained when Max asserts the primacy of the male bond and her status as something to be exchanged between men (in this case, between Max and John), it is also clear that the stability of the structure assuring the equilibrium that literally allows John to survive is in question, in part through the marked comic mode of the film. These men in the last instance are figures of ridicule. A viewer may well ask, “What does Ariel, an attractive and dynamic woman of 52, see in either of these infantile oldies, aged 68 and 73, respectively?” The film then offers a privileged avenue for understanding how the bromantic plot, as it will be belatedly designated, produces a world in which men, in this case, two old codgers, maintain the primacy of relations “between men.” Importantly, by locating its plot in the heart of middle America, in Minnesota, Grumpy Old Men proclaims its concerns as central to the American psyche. While critics were not necessarily kind,19 the success of the film among audiences suggests its topicality at the time of its release. Described as a film “to which one could take parents, kids or unwelcome guests in a pinch,” 20 it was released on Christmas Day 1993 as a result of a series of preview screenings “to an array of demographic groups, which indicated that the comedy appealed to a broader audience than the older adults originally expected to be drawn to stalwarts Lemmon and Matthau.”21 During its holiday season run, it was the “third highest grossing film . . . following . . . Mrs. Doubtfire . . . and The Pelican Brief.”22 Significantly, the film tested well, and audiences and exhibitors “rated it as a picture they believe is going to appeal to all audiences.”23 John Davis, the film’s producer, explained that the movie “screens to all demographics. We had no idea when we went out and did the movie that we were going to play so well young. But, interestingly enough, we play as well young as we do old and female as well as male.”24 This appeal of Grumpy Old Men as a “bromance” before its time raises important questions about the role and representation of gender that correspond not coincidentally to developments in the field of film studies as an academic discipline. In 1993, the year of Grumpy Old Men’s release, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, in their introduction to their landmark edited volume Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, questioned a binaristic interpretation of gender that posits

58

Hilary Radner

“a masculinity that can preserve its hegemony only by confessing its anxieties at every turn.” 25 Grumpy Old Men’s treatment of gender and, in particular, male friendship highlights both an anxiety surrounding the terms of masculinity itself as unified, set in opposition to femininity and a certain nostalgia for a time, perhaps before feminism, in which gender identity might appear less conflicted. Crucial to the definition and implications of this male friendship were the star personas of Lemmon and Matthau and their identification in the media as a couple, if an odd couple, over several decades. Typically, a review opined, “Grumpy Old Men is a shameless sort of throwback to the 1960s, exploiting each male star’s comfortably irascible traits.” The film “is more dependent on the iconography of Lemmon and Matthau in comedy than it is on the story or humor. Like a late-career John Wayne western, Cary Grant romance, or Robert Mitchum detective movie, Grumpy Old Men gets its identification and resonance from the faces of longtime movie stars.”26 The Lemmon/Matthau pairing that defined their star personas, as well as the buddy film of the 1960s,27 was their appearance in The Odd Couple (Gene Saks, 1968), based on a 1965 Neil Simon play that also starred Matthau.28 Lemmon’s role was performed on Broadway by Art Carney, of the Honeymooners’ fame (CBS, 1 October 1955–26 September 1956). The play was not only adapted to the screen but also generated a successful television sitcom (ABC, 24 September 1970–7 March 1975). Not coincidentally, in his review of I Love You, Man discussed earlier in this chapter, Farber specifically references this film and its protagonists, “Oscar” (Matthau) and “Felix” (Lemmon).29 Grumpy Old Men, while perhaps not as widely circulated as The Odd Couple through its various avatars, would generate a sequel, Grumpier Old Men (Howard Deutch, 1995), with a similar plot to Grumpy Old Men, concluding this time with a wedding for Matthau’s character, “Max,” as well as a string of further comedies starring Lemmon and Matthau including The Odd Couple II (Howard Deutch, 1998). Like The Odd Couple, though to a lesser degree, Grumpy Old Men and its sequel Grumpier Old Men have entered the cultural lexicon and are frequently cited in popular texts, as in, for example, the television talk show Grumpy Old Men (BBC 2, 2003–present) that borrows its title from the film and spawned a series of further

Grumpy Old Men

59

programs and books. Similarly, in the sitcom New Girl (Fox, 2011– present), “Jess,” the show’s star played by Zooey Deschanel, asserts that “her ideal relationship would be playing ‘girl Jack Lemmon’ to Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men.”30 The trope is further explored in the episode when she meets her potential “Walter” in a drugstore and compares his stance with that of Matthau when as Max he encounters “Maria” (Sophia Loren), his future bride in the supermarket during the course of Grumpier Old Men. Even this very cursory genealogy suggests the longevity and cultural resonance of this “man love,” cultivated in part through the star personas of the actors themselves over several decades. In 2001, reporter Jeff Strickler reminisced over the time the two stars spent in Minnesota shooting Grumpy Old Men: “It's fitting that Lemmon and Matthau, who died last year, were best known for the comedy The Odd Couple. Frequent collaborators, they were a real-life odd couple. Matthau was loud, gruff and always looking for a punch line, while Lemmon was soft-spoken, polite and took time to give thoughtful answers.”31 If contemporary depictions of gay couples in popular American television programming such as Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–2012) and Modern Family (ABC, 2009– present) seem familiar, it is probably because they draw upon the odd couple tradition that Lemmon and Matthau so spectacularly represented. The Odd Couple represented a vision of the male couple that, while not designated homosexual as such, was a comfortable feature of American iconography, one into which the actual homosexual couples of the period and in the decades that followed might be easily slotted. The newspapers of the time and later accounts of the men’s lives emphasized that they died almost within a year of each other, cementing a public image of the two men as a couple, though both left grieving widows, marriages of several decades, and adult children. Underlining the two stars’ status and their relationship, influential Variety columnist Army Archerd commented in 2001 that “It was exactly one year since Walter’s death when Jack was laid to rest in the same (Westwood) cemetery as Matthau, Marilyn Monroe and George C. Scott.”32 Blogger and film reviewer Bob Westal elaborated, highlighting the actors’ status as a couple for twenty-first century viewers: “Matthau and Lemmon not only made a number of films

60

Hilary Radner

together over the years, including the Grumpy Old Men pictures— they became inseparable in real life, as well as death. They are buried next to each other.”33 Adding to the legend, in 1992 Matthau confessed to Premiere magazine that he considered Lemmon “the most marvelous fellow in the world to work with and hang around, so bright and so decent, a helluva guy. I mean, it sounds a little bit like a homosexual relationship. If I were homosexual, I’d marry him in a minute.”34 Paradoxically, Lemmon is marvelous not because he is exceptional but, rather, in Reader’s Digest’s terms, because “no matter what the situation he makes us feel we are in it with him. He is the average man as hero.”35 Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times commented in 2009, “It has long been a critical commonplace to describe Jack Lemmon as the everyman of American film, the least glamorous of the great movie stars.”36 In spite of his ordinariness, Lemmon’s masculinity is routinely called into question in his films—including the The Odd Couple— most obviously in the earlier Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) in which his character, “Jerry,” spends much of his on-screen time impersonating a woman. While his costar’s character (played by Tony Curtis) winds up with “Sugar” (Marilyn Monroe), Lemmon’s role had him concluding the film coupled with a man, “Osgood” (Joe E. Brown). When in desperation “Jerry” reveals, “I’m a man,” Osgood replies, “Well, nobody’s perfect.” Notwithstanding the notoriety Lemmon enjoyed in this particular role, Matthau remains Lemmon’s most well remembered costar. Contemporary blogger Guy Hutchinson asserts that “Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were not a gay couple. I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. They were just friends. If they were gay, I am guessing that Lemmon would be the ‘female’ of the relationship.”37 In spite of, or, perhaps, even because of, his tendency toward an un-American femininity, Lemmon’s star persona implies that the problems that his characters encounter are ordinary even though these often result from the character’s inability to act according to established codes of male behavior. For example, in Irma La Douce (Billy Wilder, 1963), he is ineffective in his role as a policeman as well as a pimp (occupations that are typically evoked to express hyper-masculinity), while in The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960) he is

Grumpy Old Men

61

unable to emulate the promiscuity of his superiors and espouse the hardheaded instrumentality that within the film leads to success in the corporate world, suggesting that perhaps these norms were not so normal after all. To a large degree, then, the characters that Lemmon portrayed, and with whom he was associated, expressed the erosion of, or lack of confidence in, certain ideals associated with American masculinity. In 1958, the year before Some Like It Hot was released, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote an influential article about his contemporaries, “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” published in the popular magazine Esquire, claiming that “men are more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem.”38 He explained that “by mid-century, the male role had plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline.”39 Michael Kimmel saw this tendency intensifying in the decade that followed: “In the 1960s the ‘masculine mystique’—that impossible synthesis of sober responsible breadwinner, imperviously stoic master of his fate, and swashbuckling hero—was finally exposed as a fraud.”40 The Odd Couple offered an especially trenchant yet humorous depiction of late 1960s masculinity. Lemmon as Felix portrayed a fastidious man, an accomplished accountant supremely competent in the domestic arts, who drives his sloppy and feckless roommate, Oscar, a Chicago sportswriter, to throw him out of their shared apartment. Traumatized, Oscar returns to his wife, while Felix finds a home with two sisters, young divorcées recently immigrated to New York. While echoing romantic comedies such as Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), in which the elegant political columnist played by Katherine Hepburn and the rough-edged sportswriter played by Spencer Tracy must learn to overcome their differences, The Odd Couple ends on a much darker note. If Oscar manages to repair his marriage, it is only through the efforts of Felix, the accounting wizard and domestic economist, who resolves Oscar’s money problems and ensures that his alimony payments are made in a timely fashion. Felix himself seems to be heading toward a much more precarious existence on the Pigeon sisters’ couch, signaling the fragile state of his masculine identity. Most poignantly, the audience is left with the sentiment that the Oscar/Felix pairing probably offered both men the only possibility of maturity and a modicum of

62

Hilary Radner

Jack Lemmon (left) receives a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. Courtesy of Photofest.

self-realization, with a lack of physical intimacy its only major failing. With its demise, their eventual and continued unhappiness was assured. The idea that these two men belonged together was evoked again and again through the various reiterations of the Felix-Oscar pair, sometimes with other actors, often with Lemmon and Matthau themselves, as in Odd Couple II (Howard Deutch, 1998), but most notably through the two stars’ public personas. Though Lemmon had a well-defined screen persona before he was coupled with Matthau, the reverse was not the case. Largely categorized as a character actor, often appearing in the role of a “heavy,” Matthau provided a foil to the more eccentric Lemmon and emerged as a star only with the success of The Odd Couple. Though an Oscar recipient (for his performance in a film directed by Lemmon), Matthau had a much lower profile than Lemmon, who continued to receive awards as a star independently of Matthau. Notably, Lemmon received a coveted Life Achievement Award from the American Film

Grumpy Old Men

63

Institute in 1988.41 Nonetheless, a New York Times article discussing the broadcasting of the award ceremony is accompanied by a chest shot of Lemmon and Matthau together. While Lemmon turns his gaze modestly toward Matthau, Matthau confronts the camera directly, dominating the photo, evoking the myth of inseparability that surrounded the two men. Matthau continued to perform almost until he entered the hospital for the last time. His neutrality served to offer another vision of the American everyman to that of the fevered Lemmon, a more traditional if decidedly atavistic masculinity that hardened with the years into that of a formidable curmudgeon, repeatedly described as having a face like “an unmade bed” and walking like “a wind-up toy.”42 From the press’s perspective, Lemmon and Matthau did not “play” a part: they were the odd couple, the handsome boyish Lemmon with his prep school education, his Yale degree, frenetic grace, and burnished pronunciation standing in stark contrast to the awkward, monosyllabic, and homely Matthau who had grown up in an immigrant Russian family headed by his mother, the family having been abandoned by Walter’s father when he was four. By the time the two appeared together in Grumpy Old Men, their identity as a couple was firmly established as a media image. Casting the iconic pair was also crucial to garnering studio support for the project. John Davis, a producer on the film, recalled that “finally the picture hinged on casting. . . . Jack and Walter was everybody’s No. 1 team.”43 As if confirming the appropriateness of this choice, and the status of the couple as an American masculine prototype, screenwriter Mark Steven claims that he wrote the script with Lemmon and Matthau in mind, exploiting their already established characters while transporting them from New York (where The Odd Couple is set) to Minnesota, the home of his own grandfather. Johnson claims: “ ‘Grumpy Old Men’ is a very personal project for me. . . . It’s a valentine to my home state of Minnesota and the character of John Gustafson is based on my own grandfather.”44 This shift in geography further underlines the way in which this odd couple as a generic icon had been embraced as an American norm. The film’s location thus served an important function in bringing the story home—as one that in due course would play well in America’s living rooms, when the film would be, as it was, broadcast on television.

64

Hilary Radner

Reviewers considered the location of the film to be a selling point. Eric Mankin of the Reader reported, “Donald Petrie does a good job of creating a slice of provincial small-town American life.”45 Julie Salamon recounted in the Wall Street Journal that “the movie is very appealing for numerous surprising reasons. Many of them have to do with ice fishing in Minnesota. The film is set in a small town in Minnesota, in the winter. The grumpy old men are retired and spend their days fishing inside little shacks set up on the ice. . . . I like seeing this odd community of wintertime fishermen carrying on their feuds and wisecracking in these little shacks on the ice. . . .  The director Donald Petrie is very good at getting across a sense of community.”46 Shifting the odd couple from New York to the Midwest has significant implications. While New York, Los Angeles, and other urban centers to a lesser degree were viewed with suspicion by much of the United States, Minnesota, as part of the Midwest, is the Heartland, the home of true American values.47 Certainly the film depicted it as such, displaying a series of nostalgic images of small town life in its opening sequence. Relocating the odd couple to the Heartland seemed to say that the odd couple was no longer so “odd” and that by 1993 had been embraced by the larger public as a new, if somewhat eccentric, norm. Similarly, by presenting the tenets of “Guyland,” in Kimmel’s terms, through the behavior of two retired pensioners, the vision of masculinity that it represented was rendered less threatening, more familiar, and the inevitable consequence of social evolution. Similarly, the gear worn by the two stars, such as plaid jackets, insulated parkas, ribbed, woolen watch caps, and hiking boots associated with ice fishing, had also become urban symbols of “cool” among young homeboys, subsequently popularized by upscale brands like Tommy Hilfiger or the re-vamped Abercrombie and Fitch, further associating the odd couple with the new, evolving culture of Guyland. The setting, the media status of the couple, and their age point to the origins of the contemporary bromantic plot within a long and accepted tradition of male comedy beloved by the middle American and associated with the odd couple and the buddy film—indeed, a new variation on an old theme. John and Max, or the putz and the moron, as they refer to each other, demonstrate the relevance of “Guyland” beliefs across a variety

Grumpy Old Men

65

of demographic groups, locating these at the center of the American masculine experience. The softening of their humor, such that they appear infantile rather than adolescent, does not change the essential core of that experience, which revolves around the precept that the “true” or “natural” life partner of a man is another man and that women primarily serve to preserve the purity of that experience as uncontaminated by homosexuality. The opening sequences of the film clearly lay out the circumstances in which the two male characters find the terms of their partnership unsettled by the arrival of a woman.48 The first images evoke a nostalgic and picturesque vision of small town life, moving from an artful long shot of the ice fishing shanty town to shots of an antiquated train station whose sign identifies the location of the film as “Wabash,” a small town in Minnesota, moving through Main Street to linger on the town’s church, all shrouded in snow. These are followed by a series of single-family two-story homes, beginning with a white clapboard-and-brick house that viewers will come to identify as Ariel’s, followed by a shot of a similar abode that belongs to John. Though ice fishing might not be familiar to all, through the subsequent images Americans would recognize these as scenes of quintessential small town life that evoke Christmas cards and calendars of an earlier era, that of Norman Rockwell and his contemporaries. We encounter John as he evades an irate tax investigator (“Elliot Synder” played by Buck Henry) by climbing out a window and crossing over to his neighbor’s (Max’s) yard; John encounters Max on the way to his mailbox in front of his more distinctly modest home. Both John and Max are still in their pajamas. They are exchanging insults when they are accosted by the irate tax investigator, who is still vainly trying to locate John Gustafson. Both claim to ignore his whereabouts. The distinctly childish behavior of both men (John’s window-climbing antics are complemented by Max’s joyous irreverent whistling as he proceeds toward his mailbox), their disregard for authority, and the epithets with which they greet each other (“dickhead” and “moron”) belie their lined faces and receding hairlines. They remain defiantly boyish in the face of old age. In particular, Max’s description of John, who stands by unable to say a word as Max heaps insult upon insult upon him in his discussion with the tax inspector, recalls Guyland relations in which joking

66

Hilary Radner

forms an important mode of exchange. When the tax inspector asks if either of the two men have seen a Mr. John Gustafson, Max replies, “Do you mean the low-life, ass-wipe, ex-sucker John Gustafson?” He continues, “That man’s crazy, loco, always hanging out ‘round those kinky strip bars, you know the ones where the men take their clothes off.” Here Max replicates what sociologist Peter Lyman describes as “the fraternal bond as a joking relationship.”49 Lyman bases his observation on the exchanges between members of a type of male student club known in American universities as a fraternity. He concludes that “the fraternal bond was almost entirely a joking relationship. In part, the joking was a kind of ‘signifying’ or ‘dozens,’ a ritual exchange of insults that functioned to create group solidarity.” A member of a fraternity interviewed by Lyman explained: “If there’s one theme that goes on, it’s the emphasis on being able to take a lot of ridicule, of shit, and not getting upset about it. Most of the interaction we have is verbally abusing each other. . . . And you aren’t cool unless you can take it without trying to get back.”50 Max sides with John and lies to the tax inspector, technically a federal offense, while demonstrating or signifying his bond with John by insulting him, ostensibly in absentia. The nature of the insults, in particular the oblique reference to potential homosexuality raised by John’s purported obsession with male strippers, illustrates another point made by Lyman that “jokes were also targeted at homosexuality, to draw an emotional line between the homosocial male bond and homosexual relations.”51 Max insults John by claiming that he is homosexual (as well as crazy and on medication). In so doing, he also emphasizes that he and John are not homosexual, regardless of appearances that might suggest otherwise (in particular their long association in the public eye). Lyman explains, “Jokes can create group solidarity only if they allow dangerous things to be said; allow a physical catharsis of tensions through laughter; or create the solidarity of an ‘in group’ through shared aggression against an ‘out group.’ ”52 Max’s “joke” about John serves all three functions. The joke provokes laughter in the audience, who is aware of the ludicrous nature of Max’s descriptions not only because of John’s expression but also because Jack Lemmon would never play such a character. The dangerous thought of potential homosexuality between the characters

Grumpy Old Men

67

John and Max, between Lemmon and Matthau, and by extension between any two men bonded in close friendship is clearly stated; however, any discomfort in the potentially homosexual couple is discharged through laughter with the heterosexual terms of the friendship clearly established. The joke also establishes complicity between John and Max, with John and Max united against the outsider. Max not only teases John but also metaphorically thumbs his nose at the tax inspector. This initial gesture will bear fruit in the film’s conclusion when Max thwarts Synder’s attempt to seize John’s house, arranges through his son to have John’s penalties forgiven, and pays the $13,000 that John owes as a result of a bookkeeping error (with the understanding that John will repay him in due course). Once Synder walks away, failing to extract any useful information from either the curtly dismissive John or the loquacious Max, the two men turn their attentions to their new neighbor and the objects unloaded from the moving van. With boyish amazement and the expletive “Holy Moly!” Max greets the appearance of a large, heavily muscled and apparently nude male sculpture equipped with a suspicious genital bulge. This sculpture is followed by a contemporary painting of the nude torso of a suffering Christ on the Cross and John’s surprised “Jesus!” The expletives and the expressions on the men’s faces highlight the nudity and exoticism of both objects (very clearly “gay” coded) within the context of a small town, lending an aura of mystery to the new neighbor. It is impossible not to imagine an alternative story, slyly implied here, in which it is indeed a dashing and urbane gay man who arrives in the neighborhood, disrupting the old codger couple of John and Max, in spite of, of perhaps because of, the marked heterosexuality of the plot that follows. The scenes that ensue emphasize the bond that unites John and Max and the rupture in that relationship that will be initiated by the town’s new inhabitant. The film begins at dawn. After this brief exchange the film quickly segues into evening, with both Max and John watching the news and eating their evening meals in separate quarters. Max carries a sad bowl of something, crossing in front of one television in his dining room and sitting in front of another in his littered and neglected living room. The film signals the connection between the two men by cutting to the television, the announcer filling

68

Hilary Radner

the screen. In the next shot, John’s immaculate kitchen appears, and the television is tuned to the same program while he pokes at a can of Spam, an inexpensive pre-cooked meat. The two men are so attuned to each other that their movements and the rhythms of their day coincide: they watch television at the same time of day, tuned to the same channel. Later both stare out their windows at the newly inhabited house and presumably at each other. Max looks mournfully through the glass while John plays a game of chess with himself, also occasionally glancing through the glass. Both retire for the night and are awakened by a snowmobile at 1:44 a.m. Each appears again at the window, but the object of their gaze is the rider whose gender is hidden by a helmet and bulky snowsuit but whose daring recklessness suggests masculinity. Once the rider dismounts and removes the helmet, she reveals a trim waist, a startling head of long red hair and finally, facing the camera again, the poignant features of Ann-Margret or “Ariel.” Ann-Margret’s status as a former sex symbol brings an added allure and charisma to her role. The audience recognizes not only that the new neighbor is a woman but also that she is played by a female icon of legendary status, such that Oprah “borrowed” her body when she appeared on the cover of TV Guide in 1989. Her star persona invests the role of Ariel with resonances that evoke a history of American womanhood and the rise of a new ideal in the middle of the twentieth century. She was known in her early days as the “kitten with a whip,”53 from the eponymous film in which she starred, an image that literalized her iconic meaning—muting the power of femininity by coupling it with a childish playfulness, implied in the appellation “kitten.” If Lemmon had long been associated with what William Whyte calls “the organization man” (a symptom of the midcentury crisis in masculinity articulated by writers like Schlesinger), Ann-Margret represented a subdued version of his counterpart, the American woman who “has unmanned the American man” through her “female aggression.”54 Like Lemmon’s John and Matthau’s Max, Ann-Margret’s star persona is crucial to her character and infuses the role of Ariel with an emphatic seductiveness. Film critic Rex Reed comments on her performance in the film, providing evidence of her enduring appeal to male viewers of a certain generation: “As for Ann-Margret, the years must be kissing her in the middle of her

Grumpy Old Men

69

cleavage. More voluptuous than ever, radiant, effervescent and natural she melts the snow of Minnesota and every heart in sight. Color her juicy.”55 Her appearance fulfills the promise of the opening song “Heat Wave” (composed by Irving Berlin) sung by Ella Fitzgerald, reprised briefly by Max (in an another insider joke) as Ariel’s moving van pulls up earlier in the day. The song is so clearly associated with Ariel, who “started the heat wave/By letting her seat wave . . . ,” that some viewers thought that Ann-Margret was herself singing. Indeed, she is reputed to have covered the song in her breakthrough performance at a high school talent show. 56 One blogger comments, “Just a tad chilly brrr out there this morning. I was up and out at a little before 5 for my shovling [sic] duties and though I don't know what the temperature was (and kind of really didn't want to know) NOAA is reporting -10 F right now with the wind chill around -30 F. When we have weather like this I always recall the beginning of Grumpy Old Men and AnnMargret singing ‘We’re Having A Heatwave.’ ”57 With the song introducing Ariel’s arrival and proleptically figuring the subsequent plot in which she will spark a conflict between the two men, thus raising their “temperatures,” the blogger can be forgiven for mistakenly recalling that she sang the song. His mistaken memory highlights the film’s influence and the crucial role played by Ariel in covering over the way that it foregrounds the two men’s relationship. Significantly, the two men greet Ariel’s reveal, the moment when, her helmet removed, her long wavy hair and curves signal her identity as a woman, with delighted astonishment, echoing their earlier comments on her artwork: Max emits a “Holy Moly” while John contents himself with “Oh my God.” With its overlapping triangle of gazes (John, Max, and Ariel), this scene illustrates Cohan and Hark’s comments about how a monolithic, and ultimately binary, opposition between masculine and feminine cannot accommodate the complexity of current gender practices and identities, in particular the sustained anxiety that surrounds the seemingly hegemonic masculine position. Ariel, whose gender is denoted through heavily coded norms of appearance rather than her actions, challenges the division between masculine and feminine. Her gendered identity is hidden until the very last moment, raising the question whether matters are quite as clear as they may appear.

70

Hilary Radner

The men look at the mysterious intruder but also at each other. Identity is conveyed through a process of mirroring that affirms the men’s position as part of a couple defined by sameness (in terms of gender, for example) as well as difference (they are an “odd” couple), in which the identity of the object of their gaze cannot be determined. Equally, Ariel performs for an unknown spectator; she is not the passive recipient of a masculine gaze. Initially it is her masculine bravura that catches the two onlookers’ gaze, as disguised under her helmet she whips around in the snow demonstrating a youthful and daring disregard for the time of night and the quiet neighborhood in which she is newly arrived. When she dismounts, she performs femininity, through her walk and the graceful swirl of hair. When she closes her screen door, she glances out, seemingly acknowledging her admirers at their respective windows, offering them a challenge. Both respond to her by pursuing her and by passing her from one to the other, including another bro, Chuck (Ossie Davis), owner of a bait shop that both men frequent, who is the first in the neighborhood to taste the delights that Ariel has on offer. Because the African-American Chuck dies unexpectedly (but not before encouraging John and Max to develop a closer acquaintance with Ariel), the film offers no opportunity to explore his relations to either Ariel or John and Max; he, nonetheless, or rather his night with Ariel (observed by John and Max from their windows), illustrates both the threat that she represents (she is not constrained by marriage or a sense of propriety) and its containment through the invocation of the male bond. Chuck, as the first to take on Ariel, paves the way for the two men who follow. Ariel is fair game, neither a virgin nor a modest widow. The primacy of the males and their heterosexuality, or, more properly, their masculinity, is legitimated through their exchange and use of Ariel. She may hook up with one or the other, but it does not affect the relations between men, except insofar as it reassures them and the world that their connection has no sexual component. The resolution of their feud and the ensuing intimacy, kindness, and even affection between the two men remains safely heterosexual. The passing of Ariel from John and Max and back again has its origins in their past and another woman, May, who might be said to be the pretext for their joking relationship, or so-called feud, underlining

Grumpy Old Men

Poster image for Grumpy Old Men featuring Jack Lemmon, Ann-Margret, and Walter Matthau. Courtesy of Photofest.

71

72

Hilary Radner

the way that exchanging women is at the heart of their relationship. This relationship is put to the test and solidified through the intervention of Ariel, who, strikingly, is neatly sandwiched between the two men in the film’s poster. By the film’s conclusion, first John and then Max will have demonstrated a willingness to give up Ariel for the sake of the other, a gesture that recalls the “Guyland” motto of “Bros Before Hos.” Ariel’s peripatetic proclivities are downplayed, and her only on-screen sex scene is with John; however, the readiness with which she agrees to be passed from one to another allows the men in her life to assign her a secondary status with regard to their own relationship, which governs the actions of the film and their outcomes. Feminist theorists such as Judith Butler have advocated a dismantling of certain kinds of practices associated with heterosexuality on the assumption that “normative sexuality fortifies normative gender.”58 From this perspective, then, the odd couple does not seem odd at all but, rather, the highly normative forerunners of a more generalized culture of Guyland structured to preserve heterosexual masculinity in the face of its waning privileges. Kimmel associates with the culture of Guyland and its denizens what he calls an “outraged response to the waning of privilege.”59 Here this outrage and, in particular, its accompanying anxieties are contained, with women back in their place such that they are literally exchanged between men.60 Influential queer theorist Eve Sedgwick explains that “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power.”61 In Grumpy Old Men, the male characters retain a precarious position of privilege, one that is challenged by the promise of a relationship between their two children on different terms and by the power of the women themselves. Ariel in Grumpy Old Men and then the combined forces of Ariel, Maria, and Maria’s mother (Ann Morgan Guilbert) in Grumpier Old Men highlight the diminishing power of the two aging patriarchs who cling to what are basically boyish activities, such as fishing, in order to endure in the new world order. Commenting on Grumpy Old Men, one reviewer begins by stating that Ann-Margret is “still very much in the va-va-va-voom category. Like the movie, she proves that the more things change, the

Grumpy Old Men

73

more they stay the same.”62 While on the one hand, the film does reproduce particular configurations associated with patriarchal masculine stereotypes, on the other, it signals that these are the remaining vestiges of an outmoded system meaningful to two old men clinging to a way of life that is quickly passing. With each film, their numbers diminish. In the first film Chuck dies, and in the second John’s father, Grandpa Gustafson (Burgess Meredith) passes. Notably, at the film’s conclusion, the majority of John and Max’s beloved bait shop has been taken over by a romantic Italian restaurant run by Maria. If Grumpy Old Men is about a patriarchy on its deathbed, it has been a lingering and drawn-out process that leads relatively smoothly into Guyland culture as described by Michael Kimmel. Grumpy Old Men (1993) and Grumpier Old Men (1995) demonstrate the complexity of gender roles in Hollywood after second wave feminism, in what many have called postfeminist America. Though these films play upon traditional stereotypes, they leave space for imagining different modes of depicting gender, opening the way for films like Transamerica (Duncan Tucker, 2005) and A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009) in the twenty-first century. Perhaps even more importantly, the two films offer a vision of the male couple that is familiar to audiences, one that they can imagine as comfortably part of their own neighborhood. As such, Grumpy Old Men highlights the difficulty of appraising the contemporary bromance. While certainly these more recent films, such as I Love You, Man, are less reluctant to posit male emotional needs at the forefront of their concerns, the fundamental misogyny and infantilism apparent in the ensuing relations between men remains a constant. The recent Ted (Seth MacFarlane, 2012), described by the Boston Globe as “a crass, but hilarious bromance,” highlights the primarily regressive nature of the male-on-male bond within the context of contemporary Guyland. Ted, one of the main characters in the bromantic couple, a teddy bear come to life, “really is that friend you can’t outgrow even when you want to, who shares your taste of bad 80s movies and who believes adulthood can be avoided if you just don’t show up.”63 In a commending tone, a blogger remarked, “the film is really funny. Moreover, for a bromance, there is no crash [sic] reference made to gays or community [sic] likewise, and it still manages to have some funny moments.”64 These “funny moments”

74

Hilary Radner

included many jokes in which a woman is derogated or humiliated in one way or another. Nonetheless, the film, not surprisingly, in its conclusion requires its protagonist John (Mark Wahlberg) to replace Ted with Lori (Mila Kunis) in his home, if not in his heart, as a crucial moment in a trajectory that will lead to adulthood and a stable heterosexual relationship, suggesting that bromance is part of a transitional state that must be outgrown, if with difficulty. But Ted does not die—on the contrary, John, with Lori’s help, brings him back to life such that he remains, seemingly forever, as part of their couple, a sign of the unresolved issues that continue to haunt the film’s hero. Not inconsequentially, Ted also takes refuge in a couple, one in which a young woman of seemingly diminished mental capacities and an exaggeratedly feminine figure, Tami-Lyn (Jessica Barth), continues to feed his obsession for inappropriate and excessive sexual experiences—such as eating potato salad off her derrière in a public place. Thus, the contemporary bromance, as a recent development in the buddy film, points not only to the complexity of contemporary sexuality and gender relations but also to the fact that fragility of the masculine subject made visible through the star persona of the Lemmon/Matthau couple has yet to be remedied and may even have intensified. Notes 1. Ramin Setoodeh, “Isn’t It Bromantic?,” Newsweek 153 (6 August 2009): 73. 2. Gemma Berry, “Bromance Patchy,” Townsville Bulletin, 22 January 2009, 406. 3. Daniel B. Wood, “Should ‘Bromance’ Really Be in the Dictionary? MerriamWebster Thinks So,” Christian Science Monitor, 25 August 2011, 21. 4. See, for example, “Bromance,” accessed 24 March 2012, http://plymouthlibrary.org/index.php/watch/movie-lists/283-bromanc. See also Buzzsugar, “The Best Movie Bromances,” buzzsugar.com, 13 March 2012, accessed 26 March 2012, www.buzzsugar.com/Best-Movie-Bromances-5657069?slide=16. For a scholarly use of the term “bromance,” see Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos, “The Alexander Bromance: Male Desire and Gender Fluidity in Oliver Stone’s Historical Epic,” Helios 35.2 (2008): 223–51. 5. Similarly, feminist film scholars in the wake of second-wave feminism, such as Jeanine Basinger, reappraised classical Hollywood films directed at a female audience as the “woman’s film,” expressing proto-feminist sentiments. See Jeanine

Grumpy Old Men

75

Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1995). 6. Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, Understanding the Critical Years between 16 and 26 (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 7. David Hansen-Miller and Rosalind Gill, “ ‘Lad Flicks’: Discursive Reconstructions of Masculinity in Popular Film,” in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, ed. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 38. 8. Stephen Farber, “ ‘I Love You, Man,’ ” Hollywood Reporter, 16 March 2009, 8. 9. Douglas L. Fugate and Joanna Phillips, “Product Gender Perceptions and Antecedents of Product Gender Congruence,” Journal of Consumer Marketing 27.3 (2010): 251–61. 10. I want to thank Ashleigh Fox for drawing my attention to The Bucket List as an important bromance. 11. Philippa Gates, “The Buddy Film,” in Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 114. Patrick Goldstein, “It’s Still a Guy Thing: The Evolution of the Buddy Movie,” Los Angeles Times, 9 October 2001, accessed 23 March 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/oct/09/entertainment/ca-54963. 12. Kimmel, Guyland, 13. Tucker Max’s autobiographical fiction, described as “bro-lit” or “fratire,” offers a firsthand account of the culture of Guyland. See, in particular, Tucker Max, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (New York: Citadel Press, 2006). 13. Kimmel, Guyland, 13. 14. Jeff Strickler, “Impress Your Friends: Here’s Trivia on ‘Grumpy Old Men,’ ” Minnesota, 1993, press clipping, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. See the Warner Brothers press release, which describes the film as “a rollicking romantic comedy,” Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 15. Larry Jonas, “Grumpy Old Men: Curmudgeon Capers,” Entertainment Today, 7 January 1994, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 16. Goldstein, “It’s Still a Guy Thing.” 17. For a discussion of the New Girl Order, see Hilary Radner, Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011), 168–70. 18. The principle examples of “lad flicks” offered by Hansen and Gill are American comedies including The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow, 2005) and Role Models (David Wain, 2008). Hansen-Miller and Gill, “Lad Flicks.” 19. See, for example, Linda Thomas, “Grumpy Old Men,” LA Weekly, 31 December 1993, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA.

76

Hilary Radner

20. LA Life, 8 December 1993, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 21. John Evan Frook, “One Billion Reasons for ‘Men’ Move,” Variety, 12 November 1993, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 22. Brian Lowry, “ ‘Grumpy Old Men,’ ” Variety, 6 December 1993, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA; Martin A. Grove, “Hollywood Report,” Hollywood Reporter, 4 February 1994, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 23. John Davis quoted in Martin A. Grove, “Hollywood Report,” Hollywood Reporter, 3 December 1993, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 24. Ibid. See also Frook, “One Billion Reasons for ‘Men’ Move.” 25. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, “Introduction,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. 26. “ ‘Grumpy Old Men,’ ”The Outlook, 24 December 1993, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 27. Gates, “Buddy Films,” 114. 28. For evidence of the continued relevance of the “odd couple” trope in the bromantic formula, see Farber, quoted above. 29. Farber, “I Love You, Man.” 30. Bruce Handy and Julie Weiner, “Zooey Deschanel on New Girl,” VF Daily: Culture, Society, Politics, 9 November 2011, accessed 6 April 2012, www.vanityfair. com/online/daily/2011/11/Zooey-Deschanel-on-emNew-Girlem-Adorkable-orTweepulsive-Male-and-Female-Perspectives-on-Episode-Five. 31. Jeff Strickler, “Lemmon Was No Grumpy Old Man about Minnesota,” StarTribune.com, 28 June 2001, accessed 29 March 2012, www.startribune.com/ templates/Print_This_Story?sid=11521401. 32. Army Archerd, “Just for Variety,” Variety, 15 August 2001, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 33. Bob Westphal, “The Odd Couple,” bullz-eye.com, accessed 22 March 2012, www.bullz-eye.com/mguide/reveiws_1068/the_odd_couple.html. 34. Sean Mitchell, “A Slice of Lemmon,” Premiere, November 1992, 105. 35. Maurice Zoltow, “The Many Faces of Jack Lemmon,” Reader’s Digest, August 1981, 57. 36. Dennis Lim, “Jack Lemmon’s Earlier, Lighter Side,” Los Angeles Times, 7 June 2009, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA.

Grumpy Old Men

77

37. Guy Hutchinson, “Jack and Walter,” bunchojunk.com, 27 April 2005, accessed 27 March 2012, http://bunchojunk.blogspot.co.nz/2005/04/jack-and-walter. html. 38. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” Esquire, November 1958, 64–66, quoted in Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 262. 39. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Crisis,” 64. 40. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 262. 41. John O’Connor, “Film Group Tribute to Lemmon,” New York Times, 30 May 1988, 42. 42. TV Guide, 30 December 2000–5 January 2001, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 43. Martin A. Grove, “Hollywood Report,” Hollywood Reporter, 6 December 1993, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 44. Press release, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 45. Eric Mankin, Reader, 24 December 1993, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 46. Julie Salamon, “A Young Con Artist, Old Men on Ice, and a Weird Lady,” Wall Street Journal, 9 December 1993, A14. 47. Arguably, dating back at least to the publication by sociologists Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd of Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture in 1929 about Muncie, Indiana, the Midwest of the United States, also known as the Heartland, which includes Minnesota, has been viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the home of the typical American. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd. Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929). 48. For references to Grumpy Old Men, see Grumpy Old Men, directed by Donald Petrie (1993, 2005; 116 Military Road, Neutral Bay, NSW, 2089, Australia: Warner Home Video, 1993), DVD. 49. Peter Lyman, “The Fraternal Bond as a Joking Relationship: A Case Study of the Role of Sexist Jokes in Male Group Bonding,” in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, ed. Michael S. Kimmel (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987), 148–63. 50. Lyman, “The Fraternal Bond,” 155. 51. Ibid., 156. 52. Ibid., 159–60. 53. “Going Too Far with the Winfrey Diet,” New York Times, 30 August 1989, accessed 7 April 2012, www.nytimes.com/1989/08/30/arts/going-too-far-with-thewinfrey-diet.html. 54. Schlesinger, “The Crisis,” 65.

78

Hilary Radner

55. Rex Reed, “Grumpy Old Men,” Beverly Hills, 12 January 1994, press clipping, Grumpy Old Men, Production File, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA. 56. “Ann Margret (sic) Sings: Heat Wave in 1959,” accessed 6 April 2012, www. richsamuels.com/nbcmm/ann_margaret/ann_margaret_index.html; Rich Samuels, “Stagestruck Class of ’59,” Chicago Tribune, 1 March 1994, accessed 7 April 2012, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-03-01/features/9403010026_1_annmargret-heat-wave-gomer; Laura "Pineapple Princess" Pinto & Don "Stuffed Animal" Charles, “Ann-Margret: RCA’s Kitten With a Whip,” chachachacharming: a journalistic tribute to girl powered pop past, present and future and from all over the globe, chachacha.com, accessed 7 April 2012, www.chachacharming.com/ article.php?id=18&pg=1. 57. Peter, 1 February 2011, “we’re having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave,” Larsons­World, accessed 7 April 2012, www.larsonsworld.com/?q=node/46. 58. Judith Butler, preface to Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xi. 59. Kimmel, Guyland, 12. 60. For a discussion of how heterosexuality depends upon a male prerogative that allows for exchange of women between men, see Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 61. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “from Between Men,” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 600. 62. “Grumpy Old Men,” The Outlook. 63. Ty Burr, “ ‘Ted’ a crass but hilarious bromance,” The Boston Globe, 28 June 2012, accessed 13 January 2013, www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2012/06/27/ ted-crass-but-hilarious-bromance/8w8diabZ11rJcnO8TZG58L/story.html. 64. Madhulika Dash, “Movie Review: Ted,” techtree.com, 25 October 2012, accessed 13 January 2013, www.techtree.com/content/reviews/2058/movie-reviewted.html.

chapter 3

Fears of a Millennial Masculinity Scream’s Queer Killers David Greven

The films of the late 1990s and especially of the first decade or more of the 2000s are marked by an inescapable awareness of queer desire. This awareness stems from the much greater visibility of the LGBTQ community, one that has a complex genealogy dating back to the AIDS crisis of the Reagan 1980s and extending to the flourishing of New Queer Cinema, as B. Ruby Rich indelibly called it, in the early 1990s. The impact of this newly visible queer desire in the 1990s can be seen in current representation. The emergent genre of the bromance provides ample evidence that this 1990s queerness has reshaped the ways in which straight masculinity can be represented, chiefly by making same-sex desire and even genital contact between males a threatening possibility, one that is sometimes even explicitly articulated as such, more often implicitly or euphemistically referenced. If the awareness that queerness exists and is a potential sexual “option” for masculinity is an inescapable dimension of the contemporary bromance, it behooves us to track the genealogy of this awareness in genre films especially. As Barry Keith Grant observes, certain kinds of genre films and cycles offer “part of an ongoing dialogue with audiences about the ceaseless challenges to and valorization of heteronormative ideals—what I call ‘negotiation’— in a constantly changing society at specific points in time.”1 Genre films, comedy and horror especially, have been reflective of the perceived crisis in American masculinity in the ’00s, and in this regard they have come to be indissociable from the crisis itself.

80

David Greven

Even though the bromance usually takes a comedic approach to the issues that bedevil men of the moment, it represents a merger, a compromise, an attempt to paper the cracks in the facade of American male stability. In other words, masculinity is founded on instability and a repressive lockdown of all knowledge of this instability. One late 1990s film made the new queer openness and the essential instability in male roles vividly apparent and, in its own dark, menacing way, anticipated the later bromance: Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), the subject of this chapter. While a great deal of work still needs to be done on the rise of queer visibility in the United States, for the purposes of this argument I want to establish that its profound effects on mainstream representation include the acknowledgment of queer spectatorship that, while still in many respects dis-acknowledged, makes an impact on the way films are made, distributed, and received. The representation of heterosexual masculinity makes the impact of new forms of queer spectatorship, along with the concomitant, postfeminist Sex and the City–style female sexual consumership, particularly apparent. (Steven Soderberg’s 2012 male stripper movie Magic Mike and Steve McQueen’s Shame [2011], notable for its display of the full-frontal male nudity of its star Michael Fassbender in the early scenes, amply reflects the attention to both female and gay male audiences.) In sum, heterosexual American masculinity has undergone a series of profound shifts since the early nineties. No longer able to take refuge in the cartoons of hyper-masculinity of the 1980s (the Rambos, Terminators, and their ilk), the American male has more frequently come to be the object of the desiring gaze rather than its subject, a commodified object of erotic contemplation. As such, the image of the heterosexual male both reflects market concerns and the wide-scale broadening of the desiring gaze. While treated with much greater explicitness today, queer desire nevertheless always remains an undercurrent in mainstream film and television texts, a site of repression that manifests itself in odd and discordant ways. As a result of the uneasy mixture of visibility and enduring repression, queer desire is most frequently registered through modes of defensiveness. The genres of horror and comedy become especially highly charged sites for the representation of male sexuality because both genres promote intensely

Scream’s Queer Killers

81

defensive responses to sexuality generally—the one through physical violence and other kinds of bloodletting, the other through sidesplitting laughter. The Scream films synthesize both the shifts in masculinity in the past two decades and showcase the merging of modes of horror and comedy. The year 2011 saw the release, after a decade-long gap, of the fourth film in the series. All four films have been directed by Wes Craven, formerly an English professor; the first two films and also the fourth were scripted by Kevin Williamson (of Dawson’s Creek and currently The Vampire Diaries fame). Each of the four Scream films has been directed by Craven, known prior to the Scream series mainly for the first Nightmare on Elm Street film and its ensuing franchise and praised by Robin Wood for his first film, the 1972 underground work The Last House on the Left. The first three Scream films (released in the years 1996, 1997, and 2000) anticipated and also registered many of the fears that gathered around the event of the new millennium. The films demand a sustained consideration not just because they remain an index of the emergent fears of their era and not just for their pointedly, explicitly intertextual relationship to the history of horror, but because their thematization of issues of male sexual anxiety and racial panic anticipates many of the key strains in early 2000s films. My focus will be on the first Scream film. For our purposes, the relationship between the two teenage male killers, in its coded homoerotic dimensions, anticipates the fusion of horror and comedy in the “bromance” and “beta male” films that have become such defining aspects of filmmaking in the past decade. No Motive: Scream and the Horror of the New Millennium Scream (1996) follows the classical rules of the slasher horror genre, as Carol J. Clover so expertly framed them, ending with a confrontation between the killer and the Final Girl, who alone survives the bloodbath.2 The film, as has been much discussed, is metatextual and self-referential, always maintaining an ironic, knowing relationship to the horror genre. It features not one but two killers, and not one but two female survivors who together take down the killers. To

82

David Greven

evoke another important theory of the horror film, Barbara Creed has argued that a dread of being re-engulfed by the mother—derived from a primal terror of being devoured by the mawlike womb of the archaic mother—powerfully informs the genre.3 Building on its themes of narcissistic doubling, homosexual mother-son relationships, and the heroine’s fraught relationship to her mother, the film reestablishes Freudian paradigms as the essential building blocks of horror while deploying them as a conservative blockade. A savvy satire of the genre, Scream winks at the audience, putting all of its genre elements into relief so that they can be enjoyed as genre elements. What is especially interesting about Scream is that, deconstructive though it is, it nevertheless perpetuates the same kind of reactionary offenses that characterized the genre at its least deconstructive and self-conscious. For all of its self-aware, deconstructive wit, Scream in no way updates, corrects, revises, or challenges the homophobic and, especially, misogynistic aspects of the classic slasher genre (its animus toward queer male figures, on the one hand, and female sexual agency, on the other hand). The heroine and chief Final Girl of Scream is the teenage Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). Her mother, Maureen, was raped and murdered a year before the action of the film begins; her apparent killer, Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), whom Sidney testified against, is on death row. Sidney’s nemesis is Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), a brash, brazenly opportunistic television newswoman who has written a tellall expose of the case in which she claims that Weary is innocent on both counts and that, far from his victim, Maureen Prescott was an adulteress and Weary’s lover. Weathers is convinced that Weary was framed for the murder. Moreover, she accuses Sidney of blaming Weary because Sidney cannot cope with the truth of her mother’s town-tramp sexual exploits. When Ghostface, a masked killer in a black gown, begins his killing spree, it becomes increasingly obvious that Sidney is his target. At first, she suspects her boyfriend, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), of being the killer. Yet Ghostface calls Sidney while Billy is in jail under suspicion, so it appears that Billy is innocent. At a party thrown by Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), Billy’s best friend and the boyfriend of Sidney’s best friend, Tatum (Rose McGowan), the incessantly knowledgeable horror aficionado Randy (Jamie Kennedy)

Scream’s Queer Killers

83

The heroine, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), suspects her boyfriend, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), of being the killer. Scream (1996), directed by Wes Craven, Dimension Films. Courtesy of Photofest.

pontificates about horror movie rules and genre conventions as the revelers watch John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). The film, after the usual bloodletting, culminates with a showdown between Sidney and the killers. It turns out that Billy and Stu have both been doing the killings. Citing Psycho, Billy reveals himself by quoting Norman Bates’s immortal line, “We all go a little mad sometimes.” The killers, who, in typical grandiose killer-style, want to recount the full extent of their nefarious deeds before murdering the heroine, also reveal that they murdered Sidney’s mother a year earlier. As it turns out, Maureen Prescott was also having an affair with Billy’s father, which apparently led Billy’s mother to “abandon” him and his father. He and Stu framed Cotton Weary for the murder as well as the rape. The two killers stab each other, making it look like Sidney’s father, whom they have gagged and bound and plan to frame for all of the murders, attacked them. Gale Weathers shows up and, in a reversal of her villainess role, actually aids Sidney in counterattacking the killers. Between the women, the killers are subdued and then

84

David Greven

killed. Sidney kills Stu, already mortally wounded by Billy’s stabbing of him, by forcing a television set to come crashing down on his head; Gale shoots Billy; Sidney shoots Billy in the head when he, as predicted by the horror movie expert Randy, comes back to life. Robin Wood famously argued that the horror film was an enactment of the Freudian theory of the “return of the repressed”: the energies and desires that culture has repudiated or otherwise deemed unspeakable inevitably come back to life in monstrously violent form.4 If we apply Wood’s repressive hypothesis to Scream, we must first ask what it is holding back, afraid of—in a word, repressing. The answer would appear to be, inescapably, the homoerotic bonds between Billy and Stu, which come into greater clarity along with the truth of their murderous exploits. To the extent that these bonds do come into greater clarity, no sense of anguished sympathy for them is produced in the audience; the homoerotics of their bond only add to the sense of their depravity, one emblematic of their millennial generation, as one of the major, consistently thematized preoccupations of the film. Scream provides a foundational backstory to the often violent and haphazard relationships between males in bromantic and beta male comedies in which men, while ostensibly friends or teammates or allies, routinely brutalize each other verbally and sometimes physically. Moreover, the first Scream brings into greater clarity what is at stake for movies in the representation of erotic feelings between males, especially those in pairs, which usually can only be conceived in terms of violence that can take many interrelated forms: abusive verbal play, emotional sadism, physical abuse. Fear s of a New Millennium As I will discuss, the film thematizes the fears of the imminent millennium at various points. These fears relate to a larger sense of social disturbances produced by changing gender roles and sexual identities in the period. One sequence in the film allegorically represents a sense of imminent and anxious change. Sidney, at home by herself while her father is away for a few days, waits for Tatum to come by in the evening. In one of the subtlest as well as most haunting visual effects of the film, Craven painstakingly depicts the passage of time from day to night as Sidney falls asleep in her house.

Scream’s Queer Killers

85

In a deliberate stylistic choice, the film employs a series of three lap dissolves to depict this temporal transition. Through the transformation of a crepuscular sky into an ominously dark one, Craven conveys a fear of change that suggests a larger ambivalence related to the film’s cultural moment, a time verging on a new age marked by greater levels of anticipatory fear than joy. As I will show, it is the killers who are most closely associated with millennial fears that spring from rapid and inescapable shifts in the social order, at least as they were perceived. Given that these changes related in part to the increasing visibility of queer sexuality, the killers seem to be the embodiment of millennial fears with a homophobic charge. As if tied into the forces of change, they call Sidney right on cue after day has shifted into night and she awakes in the darkness. (Teasingly, Tatum is the first one to make a call, which Sidney answers while still half-awake. The film constantly attempts to preempt our genre expectations.) In a telling exchange, Sheriff Burke (Joseph Whipp) and the deputy, Dewey (David Arquette) consider the possibility of Billy’s guilt as he sits in a locked office. (Dewey, in his mixture of awkwardness and sheepish charm, deserves a discrete analysis of his own, reflective as he is of a new-style male passiveness that is presented as sexually appealing.) Looking over a packaged version of the Ghostface killer’s outfit—marketed as “Father Death,” which, as Dewey says, can be purchased by any kid—the portly, middle-aged, worldweary Sheriff Burke remarks, “If you’d asked me twenty years ago, I would have said no way this kid was guilty. But now, this generation . . . I don’t know.” Though in a comedic mode much of the time, Scream strikes a note of seriousness here that will echo throughout the film. This generation of millennial males not only strikes fear in the hearts of older men but also leaves them fundamentally bewildered. Another key scene reinforces the theme of the older generation’s uneasiness toward youth culture. The high-school principal, Mr. Himbry (played by an uncredited Henry Winkler), aghast at the insensitivity of two male students who put on the Ghostface outfit to parody the hideous murders, threateningly jabs a pair of scissors in their faces and then uses the implement to cut the masks. As he does so, he rants, “I am sick of your entire havoc-inducing, thieving, whoring generation.” In one of the genuinely eerie moments in the

86

David Greven

“If you’d asked me twenty years ago, I would have said no way this kid was guilty. But now, this generation . . . I don’t know,” remarks Sheriff Burke (Joseph Whipp, left) to Deputy Dwight “Dewey” Riley (David Arquette, right) in Scream (1996), directed by Wes Craven, Dimension Films. Courtesy of Photofest.

film, Himbry, alone in his office, puts the mask on and menaces himself in the mirror. The point seems to be that Ghostfaceness is contagious and that men in positions of power envy the very amoral blankness they scorn in youthful psychos. Earlier, he had suggested that the only fit punishment for the pranksters was to be similarly gutted from stem to stern and publically displayed, a statement that links him to the killers and to their murder of the babysitter victim played by Drew Barrymore at the start of the film, a character who was similarly dispatched. In terms as resonant as they were phobic, Scream was a cry of despair over an apparent amorality in millennial youth, especially its male population. The homoeroticism of the Billy-Stu relationship, which the film develops into an all-but-explicit queer love affair, evinces both the unpredictable, anarchic, bewildering behavior of this “entire generation” and the shifts in male gender roles

Scream’s Queer Killers

87

synonymous with it. Scream was first released in December 1996; in a hideous fulfillment of the film’s paranoid fantasies, the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999. In an eerie echo of Scream’s two teen-male killers, the teenage Columbine killers were two high-school seniors, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They killed 12 students and one teacher using sawed-off shotguns, pipe bombs, and other weapons. One of the most persistent “causes” offered for Harris and Klebold’s actions was their apparent homosexuality, which, from my understanding, has never been confirmed. (Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant, his fictionalized version of the Columbine massacre, casts the teen male killers as lovers; one shoots the other near the end of the film, erotic bonds offering no protection, apparently, against bloodlust.) Paul Morrison has described homosexuality as “the explanation for everything”: an explanation offered for every pernicious social problem, most notably the rise of fascism in Germany. The explanatory uses made of homosexuality in these ways are almost always homophobic. To forecast my conclusions, I want to add that Scream sets into motion both new patterns of male relationships that will eventually cohere into the bromance of the early 2000s and illustrates why the bromance would be so useful as a response to these new patterns. As male gender roles began visibly transforming in the 1990s and early 2000s, one of the possibilities that emerged was that men would form new ways of interacting with one another, including open emotionalism, public displays of affection, and potential sexual contact. Scream might be said to register these fears and possibilities and offer a phobic response to them, matching male anxieties with a deeply anxious vision of masculinity. The bromance would offer an ingenious means of registering shifts in male identities and interactions while effectively locking down and re-stabilizing both. Lover s and Killer s Scream redeploys the long-standing American tradition of a homoerotic bond between a pair of young male killers. The foundation of the tradition is the infamous Leopold and Loeb case. These wealthy young men were University of Chicago students who murdered the

88

David Greven

fourteen-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks in 1924 in an attempt to perpetrate the “perfect crime.” (Both were sentenced to life imprisonment; one of the men was shortly thereafter murdered by another inmate.) This case has generated several fictional treatments, ranging from Hitchcock’s significant 1948 film Rope, based on the 1929 British stage play by Patrick Hamilton (which was retitled Rope’s End for its New York premiere) to the 1959 novel Compulsion, directed by Richard Fleischer (based on the 1956 novel by Meyer Levin), to the 1992 Swoon, an independent film written and directed by Tom Kalin that has come to represent the New Queer Cinema of the era. Adding to the mystique of this paradigm is the real-life case that was famously turned into the 1966 “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: the 1959 killing of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, by two young men. (Richard Brooks made a 1967 film of Capote’s book.) Capote’s tormented, erotically charged bond with one of the killers has been widely reported. The killers in Hamilton’s play and Hitchcock’s film, as did the real-life Leopold and Loeb, consider themselves to be Nietzschean supermen, using their “superior” intellect as justification for their thrill-killing. The killers in Scream, in pointed contrast, have no lofty philosophical ambitions. Indeed, their motivations are family- and romance-driven and nebulously opaque. Billy claims to be avenging himself on Sidney for her mother’s crimes—her “whoring” ways that destroyed his family. His frequent denunciations of Sidney as “Bitch!” intensify the note of intense misogyny in his rage. Stu, it would appear, is simply aiding and abetting Billy. If Stu’s motives are left a blank, they are decisively marked as a blank. Sidney explicitly calls him on his lack of an apparent motive in one of the many moments of the climax that threatens to turn an unspoken homoerotic element in the killers’ relationship into explicit reference. “Stu, Stu, Stu, what are you going to tell the cops when they arrive?” Sidney taunts him when she turns the tables on the killers. “Peer pressure,” he offers. “I’m too sensitive.” Taunting Stu for his lack of clear-cut motive is one of Sidney’s ways of undermining and retaliating against both murderers. Her own sense of their sexual nonnormativity as an area of weakness she can exploit in order to defeat them comes through explicitly in one moment. In a bravura effect, Sidney gains control of the voice-changing device the killers

Scream’s Queer Killers

89

use to torment their victims before killing them, using it to intimidate, confuse, and frighten them for a change. Significantly, however, it is in her own voice over the phone that Sidney taunts Stu and then calls Billy a “pansy-assed mamma’s boy,” confirming her own apprehension of the killers as contemporary versions of homosexual thrill-killers—depraved but also pathetic. The film thematizes a fusion between cinephilia (obsessive movie-love, in other words) and murderous queer sexuality. In the scene that leads to them finally having sex for the first time—Billy has complained about their “PG-13” relationship—Billy tells Sidney that their lives are a movie: “It’s all one great big movie, Sid. Only you can’t pick a genre.” Though film-geek Randy is the one directly associated with a failure to distinguish representation from real-life, Billy, especially, is obsessed with the movies, and specifically with horror. Early on he compares his relationship with Sidney to The Exorcist. Understandably, she gives him a quizzical look in response. He explains that he had just been watching the “edited for television” version of William Friedkin’s film, leading him to realize that his sex-deprived relationship with his girlfriend could be described the same way. Later, he cites The Silence of the Lambs and its heroine Clarice Starling’s flashbacks of her dead father. Her flashbacks, according to Billy, help explain Sidney’s sustained grief over her mother’s death. Finally seeing the cinematically enhanced truth of Billy’s advice, Sidney declares that she will no longer wallow in her “grief process.” To demonstrate that he has clarified things for her, she agrees to have sex with him at last. The films of Alfred Hitchcock obviously loom large over this metatextual genre film with so obsessive an interest in making its relationship to other films so obvious if not altogether explicit. Although given its pair of queer killers, Rope would have been more appropriate as a reference, Billy explicitly cites Psycho: “We all go a little mad sometimes,” he says with a cunning glint in his eye. This reference bears consideration. It is Psycho, after all, that most significantly and influentially creates the cinematic image of a motherobsessed queer man—of a mamma’s boy taken to homicidal extremes. Appropriately enough, Billy’s last name, Loomis, derives from one of Psycho’s main characters, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), the boyfriend of the murdered heroine Marion Crane (Janet Leigh).

90

David Greven

Psycho’s representation of masculinity generally problematizes the oppositions between normative and nonnormative. The apparently straight male in the heroic mode, Sam Loomis, is a surprisingly dark and increasingly off-putting character, while the villain, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who murdered his mother and keeps her mummified corpse in the fruit cellar, is a site of sympathetic audience identification for most of the film. In one scene, Hitchcock films the two characters and actors in matching profile shots, emphasizing the physical resemblances between both while collapsing the distinctions that ostensibly separate them. Normative and queer-pathological masculinities cannot be easily distinguished in Hitchcock’s challenging, unquiet film. Scream also offers contrasting portraits of masculinity but only in order to intensify its vision of a gathering cultural depravity. Perhaps the first touch that links the killers to homosexuality is Ghostface’s first appearance to Sidney. He tries to trick her into believing that he is on her front porch. “Well, I call your bluff,” the intrepid, neo-Final Girl Sidney responds, walking out onto the porch. Ghostface then jumps out of her closet instead. In a scene in which Sidney, Billy, Stu, Tatum, and Randy discuss the possible identity of the killer (it seems at this point that there is only one), gender roles are discussed explicitly. “It takes a man to do something like that,” Stu says, ostensibly referring to the physical strength needed to gut a victim and hoist her up on a tree. Tatum corrects him, chiding him for his sexism. Billy also chides Stu for his graphic discussions of the murders, which visibly upset Sidney. Interestingly, the epithet that Billy uses against Stu is “fuckrag,” which sounds like a phrase that has tumbled out of the arsenal of misogynistic insults. Skeet Ulrich’s performance as Billy and, especially, Matthew Lillard’s as Stu deepen the queer resonances of the characters in this movie that poises forever on the knife edge of explication. Ulrich’s teen anomie, brooding intensity, and perpetual white T-shirt clearly evoke James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (but without his trademark unzipped jacket). The intent look in his eyes, either sad or cunning, keeps the audience off-balance as to his identity, as it does Sidney. But when he does reveal his murderous identity, the winsomeness dissolves entirely, and he becomes truly frightening, barking “Bitch!” at Sidney. Overall, the performance as delivered

Scream’s Queer Killers

91

and directed evokes Anthony Perkins’s sensitive yet secretly sinister murderer in Psycho but with an effort made to show the dark side of his all-American geniality. Lillard’s attention-getting performance is notable for its gender-bending potentialities. He uses his basketball-player height, rubbery face (sometimes it seems on the verge of melting), and excessive emotionalism to create a memorably frenetic character. Eschewing standard male stoicism, his ostensibly straight Stu would surprise no one by coming out in full drag regalia. In one scene, set in the video store where Randy works, Randy theorizes about Billy’s possible identity as the killer. (This happens after Randy has gone into hysterics about the ways in which victims in horror movies die because they remain stubbornly ignorant of genre conventions. Randy astutely presages the fanboys who were to emerge in the new millennium with their rigid attention to the rules, conventions, and logic, or lack thereof, behind genre productions.) In perhaps the most daringly homoerotic moment in the film, Billy suddenly swings upon Randy, challenging him. “Maybe you're the killer, Randy,” Billy taunts him. “Maybe your movie-freak mind got the better of you.” As Billy gets in Randy’s face, Stu comes up from behind him, holding him almost against Billy’s body as Stu even traces a line with his finger across Randy’s ear. Homoeroticism, in typical fashion, can only be expressed through violence between men, as in this tense scene in which Billy seems to be on the verge of pummeling Randy. But the physical intimacy of the actors, and Lillard’s teasing physicality especially, threaten to tip the balance of this scene from homosocial menace into homoerotic play. The film toys with making the potentially radical suggestion that all forms of masculinity are pathologically queer. Ultimately, though, the film depicts its queer killers as the most exquisite embodiment of a widespread and deepening millennial pathology that its straight male characters vulnerably, clumsily, but heroically oppose. Characters such as the goofy Dewey, who develops a relationship with the hardheaded tabloid reporter Gale Weathers, softening her edges, and film-geek Randy are shown to be, respectively, appealing romantic prospects or essentially sweet-souled virgins. In contrast, the killers display not only a vicious misogyny but also an insufficient, faltering, confused understanding of their own masculinity. Indeed, their potential effeminacy may be more threatening to the general

92

David Greven

audience than their explicit hatred of women. What has been called “effeminophobia” intersects here with homophobia, as the killers’ increasingly inept performance of gender mirrors their ultimately inept attempt to craft the perfect murder plot. Craven makes the interesting choice to stage the big revelation scene at the climax in the kitchen—a particularly large, gleaming kitchen. Parodistically, the mama’s boy killers reveal their nefarious identities within the domestic space most closely associated with the mother and her private, familial, nurturing sphere. Clearly, Billy longs for return to the mother, just as Sidney does. Indeed, he explicitly provides this as a motive after echoing Randy’s earlier line that “motives don’t apply anymore” in the new millennium. Abandoned by his mother because of the “whoring” ways of the heroine’s mother, Billy is doubly cathected to the mother, her nurturing (which he all but claims to long for) and her sexuality (which he rebukes even though he is obviously obsessed by it). His queer qualities, as the film would have it, appear to emanate from this confusion over mother’s roles and unresolved Oedipal conflict. Freud is not dead. A Negative Oedipus Complex Billy and Sidney have sex after she announces that, if life is one big movie, the genre she will pick is porn. Ghostface suddenly appears right after they have had sex and seemingly stabs Billy to death. As we learn, this is only a ruse to distract Sidney from Billy’s real identity as one of the killers. Billy staggers, it appears, back to life in his seemingly blood-drenched T-shirt. Gaining possession of the gun Sidney now wields, Billy shoots Randy, cites Norman Bates’s line about going mad from Psycho, dabs a finger in his “blood,” and brings this sticky finger to his lips. “Corn syrup,” he announces as he tastes his fake blood, “the same stuff they used for pig’s blood in Carrie.” Through his own gesture, the queer killer associates himself with a regressive orality as well as a metaphorical female world of suffering, blood, and victimization. The issue of a regressive return to orality and its associations with homosexuality link Scream once again to Hitchcock’s Rope. In this film, the gay lovers/killers place the body of the young man they have murdered in a chest that they will use as a serving area for the

Scream’s Queer Killers

93

perverse dinner party they will host, one that includes the murdered man’s aged father as a guest. These thematics are also linked to the influential paradigms of classical psychoanalytic theory. Orality is the first of the five stages of psychosexual development (followed by the anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages) as Freud theorized it in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud’s theories of male homosexuality remain controversial. In sum, he theorizes that homosexuality is narcissistic in nature and related to the homosexual child’s intimately close relationship to his mother, whose desire the child emulates, projecting the love she bestows on the child onto another male. In response to these theories, Diana Fuss argues that Freud makes a linkage between a regressive return to orality and homosexuality.5 In a discussion in which she argues that Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs typifies these homophobic paradigms, she argues that “male homosexuality is represented as fixated at the earliest stage of the libidinal organization—the oral-cannibalistic stage—in which the recalcitrant subject refuses to give up its first object (the maternal breast and all its phallic substitutes).” In this manner, the film acutely corresponds to Freudian theory, which would have it that “the male homosexual ingests the (m)other. . . . Oral-cannibalistic incorporation of the mother not only permits a homosexual object-choice but unleashes sadistic impulses.” I have elsewhere critiqued Fuss’s reading as misrepresentative of both Demme’s film and Freudian theory.6 (I argued that the serial killer Jame Gumb [Ted Levine], who fashions a “woman suit” out of the skin of his female victims, should be read as a pathological fetishist, not a homosexual male.) Scream is, in my view, a much more homophobic interpretation of Freudian theory than The Silence of the Lambs. In returning homosexuality to the oral stage and to the pre-Oedipal mother—her symbolic breast, the mother’s enveloping domestic space and technology, the kitchen where food is prepared and eaten—the film figures this return as indicative of the regressiveness of homoerotic desire and identity. It also stages this return as a showdown between the oedipal male and female and with heterosexuality itself. The Freudian and the later Lacanian accounts of children’s psychosexual development, between them, posit the Oedipus complex

94

David Greven

as a rite of passage into the realm of patriarchy. This realm, to provide a brief summary of these accounts, is what Jacques Lacan calls the Symbolic. The Symbolic order is governed by the Law and the Name of the Father—his language and his law. It is in the father’s realm or order that subjectivity is formed, through language and obeisance to patriarchal law. The father’s order opposes the pre-Oedipal world of the mother, which is associated with sensations and the body, not language or law. Both Freud and Lacan agree that individual subjectivity is won through the renunciation of the mother and an embrace of (or, perhaps, better put, acquiescence to) the father’s order. The normative Oedipus complex—in the son’s case, desire for the mother and rivalry with and fear of the father—can only be successfully resolved in this way: the son must learn to identify with, rather than rivalrously oppose, his father, and recognize that the mother whom he desires is the father’s possession. Heterosexual desire emerges from these two achievements: identification with the father and the transformation of endogamous desire for the mother into exogamous desire for a woman who resembles her but is outside of the family. But what of the so-called negative Oedipus complex, in which things go awry? Homosexuality is the chief among these. In a footnote added in 1910 to his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud conjectures that homosexual identity emerges from an identification with the mother. After the phase in their childhood in which they intensely identify with the mother rather than the father, homosexuals “identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them.”7 For our purposes, what is especially interesting is the centrality of woman to Freud’s theory of male homosexual narcissism. Her role and her love and, most importantly, her desire become the models for the homosexual male’s own version of all of these, as we have noted. While many have read Freud’s theory as homophobic, in my view it is fairer to say that it has been put to homophobic uses in American psychiatry, which historically used it to pathologize homosexuality as arrested development rather than suggesting that it is

Scream’s Queer Killers

95

homophobic in and of itself. Freud is describing the psychological experience of a male who identifies with mother rather than father, and while it would be naïve to say such an identification is true for all homosexual men, it certainly is true for some. What films like Scream make vividly clear is the cultural reception of narcissistic, mother-identified desire. The killers in Scream are monstrous not only because they kill but because their desire proceeds from identification with and, more urgently still, longing for the mother. What complicates, or is left quite deliberately unresolved by the filmmakers, is the specific nature of the boys’ relationship to each other. Stu’s desire is left especially unclear. But in some ways, it is his desire that more clearly has a basis in the homoerotic. Though he has a girlfriend (dispatched via garage door as the partygoers watch Halloween), Stu’s chief affectional energies are directed toward Billy, to whom he is devoted. What is chiefly significant about Stu’s relationship to Billy are the ways in which Billy’s desire becomes Stu’s desire. Narcissism seems very much at work, and in homophobic terms, in the depiction of Billy as mother-identified. As are so many horrormovie monster-males who cleave to their often equally monstrous mothers, Billy is presented as emotionally stunted precisely because of this maternal over-identification. Yet Stu’s overly “sensitive” identification with Billy brings up a different psychosexual dynamic altogether. His Billy-fixation is a textbook definition of mimetic desire, a desire to resemble the other. Stu becomes the mirror reflection of Billy’s narcissistic, mother-based desire. In psychoanalytic terms, mimetic desire is associated with hysteria, which often involves a wildly uncontrollable series of bodily ailments or phenomenon, instances in which the body itself seems to have gone awry. And if hysteria often involves the copying of another person’s illnesses, Stu definitely would appear to copy Billy’s psychosis as well as to make this psychosis very much his own. That hysteria is also associated with bisexuality or some kind of gender role confusion makes these connections doubly interesting, especially when we consider Matthew Lillard’s acting style and what he brings to the role. With his pliant, rubbery body; intense and often comedic emotionalism; and his, at times, oddly theatrical and effeminate manner, he evokes both the somatic mayhem and the gender-bending of the classic hysteric. We

96

David Greven

can say, then, that between them Billy and Stu inhabit narcissistic and hysterical modes of queer desire.8 The Fury of the Final Girl Carol Clover has influentially theorized that the Final Girl, who alone survives to confront and slay the slasher-movie monster, usually must face off against a sexually nonnormative male, such as Leather­ face in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As Clover herself points out, the Final Girl’s function here does not fall within parameters that can be effortlessly recuperated for feminism. To see the Final Girl as a feminist icon is to ignore or to fail to perceive the homophobic basis of her triumph.9 Like Athena at the climax of the Aeschylean tragic trilogy The Oresteia, she appears in order to speak out on behalf of patriarchy and to establish its laws as binding. Siding with the male rather than the female, Athena is the feminine face of the father’s law, perhaps appropriate for a goddess who bursts forth fully armed not from her mother’s womb but from her father’s (Zeus’s) forehead. The Final Girl of horror films sides not with her own mother but with the law of the father. In so doing, she spectacularly opposes the sexually nonnormative killer and his obsessive devotion to the mother.10 Sidney is somewhat of an unusual slasher heroine because she maintains a loving devotion to her dead mother. Indeed, the film’s only progressive politics lie in its interest in bonds between women— Sidney and her mother; Sidney and her cheeky, loyal friend Tatum; and, most surprisingly, between Sidney and Gale Weathers, who is initially presented as her nemesis. That the two women work together to defeat the killers has an undeniable feminist charge. Yet it is an expensively produced one, depending, as it does, on the pathologization of the killers not for their killer proclivities as much as for their queer ones. That Sidney and Billy have sex is partly Sidney’s decision and also a part of the killers’ plan. In their slavish devotion to horror conventions, they believe that Sidney can only be killed once she is no longer a virgin. In an interesting juxtaposition, Craven intercuts scenes of sex between Sidney and Billy with scenes of Randy, Stu, and the others all watching John Carpenter’s Halloween and

Scream’s Queer Killers

97

the various murders committed by the white-mask-wearing killer Michael Myers. Pointedly, the scene from Halloween that plays at this point is the one in which Michael kills Bob, the young guy with glasses who goes downstairs to get his girlfriend, Lynda (P.J. Soles), a beer after they have had sex. As Michael impales lanky, wriggling Bob to the wall with his long, phallic knife, Billy is shown to be sexually penetrating Sidney. It cannot be insignificant that in the scene from Halloween that plays during the moment of sexual consummation between Billy and Sidney, the particular victim is male. Adding to the complexities here, Michael Myers, in a bizarre parody, puts a sheet over his body and then impersonates Bob by putting his glasses on, creating the image of a bespectacled ghost. Michael goes upstairs, initially tricks Lynda into believing that he is Bob, playing a prank on her, and then kills Lynda by strangling her with the cord of the telephone on which she is gabbing with the heroine, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). In killing off both the boyfriend and his girlfriend upstairs, Michael provides a grisly foundation for the entire teen slasher genre to follow in the 1980s that Scream would eventually parody: the killing off of sexually active teens. When Michael kills Bob, he nails him to the wall, a grim parody of phallic penetration that suggests that the male victim has been put into a position of forced, helpless penetration. The crude as well as satirical implication made here is that, while Bob may have just penetrated his girlfriend during sexual intercourse, he has now been penetrated by Michael Myers. To whatever extent that this was an implication being made in Halloween, Scream’s specific citation of the scene makes this implication an obvious one. If, on some level, Michael is parodying heterosexual male potency and would-be heroism by both killing and impersonating the boyfriend, Scream makes ironic use of Halloween’s own ironic stance. The penetration of the male victim by the male killer in Halloween is intertextually as well as aesthetically linked (through editing/intercutting) to the scene of heterosexual intercourse in Scream—a confusing and provocative analogy, to say the least. In a further and inescapable analogy, Stu’s staged stabbing and murder of Billy also doubles the scene of heterosexual sex that has just occurred between Billy and Sidney. What emerges, then, is a portrait of homoerotic intimacy as violence, as possible only through

98

David Greven

violence. Further, this male-on-male violence-as-intimacy is a copy of heterosexuality, its perverse “imitation.” Homoerotic violence not only inadequately copies and substitutes for heterosexual sex but also is used to parody this normative relation. It is difficult to know what comes first for the filmmakers, but this sense of gendered and sexual originals and copies also has an aesthetic, Chinese-box dimension. The video of Halloween becomes the film within the film, a copy of the film we are watching. These associations find their most dramatic realization in the confession/revelation scene in which the killers tell Sidney who they are. As he did with Randy, Stu, from behind, wraps his arms around Billy as Billy tells their story of killing Sidney’s mom, framing Cotton Weary, and killing the others. They then reveal their big surprise—they have tied and gagged Sidney’s father, who plops out of a storage closet, immobilized and pleading with his eyes for Sidney’s help. The killers’ biggest coup will be to kill everyone, Sidney and her father included, and frame Sidney’s father for it. To ensure the believability of their story, the two proceed to stab each other, drawing dark, vivid blood. As Billy stabs Stu, Stu keeps screaming “Get up”—the unmentionable “it” being the key word in the imperative sentence. As Billy commands, directs, Stu plunges his knife into Billy’s side, a horrific parody of Christ on the Cross and John, the apostle Jesus loved, watching his suffering in anguished sympathy. Stu then complains that he’s dying: Billy has cut too deep. The bonds between the boys, transmuted into violence, cannot be contained by this violence—even it goes awry, a little mad sometimes, along with the killers. The delirious array of motifs—of copying, doubling, and reflection in the film—all suggest themes of narcissism while flaunting the metatextuality of Craven’s cinema, its narcissistic relationship to the previous cinematic works it doubles and mirrors so aggressively and satirically. Confirming the centrality of the figure of a woman to narcissistic homosexuality, Billy holds onto Sidney as he and Stu stab each other. It’s almost as if she anchors him to his own desire as well as to his and Stu’s murder plot. Moreover, everything about the killers’ plot revolves around Sidney and her mother. Is it possible that Billy projects the love he longed to receive from his mother onto Stu—loving him not as he had been loved but as he

Scream’s Queer Killers

99

wished he had been loved? Any viewer of the film will know immediately that such a reading can only be speculative, since the film never shows us a Billy who has more than expedient feelings toward Stu; indeed, as noted, it is Stu who seems the more devoted to his friend and accomplice. Nevertheless, by strong implication, these young men share their deepest bond with each other and serve each as the other’s double. Sidney seems to serve as a conduit for their desiring as well as rage-filled energies—as if she exists to take the sting of homoeroticism out of the deaths they together produce. If she is a heterosexual alibi, their actions deprive their alibi of much credence. A potentially progressive theme keeps threatening to make Scream a more challenging film. Tatum strongly suggests that Sidney is unable to accept that her mother was sexually active with other men in town. But Tatum does not demean Sidney’s mother. “Maybe your mom was an unhappy woman,” Tatum further suggests. Certainly in the photographs we see at times, the smiling, earthy woman standing next to her daughter or in close-up suggests a vital and intense presence whose death, especially such a horrible one, was a terrible loss. In its interest in strong women and female bonds, the film hints at a more radical sensibility. These hints, however, are overwhelmed by the phobic conservatism of its depiction of the queer killers. We might more plausibly call Clover’s Final Girl by another name: The Fury, or The Finalizing Woman, a female figure who comes into her own through her own bloodletting campaign. Through her retributive violence, she also ensures narrative closure. What I want to draw out here is the essential conservatism of the Final Girl’s function: she exists not only to defeat the killer/male monster but also to correct his aberrant, nonnormative sexuality. In many ways, to read the Final Girl as a conservative figure is counterintuitive. How can one side with the killer against the heroine who finally defeats him? Every impulse of the viewer is to identify with the vulnerable and finally heroic woman who survives. The point here is not to side against the woman—and, personally, I am inclined to identify with the heroines of all films, especially genre films—but to develop an understanding of the ways in which her victory depends upon—is, indeed, constituted by—her destruction of queer energies. As a case in point, when Sidney learns that Billy is a killer,

100

David Greven

her reaction is telling. She experiences no apparent sense of betrayal or anguish, says nothing typical or expected along the lines of, “Billy, how could you do this to me, I thought you loved me,” or even, “Why did you just have sex with me?” She makes a subtle but immediate shift from slightly uneasy girlfriend to slayer of queer males. From Scream to Bromance Though far from immediately obvious, overlaps between the slashercomedy Scream and the later genre of the bromance (which intersects at some points with the beta male comedy) exist precisely in terms of each genre’s representation of femininity. Humpday is an especially interesting case because it not only foregrounds an interest in the homoerotic dimensions of male-male relationships but was also directed and written by a female auteur, Lynn Shelton. Though a surprisingly sensitive and at times affecting film, I Love You, Man squarely figures the woman as the culprit for the discord that develops between the male protagonist-friends of the movie. The main difference between slashers such as Scream and the bromances of the early 2000s is that, in the former, ardor between males has murderous dimensions. Yet what is oddly similar in both genres is that bromance emerges as a complex agenda that the woman must not only figure out but also find a way to defeat. In the bromance, the relationship between the men is not so onerous a threat to the woman as it is in Scream. Yet the homoerotic aspects of bromance prove to be quite threatening in their own way. Rashida Jones’s character is shown to be vividly disgusted by Paul Rudd and Jason Segel’s tongue-flicking antics at the Rush concert, and in Humpday, the wife of the married friend is put off in numerous ways by the admittedly over-the-top, absurd plot gimmick of the two male friends’ decision to film themselves having sex with each other and to submit this footage as an entry for a local pornographic film contest. Across the genres, homoerotic bromance is threatening most especially to the woman—and the woman is shown, explicitly or otherwise, attempting to eradicate the threatening male bond and is almost always successful at doing so. The crucial touch in Scream’s climactic sequence is the appearance of the father within the scene of the Final Girl’s revelation.

Scream’s Queer Killers

101

Though bound and gagged, in a position of defeat, the father serves a vital function here. His presence confirms two important things at once. First, patriarchy is threatened, as suggested by the procession of wearied, bewildered, and concerned older male figures, such as Sheriff Burke and Principal Himbry. Second, the father extends his blessing not to the degenerate new millennial sons of the post-patriarchal order but to the emergent patriarchal daughters, the new Athenas who explode from the father’s nearly defeated body and restore this body through retributive violence done in the father’s name. In effectively destroying the queer, pathological sons of the new millennium, Sidney, as Fury, as Athena, restores the endangered but persistent patriarchal order. In a bizarre parody of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, in which the TV screen itself reaches out to media-obsessed Max Renn (the character played by James Woods) Sidney kills Stu by tipping the television set over so that it lands, explosively, on his head, an acute parody of the movie-media obsessions of the meta-millennial generation. One of the few poetic shots in the film is the final image of beautiful, evil Billy, writhing on the ground in his death throes, his white T-shirt now drenched in blood from bullets successively shot by Gale and Sidney. The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer of Camille Paglia’s phrase is now the beautiful boy destroyed. Twin Furies Sidney and Gale Weathers stand in phallic authority over his bloodied, dying, prostrated form. The death of the queer villain is the birth of a patriarchal feminine order that stands as the last bulwark against an impending millennial degeneracy. The late 1990s Scream trilogy was paranoid fantasy of the new millennium, a fearful prediction of the directions that American manhood might take. It prognosticated a new form of depraved masculinity, one in which queer and straight modes fuse in their attack upon the father’s law. If representation was any indication, reports that the millennium would usher in a new breed of patriarchydefying American psychos were greatly exaggerated. While the number of scary males in the movies has endlessly grown, it is also true that these oppressors have waged campaigns not against the normative social order but, more often, in support of it. Films as diverse as One Hour Photo (2002), Phone Booth (2002), Anger Management (2003), Observe and Report (2009), the Saw films, and the Showtime

102

David Greven

series Dexter (2006–2013, about a serial killer of other serial killers) all feature seemingly menacing “psychos” who turn out to be upholders of traditional moral values.11 As did the spate of late 1990s gross-out and sex-fueled teen comedies emblematized by American Pie and Dude, Where’s My Car?, bromances take as their subject white heterosexual manhood as it has been refashioned over recent decades to meet challenges from feminism and a newly visible gay culture. In these terms, the films are particularly indicative of the shifts in the national construction of gender in the past two decades. For all of their antic humor, bromances emphasize the masochistic suffering of the male characters. Yet, for all of the suffering on display, the films maintain a cool distance from their male characters, even as they present their emotional lives as the central narrative focus. What makes the films so interesting is the general attitude of ambivalence they maintain toward their subjects—an ambivalence that stems, in part, from fears about the increasing visibility of queer desire. The Scream films of the late 1990s, especially in their anticipatory depiction of bonds between men that threaten to explode into terrifying homoerotic explicitness, emerge as key forerunners to several recurring themes in the films of the post-millennium. As Linda Williams has famously shown, the body genres of horror, comedy, melodrama, pornography, and, I would add, comedy, have the central overlap of being genres that have a physical effect on the spectator’s body.12 Scream emerged during the same period as the spate of gross-out teen comedies, such as American Pie and Dude, Where’s My Car?, which were forerunners to the later bromances with stars such as Jason Segel and Seth Rogen, which tend to skew older. The late-1990s series of teen comedies were nostalgic paeans to male adolescence. The films figure adolescence as a state of acceptable male indulgence in polymorphously perverse pleasures that will have to be denied and repressed once young men pass into adulthood and its more coherent set of obligations, including, especially, heterosexual marriage.13 Scream evinces the overlaps between horror and classical tragedy: unlike the teen comedies, it is about the end of fertility, the end of pleasure, the end of sexuality. Nevertheless, what Scream shares with the antic teen comedies of its era is a view of adolescent masculinity as a last gasp before the normalization

Scream’s Queer Killers

103

of adult masculinity sets in—hence the killers’ hatred of father figures and hence, too, their indulgence in a state of polymorphously perverse, sexuality-blurring, and violent pleasures. To take one significant film as an example, I Love You, Man, starring Paul Rudd as Peter Klaven and Jason Segel as Sydney Fife, demonstrates the evolution of the teen comedy of the late 1990s into the adult-skewed bromance of the early 2000s and also evinces the strange overlaps among the slasher and both forms of comedy. While Peter’s initial and plot-motivating problem—that he has no friendships with other men—leads him to become obsessed with Sydney, in the end it is the initially charismatic Sydney who is shown to be the more desperate, need-driven friend. After secretly putting up a series of comic but also earnest billboards of Peter, a real-estate agent, in various James Bond-like poses, Sydney reveals his increasing desperation as Peter—at the behest of his fiancée, Zooey, played by Rashida Jones—rejects him. Calling up his presumably endless number of other guy friends, becoming ever lonelier, the big, loping, intimidating Sydney becomes a mass of yearning as Peter heads toward the comparatively stable and need-free stability of heterosexual marriage. There are weirdly resonant similarities between Matthew Lillard’s Stu and Segel’s Sydney—their height, their manic excessiveness, and also their seemingly aloof, detached, and sardonic distance from the proceedings. Just as Stu comes to seem desperate and even pitiable, especially in his increasing separation from Billy, who seems willing to sacrifice him for his own ends, Sydney comes to seem like a spurned lover, cast adrift. That series of billboards suggests a homoerotic fixation on Peter, fantasies of Peter in a series of male guises and personas. Exemplified by Pineapple Express, I Love You, Man, and Superbad— the classic liminal work between the earlier teen comedies and the later sub-genre—bromances continue to indulge in the extreme states of bodily mayhem that marked both the earlier gross-out teen comedies and also the humiliation comedies of Ben Stiller that first began to be released in the late 90s as well. But most of their content concerns their male protagonists’ bewilderment about the experience of adult masculinity. What Scream most resonantly anticipates is the prolonged and sustained ambivalence at the heart of male relationships in the bromance, male relationships being a holdover

104

David Greven

of teen friendships with an uneasy and ambiguous relationship to heterosexuality and the ever-looming pressure of marriage. Male relationships symbolize, at once, what men have lost and what they must renounce in order to become men, but also function as a resistance point, what the man will tenaciously preserve from his adolescent days and unmarried life in order to prove that he has not relinquished his independent masculine integrity when submitting to marriage, in the most conventional movie narrative terms. Preserving male bonds emerges as an unwieldy and challenging project, but, being comedies most often, bromances just about always effect reconciliations of some kind between their conflicted male protagonists. For example, Sydney Fife shows up at Peter Klaven’s wedding, and both utter versions of the film’s title to each other. Yet the sense of an impasse between men remains equally inevitable. In the related genre of the beta male comedy pioneered by Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen in Knocked Up and Funny People becomes disillusioned with his male friends on the one hand and comedian idol (Adam Sandler) on the other. In the more solidly bromantic Pineapple Express, Rogen and the happily pot-smoking and loyal James Franco inevitably come to emotional blows after exchanging a set of arduous physical blows with Danny McBride. In Superbad, the teen guys on the verge of college have a rapturous climactic reconciliation, but their impasse dominates the film. The representation of women as “Woman,” a monolithic figure of disappointment, judgment, and rectitude, is perhaps the chief connection among these genres. The Final Girl of Scream has a surprising amount in common with the desired woman of Knocked Up: as played by Katherine Heigl, she is aloof, glassy, and contemptuous of the slobby Seth Rogen’s antics and inability to move on with his life. As does Scream, Knocked Up proceeds to chip away at the woman’s stability and stature, rendering her finally a “body genre” all of her own—experiencing the pains of labor, uttering a string of expletives, and properly in love with Seth Rogen’s character, who is shown to have been in the moral right all along. I do not mean to suggest that the representation of a woman in labor is crude, only that Knocked Up’s representation of this experience is excessively, baroquely crude, highlighted by a series of laborious and borderline-racist jokes about Heigl’s character being forced to be treated

Scream’s Queer Killers

105

by a rude, abrasive Asian-American gynecologist played by beta-stalwart Ken Jeong. The eerie, almost frightening overlap that emerges through a comparative lens between slashers and Knocked Up is that both seem to engineer the apparently untouchable and invulnerable woman’s confrontation with extremes of bodily pain, distress, humiliation, and vulnerability. Ultimately, both Scream and the later bromances of the early 2000s continue to render male intimacy as an impossibility, or, more properly, as a possibility that must be defended against at all costs. The chief defense is almost always violence in its numerous forms— the wretched arguments between Michael Cera and Jonah Hill in Superbad, and the literal and even shocking violence in the brawl among Rogen, Franco, and McBride in Pineapple Express, as well as its melee of bodily harm during the film’s climactic sequence. The violence that seethes beneath the antic surface of bromances recalls the violence that the male duo perpetrates against its hated targets in Scream but just as resonantly that which the male duo inflicts upon itself. Violence emerges as the economy of male relationships, what coordinates them and holds them in check and what memorializes the central but unacknowledgeable loss at their center. Notes 1. Barry Keith Grant, Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 6–7. 2. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993). 4. While many critics have found Wood’s paradigm of great use, others have also dissented from it. (And, famously, Michel Foucault challenged what he called Freud’s “repressive hypothesis” altogether.) But Wood himself offered a corrective to his earlier invocation of the theory in discussions of the political radicalism of 1970s horror. Discussing what he viewed as the conservatism of 1980s horror, he wrote: “I suggested earlier that the theory of repression offers us a means toward a political categorization of horror movies. Such a categorization, however, can never be rigid or clear-cut. While I have stressed the genre’s progressive or radical elements, its potential for subversion of bourgeois patriarchal norms, it is obvious that this potential is never free from ambiguity. The genre carries within itself the

106

David Greven

capability of reactionary inflection, and perhaps no horror film is entirely immune from its operations. It need not surprise us that a powerful reactionary tradition exists—so powerful it may under certain social conditions become the dominant one. Its characteristics are, in extreme cases, very strongly marked.” Robin Wood, “Horror in the 80s,” in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 170. 5. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers (New York, Routledge, 1996), 95. 6. Fuss, Identification, 89. See Chapter 3 of David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010) for an expanded treatment of The Silence of the Lambs and Fuss’s reading of it. 7. Freud wrote Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 but kept adding to it until 1924. This footnote was added by Freud in 1910. This quote appears in Volume 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, page 145n1. 8. For an extended study of mimetic desire as the basis for hysteria, see Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 9. I have argued elsewhere that Carol Clover’s theory of the Final Girl needs to be updated through the perspectives of queer theory. For an elaboration of the themes in this section, see the last chapter of David Greven’s Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), in which I develop, in a revision of Clover, a theory of the Finalizing Woman. 10. The Friday the 13th film series, exemplary in this regard, features an undead serial killer, Jason Voorhees, who reveres his dead mother, fetishistically maintaining a spooky shrine to her decapitated head. 11. For an expanded discussion of the spate of films that normalize the menacing male who once terrorized the screen, see David Greven, “American Psycho Family Values: Conservative Cinema and the New Travis Bickles,” in Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema, ed. Timothy Shary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 143–62. 12. See Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991): 2–13. Williams did not include comedy within the body genres of melodrama, horror, and pornography and their “systems of excess.” 13. See David Greven, “Dude, Where's My Gender? Contemporary Teen Comedies and New Forms of American Masculinity,” Cineaste 27.3 (2002).

II The Contemporary Cinematic Bromance

chapter 4

I Love You, Hombre Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance Nick Davis

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the most famous explicator of “homosocial” desire as a class-inflected, typically nonsexual bond between men, has been equally influential in differentiating “minoritizing” valences of homosexuality (as a form of eroticism or style of being that delineates a specific group of people) from more “universalizing” aspects of homosexuality (engrained within a spectrum that encompasses all erotic desires and helping structure the ways we talk about, think about, and enact them).1 Applying those terms within a narrower discussion of the bromance, a universalizing definition of that subgenre would include countless films in which the intimate bond between two men, while ostensibly platonic, carries greater narrative and emotional weight, perhaps even a romantic or eroticized weight, than do the relations either man enjoys with wives, girlfriends, or other characters. The cinema has never lacked for such scenarios, which reveal themselves as early as the 30-second fragment of two men dancing together for William Dickson and Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1895, a date as pivotal within the history of homosexuality as in genealogies of the movies. Sometimes these homosocial dynamics only become apparent through fine-grained, counterintuitive exegesis, a practice that dates back further than some cinephiles may realize. In the 1940s, for example, Parker Tyler dissected mainstream classics like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) so as to articulate their embedded allegories of male-male intimacy.2 Robin Wood’s influential 1978 manifesto

110

Nick Davis

“Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic” professes more interest in the subtle challenges to heteronormativity in Howard Hawks’ adventures and comedies and in Jean Renoir’s elegant dramas than in films featuring more outwardly “gay” characters.3 If these films and critics inform a universalizing history of the bromance, then the “minoritizing” potentials of that term designate a recent spate of films that require no against-the-grain reader like Tyler or Wood to excavate their homosocial foundations. To the contrary, such foundations are foregrounded in the production decisions, advertisements, cast interviews, and press releases that are as much a part of “the movie,” considered as a trans-media and multiplatform commodity, as are the sounds and images on screen. John Hamburg’s I Love You, Man (2009) furnishes a quintessential example of the bromance strictly defined, centering its plot and even its title around the Paul Rudd character’s series of platonic blind dates in pursuit of the ideal best man for his wedding. Everywhere from Variety to Rolling Stone, reviews of the film featured the word “bromance” in the headline.4 Critics and print editors evidently shared the belief of studios, screenwriters, and publicists that homosocial desire, especially when played for laughs—albeit laughs with, not laughs at—is now a mass-marketable commodity. “Bromance” itself emerges as a term of exchangeable currency, even if some journalists have opined that, as in so many other twentyfirst-century markets, the bubble has recently burst.5 In defining this subgenre, then, contexts of production and promotion seem especially inextricable from those of narrative, structure, and style.6 Alfonso Cuarón’s comic, erotic, and overtly allegorical road movie Y tu mamá también complicates the minoritizing and universalizing aspects of “bromance” discourse in especially pointed ways; the film also departs from more typical bromances with regard to production contexts, marketing protocols, national resonance, and gender politics. Released in Mexico in 2001 and in 38 additional global markets over the next two years, Y tu mamá también precedes the innovation of the “bromance” as a mass-market neologism for a certain type of Hollywood product.7 At the same time, in its recordbreaking Mexican rollout and its triumphant 2002 release in the United States—where the movie reaped the highest-ever box-office gross for a film that bypassed Hollywood’s rating system—Y tu

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

111

mamá también generated the kind of commercial and critical heat that may well have opened the eyes of artists, executives, and exhibitors to an untapped market for flagrantly homosocial popular narratives. The subsequent stature of the film’s creators, cast, and crew in the U.S. and abroad only further confirms what the film’s closely monitored production and its Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay already made clear: that Hollywood took careful, approving notes on this movie. A bromance before there were “bromances,” Y tu mamá también for many reasons feels like an especially direct progenitor for that lexicon and product line, if also a revealingly atypical one. The fact that the intense, rambunctious, but severely tested friendship between protagonists Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna) and Julio Zapata (Gael García Bernal) eventually entails a direct carnal encounter between them would surely have ensured Y tu mamá también’s U.S. market placement as an upscale “art house” title even if its nonEnglish dialogue and unabashed approach to sexuality and nudity had not already guaranteed such a classification. That said, Y tu mamá también’s patterns of distribution and attendance in Mexico made it much more of a homegrown Superbad than a boutique object— although the adjective “homegrown” is difficult to apply in the case of Y tu mamá también’s relation to the Mexican film industry. All in all, Cuarón’s movie deters us from imagining the bromance as a specifically mass-market or a specifically Hollywood formula, even as the movie also refuses easy, contrasting categorization as an art house property or a “foreign” film. The ripe but conflicted bond between the U.S. and Mexican film industries, mediated by their shared corporate interests, mirrors the tie between the buddy protagonists of Y tu mamá también, which gets further triangulated through their shared desires for Luisa and their (often literal) drive to achieve obedient, heteronormative adulthood in a class-structured society. Ironically, many societies where Y tu mamá también circulates as a pop commodity have entered a phase of gendered and sexual possibility in which profits can be reaped from the spectacle of those slippery, eroticized male-male relations that these same societies often labor to straighten or foreclose. Cuarón’s movie presents itself both as an overt subversion of gendered and sexual codes and as a barbed but jocular comment on

112

Nick Davis

national politics and class structures, in which the latter mechanisms typically quell provocative shifts in the former. North-of-the-border bromances such as Wedding Crashers (2005), Superbad (2007), and I Love You, Man rarely undertake such critiques; if anything, they subdue their stylistic and thematic ambitions in order to foster a safe mirage of middle-of-the-road entertainment. Such anti-style thus serves as both ironic counterpoint and assuaging envelope for the films’ boundary-testing glimpses into the fluidities of “male bonding.” One key task, then, for rigorous, politicized critics of popular cinema is to underscore how such ideological structures often underpin the movies’ most conspicuous challenges to gendered and sexual norms. Viewed from this angle, Y tu mamá también’s explicit political allegory fulfills a critical function, exposing the relative vacuity of U.S. bromances but also the implicit tenets of race, class, and access on which a film like I Love You, Man semi-secretly depends. In other words, Cuarón’s movie reveals its U.S. brethren to be inattentive toward ideology and also, in that very sense, saturated with it. Even so, just because Y tu mamá también delivers both a strong political critique and a potent riposte to masculine normativity, whereas most films of its type supply only one or the other (or neither), we cannot presume that the movie’s relation to ideology is thus entirely radical, its content entirely manifest. Fredric Jameson registers just this point in his Marxist deconstruction of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the rare U.S. studio film to contest sexual and class-based politics with a vigor comparable to Y tu mamá también’s. Inspired by Jameson’s approach, then, we can savor Cuarón’s uncommon achievements in these areas while still asking, does there remain some latent control, some fixed ground from which he calibrates his nervy, bromantic triangle? As if in answer to this very question, some critics suggest that the female lead, Luisa Cortés (Maribel Verdú), occupies a retrogressively functional position, especially as compared to the film’s brave upending of machismo and its highlighting of persistent class stratification in postPRI Mexico.8 Considered, though, against parallel figures in the U.S. bromances that Y tu mamá también mirrors and prefigures, Luisa’s agency within the narrative and her alignment with Cuarón’s camera seem unusual indeed. Far from serving only as the passive vessel of

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

113

desires between men, Luisa vastly outstrips the marginalized female characters of most U.S. bromances in her charisma, her complexity, and her active complicity in Julio’s and Tenoch’s gradually desublimated erotic communion. Y tu mamá también may not stand as a thoroughly radical document, but its retrenchments lie elsewhere, for once, than its address to female desires; the movie is craftier and saucier on this point than almost any subsequent bromance. Selling the Bromance, or How to Be Big in Mexico Y tu mamá también was a pivotal entry in a wave of Mexican films at the turn of the millennium that cultivated larger-than-ever audiences at home and abroad, helping Mexico become “the only market [for film exhibition] that is constantly growing.”9 General audiences, especially outside of Mexico, might easily ascribe this phenomenal upswing to the commercial popularity or rapturous critical reception of a few defibrillating films such as Y tu mamá también, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000), or the prior box-office champion, Antonio Serrano’s Sex, Shame, and Tears (1999).10 In fact, though, this collective boom in Mexican film production unfolded in the aftermath of a historic crash in the domestic market. State supports for cinema, avidly stoked by President Luis Echevarría in the 1970s, were gradually eroded by the neoliberal policies of José López Portillo, Carlos Salinas, and other subsequent presidents and administrations; by 1991, not a single Mexican film was produced exclusively with state monies.11 Total cinematic output even for privately financed films or private-public hybrids collapsed from 33 productions in 1997 to only 11 in 1998, just a year before the successive box-office juggernauts of the Serrano, González Iñárritu, and Cuarón films, followed by Carlos Carrera’s even higher-grossing The Crime of Father Amaro in 2002.12 The specific appeal of these films and their casts to a diverse national audience simply does not explain such a spectacular turnaround, which depended on several major policy changes during the 1990s. These included the deregulation of movie-ticket prices; the opening of new cinemas in potentially lucrative suburbs, city centers, and previously ignored rural markets; and what Paul Julian

114

Nick Davis

Smith describes as an “emergent promotion-innovation paradigm” in the wake of diminished state supports.13 Beyond the sheer fiscal resources offered by wealthy investors and transnational companies, privately funded films can also take advantage of professional marketing campaigns, a popularly anointed stable of marketable stars, and the creative involvement of producers who are more than bureaucratic grant administrators. Indeed, Smith posits these as a holy trinity for expanding profit potential.14 Y tu mamá también, a privately financed enterprise, was thus the first Mexican film to attempt that staple of Hollywood film production, the cross-country promotional tour. Both the carefully choreographed junkets and the film’s website stressed Cuarón’s creative liberty in developing the work, chiefly connoting his newfound freedom from governmental oversight but also fostering perceptions of the film’s iconoclasm regarding sex and gender.15 Reviewers and audiences generally relished this bawdy, humorous, deftly photographed, and craftily scripted tale in which Tenoch and Julio, two roustabout high-school graduates, invite the older and very sexy Luisa, Tenoch’s cousin’s wife, to join them for a road trip to a magnificent but imaginary beach they have concocted as a lure to get closer to Luisa. Meanwhile, the cast and crew’s personal chaperoning of Y tu mamá también from corner to corner and coast to coast of Mexico all but reproduced the film’s own road-trip narrative. Among other effects, this tour carried the movie into rural and working-class areas of the country where, as sociologist Rafael de la Dehesa reports, “traditional” masculinity may be even more subject to a “certain fluidity” of gendered scripts and sexual behaviors than is true within those urban enclaves where most of Y tu mamá también’s viewers reside, as do Mexico’s largest self-identified LGBT communities.16 Within this unprecedented scope of advertising and exhibition, the bromantic bonds among the film’s makers served as prominent motifs—a strategy with important U.S. precedents. Four years previously, Miramax Films had turned Gus Van Sant’s modestly budgeted therapy drama Good Will Hunting into its most lucrative crossover hit to date, largely by hawking the lifelong friendship between stars and cowriters Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as vigorously as they advertised the film’s plot and characters. Y tu mamá también appeared to mimic this tactic, albeit with three sets of bonded bromancers to

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

115

sell. In many media accounts and in Cuarón’s own interviews, the tie between actors Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, acquaintances from early childhood just like Damon and Affleck, merged with an account of the characters’ on-screen rapport.17 Of course, Good Will Hunting’s stars and scribes did not need to address how a simulated sexual encounter in the film redounded onto their real-life relationship, or explain why the rowdy familiarity that otherwise infused their performances somehow posed a problem when it came time to enact what Y tu mamá también’s script calls “un beso jugoso, de amor,” or “a juicy kiss, a kiss of love.”18 With the actors pulling the usual PR bait-and-switch of advertising while also disavowing the film’s homoeroticism—“It would have been much easier if the guy I had to kiss weren’t my best friend in real life!” said García Bernal—other bromantic associates were called in as expert witnesses to give their gay blessings to the union.19 As Carlos Cuarón reports, despite the objections from some members of “the radical gay community” to Tenoch and Julio’s post-coital disgust, “a Mexican director who is a friend of ours, he is openly gay, he said, ‘You have finally captured Mexican machismo with that kiss.’ ”20 Describing himself as “blown away” by this verdict, “because coming from this guy, that is a huge compliment,” Carlos set the tone for the marketing push, one that widely and candidly divulged the full spectrum of the film’s eroticism yet managed to position homosexual desire as a lens for seeing something other than homosexuality per se: machismo, Mexico, or actorly bonhomie. Meanwhile, Alfonso and Carlos Cuarón put the “bro” back into bromance, often stating how they cowrote the script over a period of 10 years, during which time, according to Carlos, they achieved a level of personal maturity that rescued Y tu mamá también from its initial contours as a Mexican version of Porky’s, the famously puerile Canadian sexcapade of 1982.21 Similar lore of a screenplay emerging out of two men’s youthful bonding reprised itself later in the U.S. marketing of Superbad, written in their high-school years by costar and bromantic figurehead Seth Rogen and his hometown pal Evan Goldberg, who modeled their eponymous lead characters after themselves. Rooting both films’ “surprise” confessions of love between men within a real, well-publicized bond between their makers lends the fictional narratives a credible (and marketable) sense of knowing

116

Nick Davis

wherefrom one writes, even as Y tu mamá también goads Julio and Tenoch toward physical expressions of love that obviously exceed the bounds of Carlos and Alfonso’s kinship. At the same time, the insistent parallels between the characters and their creators can have conservative ramifications. Critics including María Josefina SaldañaPortillo, Hector Amaya, and Laura Senio Blair read Julio and Tenoch’s sexual tryst as an abortive anomaly, quickly sacrificed to the cultural mandates of heterosexuality. Within that context, pitching a film’s script as the fruit of teenage experimentation can serve to downplay or foreclose the homoerotic fantasies that Y tu mamá también and Superbad suggestively conjure but which the writers, now grown up, reposition as a “phase” in their creative juvenilia.22 The press memes that followed Y tu mamá también through its U.S. and Mexican runs yielded still further bromantic figures. The Cuaróns often interpolated cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki into their accounts of fraternal and artistic synergy. Even more conspicuously, Alfonso used the various Y tu mamá también press tours to champion the work of his close friends and fellow Mexican auteurs Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro, whose film The Devil’s Backbone (2001), a supernaturally inflected allegory of Franco’s Spain, became the second project fostered by Anhelo Producciones, the company the Cuaróns founded in order to make Y tu mamá también. Cuarón, del Toro, and González Iñárritu quickly became known on the international press circuit as the “Three Amigos” and appeared at festivals, premieres, and award shows with their arms slung warmly around each other’s shoulders, as Damon and Affleck ceaselessly did four years prior to promote Good Will Hunting.23 These chummy joint appearances crescendoed in 2006, as all three directors achieved their most profitable amalgams of popular and critical prestige: Cuarón’s dystopian thriller Children of Men, González Iñárritu’s globe-trotting drama Babel, and del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, yet another supernaturally inflected Franco allegory.24 Appearing as a trio on The Charlie Rose Show to discuss their films and their involvements in each other’s work, Cuarón described Children of Men, Babel, and Pan’s Labyrinth as “sister films” and himself and his amigos as “liking to stick our forks in each other’s salads.” This phrase is remarkably redolent of those like “becoming milk brothers” and “stirring each other’s vanilla” by which Julio and

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

117

Tenoch express the homosocial communion they achieve by sleeping with each other’s girlfriends and having sex in short succession with Luisa. Y tu mamá también thus undertook its aggressive, specifically tailored press tour as an opportunity to circulate stories of longstanding, collaborative affection among the newly minted stars, the Cuaróns, and their peer auteurs.25 The film thus participates in a pattern swiped from the Miramax playbook and later appropriated by Rogen & Co. on behalf of a Hollywood film marketed as a “bromance” in the most specific, minoritizing terms. In other words, Y tu mamá también coalesced within a reciprocal economy of overlapping marketing strategies by which Hollywood and Mexico peddled the spectacles and discourses of men exploring their relations with each other in outwardly tender and sometimes eroticized terms. Selling stars and backstories has always been a major Hollywood racket, but the era of the bromance’s ascendance was also one in which celebrity culture exploded to new levels of 24-hour multimedia coverage and viral, synergistic marketing became less and less distinguishable from the movies it promoted. As a result, Y tu mamá también’s emphatic stress on bromantic ties both within the so-called “text” and as a selling point of that text is noteworthy from social, industrial, and narrative standpoints, particularly in Mexico. It’s a Small World After All Beyond advertising their fervent camaraderie, inscribing prominent thanks to each other in their credit rolls, and joking about wifeswaps to Charlie Rose, the “Three Amigos” come across in all of their films as attempting to broker a union between the values of art and those of commerce and also between the resurgent but still precarious Mexican film industry and the Hollywood companies that often facilitate their projects. Granted, as Maria Pramaggiore reminds us, “Hollywood” itself has long since become a romantic misnomer for a hydra-headed network of transnational conglomerates only provisionally rooted in American wealth or southern Californian endeavors.26 Speaking directly to this notion of international film production as an uneasy alliance of jealous, dissimilar, but mutually desiring partners, Y tu mamá también and its “sister”

118

Nick Davis

Tenoch’s fury at Julio (left), lit and framed as its own form of intimacy. Y tu mamá también (2001), directed by Alfonso Cuarón, IFC Films.

films invite us to consider art/commerce and Mexico/Hollywood as themselves bromantic pairs. As part of its remarkable knack for allegorizing almost every thematic, political, and industrial tension that shapes the film, Y tu mamá también figures these strained symbioses in dramatic terms— especially if we understand Julio to be Tenoch’s poorer but attractive and upwardly ambitious complement. Across the narrative and through the melancholy coda of Y tu mamá también, when the boys bid anxious and permanent farewells to each other, lower-middleclass Julio visibly deplores but also covets Tenoch’s caste-based privileges. These include trips to the United States, which enable access to such highly fetishized American commodities as the comic books Tenoch regrets buying for Julio once he admits to cheating with Tenoch’s girlfriend. (The shot of Tenoch fulminating at Julio that “You fucked the friendship, you fucked me!” is backlit and framed almost exactly like their eventual kiss; the visuals and the dialogue thereby couch such fervent hostilities as basically another form of intimacy.) For his part, Tenoch dresses with ostentatious casualness given his abundant means, one of many verbal, stylistic, and behavioral affectations that he cultivates—to include the friendship

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

119

itself—in pursuit of those “popular” credentials that attract but also repulse him in Julio.27 These dynamics inform the bond Y tu mamá también observes between Julio and Tenoch but also between culture and money more generally and between Mexican and American cinemas. However, for these pairings to function as bromances, we cannot grasp them only as dialectical contrasts but also, somehow, as alternate figures of “the same.” That is, they must be aligned via some shared attribute, in the way that maleness establishes a ground of tantalizing but taboo commonality within any bromance. Once again, this task requires reading the form and narrative of Y tu mamá también in and through its production contexts. Variety eagerly advertised the movie, even at its earliest stages, as Cuarón’s return to Mexican roots and his “first pic under his own shingle,” referring to the autonomous production unit that proved as key to Y tu mamá también’s promotional discourses as were the brotherly loves among the on-screen and offscreen talent.28 The movie was not, of course, a self-generating enterprise, nor even a straightforwardly “Mexican” one, though neither was it wholly co-opted by the fiscal, aesthetic, and ideological forces we broadly designate as “Hollywood.” Shot in Spanish amid Mexican locations, with primarily Mexican and Spanish actors and crew, Y tu mamá también was principally financed by Mexican vitamin magnate Jorge Vergara, an elliptical figure whose fortune was built in part on such huckster commodities as herbal remedies for HIV.29 Still, the film recruited top-drawer U.S. technical artists, including the Coen Brothers’ sound designer, Skip Lievsay, and gained financial underwriting from pre-sales to U.S.-based distributors like Good Machine and 20th Century Fox.30 This corporate backstory bears direct if contradictory impresses on how Y tu mamá también looks and sounds, and even on the story it tells, to include its bromantic vibe and its boundary-pushing homoeroticism. Good Machine acquired the film in order to kickstart a soon-defunct internal brand called “Uncensored Cinema,” which was designed to bring sexually daring films to international markets.31 This sale would have encouraged, then, the nudity in Y tu mamá también and its challenges to heteronormativity. At the same time, the pre-sale of U.S. DVD rights to MGM required that an Rrated cut of the as-yet-unmade movie would eventually be required

120

Nick Davis

for then-thriving rental outlets like Blockbuster and for “family” retailers like Walmart. This censored version, which represented many American viewers’ first exposure to the film, excises most of its nudity and sexual content, including the culminating kiss and strongly implied liaison between Tenoch and Julio on which the entire plot ultimately hangs.32 Thus, despite its compelling veneer of sexual and aesthetic emancipation, Y tu mamá también was always simultaneously in bed with Mexican and U.S. monies and with liberal and reactionary projects. The gay U.S. magazine The Advocate, despite an overwhelmingly positive endorsement of this “most talked-about movie of the summer,” nonetheless posits that Y tu mamá también’s lucrative appeal to diverse audiences depends on its own mixed messages of sexual rule-breaking and political conservatism.33 If the movie dramatizes a lingering, finally insuperable ambivalence within Julio’s and Tenoch’s feelings for each other, then it is worth pointing out that the film’s very existence also depends upon a strained, productive, but asymmetrical and resentment-laden bond between Mexico and the United States. According to Carlos Cuarón, in terms that reprise the old phobic trope of sodomy as degrading violence: Mexican migration toward the U.S. increased and became illegal at the same time that the Mexican government shifted from nationalist populism to the here-I-come-so-just-lubricateyour-ass neoliberalism so loved by Ronald Reagan and the like. In the seventies we would have voted against the U.S. in every way, in the eighties that was not so, it was almost the other way around. I guess we also started to differentiate between the American government and the American people. But it’s always been a very complex love/hate, poor/rich, needy/need-you relationship.34

Cuarón’s sentiment echoes in the way that the boys’ intense but finally ineffable attachment depends on both a shared obsession with U.S. cultural productions (comic books, Frank Zappa albums, even Cheech & Chong movies) and a shared hostility toward the U.S. expressed in homophobic language: the sixth rule of their Charolastra Manifesto holds that “Anyone who roots for Team America is a fag.”

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

121

The very production of Y tu mamá también, much less its commercial success, relied on U.S. media’s Tenoch-style craving for the street cred, handsome surfaces, and sexual titillations they attribute to Mexican culture. The project depended equally, though, on Mexico’s Julio-esque appetite for U.S. cash and infrastructure and for American stylistic templates. Reviewers, journalists, and scholars have been as consistent in perceiving Y tu mamá también as a pointed departure from Hollywood norms (with its “360-degree alertness to humanity and an appreciation for the porous nature of sexuality that the American Pie bakers of Hollywood couldn’t conjure in their dreams,” according to Jan Stuart) as they have been in arraigning it as a depressingly homogenized retread of those very archetypes (“Just another obnoxious sexed-up teen comedy, with subtitles,” according to an anonymous colleague whom Stuart quotes in her review).35 Lubezki quotes with pride a Uruguayan friend who told him that Y tu mamá también “helped him to understand who we [Mexicans] were, and how sex was so important to us,” yet in Jason Wood’s collection of interviews about Y tu mamá también, this passage emerges only a few pages after Alfonso Cuarón has dismissed such national essentialisms as “bullshit” and inimical to real creativity.36 A bromance, of course, always depends not just on the barely veiled infatuation of two non-amorous or pre-amorous partners but also on their “very complex love/hate, poor/rich, needy/need-you relationship,” a dynamic that rears its head in such generic exemplars as Superbad, Wedding Crashers, Humpday, and I Love You, Man. The notion of the bromance, then, offers some useful purchase on why Y tu mamá también is neither an unproblematically Mexican film, unpolluted by U.S. influence and agendas, nor the kind of wholly deracinated object that critics of the U.S.-driven, blandly “globalized” economy unfairly posit as the only type of product such a system is capable of producing.37 Still, well beyond crossing one national border, the film’s ardent but antsy fusion of American and Mexican influences bespeaks a corporatized model of film production that has less and less to do with nations per se. Y tu mamá también stops being an American or a Mexican movie once we recognize it as what Hester Baer and Ryan Long call an “emblematic product of globalization.”38 Similarly, the tastes, desires, and behaviors of Tenoch and Julio, ostensibly

122

Nick Davis

“Mexican” teenagers, have been constituted indivisibly by multiple cultures. Globalization, like social class, is not just an antagonizing force that calls their “bromance” to a close; each names a set of preconditions that shape Julio and Tenoch into the kinds of subjects they are, responsible as much for bringing them together as for pulling them apart. Considered in the light of social stratification, Julio and Tenoch appear quite different, perhaps especially to each other. Compared, though, to the imaginary Italian lovers who are their phantasmal foes, or construed as mutual consumers of the same media, or as inexperienced lovers and premature ejaculators, Tenoch and Julio feel and appear quite similar. The movie underlines this point with the boys’ mirrored opening scenes, as they make typically hasty and fumbling love to their respective girlfriends, Ana and Ceci, and again later in their comparably pathetic “seductions” of Luisa. The offscreen narrator even uses homologous lines of dialogue to describe each boy’s internalized feelings of post-coital shame.39 Viewers of Y tu mamá también often read the boys’ panic that their girlfriends will be sexually unfaithful while traveling abroad as proof of their possessive immaturity and displaced homoerotic anxieties, just as they read Luisa’s absolute certainty that Ana and Ceci will sleep with plenty of Italian men (“fags,” according to Tenoch and Julio) as a sign of her relative wisdom. In my view, the extra layer of the joke, as Tenoch implores Ana in flagrante delicto not to be lured by any “Italians . . . gringo backpackers . . . French fags . . . dirty Mexicans . . .  Chinamen . . . Brazilians, Germans, Argentineans, Poles,” etc., and as Julio has furtive, last-minute sex with Ceci under the resonant pretense of searching for her passport, is that the boys are as fully agitated by the prospect of female libidos as they are by their sudden self-perception as interchangeable, unremarkable goods in a competitive world market. Luna’s and García Bernal’s joint marketing as budding Mexican ingenues only further stokes an impulse to view these actors as parallel commodities—birds of a feather who have flocked together since childhood, sold as Hollywood-ready stars in Mexico and as breakout Mexican talents in Hollywood and abroad. All of these factors amplify what Lee Edelman, Tim Dean, and countless other critics have outlined as the dialectics of sameness and difference that

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

123

define homosexuality in its cultural life, which inevitably pervade the bromance form.40 When the going is good between Julio and Tenoch, they pull similar stunts and harbor similar desires even as they covet “opposite” attributes of each other’s style and social constitution. They coordinate their personal convictions into the form of a shared manifesto, and they masturbate in tandem on sideby-side diving boards while rhapsodizing aloud over the MexicanLebanese Hollywood star Salma Hayek, another “emblematic product of globalization.” When the finale of Y tu mamá también drives Julio and Tenoch apart, though, it is not clear whether it is their shared gender they now find intolerable, having crossed a line of sexual exchange, or if their dramatically opposed class status causes them to recoil from each other at the same moment. Perhaps, though, it is a broader dimension of sameness they suddenly find nauseating (in Tenoch’s case, literally so). Axiomatically in line with Sedgwick’s homosocial triangle, Julio and Tenoch solidify their kinship through the medium of the women’s bodies they conspire to share. Still, as these women are increasingly defined by foreignness—because Ana and Ceci are heading to Europe, and because Luisa hails from there—the boys are drawn inexorably closer together and, by dint of that fact, stand increasingly exposed as wholly generic adolescents unlikely to compel the fascination of their traveling countrywomen or of the foreigner in their midst. Meanwhile, as the ironic narration and drive-by glimpses of more locally enmeshed subjects make clear, even the “Mexicanness” of these boys has been all but evacuated of specific content. As we have seen, the “Mexicanness” of Y tu mamá también itself is up for debate, too, but Cuarón is a much savvier, more contented navigator of international economies, whether of money, art, or desire, than his young alter egos are. If Y tu mamá también, with its seductive spectacle of two boys semi-platonically in love, is itself an “emblematic product of globalization,” it notably does not inhabit that mosaic structure of interlocking, multilingual narratives of globally dispersed contingency and chance that Baer and Long highlight as the favored protocol of post-2000 transnational film. This template, heightened to what some would call a ludicrous extreme of fortuitous encounters in González Iñárritu’s Babel, seems

124

Nick Davis

conspicuously suppressed in Cuarón’s implacable road-movie trajectory from point A to point B—all the more so since the characters decline to engage strangers in the way a film like Babel requires in order to catalyze its overlapping serendipities. Yet Y tu mamá también encompasses its share of remarkable coincidences. For instance, not only do the boys stumble onto a resplendently unpolluted beach of the very kind they falsely advertise to Luisa but they discover that “Boca de cielo,” a name they invented, is indeed its local sobriquet. Saldaña-Portillo interprets this beach as a figure for national nostalgia, commemorating a Mexico whose only antagonists were external powers rather than the immanent corruptions of capitalism.41 I think this beach—despoiled by a pack of wild hogs mere hours after our protagonists arrive—equally represents a utopian ideal of artistically distinguished and popularly celebrated Mexican film, finally achieved by political and industrial fiat just at the moment when a fully “Mexican” film per se might no longer be possible. In the open-air bar where Julio, Tenoch, and Luisa pass the first part of the night, they exclaim a toast to their own private Mexico with the same inebriated abandon that underwrites their toasts to the clitoris and the blowjob. All three signify as fully compelling but nevertheless outlandishly idealized objects of youthful (b)romance. Looking Back: Women, Bromance, and New Queer Cinema In reading Y tu mamá también as a parable of either homoerotic or transnational anxiety, Luisa may appear confined to a depersonalizing role: the icon of alluring Otherness, the vessel for stirred vanilla. Scholarship thus far on Y tu mamá también often privileges her character, played by top-billed Maribel Verdú, as the decisive figure in plot and theme. Still, critics divide rather sharply among those who find both the role and the film essentially reactionary and those who see Cuarón and his collaborators as transforming clichés in vital ways, opening up genuinely new arrangements of gender, class, and power.42 One inroad toward re-evaluating Luisa’s role and her formal presentation within the film entails placing Y tu mamá también within a historical transition between the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s and the bromances of the following

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

125

decade—two constellations of popular cinema that Cuarón’s movie conjoins while casting each in a fresh light. B. Ruby Rich famously hailed New Queer Cinema as a movement of sexually dissident cinema that flouted heterosexist norms through complex, self-reflexive filmmaking styles while nevertheless refusing to stint on funky attitude and spectatorial pleasure. These qualities allowed aesthetically adventurous, politically prickly films such as Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), and Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) to entice commercial distributors and find an audience in the Anglophone commercial market. Still, by the late 1990s, many critics, including Rich, lamented that the political edge and collective coherence of New Queer Cinema had been sacrificed to profit-minded and artistically blunted expropriations. Perhaps not coincidentally, the movement entered a seemingly dormant period amid the same Good Will Hunting and Chasing Amy years when the modern bromance first began to percolate in U.S. studio filmmaking. As we have seen, Y tu mamá también presages the more fully flowered bromances that Hollywood produced five and ten years later via its brazen mostly amiable portrait of homosocial affection and its strategies for marketing this premise. At the same time, Y tu mamá también’s exposés of political corruption, crumbling national infrastructure, and widening class divide recall the New Queer Cinema’s impulse toward ideological critique, even as the movement merged more closely with the box-office mainstream. It is worth observing here, too, that Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja (1991), his debut film and his only previous Spanish-language feature, premiered in the same year as many watershed texts of New Queer Cinema, constituting the rare AIDS-centered feature from that time period to confront HIV as something other than a gay disease—and in a comic farce, no less. Whereas, then, Y tu mamá también struck the generalist film journal Cineaste as defying the conventional wisdom that “after the Farrelly brothers, there is nowhere left to take the raunchy-buthapless adolescent male shtick,” the same textures and plot points registered with the LGBT-targeted magazine The Advocate as sparking “the hottest queer cinephile debate since New Queer Cinema polarized gay audiences a decade ago.”43 Several of Y tu mamá también’s key tropes resonate with recurring frameworks of the New

126

Nick Davis

Queer films, including that of the road movie, which Robert Lang highlights as an organizing rubric for a surprising number of latecentury queer films.44 According to Lang, queer road movies rarely culminate in happy endings, though Julio and Tenoch are certainly more fun-loving hedonists than the terse, haunted hustlers of My Own Private Idaho; neither do they cross over into the highway banditry that bonds Jon and Luke in Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992). Clearly, the ethos of the road and the role of the car in Y tu mamá también signify in copious and more culturally specific directions—from the glimpse they afford of an increasingly crisscrossed and interconnected Mexico in the post-NAFTA era to their idiomatic swerve away from the largely urban-centered Latin American cinema of the 1990s.45 For my purposes, the intertwining of Y tu mamá también’s bromantic aspects and its open-road trajectory place it within a continuum of New Queer films that employ sexual and topographical discoveries as informing tropes for each other. This continuum encompasses other popular bromances while inevitably highlighting those traits of Cuarón’s movie that distinguish it from its American cousins. I Love You, Man serves as an unexpectedly apropos point of comparison, since although it is not a road movie per se, it places diegetically gratuitous emphasis on highways and driving scenes, even by the standards of films set in Los Angeles. Beyond major plot points in which cars figure prominently (to include the scandal of the roadside billboards that Sydney buys to save Peter’s job or the wild ride down the interstate to get Sydney to Peter’s wedding), I Love You, Man stages many scenes in automobiles that could easily have been set elsewhere, such as the early, embarrassing episode when Zooey uses the speakerphone in Peter’s car to inform her friends of their surprise engagement. The loneliness of L.A. culture, yielding a minimum of person-to-person contact during day-to-day routines, is prominently telegraphed in several shots of Peter driving throughout the film and in unusually long transitional interludes; these amplify our sense of Peter’s isolation, ascribing his lack of buddies and “bros” to his inhabiting of a specific urban center. At one point, Peter’s best idea for winning friends is to make chipper overtures to a car full of men he does not know who are halted at the same stoplight he is. That said, unlike Y tu mamá también, which critically observes how Tenoch and Julio avoid

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

127

contacts outside their peer group and hold within a narrow range of car-, sex-, and drug-centered pastimes, I Love You, Man simply takes it as a given that Los Angeles is a fundamentally anonymous zone inhabited almost exclusively by upper- and middle-class white professionals who must learn how to locate and befriend each other within what otherwise appears as empty space. The first scene of I Love You, Man, even before the marriage proposal, revolves around Peter’s desire to buy that Holy Grail of modern L.A., an undeveloped plot of land. The romantic, even hedonistic implication of the film is that the city is Peter’s for the taking if only he can break out of his car and hook up, in a manner of speaking, with a man or group of men much like himself. The politics of setting are of key concern to Jameson’s analysis of Dog Day Afternoon, a film invoked earlier as a pertinent forbear to the kind of multidimensional allegory Y tu mamá también constructs around sexually adventurous lives that remain proscribed within capitalism’s structuring relations and ideological limits. Dog Day Afternoon became a hit on the strengths of Al Pacino’s method-acting performance and the sensationalistic true-life story about a gay but married man who robs a bank in order to finance his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. Jameson, though, treats such spotlighting of sexual nonconformity as a decoy for the “actual” content of Lumet’s film, which inheres for him in the depiction of the Flatbush bank branch as a paradigmatic scene of alienated labor, a colonial outpost within the heart of a First World city. The bank is even staffed by women in their frequent global role as the mules of corporate profit, which inevitably accrues to an unseen cabal of male magnates.46 By this same logic, I Love You, Man is surely not the only U.S. bromance Jameson would decry as sequestering the real problems of modern urban life (massive wealth extraction; white flight; and the classist, chauvinist, and anti-communal interests of corporate power) within a Trojan Horse of gendered and sexual boundary-pushing—indeed, a much feebler one than Dog Day Afternoon presents. Hence, we chuckle and coo as Sydney accepts Peter’s best-man proposal while public fountains hyperbolically ejaculate large jets of water in the background of the shot. Sydney, the film’s only apparent representative of anything like a working class, turns out to be a humble but highly solvent day trader. Thus, the restoration of his bromance

128

Nick Davis

with Peter entails, not unusually, a rallying together of attractive and upwardly mobile white guys. Peter’s wife Zooey, the only non-white character in the principal cast, observes this reunion with a smile— though, as is true of the female characters in Wedding Crashers, Superbad, Humpday, and Knocked Up, she is never fully engaged within and rarely even present for the scenes of Peter and Sydney’s jubilant camaraderie and gentlest confidences. Many would charge the New Queer Cinema, including its roadmovie iterations, with similar kinds of ideological deception, foregrounding identity politics in the guise of subverting them while declining to address or even deliberately re-inforcing other axes of inequality. In The Living End, the quintessential New Queer road movie, nervy images of all-male eroticism and of PWAs refusing to go softly into that good night arrive swiftly and harshly at the expense of women—specifically, the caustic, penis-obsessed, gun-toting lesbians who pick Luke up on the side of the road and are portrayed as too dumb to successfully shoot him.47 The movie has a firm, angry hold on urban dispossession and governmental indifference, but its active occluding of female perspectives is hardly unusual among New Queer films or bromances or films falling somewhere between. At least a generation previously, Molly Haskell famously and justifiably fretted about the diminishment of women’s roles with the rise of the Butch Cassidy–style buddy film in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a pattern that has resurfaced bounteously with the rise of the bromance during the past decade.48 These concerns turn out to be equally recurrent with respect to the so-called Mexican New Wave of the early 2000s, which Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz describes as rich in women’s roles and yet perpetually at risk of reprising the usual feminine archetypes of Mexican cinema and culture: the Goddess Mother, the Virgin, and the disloyal and sexualized La Malinche.49 Inclined toward maternal solicitude with her husband and with Tenoch and Julio, introduced in a chic gown and shoulder wrap of virginal white, and partly responsible for upsetting the boys’ alliance by having sex with both of them, Luisa has been interpreted as occupying all three of these conservative archetypes. The very fact, though, that Y tu mamá también shuttles her among such dissimilar positions—not to mention how blatantly the film flaunts the generic clichés it wittily undercuts—suggests that Cuarón and Verdú are up

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

129

to something wilier than confining Luisa to the role of one-dimensional foil. In the kind of quick screenwriting grace note so typical of Y tu mamá también, Luisa resides on 52 Machu Picchu Street in the aptly designated Apartment 3-D. Verdú’s verbally and physically limber performance, Cuarón’s and Lubezki’s refusal to exploit her through fetishizing close-ups of her body (while also refusing to prudishly overlook that body), and her shrewdness in sussing out the depth of the boys’ inchoate attraction to each other all contribute to how truly three-dimensional a character Luisa remains. Just before the bedroom denouement of Y tu mamá también, near the end of an unbroken, seven-minute, deep-space sequence shot in which Julio, Luisa, and Tenoch drink, toast, and revel in each other’s company, Luisa walks to the jukebox in the outdoor bar; the camera leaves the boys to track forward with her. On her way back to the table, Luisa/Verdú dances to the song she selects, sips from her shot glass, and maintains for 30 seconds a barely blinking look directly into Cuarón’s lens: a look of sexy, smiling, conspiratorial fellowship with Y tu mamá también’s audience. An absolute anomaly within the film, Luisa’s forceful, illusion-busting gaze does more than surpass the bashful, bystanding non-gazes that are so typical of women in Hollywood bromances, though it certainly does this; whereas characters like Zooey limply look on as their boyfriends and buddies commune with each other, Luisa powerfully looks back. Beyond just a privileged gazer, though, Luisa is a full-bodied participant in Julio’s and Tenoch’s exploration of their own feelings. She is concomitantly a stage manager, catalyst, witness, and highly aroused collaborator within that erotic and affective investigation. In this configuration, “bromance” denotes not a male-male transaction that is channeled through an unsuspecting woman but a coaxing outward of male longings that a woman actively helps propel, partly in the interest of her own gratification and entailing her strongly transmitted sense that the audience may want to see what she sees or enjoy what she enjoys. Reporting on the openingweekend grosses for I Love You, Man, Brandon Gray discloses that its audience “was roughly even between males and females,” which was unusual at the time for a male-driven studio comedy.50 In sync with all the statistics about gendered patterns among ticket buyers for gay male romances like Brokeback Mountain, the not-at-all-hidden truth

130

Nick Davis

Luisa aims her frisky, conspiratorial gaze right at the film’s audience. Y tu mamá también (2001), directed by Alfonso Cuarón, IFC Films.

about gay romances and “straight” bromances is that women constitute a huge and sometimes a majority proportion of their patrons. This fact of patronage consequently poses a major influence on production and marketing, one that Y tu mamá también anticipates and diacritically embeds with this incisive, unexpected look from Luisa. In a film that blends so many genres and penetrates so many boundaries within and between Mexican and international markets, Luisa emerges in her own way as a border crosser. She refuses to stay put as the feminine “other” to the boys’ sexually excitable sameness. Perhaps, then, the homosocial triangles outlined in Between Men are not the only or even the best rubrics within Eve Sedgwick’s scholarship for understanding why the proto-bromance of Y tu mamá también struck such a nerve and remains so piquant—and so very distant, in my view, from Baer and Long’s sense of the Spanish-born Luisa as symbolizing a “castrating woman bent on emasculating Mexico.”51 In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick’s reading of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd underscores both the strong textual signals of Billy’s homoerotic appeal to his fellow sailors and also the toxic brew of homophobic vitriol and homosexual longing that the Sergeantat-Arms, John Claggart, feels in relation to Billy. More innovatively,

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

131

Sedgwick argues that Captain Edward Vere, often interpreted as a figure of rational disinterest, actually enacts his own form of homoerotic gazing and longing, managing through a willful reading of naval law that only appears dispassionate to make Billy’s gleaming body ecstatically available to the ship’s titillated crew, including himself. Despite the relative opacity of Vere’s desires compared to Claggart’s, Sedgwick identifies Billy Budd’s occlusion of exactly what transpires inside Vere’s cabin or closet as a mark of that character’s centrality to what the title page calls “an Inside Narrative.” She thus ingeniously succeeds at making Vere complicit within the same circuits of homoerotic desire that lash together Billy, Claggart, and the other sailors, rather than Vere embodying their exempted onlooker or purely objective jurist. Like Dog Day Afternoon, Y tu mamá también operates so evenly and overtly as both a national and a sexual allegory that, despite Jameson’s claims, it is hard to imagine there could be more lurking beneath such a floridly self-glossing text. And like Billy Budd, Y tu mamá también turns on a climactic scene to which we are unexpectedly denied access either by the images or the offscreen narrator: the fateful, tequila-lubricated night among the three travelers in Chuy’s cabin. Rather than read this occlusion as a sign of homophobic censorship, even before the further closetings imposed by the R-rated cut, and rather than valuing this elision only as a chance to project whatever salacious events a given viewer fancies between Tenoch and Julio (or between Luna and García Bernal), I read this scene as the moment when Luisa becomes more than a shrewd spotter of bromantic ties or a happy handmaiden of erotic gratifications that exclude her. If Y tu mamá también is not a story about two gay characters but a proto-bromance of singularly bold sexual brinksmanship, it stands to reason that gendered borders between men and women and their “respective” desires might also prove highly porous— entirely compatible or at least complicit with each other. Motivated by more than insight or altruism, Luisa engineers the Tenoch-Julio encounter because she, too, gets off on it and even wants to get in on it. By the time this (vanilla-)stirring finale rolls around, if not well beforehand, Y tu mamá también memorably erodes easy assumptions that bromances are American, platonic, and made exclusively

132

Nick Davis

for mass audiences (or, for that matter, exclusively for art house patrons) or that they reproduce homosocial triangles in which women are limited to passive, vehicular roles. Cuarón’s movie manages to occupy a transitional ground between the artistically sophisticated, politically attuned, and sexually explicit New Queer Cinema and the determinedly middlebrow, cleverly escapist, rhetorically gutsy, but sexually coy world of the bromance. Perhaps for that reason, or maybe because some of the utopian longing that accrues to “Boca del cielo” rubs off on Y tu mamá también itself, it is tempting to construe the film as miraculously avoiding the generic pitfalls of misogyny and ideological myopia that so often manifest in both the New Queer and bromance traditions. Again, one need not dig far into scholarly and journalistic responses to find critics who lambast the movie for these very shortcomings. Still, given the spectatorial pleasures and intellectual provocations I have gleaned from so much New Queer Cinema and from so many popular bromances, I intend no backhanded compliment when I say that Y tu mamá también’s unique achievements feel especially pronounced in the context of those two movements—and particularly so as a relative latecomer to the former and an early prognosticator of the latter. If, inevitably, the movie cannot fully account for all of the political and thematic cans of worms it opens, I take great satisfaction in how strongly and sneakily it pushes against conventional boundaries—and often pushes right through them. Notes 1. For Sedgwick’s definition of the “homosocial,” see Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), especially the introduction and Chapter One; for her definitions of “minoritizing” and “universalizing” aspects of homosexuality, see the introduction of Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) as well as pages 82–86 and 91–94. 2. See Parker Tyler, “Double into Quadruple Indemnity,” reprinted in American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2008), 249–57. For more of Tyler’s broad-minded inquiries into the erotic subtexts of Hollywood movies, see his collection Screening the Sexes (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972). For a rich historical account of Tyler’s impact on American film criticism, including his remarkable attention

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

133

to homoerotic subtexts, see Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 3. See Robin Wood, “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic,” Film Comment 14.1 (1978): 12–17. This essay is positioned quite early, suggesting its durable value for later generations of queer readers, in the important anthology Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995): 12–24. 4. See, for example, Todd McCarthy, “A Tortured Bromance” Variety (16 March 2009): 26–29; and Peter Travers, “True Bromance,” Rolling Stone (2 April 2009): 92. 5. See, for example, “Has the Bromance Lost Its Passion?” Chicago Tribune (30 July 2010): 33. 6. Diagnosing precisely what bromance constitutes—a genre, a subgenre, a narrative trope, an affective state, a media discourse, a marketing term?—is a task of this collection, not of any one article. I admit to frequent changes of mind, though I hope my analysis suggests why such confusion arises and implicitly argues that bromance encompasses all these facets at once. 7. Market statistics from Hester Baer and Ryan Fred Long, “Transnational Cinema and the Mexican State in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también,” South Central Review 21.3 (2004): 151. 8. For severe assessments of Luisa, see Baer and Long; Elena Lahr-Vivaz, “Unconsummated Fictions and Virile Voiceovers: Desire and the Nation in Y tu mamá también,” Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 40 (2006): 79–101; and Tabea Alexa Linhard, “Unheard Confessions and Transatlantic Connections: Y tu mamá también and Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 5.1–2 (2009): 43–56. Sergio Wolf’s conspicuous omission of Y tu mamá también from his digest of the most influential latter-day Latin American films appears motivated by his convictions that Cuarón’s film is almost entirely designed for foreign consumption and that it embraces an anachronistic mode of national allegory. See Wolf, “No Turning Back,” Sight & Sound 20.9 (2010): 14–17. 9. Simeon Tegel, “South of the Border, Box Office is En Fuego,” Variety (30 July–5 August, 2001): 10. 10. For more on Y tu mamá también’s record-setting box office, see Mary Sutter, “ ‘Mother’ of all B.O. in Mexico,” Daily Variety, Gotham Edition (18 June 2001): 18. 11. Baer and Long, 155. Not unexpectedly, Rafael de la Dehesa describes concurrent patterns of a surging gay-rights movement in Mexico under the same administrations that supplied public funds to filmmakers and artists in the 1970s; a decline in the gay-rights movement under the successively more conservative administrations of the 1980s; and an erratically regalvanized gay-rights coalition in the 1990s as the movie industry underwent its own crashes and upswings. See de la Dehesa, Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 16.

134

Nick Davis

12. Juli A. Kroll, “The Cinergetic, Experimental Melodrama: Feminism and Neo-Machista National Consciousness in Mexican Film,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 26 (Oct. 2007): 27. 13. Tegel, 10; Paul Julian Smith, “Transatlantic Traffic in Recent Mexican Films,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 12.3 (2003): 398. 14. Smith, 396. 15. Tegel 10; Smith, 395. The box-office windfall even survived such major setbacks as the restrictive “18” rating that Y tu mamá también received from the Mexican review board, which formally barred any customers the same age as the film’s protagonists from seeing the movie. Cuarón successfully positioned the rating as a dangerous act of political censorship by the newly elected, left-leaning Vicente Fox administration, itself a late but resonant plot point in Y tu mamá también. Whether or not in response to Cuarón’s savvy rhetorical maneuvers on this question, many film exhibitors in Mexico refused to enforce the official rating. See Jason Wood, The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), 105–107; and Nuala Finnegan, “ ‘So What’s Mexico Really Like?’: Framing the Local, Negotiating the Global in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también,” Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market, ed. Deborah Shaw (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 31. Aided, perhaps, by his PR experience in stumping for his Hollywood projects A Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1998), Cuarón adroitly turned further criticisms of Y tu mamá también into sympathetic rallying points for wider audiences. Without naming names, the director recalls how Mexican critics or festival journalists occasionally denigrated Y tu mamá también’s style or politics as superficial. He reframes these charges as evidence of racism, arguing that the solipsistic, hormone-driven comedies produced by white directors in the U.S. or the U.K. are rarely indicted for the limpness of their aesthetics or their politics. See J. Wood, 105, 108. 16. de la Dehesa, 20. For a fascinating account of masculine sexualities in Mexico, torn between self-conscious idealizations of “Mexicanness” on the one hand and practices and discourses absorbed from the U.S. on the other, see Héctor Carrillo, The Night Is Young: Sexuality and Mexico in the Time of AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), published at virtually the same time as Y tu mamá también’s global rollout. 17. See, for example, Pat Aufderheide, “Y tu mamá también,” Cineaste (Winter 2001): 33; A.G. Basoli, “Sexual Awakenings and Stark Social Realities: An Interview with Alfonso Cuarón,” Cineaste (Summer 2002): 29; Erik Meers, “Love and Kisses, and Your Mama, Too!” The Advocate 865 (11 June 2002): 2; and J. Wood, 103. 18. Alfonso Cuarón and Carlos Cuarón, Y tu mamá también, Screenplay (Guadalajara: Producciones Anhelo, 2001), 226. Alfonso Cuarón described the filming of the climactic three-way encounter among Tenoch, Julio, and Luisa as a particularly

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

135

difficult day for all three actors, permeated with crankiness and displaced anger and necessitating 16 takes to shoot. See Meers, 3. 19. J. Wood, 103. 20. Kevin Conroy Scott, Screenwriters’ Masterclass: Screenwriters Talk About Their Greatest Movies (New York: Newmarket Press, 2006), 63. 21. Scott, 57. See also Aufderheide, 32. 22. Cuarón partakes of this Oedipal logic in describing Y tu mamá también as an allegory for an adolescent country that itself needs to grow up. See Basoli, 26. 23. Cuarón even extends these close-kin relations to the films themselves, describing Y tu mamá también and González Iñárritu’s Amores perros not just as “the first films that really show contemporary Mexico” (Basoli, 27) but as “cousins, because both deal with a society that is fractured by class” (J. Wood, 109). 24. We see further evidence of Hollywood’s enthusiasm for the “Three Amigos” but also of the qualified “Mexicanness” of their films in noting that Universal Pictures produced Children of Men, that Babel was funded in part by Paramount, and that Pan’s Labyrinth, co-produced by five smaller production companies, was picked up for distribution by Warner Brothers International and by Picturehouse, a defunct subsidiary of the now-folded New Line Cinema. To credit Children of Men as Cuarón’s signal achievement in uniting critics and audiences is, admittedly, to omit his blockbuster Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), by far the bestreviewed entry in that colossal film franchise but not quite the succès d’estime that Y tu mamá también and Children of Men represent. 25. Carlos Cuarón’s short film Me la debes (2001), played as an appetizer course to Y tu mamá también in several Mexican theaters, only intensifying public impressions of the Cuaróns as co-creators committed to each other’s success. MGM later included Me la debes as a special feature on the U.S. DVD of Y tu mamá también. 26. “ ‘Hollywood’ is an increasingly problematic framework to use to describe an industry populated by a few voracious entertainment conglomerates, a growing number of small production companies, and the fashionable Indie circuit experiencing a feeding frenzy as a result of profitable (queer and non queer) small films.” See Maria Pramaggiore, “Fishing for Girls: Romancing Lesbians in New Queer Cinema,” College Literature 24.1 (1997): 62. 27. For more on these dynamics, see María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “In the Shadow of NAFTA: Y tu mamá también Revisits the National Allegory of Mexican Sovereignty,” American Quarterly 57.3 (September 2005): 751–77. See also Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Sex Versus the Small Screen: Home Video Censorship and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (Spring 2009). www.ejumpcut.org. 28. See Adam Dawtrey, “Cuarón Pic Finds Gear at Machine,” Daily Variety (17–23 April 2000): 19; and especially Sutter, “ ‘Mother’ of all B.O. in Mexico,” 18.

136

Nick Davis

29. Peter Bart, “Calling Out the Sex Police,” Variety (8–14 April 2002): 54; and Smith, “Transatlantic Traffic,” 397. 30. For an easily digestible explanation of how this strategy of pre-sold rights functioned to support “independent” filmmaking in the 1990s—and how and why the system became less and less tenable by 2010—see Edward Jay Epstein, The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2010), especially the section of the epilogue titled “Are Indie Movies Dead?” 31. See Dawtrey. 32. Caetlin Benson-Allott, cited above, offers the most thorough and thoughtprovoking analysis of the R-rated home-video cut of Y tu mamá también, including the insight that the R-rated version amounts to an excision of an excision, given the abrupt cut that already follows the original Julio-Tenoch kiss in Cuarón’s version of the film. Peter Bart reports that IFC Films chairman Bob Berney briefly entertained an R-rated cut for the U.S. theatrical release, but more than the diminution of erotic content or the blunting of the political allegory, he realized that the sexual scenes contained a lot of the movie’s comic vitality as internal cargo, and you couldn’t lose one without the other. 33. Meers, 36. 34. Scott, 50. 35. Jan Stuart, “Bye-Bye, American Pie,” review of Y tu mamá también, The Advocate 861 (16 April 2002): 65. 36. J. Wood, 98, 96. 37. Several scholars have evaluated Y tu mamá también as a site of nuanced affinities and active antagonisms between aspects of U.S. and Mexican culture rather than a flat exemplar of either. See, for example, Smith; Finnegan; Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, “Sex, Class, and Mexico in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television. 34.1 (2004): 39–48; Jeff Menne, “A Mexican Nouvelle Vague: The Logic of New Waves under Globalization,” Cinema Journal 47.1 (2007): 70–92; and Salvador A. Oropesa, “Proxemics, Homogenization, and Diversity in Mexico’s Road Movies: Por la libre (2000), Sin dejar huella (2000), and Y tu mamá también (2001),” Hispanic Issues On Line 3.5 (2008): 92–112. 38. Baer and Long, 150. 39. Extending the boys’ congruence with each other in sexually comic directions, the “Trivia” page for Y tu mamá también on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) reports that each boy’s sex scene with Luisa lasts precisely the same amount of time at 1 minute, 28 seconds until their equally premature orgasms. 40. See Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), especially Chapters 1 and 11; and Tim Dean, “Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness,” Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 120–43.

Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance

137

41. Saldaña-Portillo, 763. 42. For defenses of Luisa’s characterization, opposing the more pessimistic takes listed earlier, see the cited essays by Acevedo-Muñoz, Aufderheide, Meers, and Oropesa. See also Andrea Noble, Mexican National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005). Of course, some critics fall within the middle of this polarized spectrum, such as Hector Amaya and Laura Senio Blair, who admit that their article was first conceived as a frontal critique of Y tu mamá también’s gender ideologies before they arrived at more qualified positions about the film and its politics. See Amaya and Blair, “Bridges Between the Divide: The Female Body in Y tu mamá también and Machuca,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 4.1 (2007): 47–62. 43. Aufderheide, 32; Meers, 14. 44. See Lang, 243–62. To Lang’s examples of Postcards from America (1984), My Own Private Idaho (1991), and The Living End (1992) we could add highly visible and driving-heavy titles such as The Natural History of Parking Lots (1990), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), and Transamerica (2005), not to mention soft-pedaled Hollywood translations of the New Queer phenomenon such as To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995) and Boys on the Side (1996). 45. For a stimulating account of Y tu mamá también in relation to the expanding highway system of modern Mexico and in dialogue with other Mexican road movies produced around the same time, see Oropesa. For more on the urban epicenters of Latin American filmmaking in the 1990s, see David William Foster, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), especially the introduction. 46. For Jameson’s reading of Dog Day Afternoon in relation to gender, corporatism, and the American inner city as a colonized space, see pages 38–39 and 44–54 of Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), in the chapter titled “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film.” 47. The acronym PWA, designating “Person With AIDS,” has become an archaism, but it circulated widely in the early years of the epidemic and is as much a time capsule of that period as are films like The Living End. 48. After itemizing the depressingly few and recurrent roles for women in Hollywood films throughout her chapter on “The Woman’s Film” in her influential book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Haskell expresses concern that even these deathless archetypes will dry up if matinee idols only want to consort with other male actors on screen—which, of course, makes the male buddy movie an obvious paradigm of what we now call the bromance. See Haskell, especially pages 186–188. For a typical instance of reviewers lamenting the fate of already underemployed actresses and already underwritten female roles in the age of the bromance, see Mary McNamara, “Actresses Lost in Land of Bromance,” Boston Globe (31 July 2009): 33.

138

Nick Davis

49. Acevedo-Muñoz, 39–40. La Malinche refers to both a specific personage and, by association, a conflicted archetype of Mexican womanhood. In much national lore, she was notoriously the interpreter, accomplice, and lover of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador; in other accounts, or sometimes in the same accounts, she emerges as an indigenous conscript of these invaders and, wittingly or not, as the matriarch of the Mexican people as a mestizo race. For influential accounts of La Malinche as a cultural trope, laying groundwork for many filmgoers’ conflicted reactions to Luisa in Y tu mamá también, see Octavio Paz, “The Sons of La Malinche,” The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1985); Norma Alarcón, “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism,” Culture Critique 13 (Fall 1989): 57–87; and Sandra Messinger Cypress, La Malinche in Mexican Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). I thank John Alba Cutler for pointing me toward these and other sources. 50. Brandon Gray, “Weekend Report: ‘Knowing’ Digs Up the Digits,” BoxOffice­ Mojo, 23 March 2009, www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=2566. 51. Baer and Long, 162.

chapter 5

From Dostana to Bromance Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered Meheli Sen

“Bahut yaraana lagta hai.” (“This seems like a very close friendship.”) Dacoit Gabbar Singh in Sholay In the ninety-year history of Bombay Cinema, no actor has achieved the status of Amitabh Bachchan. . . . He was also, arguably, the last of the pan-Indian film heroes. Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire

In this chapter, I trace the transformations that have attended to male homosocial friendships in Hindi commercial cinema from the 1970s to the present. Needless to say, much has changed for the popular film in India over the last four decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, the period the first half of this chapter focuses on, what has been called the all-India film or masala film held sway over the industry and audiences alike. The form, which had crystallized over the late 1940s and early 1950s, encompassed Bombay cinema’s typical pleasures—spectacular song sequences, an emphasis on romance, and, above all, a strong reliance on stars. In the 1970s and 1980s, the successful formula of the masala film also incorporated protracted action sequences, narratives centering on crime and retribution, and Amitabh Bachchan, superstar. Within the umbrella

140

Meheli Sen

form, the Bachchan film was its own prototype: while Salim-Javed’s screenplays, proletarian themes, and the crafting of a new kind of masculinity are the most obvious innovations ushered in by the Bachchan film, inclusion of the buddy subplot also emerged as a core melodramatic component. Other major male stars of the period—Shashi Kapoor, Vinod Khanna, and Dharmendra, to name a few—played Bachchan’s buddies in baroque sagas of deep love, loyalty, and sacrifice between men. The films in question were immensely popular among audiences across the formidable divides of class, language, and region in India, a factor that made Bachchan a truly national icon. Its many component parts carefully orchestrated, the Bachchan film was also made to appeal to the widest audience possible; the filmic address in question is inclusive in nature and, as scholars have pointed out, especially sensitive to marginal characters and collectives. This form of intensity between men has disappeared in recent Bollywood cinema. Or, to be more accurate, the buddy film has transformed alongside everything else in recent decades. In this chapter, my goal is to trace that story of change from the 1970s to the present, which is also a narrative of transition from Hindi commercial cinema to what is understood as “Bollywood” proper. The liberalization of the Indian economy has had a profound influence on the political economy of the Bombay film industry. Following the granting of “industry status” by the government in 2001 to what were largely disorganized production/distribution/exhibition sectors, the influx of corporate capital has changed the nature of the business of cinema almost beyond recognition. The onset of the multiplex boom has transformed film viewing habits and target audiences in urban and semi-urban regions.1 Stars have become “brands,” and successful films have morphed from individual texts to “franchises,” and, as Asish Rajadhyaksha has argued, cinema is now simply one component in the plethora of texts, products, and services signified by the umbrella term “Bollywood.”2 All of these changes have, of course, changed the nature of the cinematic text. Bollywood is now crafting a new kind of cinema in the era of new media and media convergence.3 Nestled in the folds of these sweeping changes, we are able to discern the transformations that have animated the figuration of male friendships in Hindi commercial cinema. The buddy film of

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

141

the 1970s has morphed into the “bromance,” a post-globalization configuration that is foundationally tethered to India’s “shining” new economy, its consumer ethos, and its avowedly global avatar. The unqualified contemporary circulation of the term “bromance” is a marker of this confident globality; the English language press, which deploys the term to describe a certain kind of hip, urban friendship between men, apparently assumes that its readership is perfectly attuned to the valences of the word as it circulates via MTV and other global media platforms. There are other key differences between the older Bachchan buddy film and the more recent iteration of the subgenre. The new bromance unapologetically addresses a specifically urban, middleclass, and English-speaking youth audience. Dialog is peppered with English words and phrases, and characters embody decidedly urbane, cosmopolitan subjectivities. The bromance is also more sophisticated and aware in terms of its relationship to global discourses of queerness. These films register an awareness of the distinctions between straight, gay, and queer cultures and subcultures and often either invoke or parody alternative lifestyles, sexualities, and subjectivities within their narratives. In this sense, too, the new Bollywood bromance is quite different from the amorphous, ambiguous, and fluid terrains of affection and attachments that were elaborated within the Bachchan dostana film. In other words, the indistinctness of the social, familial, and erotic energies that Amitabh Bachchan shared with his buddies in the 1970s are now firmly grounded in clearly demarcated sense of selves, identities, and relationships. The older configuration was somewhat naïve, even innocent, in its “unwitting” and guileless dispersal of the erotic energies between men; the new bromance is more “wordly” in this sense, too—sons, brothers, friends, and lovers are now clearly identified as such. In spite of humorous and playful invocations of homosexuality, the overlap between the social and the sexual is strictly policed, effectively blocked, and finally contained in these recent films. The bromance film also shares a different relationship with the melodramatic mode: the new configuration aspires to a more “realistic” cinematic language, albeit one that still incorporates songand-dance sequences, stars, and plush production values. Furthermore, the self-conscious rejection of the baroque melodrama as a

142

Meheli Sen

particular mode of cinematic articulation does not mean a repudiation of excess as such. As I argue in the final sections of this chapter, the bromance film remains excessive on a different register: in its romance with a frenzied consumerism that throws into sharp relief the narratives of lack, deprivation, and sacrifice that animated the Bachchan film. This is the most important difference between the earlier iteration and its new avatar—if the Bachchan film was foundationally a cinema of lack and loss, the new bromance emphatically endorses a cinema of fulfillment and plenitude. Bachchan and the Figur ation of Dostana The scholarship on Hindi commercial cinema has looked at Amitabh Bachchan as a singular presence who transformed the very language of the Bombay film in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Madhava Prasad, Bachchan’s entry into the commercial industry not only inaugurated a new narrative form but also enabled a restructuring of the industry at large: Bachchan came to be identified with the dominated, a figure of resistance who appeared to speak for the working classes and other marginalized groups. However, the effectivity of the Bachchan persona must be investigated not only at the level of a shift to proletarian themes but more importantly, in its function as a rallying point for the industry as a whole, a magnetic point around which the industry reconstituted itself . . . Bachchan thus became an “industrial hero” not only in the sense that he played working characters but also because he was the hero of the industry.4 (emphasis in original)

As the biggest star produced by the mammoth Bombay film industry, and someone whose prominence in South Asian popular culture continues unabated, Bachchan’s colossal stardom certainly merits scrutiny.5 Much of this important work has engaged with Bachchan as the “Angry Young Man”—a masculine prototype that crystallized as a sensitive barometer of the violence and anxiety that characterized the National Emergency years from 1975–1977.6 Bachchan remains paradigmatic not only because he crafted a masculinity

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

143

that resonated with the dismantling of Nehruvian India7 but also because he transformed the very foundations of male stardom in South Asian popular culture, within films and without. However, while scholars acknowledge the contributions of other factors in the emergence of the Bachchan phenomena—most notably the crafting of the “Angry Young Man” figure by screenplay writers Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar—he is nonetheless read as a gargantuan singularity, a fortuitous congealing of discourses around a specific star text. In this chapter, however, I argue for a reevaluation of that story of the meteoric success of a singular colossus. I suggest that, in fact, the Bachchan film in the 1970s and 1980s almost invariably included supplementary male figures and buddy themes, and we must recalibrate our readings of his superstardom within this generic domain. A baroquely melodramatic variant of the buddy genre, the “Bachchan film” concentrates on intense love and loyalty between ostensibly straight men in primarily action-adventure-revenge narratives. Even a cursory glance at Bachchan’s filmography at this time reveals a prodigious proliferation of masculinities in some of his biggest hits: Bachchan is paired with major stars such as Dharmendra (Sholay, 1975; Ram Balram, 1980), Shashi Kapoor (Deewar, 1975; Imman Dharam 1977; Suhaag, 1979; Do Aur Do Paanch, 1980; Namak Halal, 1982), Vinod Khanna (Hera Pheri, 1976; Khoon Pasina, 1977; Parvarish, 1977; Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, 1978), Shatrughan Sinha (Dostana, 1980), and even his archenemy from Sholay, Amjad Khan (Yaraana, 1981). Occasionally, Bachchan appears as part of a heroic triumvirate in films such as Amar Akbar Anthony, 1979 (Bachchan, Vinod Khanna, and Rishi Kapoor); Kaala Patthar, 1979 (Bachhan, Shashi Kapoor, and Shatrughan Sinha); Shaan, 1980 (Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, and Shatrughan Sinha); or Naseeb, 1981 (Bachchan, Shatrughan Sinha, and Rishi Kapoor). What do these staggering numbers of titles alert us to? First, that the buddy theme was very much the dominant modality of action-adventure films in the 1970s and 1980s; and second, that Bachchan’s on-screen persona must be contextualized within a filmic domain in which he was consistently set up as a foil against other male stars. If a shift to proletariat themes is a foundational aspect of Bachchan’s stardom, then so is the buddy idiom. This is not to privilege one narrative imperative over another but to note that the Bachchan film’s successful formula—proletarian

144

Meheli Sen

themes, anti-heroic hero, narratives of crime and retribution, protracted fight sequences, etc.—is also constituted through a strong reliance on homosocial friendships. The question of genre is not inconsequential here, because even in the avowedly “middle-class” cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, which first put Bachchan on the map and has completely different narrative and ideological concerns, the buddy modality dominates. Examples of films in this genre are Anand (1971), Namak Haram (1973), Jurmana (1979), and Bemisaal (1982). Heist films such as Hera Pheri Do Aur Do Paanch and Shaan also couple Bachchan with other male leads. Irrespective of major or minor generic variation, the point is that Bachchan’s characters are always embedded within a fictional space in which love and loyalty toward male friends is of paramount importance. It remains curious that despite the massive evidence to the contrary, most scholars have continued to understand the on-screen Bachchan persona as a constellation of meanings that stands apart in splendid isolation. Scholarly as well as popular readings of his stardom emphasize his “uniqueness,” as though his on-screen presence forms the only masculine “type” within these films. As evidenced in my readings in this chapter, this was hardly ever the case; Bachchan figures as only one of the many masculinities that animate these films. The contours of his male persona emerge and eventually congeal in his interaction with the other male stars of the films in question. Of course, Bachchan’s stardom far surpassed those of the other male actors he was paired with, and the specific components of his physiognomy coupled with details of his biography and career certainly set him apart from the others. However, here I am concerned with how the meanings that gather around the Bachchan figure—including his Angry Young Man roles—insistently focus on the closeness between men and the generic mode that enables this multiplicity of masculinities. In Hindi commercial cinema’s dominant idiom, close friendships between men are called “dostana” or “yaraana,” “dost” and “yaar” being the friend in question. The dostana film phenomenon was certainly not invented in the Bachchan film,8 but I would argue that his on-screen performances did bring a certain kind of energy and intensity to the formation. Gayatri Gopinath has noted that the buddy film “seems to come to its own” in the 1970s and 1980s, and she also identifies Bachchan as “the prototypical hero

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

145

of the buddy movies.” Her reading of some of these films additionally underscores the ruthless marginalization of female characters in this “macho brotherhood.”9 Other scholars have also noted both the elaboration of queer desire in these films as well as its insistent disavowal; typically, in this literature, specific films are cited as elaborating a queer poetics, although Bachchan’s repeated performances in what are called “multi-starrers” in industry parlance are rarely engaged with.10 This body of work remains important to the current inquiry; however, here I am more interested in delving into the ways in which the Bachchan film extends the affective force of the dostana between male friends into larger structures of belonging, commitment, and kinship. The moral scaffolding of these texts hinges on this imbrication of homosociality with larger social and political formations such as the family, community, or nation. In addition, I would like to emphasize that the “all-India film,” that now-defunct generic prototype that combined action, adventure, romance, music, and melodrama in a dizzying cocktail, did open up spaces for the elaboration of male friendship in a manner that current Bollywood films no longer do. The ambiguous, overlapping, interstitial spaces of friendship, love, and attachment allowed for the formation of an economy of desire that is impossible to figure in the new Bollywood film as I illustrate in this chapter. This is not meant to deny the misogyny or the machismo of these earlier texts but to note that a certain kind of industry-audience relationship, embedded in a specific moment of history, enabled these films to explore male dostana in an unprecedented fashion. I will return to more recent iterations of the buddy film later in this chapter. Let us for a moment return to the question of history. Why was the Bachchan dostana film so popular in the 1970s and 1980s? As mentioned earlier, Bachchan’s superstardom is almost always read within the matrix of the National Emergency, a twenty-one-month period of enormous political disturbance and upheaval. Ranjani Mazumdar, who has described Bachchan as an “urban warrior” befitting those troubled times, describes the Emergency period succinctly: In mid 1975, the Congress government declared a state of national emergency, citing threats to national security. With civil rights suspended and the media censored, thousands of

146

Meheli Sen opposition activists were thrown in jail. The postcolonial republican model now lay in shambles . . . During the Emergency, the regime carried out its visions of social engineering: mass sterilization of the urban poor, forcible re-settlement of millions of migrant workers from the inner city to suburbs, and the constant use of the language of disease as a substitute for democratic politics. It is not surprising that this period . . .  witnessed the emergence of nonlegality as a popular trope in Bombay cinema.11

This terrain of illegality would be perfectly embodied in and inhabited by the Bachchan figure whom Mazumdar calls the “anti-hero”: “a performative figure that emerged from a cynical political culture in which the division between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ was becoming increasingly blurred.”12 Bachchan’s cinematic alter ego—the Angry Young Man, often named Vijay—with his scarred body, moral ambiguities, and wounded psyche articulated most compellingly the violence of that turbulent period. The enormous popularity of the male buddy film in this era is a more complicated terrain to interrogate. The film industry’s reliance on “multi-starrers” could furnish one possible explanation for the predominance of the male friendship genre; in other words, the inclusion of multiple male stars could have been seen as a formula for commercial success. The relatively early success of films like Anand and Namak Haram established a recipe that was recycled and regurgitated ad infinitum. However, Bachchan is one of the few stars of his time who could “carry” a film on his own; in other words, the emphasis on multiple male stars—and, by extension, on dostana—was not exclusively a matter of ensuring box-office returns. The introduction of video technology in the Indian market in the 1980s meant that middle-class audiences—especially women— largely shunned theatres for the comfort of viewing films in their living rooms; this, too, had an impact on formal and thematic aspects of Hindi commercial cinema. Bachchan’s own stardom flourished in an era when middle-class films came to be eclipsed by actiondriven, working-class themes. The action-adventure genre’s arguably macho components provided a hospitable habitat for buddy subplots. The many legacies of the Emergency are also constitutive

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

147

of the dostana imperative in commercial cinema. Priya Jha, for instance, has suggested that song sequences in iconic buddy films like Zanjeer and Sholay “reacted in large part to the repressive political atmosphere of the times. The recalling of ‘simpler times’ in these [dostana] songs maintain a sociomythic narrative that can sustain India in its moment of crisis.”13 I would additionally argue that the aggressive criminalization of the larger public sphere during the Emergency had a profound impact on the Bachchan buddy film. In other words, the marginalization of women—both as characters and in terms of the films’ address to a specific kind of male spectator—was perfectly in tandem with the tenor of this period. More abstractly, we could read the dostana film as a particularly charged instantiation of a decidedly masculinist moment in Indian history. While a comprehensive taxonomy of the Bachchan buddy or dostana film is beyond the scope of this chapter, in the following sections I will map some of the primary configurations of the genre in its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. Ties That Bind: Bachchan, Brother s, and Buddies The centrality of the family as an institution in Hindi commercial cinema can hardly be overstated. The melodramatic scaffolding of the form ensures that the family—as biological entity or symbolic imperative—dominates what Peter Brooks has famously called the “moral occult” of narratives. Ravi Vasudevan argues that in its Hindi film avatar, the melodramatic mode renders the family not just as a domain of the private but rather as “one that needs to be thought of as entangled with public authority”: “The public family form provided a narrative architecture encompassing the apparently differentiated spaces of family, society and public-institutional life. . . . As the integument of the social and political realm, the family form does not simply personalize social and political issues. Rather it renders the personal and political as non-distinguishable registers of fictional organization.”14 Vasudevan’s reading is especially valuable as we consider the manner in which tropes of dostana operate within the Bachchan film of the 1970s and 1980s. The affective charge of the Bachchan

148

Meheli Sen

dostana film derives from its inscription within a language of the familial: the Bachchan film is constitutively a romance between brothers, biological or otherwise. In the films discussed here, familial obligations, and especially obligations of loyalty between male friends, often come to be at odds with larger ethical imperatives, such as those dictated by the state’s legal apparatus. These conflicts can temporarily destabilize the terrain of love and commitment between male friends. Multiple films of the genre arrange the tensions between love and duty in a melodramatic field in which the primary male friends find themselves on opposite sides of the law. The resolution of these conflicts must necessarily be a conciliation between the male friends and the larger terrain of belonging, such as the family or the community in question as well as the law; the primary couple—in this case the male buddies—must be re-integrated into the community at the film’s close. Let us consider the most iconic “lost and found” formula film of the 1970s, Manmohan Desai’s magnum opus Amar Akbar Anthony. In this film, three young siblings are separated as children and brought up by ersatz parental figures belonging to three of India’s primary religious communities—thus, Amar (Vinod Khanna) grows up a Hindu; Akbar (Rishi Kapoor), a Muslim; and Anthony (Bachchan), a Christian. The final consolidation of the biological family is also, through this canny sleight of hand, the utopian consolidation of a syncretic nation. The mother (Nirupa Roy)—poverty-stricken, sick, and, in a spectacular twist, even blind—is named Bharti, Bharat being another moniker for India. However, for the purpose of my argument here, it is crucial to underscore the dostana between the three male leads even before the final revelation of filial ties. While Akbar and Anthony are firm friends from the beginning, the friendship with Amar proves trickier to establish. This is because Amar grows up to become an upstanding police officer, but Anthony is a small-time bootlegger by trade. Not surprisingly, the two come into conflict in a protracted action sequence that showcases both stars’ considerable fighting skills. But even during this sequence, the film makes an effort to set up the male stars as equals in strength and valor while close-ups of clasped hands emphasize the (undisclosed) blood ties between them. Failing to recognize the bonds of blood provides the baroquely melodramatic tenor of these sequences,

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

149

including the most compelling one in which all three friends/brothers/sons unwittingly donate blood to their injured mother, Bharti. Amar Akbar Anthony organizes its fictional space around such moments of misrecognition between the three men and their parents. While the trio team up as brothers at the climax to vanquish the villainous Robert (Jeevan), the film takes considerable pains to establish the deep comradeship between them long before the revelation of biological ties. Amar Akbar Anthony and other films like it deploy the melodramatic mode through a series of missed encounters between biological brothers who fail to recognize each other as such. Here, a second level of filmic enunciation, through unrestricted narration, allows the viewers access to information that the characters within the diegetic world do not possess. The affective resonance of these narratives depends on this constant slippage between biological brotherhood (which the characters are unaware of) and the fraternal bonds of comradeship or dostana (which the characters are embedded within). In Suhaag (Manmohan Desai, 1979), for instance, twins Kishan (Shashi Kapoor) and Amit (Bachchan) are separated as infants and meet again as adults on opposite sides of the law; Kishan is a police inspector while Amit has become a petty criminal. Despite these differences, the two become close friends; their mother, Durga (Nirupa Roy), lavishes affection on both men in spite of her ignorance of Amit’s true identity. The “real” family is thus reunited accidentally and unknowingly. When Amit is hired by the villain, Vikram Singh (Amjad Khan, who is also their biological father), to kill Kishan for meddling in his crooked business deals, the two friends formulate a plan to get him arrested. This plan, however, goes horribly awry, and Vikram escapes while Kishan loses his vision from a wound to the head. It is at this juncture in Suhaag that the dostana between Amit and Kishan reaches unprecedented heights. Amit first offers his own eyes to Kishan, and when the doctors deem this transplant medically impossible, he vows to take revenge against Vikram Singh. Kishan suggests another route for seeking justice: he exhorts Amit to fight Singh by joining the police force instead. In his defense of Amit’s eligibility for the task at hand, Kishan delivers a passionate statement to the understandably reluctant police authorities. Amit, on the other hand, desires to efface himself, in a

150

Meheli Sen

sense, and become Kishan in his fight for justice. When Amit comes home to Durga and Kishan dressed in a policeman’s uniform, she wistfully comments that she would have loved to see them both in identical uniforms. Kishan’s response is telling: it makes no difference who wears the uniform, he tells his mother, because he and Amit may have different bodies, but they share a soul. This profound desire to fuse together—to become one, as it were— prompts the song sequence “Aye Yaar Sun” (“Listen My Friend, Your Friendship is Dearer Than Life Itself”). While he fails to literally give his eyes in gift to Kishan, Amit nonetheless becomes Kishan’s vision. In the song sequence, he insists that his blind friend drive a motorcycle while he guides him from behind. The song is extraordinarily candid in its elaboration of intimacy between men, including many moments in which they are physically affectionate toward each other. The dostana between Kishan and Amit, in other words, is established before the revelation of familial ties in the last few minutes of Suhaag; of course, the audience has been privy to the biological connection between them all along. The melodramatic instance of revelation is inserted within a protracted action/chase sequence as Amit and Kishan attempt to capture Vikram Singh and his many cronies while simultaneously saving their mother’s life. Here, too, the film stresses the solidarity between the brothers as they hang precariously from a helicopter that Singh attempts to escape in, determined not to be separated at any cost. The buddy modality in the Bachchan film gathers its affective force from this split level of filmic narration: while the dostana between characters must be established and consolidated “independent” of familial ties, the family, nonetheless, encloses the male friends from without. By nestling the male friendship within the realm of the family, by eventually circumscribing the male friends within bonds of biological fraternity, the films are able to contain the excessive and erotic energies that have gathered around the male friends. This strategy of defanging the attachment between male friends by embedding it within the familial domain becomes problematic when the characters involved do not share blood ties. And, it is in these scenarios that the ambit of the family must be extended to

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

151

include those other ties that cannot be left unintegrated or unanchored.15 The Bachchan dostana film performs a certain kind of narrative and ideological labor in order to ensure that the intensities between men remains tethered to the rhetoric of the family in crucial ways. While in some films—such as Suhaag, Amar Akbar Anthony, etc.—brothers meet as strangers and fail to recognize each other, in others, strangers come to be brothers and are legitimized as such. In Manmohan Desai’s Parvarish (1977), for example, Amit (Bachchan) and Kishan (Vinod Khanna) grow up in Deputy Superintendent of Police Shamsher Singh’s (Shammi Kapoor’s) home as siblings.16 However, Amit is, in fact, the biological child of notorious bandit Mangal Singh (Amjad Khan), who had been adopted by the policeman as an infant. Upon his release from prison, when Mangal comes to claim his child, Shamsher refuses to relinquish him into the hands of a criminal father. Mangal Singh vows revenge against the policeman and leaves but not before Kishan overhears their altercation and assumes that he is Mangal’s offspring. Suffused with self-loathing, Kishan decides to become exactly like his “father” and enthusiastically pursues a life of criminal activity. The film’s thematic emphasis on nurture over heredity ensures that Amit grows up to be a policeman and finds himself pitted against Kishan and his cronies. Thus, on each side of the law, the son is aligned with the “wrong father.” However, Kishan and Amit’s commitment to each other remains unshaken, even as they work against each other’s professional interests. As in the other dostana films discussed here, the film takes considerable pains to establish them as equals in every way; as in their childhood years, Amit and Kishan continue to protect each other from hostile adversaries. When Amit is injured (and pretends to have lost his vision) in an accident involving Kishan, the latter becomes especially protective, and, in an echo of Suhaag, promises to act as his brother’s eyes. Again, what is noteworthy in this intensity of feeling between the men is the emphasis on the fraternal. Kishan knows from the beginning that they are not biological siblings and yet does not disclose this fact to Amit. During the climax, when all is revealed and a horrified Kishan discovers that he is, in fact, not Mangal Singh’s son, he promises to help Amit nab both Mangal and the villainous Supremo (Kader Khan),

152

Meheli Sen

who operates as the kingpin of the smuggling operations in the country. Predictably, the “criminal family” does not consolidate, and the ersatz brothers/buddies team up in a lengthy underwater action sequence to defeat the array of villains. Mangal Singh admits that Shamsher Singh had done the right thing by keeping Amit away from him because only parvarish (upbringing) and not the accident of birth determines a child’s destiny. As Amit handcuffs his biological father, Kishan surrenders to Shamsher Singh as a reformed criminal willing to atone for his past crimes and misdemeanors. The morally upright “family” crystallizes at closure but only after Kishan has completed his prison sentence. Numerous other films of the genre, including Dostana, Naseeb, and Yaraana, feature male friends who are not biologically related but whose closeness imbricates the language of the family. Namak Halal (Prakash Mehra, 1982) is an especially interesting case in point. Here the zone of attachment between Arjun Singh (Bachchan) and Raja (Shashi Kapoor) is mediated through a discourse of loyalty between employer and employee. As an employee in Raja’s hotel, Arjun believes that his fundamental duty is to ensure his master’s well-being at all costs; much of the narrative focuses on successive attempts on Raja’s life and Arjun’s untiring efforts at thwarting these murderous schemes. But beyond all of these instances of friendship, the melodramatic lynchpin between the two men is Sita Devi (Waheeda Rehman), who unbeknownst to each of them is Arjun’s mother. Caught in a catastrophic conflict between maternal love and duty, she had chosen the latter, abandoning her biological son to care for Raja. Thus, despite the overarching master-slave-loyalty discourse deployed by the film, since both men have drunk Sita Devi’s milk, they come to function as de facto brothers. I would like to explore two other strategies that the Bachchan film has traditionally deployed in elaborating dostana: in the first instance, love and loyalty between men are embedded within straightforward proletarian themes of class struggle—the kind of cinema that made Bachchan an emblematic icon of the tempestuous 1970s. The second prototype, which I note in passing, relies on the comedy “track”—dialogue-based or slapstick—in order to diffuse the

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

153

excessive bonds of attachment between male buddies. Examples include Do Aur Do Paanch, Yaraana, etc., in which the elaboration of dostana between Bachchan and his male friend revolves around humor, gags, and outlandish situations. Love in the Time of Labor: Bachchan, Fr iends, and Class Struggles Kaala Patthar (Yash Chopra, 1979) and Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1983) belong to the first generic mode; both films are narratives of class struggle against corrupt capitalist bosses in which Bachchan and his buddies join the ranks of laborers.17 The ethical dimension of the dosti narrative emerges in these films from a dispersal of the interpersonal energies between friends into the more generalized terrain of proletarian activism. Kaala Patthar is an extraordinary film set in a coal mine in northern India in which the owner/villain Dhanraj Puri (Prem Chopra) routinely endangers the workers’ lives in order to maximize profits. The film mounts a scathing critique of capital and the inhuman poverty and working conditions of labor that enables a certain kind of economic system to flourish. Here, three distinct types of masculinities come together as comrades united against oppression. Bachchan’s character, Vijay Pal Singh, is flanked on either side by the good-natured Ravi Malhotra (Shashi Kapoor) and the brash ex-criminal Mangal Singh (Shatrughan Sinha). The film carefully sets up Ravi and Mangal as foils to Vijay’s anguished personality; we learn that Vijay seeks the anonymity provided by the coal mine as a safe refuge against the demons of his past life. As a ship’s captain, he had once reneged from duty, allowing scores of passengers to die in a storm, while saving his own skin; the public ignominy of that incident haunts him in the present and accounts for his studied isolation in the mine. Although Vijay is always shown extending a helping hand to fellow mine workers, he is very much a loner in Kaala Patthar; his solitude is often visually underscored in the film through shot angles and framing. When Ravi joins Dhanraj Mines as an engineer, he immediately learns that Vijay’s status is special among the miners: they respect his courage but are wary of the suppressed fury that seethes within him. What

154

Meheli Sen

makes Kaala Patthar especially effective as a dostana film is that it extends the affective axis of love, loyalty, and friendship between the three male leads to include all the laborers who toil in the mine. The familial horizon, indispensable in the films discussed previously in this chapter, is palpable in its absence here; the film seems to suggest that the harsh, oppressive contours of the coal mine do not allow for the establishment of loving, secure familial ties. The dangers inherent in the workers’ lives—and we see scores of them injured and dead in accidents that could have been prevented by the management—disallows the formation of close, personal ties. The absence of the familial is also signposted by the film’s refusal to stage any of its action in domestic spaces; with very few exceptions, viewers do not have access to private spaces of the workers. Much of Kaala Patthar’s action takes place in public spaces of the coal mine: the little dhaba (restaurant) where the miners eat, the canteen where they hang out, the dark and claustrophobic confines of the mine tunnels, and the vast expanses of the coalfield where they work. These spaces remain zones of homosocial bonding, labor, and community that are also overwhelmingly male; barring a few moments when women mourn the deaths of their fathers/sons/brothers/lovers, women remain conspicuously absent. Channo (Neetu Singh) the jewelry seller, Dr. Sudha Sen (Rakhee) the resident medical doctor of the coal mine, and Anita (Parveen Babi) the journalist are the exceptions, but, predictably, even these “love interests” are secondary to the most important narrative strands in Kaala Patthar. The mise-en-scène is a crucial aspect of the film’s invocation of the inhospitable atmosphere in the coal mine; a dense fog of soot and coal dust hangs over these spaces of belonging and community, darkening faces as well as spirits. The grime on workers’ faces also buttresses the solidarity of Vijay, Ravi, and Mangal with the other workers—in the noxious air of the coal mine, all workers look alike; the dehumanizing effects of the work render them a singular force against injustice. While most of the workers share an easy camaraderie, petty enmities also thrive here. One such incident cements the friendship between Ravi and Vijay as the former rescues the latter from a tunnel in which he had been trapped by Dhanna (Sharat Saxena), an

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

155

Ravi (Shashi (Ravi Malhotra, center) intervenes in a brutal fight between Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan, left) and Mangal (Shatrughan Sinha, right) in Kaala Patthar (1979), directed by Yash Chopra, Yash Raj Films.

antagonistic coworker. Ravi not only rescues Vijay but also proceeds to resoundingly thrash Dhanna for harassing other miners, following which he and Vijay become firm friends. The alliance with Mangal proves to be more arduous, because he remains hostile toward Vijay for much of the film. Mangal’s brash arrogance brings him into conflict with Vijay repeatedly: the film stages several protracted encounters between the two men in which Mangal’s provocation spurs Vijay into anger and violence. In one sequence, they fight each other with fists and shovels while the other miners look on in awe; it is Ravi who breaks up this skirmish eventually. The clash here is a contest of “badass-ness,” as Mangal constantly baits Vijay in order to demonstrate his own superior toughness; however, we can also read these moments of conflict as parts of an elaborate courtship ritual between the two heroes. Mangal’s resentment

156

Meheli Sen

transforms into admiration when he is injured, and it is Vijay who saves his life by giving him blood. At the climax of Kaala Patthar, when Mangal meets Vijay for the last time, he says, “I have never considered anyone else worthy of praise. But I raise my hat to you, my friend.” Their dostana is finally consolidated as they clasp hands in solidarity. As mentioned above, the horizon of male friendship overlaps with the axis of protest and struggle against capitalist oppression in Kaala Patthar. Ravi and Vijay confront Puri on several different occasions over the pitiful conditions of the workers’ lives and the dangers to which they are exposed on a daily basis in Puri’s unsafe mines. Ravi organizes the workers into a cohesive, politically effective force while Vijay uses his personal toughness and integrity to challenge Puri’s exploitative mining practices. Ravi tries to halt drilling in one of these unsafe mine tunnels, but Puri overrides his impassioned plea on behalf of the miners’ lives. When the inevitable accident happens and torrents of water start gushing into the tunnel, endangering at least four hundred trapped miners, it falls on Vijay to articulate the rage that grips the community. He storms into Puri’s abode and beats him up before rushing into the rescue operation. Mangal, who had been arrested before this, flees the prison to also join the rescue mission. Thus, all three male friends are united at the climax in the singular mission: saving as many workers as possible from the rapidly flooding tunnels. While Vijay’s desperate effort is also spurred by the ghosts of his past failures, Ravi and Mangal selflessly risk their own lives to save others’. Mangal dies a hero’s death as he literally stands in harm’s way to save his coworkers’ lives. Ravi, similarly, finds himself trapped under a huge rock as he guides another group of workers to safety. Vijay returns Ravi’s earlier favor by saving his life in this protracted rescue sequence, and they make it out of the flooded tunnel just in time. Kaala Patthar extends the affective domain of dostana to encompass the entire laboring community in the coal mine. The interface between the personal and the political—the coextensive nature of the two terms—comes to be the nesting space for male homosocial bonding and solidarity against exploitation. While scholars have typically understood Bachchan’s stardom to share an indexical relationship with themes of proletarian struggle, films like Kaala Patthar demonstrate

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

157

the indispensability of the buddy configuration in elaborating such critiques of class oppression. The ethical aspect of dostana emerges through collective action and struggle. The Son Also Rises: Dostana Reimagined In the opening sequence of the 1980 film Dostana (Raj Khosla), Vijay (Bachchan) and Ravi (Shatrughan Sinha) sing an impassioned duet celebrating their friendship, love, and commitment to each other. Later in the film, when both men fall in love with Sheetal (Zeenat Aman), tensions develop between the two friends. Vijay sings an anguished plaint to his friend in a party sequence, following which he decides to sacrifice his romantic feelings for Sheetal on the altar of his love for Ravi. As Gayatri Gopinath notes, Sheetal functions as a transactional trope in the film, “a bonding device that serves to cement male friendship, she gets passed around from one to the other at various points in the film.”18 What is especially compelling about this older modality of dostana is the emphasis on sacrifice. Several Bachchan films, notably Naseeb, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, and Bemisaal, structure the affective bond between male friends around an almost ritualized invocation of sacrifice; most often, this sacrifice involves Bachchan surrendering his female “love interest” to the male friend in question, with little or no participation from the woman. Occasionally, the sacrifice demands the death of one of the male buddies, as in Muqaddar Ka Sikander or Sholay, in which the heterosexual couple can be consolidated only after Bachchan dies in his buddy’s arms. The baroquely melodramatic figuration of the Bachchan persona buttresses this willful embrace of suffering. Loyalty toward the male friend always trumped romantic love in this generic mode; this is no longer the case. Bollywood—Hindi commercial cinema’s current, spectacularly global avatar—continues to produce dostana films. Abhishek Bachchan, Amitabh’s son, is considered to be one of the most promising actors in the Hindi film industry, and many of his most successful films include the dostana subplot. The eponymous hit Dostana (Tarun Mansukhani, 2008) is an especially interesting case in point, because it enables us to chart the transformations that have attended to the buddy film formation over the last three decades. The dostana

158

Meheli Sen

film has now morphed into the bromance proper; here, the love between men is, necessarily, also a love affair with globalization. Dostana is the story of two straight men, Sam (Abhishek Bachchan) and Kunal (John Abraham), who pretend to be gay in order to secure rooms in an apartment owned by Neha (Priyanka Chopra) in Miami, Florida. Both men fall in love with Neha and spend much of the film trying to negotiate the contradictions between their (assumed) homosexual identities and their (real) heterosexual desire for Neha. Dostana is very much a product of the post-economic liberalization Bollywood industry, and, as such, certain markers of globality and consumption come to be absolutely crucial in the film’s dispersal of meanings. The fact that the three friends/roommates are diasporic citizens endows them with an easy cosmopolitanism and urbanity; Dostana expends much energy in demonstrating the characters’ embrace of a certain urban, upmarket, “hip” lifestyle and their confident command of the English language—the dialog is peppered with English words and phrases. Sam, Kunal, and Neha become close friends through shared interests in shopping, hanging out on the beach, and exercising—all signs of their status as citizens of a modern, planetary youth community. Their immersion in these activities also allows for the display of commodities and a determinedly consumerist ethos. Yash Raj Films, which produced Dostana, is known in India and beyond for precisely this sort of glossy, aspirational, consumption-oriented cinema. Visually, too, the film mimics the gloss and shine of advertisement-style images, an effort aided by Kunal’s profession in the fictional universe as a fashion photographer.19 The target audience is, emphatically, the young, urban millennial generation both within India and without; the film makes no effort to communicate with a larger audience segment.20 This new filmic idiom is a far cry from the buddy films of the 1970s and 1980s, which belonged to that now-obsolete category of the all-India film and, at least on principle, attempted to breach the urban-rural divide in India. One must also note that overseas distribution of Hindi cinema was not a primary concern for filmmakers in earlier decades. What I have been calling the Bachchan film was made primarily for a South Asian viewership. Beyond a fethishistic display of wealth, consumption, and youth culture, the very tropes of dostana have been fundamentally and constitutively transformed

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

159

Contemporary intimacies: Kunal (John Abraham, left) and Sam (Abhishek Bachchan, right) are in love with Neha (Priyanka Chopra) in Dostana (2008), directed by Tarun Mansukhani, Dharma Productions.

by globalization. While the affective energies between Bachchan and his male friends are embedded within larger structures of the family, community, nation, and even labor, this larger zone of belonging and/or comradeship is entirely absent in Dostana. Sam’s mother and Neha’s auntie are the only family members we encounter, and these characters remain caricatured sketches at best, baroquely humorous renditions of Hindi cinema’s typical maternal figures. The ethical heft of the family—biological or symbolic—is entirely missing, as is any larger sphere of affiliation. In this newer iteration of the buddy film, there is no outside to the inter-subjective zone of attachment between Sam, Kunal, and Neha; all other concerns are either absent or have been telescoped into the ambit of individual desire. It is this emphasis on individual desire that renders the trope of sacrifice not just unnecessary but obsolete. As mentioned previously in this chapter, the gesture of sacrifice was a predominant mode through which the Bachchan film negotiated the terrain of dostana; what gave the Bachchan figure its moral and melodramatic force was this willing negation of self and desire for the male friend in question. As Sam, Abhishek Bachchan inhabits a vastly transformed libidinal universe in which consumption—connoting fulfillment and plenitude in this context—is the dominant emotional impetus for characters as well as the audiences that these films

160

Meheli Sen

address. In this new version of Dostana, Sam does not have to—indeed will not—sacrifice his love for his friend. Here bromance is a game of breathless competition between the two men, an elaborate cat-and-mouse pursuit of Neha in which both of them attempt to be one step ahead of the other in winning the woman’s affection. In other words, the two men share the same goal: “getting the girl” at any cost. This logic of pursuit, I would argue, is inextricably linked to the film’s larger rhetorical emphasis on individual desire and the consumer as subject. When Neha falls in love with her boss, Abhimanyu (Bobby Deol), and starts dating him, Sam and Kunal unhesitatingly unite in a mission to destroy their fledgling relationship. In a universe in which individual desire and fulfillment triumph over all other considerations, the question of Neha’s decision in choosing a mate becomes yet another hurdle to be overcome by the male buddies. Dostana tries to address both gay and straight viewers via its depiction of sexual identities and behavior. The publicity blitzkrieg that surrounded the film’s release loudly proclaimed its refreshing attitude toward homosexuality.21 A closer reading of the film, however, yields more sobering conclusions. While much of the film’s humor emerges from Sam and Kunal’s inept attempts at “being gay,” the real homosexual characters remain highly florid caricatures of gay men; for example, M (Boman Irani), Neha’s boss, plays the token flamboyant older gay man who is also ridiculously promiscuous and perpetually “on the prowl.” The film also reveals a certain degree of anxiety over alternative sexualities in its opening sequence: both Sam and Kunal are shown waking up next to women, cementing, as it were, their heterosexual credentials. On numerous occasions the film insists on their straightness either by inserting shots of them leering at Neha or by proclaiming it through verbal interactions between the two men. The film’s profound ambivalence toward the slippage between the social and the sexual is evidenced in this labor of protestation.22 While the older dostana film was able to—however evasively—negotiate ambiguous, ambivalent spaces of love, longing, and attachment between Bachchan and his male friends, the new Bollywood bromance belies a considerable amount of anxiety— and by extension homophobia—about the closeness shared by male

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

161

friends. I would argue that the act of naming certain relationships “gay” or “straight” has robbed Hindi commercial cinema of that liminal, amorphous terrain of love, intensity, and attachment that Bachchan and his buddies so easily inhabited in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps this shift is inevitable, because the new bromance situates itself in vastly transformed social and political matrices. Since 2009, following the decriminalization of homosexuality by the Supreme Court of India, public spheres in South Asia continue to grapple with the increased visibility of alternative sexualities, lifestyles, and also the backlash that has accompanied these. The passage from the dostana film to the bromance comes to be meaningful within this larger story of socio-cultural transition. Hindi commercial cinema is a formation that has imaged and imagined closeness among male friends with extraordinary candor for many decades. In this chapter I have argued that the emblematic star of the male friendship or dostana film is Amitabh Bachchan, whose massive stardom transformed the very contours of the industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Bachchan’s preeminence as the emblematic star of the buddy film also prompts us to reevaluate the manner in which his star persona has been traditionally viewed—as a singular, exclusive cluster of discourses that sets him apart from all other male actors of the period. Instead, as I have demonstrated in this chapter, Bachchan is almost always coupled with a range of other masculinities in his most popular films. In fact, many of his “single hero” films, such as Shahenshah (1988) and Ajooba (1991) failed at the box office during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, portending a temporary setback in his stardom. Reading Bachchan’s stardom and on-screen “angry-young-man” persona as a singularity—or to read the dostana as a minor component of his stardom or one that is specific to films like Sholay—is to rob the icon of its richness and complexity. The buddy film and Bachchan’s superstardom need to be understood as mutually constitutive clusters of meaning. This chapter has charted the ruptures as well as the continuities that attend Hindi cinema’s continued romance with the generic mode. While Bollywood still produces films that center on close male friendships, its determined allegiances with discourses of globalization have altered the genre in a foundational manner.

162

Meheli Sen

Notes 1. For a detailed description of the multiplex phenomenon in India, see Aparna Sharma, “India’s Experience with the Multiplex,” 17 April 2011, www.india-seminar. com/2003/525/525%20aparna%20sharma.htm. 2. Rajadhyaksha describes the Bollywood conglomerate as follows: “Bollywood is not the Indian film industry, or at least not the film industry alone. Bollywood admittedly occupies a space analogous to the film industry, but might best be seen as a more diffuse cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption activities from websites to music cassettes, from cable to radio.” Ashis Rajadhyaksha, “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in the Global Arena,” City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, ed. Preben Kaarsholm (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004), 116. 3. For example, one of the most noticeable changes in recent Bollywood cinema has been the tendency toward generic differentiation. Aided by variegated venues of exhibition afforded by urban multiplexes, the traditional “all-India-film,” which combined melodrama, action, romance, and music in a single heady cocktail, has been dismantled into clearly identifiable generic categories. What has been termed the “multiplex film”—notwithstanding the array of film texts that are screened at most multiplexes—is basically a film of shorter duration, often of an identifiable genre, that targets urban, middle-class, English-speaking audiences in urban India. 4. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 138. 5. For example, even in 1999, when his stardom seemed to be on the wane, Bachchan was voted ‘Star of the Millennium’ in a poll conducted by the BBC. 6. See, for example, Madhava Prasad, “The Aesthetic of Mobilization,” in Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, 138–59. Ashwani Sharma, “Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Amitabh Bachchan: Urban Demi-God,” in You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men, eds. Kirkham and Thumim (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1993), 167–80. Vijay Mishra, “The Actor as Parallel Text: Amitabh Bachchan,” in Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2002), 125–56. Fareeduddin Kazmi, “How Angry is the Angry Young Man? Rebellion in Conventional Hindi Films,” in The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, ed. Ashis Nandy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 134–56. 7. Nehru’s vision of/for India relied heavily on discourses of secularism, development, and Soviet-style planning. Heroes of earlier decades embodied, to a considerable extent, these progressive-reformist ideologies. 8. For example, earlier buddy films include Dosti (Satyen Bose, 1964) and Raj Kapoor’s spectacular Sangam (1964). 9. Commenting on the film fittingly titled Dostana, Gopinath writes, “Dostana makes blatantly apparent the ways in which male bonding codifies male same-sex

Buddies in Hindi Commercial Cinema Reconsidered

163

desire. The film also shows how this romantic male bonding and desire often relies on sexism and misogyny. Dostana is structured through the typical male buddy triangle of two men ostensibly competing for the attentions of the same woman (Zeenat Aman). It quickly becomes apparent that Zeenat’s role is simply to act as an object of exchange between the two men; as a bonding device that serves to cement male friendship, she gets passed around from one to the other at various points in the film . . . indeed by the film’s end Zeenat has disappeared entirely” (290–91). See Gayatri Gopinath, “Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema,” Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, ed. Andrew Grossman (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000). 10. See, for example, Sohini Chaudhury, “Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television and Queer Sexuality in India,” in Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2001), 207–21; Priya Jha, “Lyrical Nationalism: Gender, Friendship and Excess in 1970s Hindi Cinema,” Velvet Light Trap no. 51 (2003): 43–53; R. Raj Rao, “Memories Pierce the Heart: Homoeroticism, Bollywood Style,” in Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, ed. Andrew Grossman (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000), 299–306; and Ashok Row Kavi, “The Changing Image of the Hero in Hindi Films,” in Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, 307–12. 11. Ranjani Mazumdar, “Rage on Screen,” Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), 6–7. 12. Ibid., 7. 13. Priya Jha, “Lyrical Nationalism: Gender, Friendship, and Excess in 1970s Hindi Cinema,” 49. 14. Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010), 42. 15. As Vasudevan argues, the family form is extremely malleable in Hindi commercial cinema, a capacious institution that can “be displaced or drawn into other registers of attachment” (42). 16. As is evident, the buddy/brother characters often have the same names in different films, alerting us to the intertextual nature of the genre as a whole. 17. Coolie combines the theme of class struggle with an emphasis on familial bonds that are destabilized by the villains in question. So, in this instance, malevolent capitalist forces threaten both the sacred institution of the family as well as the survival of the working class. The personal once again imbricates the political in a startling collapse of the individual into the collective. 18. Gopinath, “Queering Bollywood,” 291. 19. The film’s attention to surfaces is noteworthy in scenes on the beach in which Kunal’s body, toned to perfection, is prominently on display amidst other lithe “beach-worthy” young bodies. These sequences also allow for the display of prominent clothing brands that specialize in exercise gear and designer “activewear.”

164

Meheli Sen

20. The recent commercial success of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Zoya Akhtar, 2011) is yet another indication that the bromance film has found a hospitable home in Bollywood. Ostensibly a story of three young men who undertake a road trip across Spain to rediscover their friendship by indulging in a series of adventure sports, ZNMD is heavily inspired by Hollywood hits such as Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004) and The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009). What starts out as a road movie with three taut and tanned male protagonists quickly evolves into a resolution of the characters’ largely Oedipal crises during the course of their journey. Spain’s tourist hot spots provide a perfect setting for their inexhaustible capacity for consumption: from wine and women to deep-sea diving, tomato-throwing contests and aerial sport, ZNMD is an unrelenting immersion into the delirium of global tourism. Not surprisingly, the film remains largely silent on the issue of the money that enables this orgy of indulgence. Interestingly, almost every review of the film describes the film as a “bromance,” thereby concretizing the connections between the genre, globality, and the ethos of consumption that pervades its Indian avatar. Dil Chahta Hai (2001), directed by Zoya’s sibling Farhan Akhtar, is an earlier indication of the success of the bromance prototype, especially among urban youth audiences. 21. Critic Taran Adarsh gushed, calling the film a “trendsetter” in his review for “treading the untrodden path,” i.e., showcasing homosexuality “without making a mockery of the gay community.” Bollywood Hungama, 14 November 2008, accessed 8 July 2011. www.bollywoodhungama.com/movies/review/12974/index.html. 22. In his now classic essay, Robin Wood describes a similar compulsion in 1970s Hollywood film: “from the insistence of disclaimers: by finding it necessary to deny the homosexual nature of the central relationship so strenuously, the films actually succeed in drawing attention to its possibility.” Robin Wood, “From Buddies to Lovers,” in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 204–5.

chapter 6

From Batman to I Love You, Man Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre Ken Feil

A recent issue of the Boston rag Stuff magazine features Scott Kearnan’s story “Boston Bromance,” which examines the contemporary bromance as a hetero-male lifestyle, taste code, and media phenomenon, as well as its comedic proximity to queerness. Crowned by a photo of two dreamy dudes who are tastefully coiffed and clothed, slumbering tête-à-tête, “the ABC’s of platonic dude-dating” unspool through stories of Beantown’s “metrosexual” man-couples who “dress well,” “stay groomed,” “enjoy cooking,” “keep fit as gym buddies,” maintain long-standing, intimate relationships, and often cohabitate.1 Kearnan characterizes bromance as a comedy of incongruity, masquerade, and mistaken identity,2 an inherently funny sensibility arising at a time when the assimilation of queer perspectives in popular culture render the distinction between “straight” and “gay” evermore confusing. A dated, camp example concretizes the bromance’s playful, comedic dance around the closet door: a photo of Batman and Robin from the 1966 series. Once the “wish dream of two homosexuals living together” (as Dr. Wertham so hysterically warned in 1954) and “high-camp folk heroes” (as Time magazine celebrated them in 1965),3 the dynamic duo, pictured in Kearnan’s article, pose akimbo, demonstrating “Bromance Rule #27: Always coordinate outfits when fighting crime.”4 Next to them, local heroes and bromantic pioneers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are pictured posing in tuxes, their Oscar statuettes’ heads touching; Kearnan not only acknowledges the queer connotations here but also factors them

166

Ken Feil

into defining “bromance”: “Inevitable ‘Are they or aren’t they?’ ribbing from late-night talk show hosts was quick to follow, but Affleck and Damon . . . were always good sports, owning the jokes instead of getting defensive. (That’s hallmark of modern bromance: smiling self-awareness, amused acknowledgment, and tongue-in-cheek selflabeling.)”5 Just as quickly as bromance invokes the campy, queer connotations of male intimacy combined with self-conscious stylishness, it subsequently negates actual queer desire. Consider Kearnan’s definition of the bromantic “man-crush”: “a heterosexual (seriously!) appreciation for another dude, socially acceptable as a ‘free pass’ for fawning and often reserved for a celebrity of unattainable stature.”6 In theory, bromance is comically queer, but in practice, its adherents assert, bromance remains “(seriously!)” hetero. Bromance is rooted in a lineage of sensibilities attributed to heterosexual men during time periods when queer culture was widely perceived as impacting popular taste: in the 1960s, “stoop,” the heterosexual, implicitly male taste for “low” culture; and in the 1990s, “straight camp,” pretty much the same as stoop. These sensibilities comically invoked their proximity to gay taste in order to deny it and, by extension, belied any hint of queerness creeping into red-blooded American masculinity.7 The similarities and differences among these generations of hetero-male sensibilities enable a historical understanding of bromance as a lifestyle, taste code, and comedic film cycle, along with the anxieties, pleasures, and power struggles underpinning it.8 Two principles forwarded by Pierre Bourdieu apply to all three sensibilities: that lifestyle and taste remain discursively intertwined, and that taste operates through “negation”—“disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘sick-making’) of the tastes of others.”9 “Aversion to different lifestyles,” Bourdieu explains, drives “aesthetic intolerance,” and, likewise, disgust toward particular taste codes coincides with repugnance toward other lifestyles.10 Stoop and straight camp devalued gay taste’s self-conscious style and gender-bending as inextricably linked to a homosexual lifestyle, but the metrosexual bromance invests gay taste with value—in Bourdieu’s words, “conferring aesthetic status on objects or ways of representing them which are excluded by the dominant aesthetic of the time.”11 Attributing “aesthetic status” to the male body as a vehicle to attract and deliver

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 167

homosocial affection,12 metrosexual bromance embraces the gay sensibility that stoop and straight camp outright refused, a gesture that reinforces the incongruous proximity of hetero and homo. “Coordinating outfits,” staying groomed, fit, and having “man-crushes” provide vehicles to express hetero-masculine affection, the queerness of which renders the scene of metrosexual, hetero-male bonding funny. The metrosexual bromantic relationship materializes as a comedy of incongruity that juxtaposes and approximates heterosexual masculinity with gay taste and the image of a feminized lifestyle of emotional and cultural sensitivity. Defining the bromance in purely metrosexual terms stifles, however, an integral element of this sensibility and genre, one that ostensibly reassures the straightness of homosocial bonding: vulgarity. Vulgarity played a key role in stoop and straight camp and, in film, figured centrally in bromantic comedy’s predecessors, 1980s male-dominated “gross-out” sex comedies. The vulgarity of grossout, “animal” comedies signified as heterosexual, masculine power through unity among the male group.13 Kearnan erases vulgarity from the bromance sensibility when he exemplifies the “metrosexual brotherhood of Entourage” as “post-Porky’s” and insists that the man-cave remain tidy: “this is bromance, dude, not Animal House.”14 The “vulgarity” of stereotypical masculinity nevertheless remains underscored in bromantic comedies as various as I Love You, Man (2009, which heads off Kearnan’s list of media examples), Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), Wedding Crashers (2005), Superbad (2007), I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007), Pineapple Express (2008), The Green Hornet (2011), and all of the Jackass films (2002, 2006, 2010). The bromance’s vulgar humor was not lost on New York magazine’s David Edelstein, who labeled I Love You, Man a “slob comedy.”15 Building on Peter Alilunas’ arguments about “dude flicks” and David Greven’s on teen comedies in the early 2000s, displays of “masculine” vulgarity in contemporary bromantic comedies unify the all-male group and serve as a bastion against full absorption into the “feminine,” “gay” sensitivity, and style-consciousness of metrosexuality.16 The grotesque vulgarity of these male-centered narratives marginalizes and objectifies female and gay male characters17 to offset a kind of “vulgarity” that threatens heterosexual masculinity: the

168

Ken Feil

feminizing and eroticizing of the male body and male bonding. The perspectives of the hetero-male protagonists generally render gay desires, bodies, and activities in a gag-inducing vulgarity that always trumps the “animal” vulgarity of heterosexual men. The task of the contemporary bromantic comedy remains to reconcile the sensibility of vulgar hetero-masculinity with metrosexuality and, by extension, control female and gay influences. Alilunas argues that the bromance repairs “castrated” hetero-male subjectivity through “success” narratives about “finding escape routes and places where white male masculinity can recuperate and celebrate its insecurities without incessant female judgment and evaluation”; once located, the male protagonists progress from failure to victorious manhood.18 These “escape routes and places” always abound with vulgar gross-out humor, but, to achieve success, the male protagonists must also incorporate a measure of metrosexual tastefulness and sensitivity. As long as heterosexual masculinity maintains its difference from homosexuality and femininity in the comedy of incongruity, a level of proximity between them is not only allowable but fun and funny. Gay erotic desire and gay bodies remain a manifest source of gross-out humor in the success narratives of numerous bromantic comedies, concretizing sexual and gendered distinctions. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and I Love You, Man depict gay male desire as ridiculous and repulsive, but the latter film proves exceptional by locating gay desire within the heteronormative theatrics of masculinity, in particular, “animal” masculinity. Other bromantic comedies reveal the fetishized styles of hetero-masculine vulgarity and queer them, such as Anchorman and the film adaptations of the comedy-documentary television program Jackass. Anchorman combines the extremes of masculine vulgarity with metrosexual stylishness to italicize the theatrics of masculinity and punctuate its failed performance. I Love You, Man and especially the Jackass films vividly eroticize masculine vulgarity and homosocial affection. The gay male appropriation of bromance sensibility also remains an ostentatious and readily available intertext. The pleasure of queering the bromance derives from the camp, comedic play of gay and straight taste and lifestyle, their incongruity and proximity, and the transgressive glee in discerning something “dirty” or “vulgar” within heteronormative frameworks and rendering it beautiful and

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 169

titillating.19 Queering the bromance consequently seizes on the “passionate failure” (Susan Sontag’s expression) of hetero-masculinity portrayed in the films and reinvests it with queer value. The redemption of queer masculinity within mainstream mass culture constitutes the “success” narrative of queer readings of the bromance. Designs for Living: Stoop, Str aight Camp, Metrosexuality, and Bromance Gustavus T. Stadler notes a long-standing “Anglo-American tradition of cultural homophilia,”20 one that also informs the development of bromantic sensibility. Gays’ “highly stylized, embodied relationship to culture,” expressed through “taste and wit,” has served straight audiences as “relief from a deficient, stagnant, unfulfilling relationship to culture—a relationship seen as a burden of modern convention and, notably, sexual repression.”21 Gay taste “embodied” in fashion, decor, conversation, and emotional and physical activity has become an avatar and catalyst for free expression and nonconformity in “straight” mainstream commercial culture.22 Stadler views the allure of gay taste as an enduring means of queer assimilation and traces it back to Sontag’s germinal “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” from 1964.23 Sontag’s observations about gay “integration” through “the aesthetic sense” especially signify for Stadler amid the rise of metrosexuality in the early 2000s and its popular expression on the program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007).24 But one element of this queer “aesthetic sense” remains overlooked by Stadler despite its centrality in the liberatory function of gay taste: vulgarity, or bad taste. Inasmuch as gay “taste and wit” have correlated with a release from sexual repression, camp sensibility proved a gay means for redeeming the vulgarity of “low” culture and “low” lifestyles. And “straight” culture found this attribute appealing. As Sontag put it, “the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity,”25 and toward the conclusion, she pushed the liberatory aspect of this fondness for vulgarity in the form of good-bad taste: “Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste . . . The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually

170

Ken Feil

restricts what he can enjoy . . . Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated.”26 Part of this “cheerful,” “liberating” process pertains to inverting other cultural hierarchies related to high/low taste, such as preferring style over content, failure over success, and frivolity over seriousness. These inversions inform camp’s theatricalizing of gender roles and ironizing of faded cultural conventions.27 Since the mid-1960s when camp good-bad taste was first popularized, the appreciation of failed seriousness and theatricalized gender roles have been available as means for cultural emancipation from the “burden of modern convention and, notably, sexual repression.”28 But homophilia and the popularizing of gay taste have also compelled the custodians of patriarchal, hetero-masculine taste and lifestyle to revolt against what appeared to be an attack. The 1966 parody “Notes on Stoop” appeared in Esquire, an American lifestyle magazine addressed to straight male readers. Short for “stupid,” Lee Israel characterized stoop in liberatory terms similar to Sontag. Emerging in the midst of “the many new sensibilities burgeoning in our fecund era of freedom from the constrictions of taste,” such as the “kindred sensibility called camp,” stoop was “neither camp nor campy.” Where camp is “playful” and “embraces ‘passionate failure’ passionately,” stoop “appreciates urban man and his droppings,” remaining “semiconscious, bigoted, ignoble, irrational, antelogical (sic), humorless,” and “heterosexual.”29 Kitsch and vulgarity proved to be key elements in placing this “heterosexual” boundary. Beginning with the image of “urban man and his droppings,” stoop culture included everything from the TV Guide crossword puzzle to KKK cant, and “notably heterosexual” figures populated the “stoop cult,” from Frank Sinatra to backyard barbecuers.30 Israel’s mockanthropological discussion of “heterosexual” taste suggested both critique and, considering the mid-1960s explosion of “homosexual taste,” straight male boundary-maintenance.31 Almost thirty years later, in the midst of another efflorescence of gay cultural visibility and queer activism, Esquire gave an updated manifesto defending hetero-male taste against the encroaching impact of homophilia: “Viva Straight Camp!” This arrived in 1993

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 171

during the dawn of a cultural shift in which, as Michael DeAngelis describes, “the eroticized male body is packaged for both gay and mainstream consumption as an object of identification and desire.”32 Such “packaging” carried a queer significance, even when marketing and distribution strategies deliberately downplayed gayness,33 due to the resurgence of queer activism and the rise of what Michael Musto dubbed “new” camp. Musto observed how queer activism, visibility, and the politicizing of queer sex amid the AIDS crisis generated “new” camp, “reflecting a new queer generation that can both raise its fists and drop its pants quicker than before.”34 And new queer camp reached mainstream audiences, from pop superstar Madonna to new “homoerotic camp icons” such as white rapper/Calvin Klein underwear model Marky Mark (Mark Wahlberg).35 Esquire published “Viva Straight Camp!” one month after the Lesbian/Gay/Bi March on Washington and after Out magazine’s issue about the march in which Musto’s article appeared. Esquire observed combatively, “the camp canon is under siege,” a counterattack that mimicked stoop in its co-optation of queer liberatory rhetoric: “All of a sudden, heterosexuals are fabulous! An out-of-the-closet first look at the breeders who are really working it.”36 Similar to stoop, straight camp aimed to reappropriate popular style and reinscribe it as macho and heterosexual through asserting masculinized bad taste and offensive behavior. Marky Mark proved a pivotal figure in this reappropriation. Pictured shirtless on Esquire’s cover, tied to a tree, an anguished martyr to homoeroticism, Marky Mark exemplified “gay camp” as “an overexposed underwear sensation,” and “Straight Camp” (now capitalized) as “a foreignerbashing homophobe.” The article commenced to announce its essential distance and difference from queer camp in terms strikingly similar to its predecessor, stoop, through a litany of kitsch and schlock: “Straight Camp is not about the blurred distinctions between gay or straight (or show tunes, for that matter). It is about male plumage and the ongoing comedy of American straightness: the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, David Hasselhoff in Baywatch, the United States Secret Service, barbecue, the NRA, golf.”37 Fabio Cleto characterizes these gestures as “the explicit removal of the queer [camp] challenge to sexual boundaries,”38 a challenge especially nauseating

172

Ken Feil

to heterosexual masculinity amid the ascendance of mainstream, homoeroticized, and metrosexual icons such as Marky Mark. The concept of the “metrosexual” arose in the mid-1990s, identified initially by British journalist Mark Simpson. Simpson also cited Marky Mark’s underwear ads, signs of the metrosexual “single man living in the metropolis and taking himself as his own love-object,”39 enamored of “the eroticized male body” discussed by DeAngelis, “as an object of identification and desire.” While straight camp enacted a nostalgic confirmation of “macho” vulgarity to negate any “blurred distinctions between gay or straight,” metrosexuality flirted with them by negating vulgarity and seeking something akin to “ ‘gay lifestyle.’ ” A variation on metrosexuality surfaced in Randall Rothenberg’s 1997 Esquire article about “Lounge” culture, which underscored the “camp” of “ostentatiously stylish” straight men enjoying the “kitschy enthusiasm of Esquivel’s zoo-zoo-pows.”40 Metrosexual sensibility nevertheless strived to retrench heterosexual masculinity. Style magazines such as GQ and Esquire upheld a “ ‘heterosexual’ address,” Simpson explained, “to reassure the readership and their advertisers that their ‘unmanly’ passions are in fact manly.”41 Predictably, Rothenberg comforted Esquire’s readers that, in Lounge culture, “high-style heterosexuality reigns over camp’s more familiar gay aesthetic.” Although “irony” informs this “high-style heterosexuality,” heterosexuality itself is never ironized.42 The queerness of metrosexuality persisted nonetheless because, according to Simpson, metrosexuality “contradicts the basic premise of traditional heterosexuality—that only women are looked at and only men do the looking.”43 Although Simpson stressed the narcissistic gaze of metrosexuality, the bromance brings in a more dangerous dimension: homosocial gazes among narcissistic men. Esquire proved to propagate both straight camp and metrosexuality, albeit distancing itself from the term “metrosexual” for fear of its queer connotations.44 These wildly contradictory attitudes about hetero-masculine sensibility and identity prove instructive when examining the bromance, and, indeed, Esquire has provided a definitive forum for founding and cultivating bromantic sensibility: soliciting the homosocial gazes of male readers, encouraging their desire and identification with idealized male bodies and tastemakers,

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 173

luxuriating in a masculinity both authentically “animal”—“straight” and “vulgar”—and stylishly, tastefully (queerly) metrosexual. Bro-Sense and Sensibility The bromance instances a culmination of hetero-male appropriations and negotiations of gay taste and, like stoop, straight camp, and metrosexuality, demonstrates the long-standing appeal of gay taste to hetero-male lifestyle—its offer of sexual and cultural liberation—and its repulsiveness due to the threatened loss of fixed hetero-male identity. Through a dynamic of appeal and repulsion, admission and denial, the bromance plays out loudly at the thresholds of gay/straight and feminine/masculine, approximating Sasha Torres’s observations about the uses of camp in the 1966 TV series Batman: “Camp thus serves as a perfectly condensed marker for the simultaneous admission and denial of Batman’s queerness. But . . . the makers of the series were also unable to purge camp of its connotative associations with gay culture.”45 In discussions about “bromance” that erupted in 2009, when both I Love You, Man and the MTV reality show Bromance premiered, the term signifies as a “simultaneous admission and denial” of the queerness underpinning intense male bonding in the metrosexual era. An article on the humor site Cracked enlists the portmanteau “bromosexual” (from Pineapple Express) and traces the bromance back to ancient Greece (illustrated by a classical painting of two naked musclemen). Exalting I Love You, Man as “the pinnacle of bromance films,” it approximates “a typical romantic comedy. Only with men. In a completely heterosexual way.”46 College Candy, a site addressed to collegiate women, posts a “Favorite Bromances” column that asks, “is there anything hotter than two men who are such good friends they are often confused as lovers?”47 Handbag.com (another lifestyle site addressed to women) also produces a spread on celebrity bromances: “Manhugs and gay rumours aside, these celebrities seem to do everything together, and aren’t afraid to say, ‘I love you, man!’ ”48 Kearnan’s article (from 2010) provides numerous examples of queer admission/denial, such as characterizing the bromance’s popularization as a “proud march out of the closet.”49 His reference to Brokeback

174

Ken Feil

Mountain as a bromance proves particularly illustrative due to the rejoinder, “Oh wait, they did what? I must have gotten popcorn during that part.” The disclosure and negation of the bromance’s queerness in these examples both reflect and refract Bourdieu’s observation of “disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘sick-making’) of the tastes of others.”50 Denial might entail censoring queer sex entirely in these examples, but bromantic comedies periodically represent it, albeit always as comically repulsive. The bromance derives from stoop and straight camp by asserting taste in the form of a masculinized vulgarity as a bulwark against femininity and homosexuality. Unlike its predecessors, however, the bromance sees gender in “quotation marks” (like gay and feminist camp)51 and understands “masculinity” as a “style.” In bromance films, this awareness of slippery, theatricalized gender roles, essential to the comedy of incongruity, is usually expressed through vulgar gross-out humor. Similar to the teen comedies examined by Greven, the bromance reflects the impact of “gay sensibility” on “the depiction of conventional manhood” within narratives that challenge but finally sustain masculine heterosexuality.52 Greven locates this impact of gay sensibility in instances of “cheerfully vulgar” gross-out comedy, such as Stiffler in American Pie (1999) unwittingly gulping someone’s semen,53 or the metrosexual “Dudes” in Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000) passionately kissing each other in a competition of macho bravado.54 Greven’s argument applies to bromances and recalls the “queer challenge to sexual boundaries” that Cleto attributes to camp. Although this sensibility, Greven explains, “suggests a new willingness in American males to adopt an increased tolerance— if not an all-out embrace—of homosexual identity,” the “tolerance” and occasional “embrace” of queerness are expendable, attitudes the straight male bros “can discard at any moment.”55 As bromances reflect the impact of gay sensibility, they play the admission/denial game through the exercise of vulgarity and “disgust.” Conceptions of theatricalized “styles of masculinity” (as Alilunas puts it) are compensated by “success” narratives in which protagonists achieve “manhood” by reveling in “its insecurities,” such as the fear and disgust provoked by queerness.56 Protagonists of bromantic comedies achieve “success” through the assertion of a particular style of masculinity: vulgarity. Although

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 175

the bromantic success narrative requires a metrosexual “makeover” of hetero-masculinity, vulgarity nonetheless persists as an emblem of authentic, victorious manhood. When queerness erupts in these films, it most often functions as a challenge to the characters’ hetero-male stamina, as well as the imputed majority audience of young, straight men, and is intended to elicit the gross-out laughter of disgust.57 I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry plays macho, “bro” vulgarity against a threatening, gross-out, queer vulgarity throughout the film, despite its seemingly queer-friendly story in which two heterosexual, homophobic firemen masquerade as a gay couple for insurance benefits and consequently learn about homophobic persecution as well as their own intense, platonic love for each other.58 Larry’s slovenly appearance, Chuck’s womanizing, and their homophobic language pale in comparison, for instance, to Ron the Mailman (Robert Smigel), who sexually propositions Larry through “postal” entendres: “I make drop-offs . . . I’d be happy to come in through the back door . . . Used to holding large packages.” Each of these groaners strikes the audience as a bad joke that also evokes images of “grotesque” sexual activity. The following scene at an AIDS benefit costume ball animates the queer gross-out humor when Chuck accidentally propositions a drag queen, and a winged “fairy” boy in silver hot pants shrieks, “I’m dirty! Who’s dirty? Are you?” After macho fellow fireman Fred (Ving Rhames) comes out to Chuck, he immediately turns into a finger-snapping queen who flaunts his nudity and sings “I’m Every Woman.” When a city hearing enjoins Chuck and Larry to verify themselves, they sincerely profess their love, criticize homophobia, and finally, tentatively, move in for a kiss. Their captain (Dan Aykroyd) interrupts, however, in a line articulating straight male disgust: “Enough! I’d rather change my grandfather’s diaper than see two straight guys kissing.” In order for the hetero bros to achieve success, the film must reconcile them with gay culture without jettisoning their masculinity. The film concludes with a metrosexual reconciliation of gay and straight desire and a hesitant validation of homoeroticism— on condition that it remains utterly ridiculous. In a bookstore, a young, ostensibly gay muscle-boy and an older man page gleefully through an AIDS charity calendar that Chuck, Larry, and their fellow

176

Ken Feil

In I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007), the charity calendar personifies bromantic sensibility: macho “bro” vulgarity protects the heterosexual males from the threatening, gross-out, queer vulgarity of the gay erotic gaze. Directed by Dennis Dugan, Universal Studios.

firefighters posed for. Each month contains one or more characters in silly “erotic” poses. The gay erotic gaze exists, the film tells us, and is so normal that it figures into charity fundraising. The calendar also continues a “metrosexual” theme begun earlier in the film, the idea that straight male vanity can overcome homophobia because heterosexual men desire to be desired by anyone, female or male, gay or straight.59 Just before the hearing, one of Chuck’s straight, homophobic firefighter buddies asks him, “Why’d you pick Larry? . . . Am I not good-looking enough for you or some shit?” The calendar plays into this “metrosexual” dynamic of straight male narcissism as a combative to homophobia along the lines of metrosexual role models Brad Pitt or David Beckham, whose encouragement of gay fans’ adoration rested alongside the suggestion of their own narcissistic delight, their reported “bromances” with other attractive men, and implications of sexual fluidity.60 At the same time, the calendar sequence undercuts the gay erotic gaze with comedic, vulgar, mock-sexual theatrics rather than sultry poses by the likes of

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 177

Beckham or Pitt. Chuck and Larry undergo a metrosexual bromantic makeover, sacrificing their macho vulgarity (homophobic language and attitudes as well as Chuck’s womanizing), and discovering their love for each other. But the film compensates by framing queerness—through hetero-masculine anxieties—as vulgar, ridiculous, grotesque, asexual, and consequently, unthreatening. The comedy of incongruity concludes successfully, sexual categories intact, without suggesting the fluidity of sexual identity. In contrast to Chuck and Larry, Anchorman subjects hypermasculine “stoop” to something approximating queer camp parody, rendering patriarchal heteronormativity as risible as the 1970s fashions on parade. At a pool party at Ron’s bachelor pad, reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) introduces himself, appearing as a hilariously theatricalized image of the 1970s’ macho man: mustache and sideburns, tan leather jacket, gold bracelet and pinky ring, lounging with a revolver in one hand, a scantily clad blond in the other. Brian addresses the camera directly: “People call me the Bri-man. I’m the stylish one of the group. I know what you’re asking yourself, and the answer is yes, I have a nickname for my penis . . . But I also nicknamed my testes . . . You ladies play your cards right, you might get to meet the whole gang.”61 Brian’s speech and appearance render hyper-masculinity a ridiculous construct of style, the product of a sensibility that dictates everything from fashion and hairdo to firearm accessories. The speech also bends gender norms when Brian addresses the audience not as a “bro” but a “chick” he wants to seduce. Given that these films have a predominantly straight male fan base, Brian’s male gaze objectifies and feminizes the ostensible male majority of spectators, denying them the opportunity to identify with his hyper-straight masculinity. Anchorman also squarely locates queer desire within the homophobia and sexism of the bromance sensibility. Sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner) affirms his machismo when he objectifies the new female coanchor Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate): “Oh, that behind is driving me loco! I’m like a night wolf,” whereupon he howls wildly. When Ron advises his news team to consider Veronica’s feelings, Champ taunts, “You sound like a gay.” After Ron starts dating Veronica, Champ’s pleas to restore their bromance blur with gay desire: “The bottom line is you’ve been

178

Ken Feil

spending a lot of time with this lady, Ron. You’re a member of the Channel Four News Team. . . . We need you. Hell, I need you. I’m a mess without you. I miss you so damn much! I miss being with you. I miss being near you. I miss your laugh. I miss your scent. I miss your musk. When this all gets sorted out, I think you and me should get an apartment together.” By treating Champ’s homophobia as an irrational fear symptomatic of repressed desire and antiquated attitudes, the film devalues and derides patriarchal heteronormativity as equally outmoded and unfashionable as the characters’ haircuts and clothes.62 Anchorman’s satire of repressed homosexuality in the bromance surely reflects the influence of “gay sensibility” and the metrosexual masculinity of the early 2000s. The film imposes limits, however, on this parodic critique of heterosexual masculinity since Champ remains a secondary character with little impact on Ron’s central success narrative. Like Anchorman, the hyper-masculine morphs into the homoerotic in I Love You, Man, but it also unearths the aesthetic features of this ambiguity alongside the grotesque: briefly but vividly through the gay character Robbie (Andy Samberg) and, more figuratively in key instances of bonding between the protagonists, Peter (Paul Rudd) and Sydney (Jason Segel). Here the success narrative revolves around the restoration of Sydney and Peter’s bromance. I Love You, Man centers on recently engaged realtor Peter Klaven who is in search of a male best friend to counter his fear of being “a girlfriend guy,” devoid of “dude friends” and “clingy” with his fiancée, Zooey (Rashida Jones). The film establishes Peter’s metrosexual taste (and distance from conventional machismo) through his “feminine” demeanor,63 kempt appearance, politeness, domesticity (he makes Zooey and her friends root-beer floats topped with “pirouettes”), and cultural interests (favorite films include The Devil Wears Prada and Chocolat). A montage of disastrous “man-dates” pits Peter—metrosexual, sensitive, and tasteful—against various forms of masculine vulgarity, straight and gay. Two dates erupt with hypermacho grotesqueness, in particular, when Peter projectile vomits on crude, brutish Barry (Jon Favreau) after a drinking contest. The third date transpires smoothly until Doug (Thomas Lennon) surprises Peter with a French kiss; the film conveys the lasting vulgarity of the gay kiss when Peter tells Zooey that he needs a stronger mouthwash

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 179

to rid him of Doug’s lingering bad breath: “I gotta go with chemicals on this. . . . I might use Comet.” Peter experiences the typical grossout response to queer sexuality—such vulgarity literally leaves a bad taste in the protagonist’s mouth—but the same can be said of the macho, straight vulgarity of Barry’s drinking contest. Peter meets Sydney at the open house for his crowning venture, selling the Lou Ferrigno estate, thus igniting two of the dominant storylines related to the success narrative. Sydney ingratiates himself with insight into flatulence (“I know my farts”), compliments on Peter’s hors d’oeuvres (“Thank you for the sun-dried tomato aioli . . . it’s a revelation”), and the admission that he attended the open house to seduce a “divorcée.” Sydney’s vulgar sexual and scatological references arise without any of Barry’s malignant machismo, and punctuate his stylized, flowery tribute to the mayo by affirming his heterosexuality. As the film transpires, Sydney’s somewhat ambiguous sexuality emerges through his vulgar, bromantic behavior, such as when he reveals the “jerk-off station” within his “man cave” and advises Zooey to give Peter fellatio, but Sydney’s crude behavior enhances the bromantic intimacy by enabling Peter to be a “dude.” Their bromance reaches its vulgar, homoerotic zenith when Peter and Sydney attend a Rush concert, dancing and writhing together, licking each other’s air guitar. Sexual instability pervades I Love You, Man, just as it does in bromantic sensibility, due to the centrality of emotional and physical male bonding within the success narrative. When the two go shopping for Peter’s wedding tuxedo, the homosocial, bromantic gazes center on a key metrosexual tenet: the connection between personal stylishness and self-confidence.64 Sydney snaps pictures of Peter in various “James Bond” poses, then advises with the authority of a GQ columnist, “You should wear something with a little more pizzazz . . . more flash. . . . Peacock it out a bit.” When Peter protests out of insecurity, Sydney delivers a bromantic motivational speech: “Look at me. You have this image of yourself as this straight-laced, tight guy, but I’ve seen you cut loose in the man-cave, and it is fantastic . . . it’s the same with the Ferrigno house. You have all of the skills in the world, and you have no confidence. Now, sack up, man.” Sydney reaches down, offscreen, to slap Peter’s cojones. Sydney’s gaze dominates throughout the scene as both tastemaker and lifestyle

180

Ken Feil

coach, and he seems to delight in perusing Peter, directing him during the photo shoot, doling out advice, and smacking Peter’s “sack.” Sydney’s idealized, bromantic vision of Peter eventually materializes in a series of billboards for Peter’s realty business that depict Peter as a variety of male fantasy figures: overtly macho, such as James Bond (“License To Sell”); a cowboy (“ ‘Pistol’ Pete”); a rap star grasping a woman’s buttocks; and as eroticized, shirtless metrosexuals—one in bed with a seductively smug expression (“Peter Klaven Can Sell Your House In His Sleep. . . . So Jump On In”), another on the beach shirtless, six-packed, in Speedos, and advertising a sizable package (“LA’s Biggest Realtor!”). Near the climax of the film, Peter breaks away from Sydney for alienating him from Zooey. This is the plot’s nadir, which is not even reversible when the billboards improve Peter’s business or he reconciles with Zooey. Before the wedding can commence, Peter and Sydney must reunite to say their vows, the eponymous “I love you, man.” The film emphasizes the bromantic play of homosexual and heterosexual desire, admission and denial, something not demanded by other bromance films in which flashier plotlines adumbrate intense homosocial relations, e.g. hetero-mantic entanglements in Anchorman, Wedding Crashers, and Superbad or crime plotlines in Pineapple Express and The Green Hornet. The inclusion of gay male gazes in I Love You, Man confirms the queerness of the protagonists’ intimacy as well as their heterosexuality. Before leaving the men’s clothing store, Doug (the mandate kisser) suddenly appears, witnessing Peter touching Sydney and looking into his eyes. Peter behaves guiltily, as if cheating, and Doug plays the spurned lover: “I just wish I could take back that kiss, because I felt something that I haven’t felt in years . . . It was the taste of betrayal, you fucking whore.” Doug’s line invokes his bad taste, which he deposited in Peter’s mouth and, by connection, their different lifestyles. His misperception of bromantic, metrosexual intimacy as homosexual underscores the comedy of incongruity simultaneous to confirming the bros’ heterosexuality. I Love You, Man also unearths the homoerotic ambiguity of the bromance through the perspective of Peter’s out gay brother, Robbie. A “dude” well versed in bromance and comfortable with his sexuality, Robbie couples metrosexuality with macho vulgarity to triumphantly maneuver the fluid boundaries of gay and straight

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 181

in bromantic relationships. As a gym trainer, well coiffed, stylishly but casually dressed in sports apparel, he spots his straight male clients with “manly” coercion (“Push that shit out”). When Peter asks Robbie’s advice about male friendships, he responds, “straight guys are my specialty . . . I get bored pursuing gays. I like to give myself more of a challenge.” Robbie requires little effort, though, to attract straight men. After watching Robbie spot married “straight as an arrow” Alan, Peter exclaims, “That guy was totally flirting with you.” Far from the stereotype of the predatory gay man, Robbie’s ideal embodiment of a “bro” renders him an ideal object of straight male desire/identification. In contrast to Doug’s grotesque kiss, Robbie’s brief gym session with Alan renders the homoerotic dimensions of “manly” performance visible for straight spectators without being a gross-out gag. In an over-the-shoulder shot from Robbie’s point of view, Alan rises from the weight bench after Robbie spots him: handsome, messy hair, sweaty, an exhausted smile. The next shot pictures Robbie from Alan’s perspective: square-jawed, wavy hair, with a thick-lipped halfsmile. Robbie pats Alan’s arm and says, “I’ll see you around,” and Alan grins, saying, “I hope so.” Robbie leaves Alan’s view revealing Peter, surprised at the flirtation that transpired. Not only does the (woefully brief) sequence pinpoint the homoeroticism of the supposedly straight “dude” construct, it also aestheticizes and eroticizes it for an audience presumably dominated by straight men (Alan, Peter, and the filmgoers). The sequence visually approximates metrosexual fashion spreads of male models in homosocial intimacy. An article on the Trendhunter site noted “Bromance Fashion Ads” among 2009’s most popular fashion fads, including an Armani photo spread that “Shows Physical Male Bonding.” Pictured primarily in duos, fashionably dressed young men pose intimately, heads touching, spooning.65 Although Robbie and Alan never have physical contact apart from arm pats, the shots accentuate their attraction, attractiveness, and the source: their metrosexual “bro” appearances. The macho “vulgarity” of sweat and weight lifting also informs the eroticism of the sequence, another common element of homoerotic fashion spreads. I Love You, Man briefly homoeroticizes the kind of macho vulgarity that bromances usually wield to negate the queerness of male bonding, but this occurs only briefly,

182

Ken Feil

at the beginning of the film. By the conclusion, the fulfillment of the success narrative—Peter and Sydney’s reunion, Peter’s business achievements—enables the fruition of the heterosexual romance, Zooey and Peter’s wedding. Conclusion: Jackass, Queerness, and the Self-Destruction of Bromance The Jackass films offer a bromantic scenario that deviates from all others, one in which masculinity continually undergoes humiliation and vulgarity remains expressly homoeroticized, all within an episodic narrative format composed of one absurd, hazardous prank or stunt after another.66 The abuse of the male body persists as common content for physical gags in bromances as well as previous film comedy cycles centered on the all-male group, such as teen gross-out comedies.67 But devoid of a traditional goal-oriented narrative (besides committing a stunt or prank) and heterosexual romance, Jackass revolves around exposing and abusing men’s bodies and the participants’ attendant sadomasochistic glee. The idea of “success” evaporates as victory is only possible through the punishment and humiliation of the male body via perilous deeds, grotesque displays, and fetishistic presentation: Chris Pontius donning a bikini and bunny ears in Jackass 3D, for instance, merely to introduce a stunt involving lead Jackass Johnny Knoxville; or, more painfully, Steve-O in briefs (also Jackass 3D) receiving a direct slam into his scrota from a T-ball. As Knoxville, Pontius, Steve-O, and other Jackasses suffer, their “bros” (as they often call each other) watch, laughing at their misery. The bromantic community here forms around a democracy of shared sadomasochistic gazes. Acknowledging the pervasive queerness of Jackass’s “reflexive sadomasochism,” Sean Brayton alludes to the inversion of the usual bromantic “success” narrative: “Intending to fail at each sordid stunt, the Jackass gang both contests and confirms ‘normative’ assumptions of white heterosexual masculinity.”68 Despite the “travesty of heteronormative masculinity and bourgeois society” through fervent humiliation of white, heterosexual masculinity eagerly performed among the gazes of white, heterosexual bros, Brayton avers, “Reflexive sadomasochism reassures the ‘straight’ sensibilities of homosocial bonding by punishing not only the protagonist’s

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 183

Jackass Number Two (2006). The bromantic community of Jackass forms around a democracy of shared sadomasochistic gazes and homoerotic imagery. Directed by Jeff Tremaine, Paramount Pictures.

genitals but also the queer gaze of the male viewer . . . A hierarchy of competing masculinities is reproduced even during moments of apparent emasculation.”69 Brayton assumes the success of heteromasculinity through the endurance of its failure, “emasculation” as a boundary, a form of distinction that separates hetero- from homo-masculinity and positions the former as successfully superior. Omitting the queer reception of Jackass from the equation, however, actually reinstates the hegemony of hetero-masculinity. Considering gay male fandom, cast testimonies, and the operation of camp, an unambiguously queer bromantic “success” narrative triumphantly emerges through the maneuvers of queer gazes that eroticize and appropriate the vulgar spectacle of hetero-masculine failure. In this equation, “punishing . . . the protagonist’s genitals” invokes, even welcomes, “the queer gaze of the male viewer,” which is victorious over other “competing masculinities.” The degradation of the male body in Jackass, coupled with the homosocial constellation of “bros” unified in sadomasochistic pleasure, set the stage for queer fantasy. On the one hand, such fantasies

184

Ken Feil

congeal around the eroticizing of masculine vulgarity: bodies denuded, costumed absurdly, and subjected to pain and vulnerability. In many regards this characterization approximates “hard body” action films, as Alilunas and Brayton discuss, but in the absence of a goal-oriented narrative and a heterosexual romance plot, Jackass encourages audiences to simply delight in suffering denuded dudes and their giggling bros.70 As Carl Swanson opines in New York magazine following the release of the first Jackass film (2002), “It doesn’t take a leering queer-theory grad student to tell you that Jackass: The Movie has more than a little in common with gay porn. The crew of aging skate-rat guys spend much of the film in jockstraps egging one another on to do things like shove Hot Wheels cars up their butts. Plus, there aren’t any girls.” Swanson entitles his article “Boys Gone Wild,” following the gay porn series, and his subtitle underscores a queer preference for vulgar low culture over middlebrow, legitimate gay culture: “Never mind Will & Grace: Gay men are in lust with Johnny Knoxville and the skater punks of Jackass.”71 Jackass represents bromantic bonding as the “passionate failure” (Sontag’s expression) of hetero-masculinity, reinvesting masculine failure with queer value. Where the bromance compensates for the humiliation of masculinity—its castration, feminizing, and queering—through a success narrative involving heterosexual romance, Jackass simply contains the castration, feminizing, and queering while refusing to contain it within a heterosexual, patriarchal perspective. The Jackass bros embody the male masochist as characterized by Kaja Silverman, a male who “acts out in an insistent and exaggerated way the basic conditions of cultural subjectivity . . . that are normally disavowed . . . [He] prostrates himself before the Gaze even as he solicits it, exhibits his castration for all to see . . . The male masochist magnifies the losses and divisions upon which cultural identity is based . . . he radiates a negativity inimical to the social order.”72 Gay male fans of Jackass explain to Swanson their pleasure in the exhibitionistic masochism of the dudes, according to Silverman’s terms: “Howard . . . likes the way ‘everybody is naked all the time, even in stunts where you don’t have to be.’ It’s like, ‘You don’t need to be wearing some butt-floss G-string to be doing that.’ ” If the Jackasses denude and objectify their bodies eagerly as part of the exhibitionistic contest of taking punishment, this

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 185

could also pertain to their readiness for gay sex, as another respondent avers: “ ‘It’s one of my favorite shows on TV,’ says Ryan Shiraki, a 32-year-old screenwriter. ‘I would fuck almost all of them, and I’m sure they would fuck me if Johnny Knoxville told them to.’ ”73 The quest to exhibit masculine endurance and strength in front of the male group is typical of the bromance, but here, queer Jackass fans expose the absurd tautology of masculinity enduring its own demise to prove itself masculine.74 Queering the bromance involves usurping the privilege of voyeurism, formulating what DeAngelis refers to in another context as an “if only” fantasy,75 and preferring the vulgar, oppositional pleasures in Jackass over the bourgeois “Pottery Barnstorming vision of gay life on Will & Grace,” as Swanson puts it. Queering the bromance necessitates voyeurism, catching masculinity unaware of its eroticized failure. “For gays who grew up pining for the toned skater crowd,” Swanson proffers, “Jackass’s boyishness-run-amok is compelling. ‘These guys are every guy I wanted to bone in high school but couldn’t,’ ” states one young man, and another fantasizes about being “ ‘an undercover gay’ ” to “ ‘infiltrate their subculture, study their mores, and sniff their underwear.’ ” Jackass Number Two and Jackass 3D inscribe a queer address, however, which enables another kind of queer engagement, a simultaneous identification with and desire for the subject/object that would reconcile the bromance sensibility with a queer lifestyle.76 The erotic pleasures of queer vulgarity remain largely excised from the bromance; in their place arises an objectified image of vulgar queerness: repulsive, grotesque, other. Pontius, Steve-O, Knoxville, and other Jackass dudes verify the queer pleasures of Jackass as they dress in briefs, thongs, or drag and touch each other provocatively. When a Vanity Fair interviewer asks if “Jackass is at least a smidge gay,” Knoxville replies, “I’m offended you just said a smidge! . . . We’re over here sitting on rainbows and you say a smidge . . . We’re a gay pride parade that’s happening! And in 3-D!”77 In a recent Twitter event about Jackass 3D, Knoxville was asked, “What is the gayest thing that went down?,” to which Knoxville responded, “What wasn’t gay in Jackass 3-D?!?!”78 The films also include gay male icons of low comedy: Rip Taylor in all three opuses, and, in Number Two, John Waters. In his second interview with The Advocate in 2004, Knoxville

186

Ken Feil

acknowledges his respect for Waters and influence on his work.79 Putting Waters into Jackass suggests the queer extents of Knoxville’s “trash aesthetic” along with other signifiers identified by Knoxville in interviews as having gay meaning—in particular, the rainbow insignia that adorns his hat in the first Jackass, fills the background in Jackass 3D’s spectacular opening sequence, and adjoins the insignia for dickhouse.tv (Knoxville’s production company).80 That Knoxville hosted a pre-screening of Jackass 3 at the gay L.A. leather bar The Eagle also punctuates the film’s queer, sadomasochistic ad/un/dress.81 As a manifestation of the bromance sensibility, Jackass appears far removed from Kearnan’s tastefully stylish “Boston Bromances” or the metrosexual-animal hybrids of bromantic comedies. The Jackass films defy the bromance’s straight camp and straightened metrosexuality, discombobulating the admission/denial formula. The Jackass films are “about the blurred distinctions between gay or straight” because they theatricalize and eroticize “male plumage and the ongoing comedy of American straightness.” The Jackass version of the bromance sensibility holds on to certain markers of metrosexuality, particularly in the figures of Knoxville, Pontius, and Steve-O (all of whom could populate Steve Klein’s kinky fashion photography),82 but its deployment of vulgarity stays pervasive and queerly inclusive rather than divisive. The masochistic vulgarity of Jackass jettisons any claims to fixed masculinity even as the Jackass bros revel in each other’s denuded and anguished bodies. As a result, the Jackass films incorporate queering the bromance into their audience address and reinvest it with value. These films expect spectators to join the Jackass dudes in delighting over the “passionate failure” of hetero-masculinity, to identify with and desire it. Lacking the typical bromantic success narrative and metrosexual compromise, these films confer value on the fluid territories of queer and popular tastes as well as lifestyles.

Notes Many thanks to Michael DeAngelis, Janet Staiger, Michael Selig, Emerson College Library, students in my 2010 Sex Comedy class, and as always, Michael S. Keane. In memory of Ryan Dunn (1977–2011) and Stucka Keane-Feil (1999–2013).

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 187 1. Scott Kearnan, “Boston Bromance,” Stuff (20 April 2010): 32. I am grateful to Rachel Alexander for giving me this article. 2. Jack Babuscio, “The Cinema of Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 117–35. 3. “The Return of Batman,” Time (26 November 1965): 60. 4. Kearnan, “Boston Bromance,” 31–32. 5. Ibid., 32. 6. Ibid., 33. 7. “Viva Straight Camp!” Esquire (June 1993): 92–95; Lee Israel, “Notes on Stoop,” Esquire (August 1966): 90–91; Randall Rothenberg “The Swank Life,” Esquire (April 1997). 8. See Jennifer Lee, “The Man Date,” New York Times (10 April 2005), Section 9: 1–2; David Colman, “Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell,” New York Times (19 June 2005), Section 9: 1, 6. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, “The aristocracy of culture,” in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins et al. (London: Sage, 1986), 192–93. 10. Ibid. 11. Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture,” 186. 12. David Greven, “Dude, Where’s My Gender? Contemporary Teen Comedies and New Forms of Masculinity,” Cineaste (Summer 2002): 21. 13. William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 92, 110–12. 14. Kearnan, “Boston Bromance,” 32. 15. David Edelstein, “An Affair to Remember,” New York, March 15, 2009, http:// nymag.com/movies/reviews/55344/. 16. Greven, “Dude,” 14–16; Peter Alilunas, “Male Masculinity as the Celebration of Failure: The Frat Pack, Women, and the Trauma of Victimization in the ‘Dude Flick,’ ” Mediascape (Spring 2008), www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Spring08_MaleMasculinity.htm. 17. Alilunas, “Male Masculinity”; Greven, “Dude,” 19. 18. Alilunas, “Male Masculinity.” 19. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 33–35. 20. Gustavus T. Stadler, “Queer Guy For the Straight ‘I,’ ” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 11.1 (2005): 109. 21. Ibid. 22. Mark Simpson, “Here come the mirror men,” Independent (15 November 1994), www.marksimpson.com/pages/journalism/mirror_men.html; Toby Miller, “A Metrosexual Eye on Queer Guy,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 11.1 (2005): 112.

188

Ken Feil

23. Stadler, “Queer Guy,” 110; Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 290. 24. Stadler, “Queer Guy,” 109–11. 25. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 289. 26. Ibid., 291. 27. Ibid., 285–86. 28. See Ken Feil, “ ‘Talk About Bad Taste’: Camp, Cult and the Reception of What’s New, Pussycat?,” in Convergence Media History, ed. Janet Staiger et al. (New York: Routledge, 2009). 29. Israel, “Notes on Stoop,” 90–91. 30. Ibid. 31. In the mid-1960s, camp’s reputation as “homosexual” remained firmly established and often framed understandings of camp taste. See Feil, “Talk,” 141–47. 32. Michael DeAngelis, Gay Fandom and Crossover Fandom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 183. 33. DeAngelis, Gay Fandom, 181–83; Simpson, “Here come.” 34. Michael Musto, “Old Camp New Camp,” Out (April/May 1993): 34. 35. Musto, “Old Camp,” 35, 37, 39. 36. Ibid., 92–93. 37. Ibid., 92. 38. Fabio Cleto, “Introduction: Queering the Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 33. 39. Simpson, “Here Come.” 40. Rothenberg, “The Swank.” 41. Simpson, “Here Come.” 42. Rothenberg, “The Swank.” 43. Simpson, “Here Come.” 44. See David Katz, “Ways to Improve the World,” Esquire (December 2003): 48; James Oliver Cury, “The Cure: How Not To Be a Metrosexual,” Esquire (December 2003): 46; Poppy Montgomery, “Ten Things You Don't Know About Women,” Esquire (May 2004): 74; Reed Tucker, “This Is Your Destiny,” Esquire (January 2006): 41. 45. Sasha Torres, “ ‘The Caped Crusader of Camp’: Camp, Pop, and the Batman Television Series,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 339. 46. “Bromance,” Cracked, last modified December 2009, www.cracked.com/ funny-1969-bromance/?profanity=on. 47. Amanda Wagner, “College Candy’s Favorite Bromances,” College Candy, last modified Spring 2009, accessed 8 June 2011, http://collegecandy.com/2009/05/04/ collegecandys-favorite-bromances/#more-27888.

Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre 189 48. “Bromance,” handbag.com, last modified 27 July 2009, www.handbag.com/ celebrity/lives/male/bromance-102855. 49. Kearnan, Boston Bromance,” 32. 50. Bourdieu, “Aristocracy,” 192. 51. See Pamela Robertson (now Wojcik), Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp From Mae West To Madonna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 52. Greven, “Dude,” 19. 53. Ibid., 14, 19. 54. Ibid., 20. 55. Ibid. 56. Alilunas, “Male Masculinity.” 57. Greven, “Dude,” 20–21. 58. It is worth considering another earlier incarnation of bromance and a variation on “straight camp”—1969’s The Gay Deceivers. See Harry M. Benshoff, “Representing (Repressed) Homosexuality in the Pre-Stonewall Hollywood Homo-Military Film,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 85–90. 59. Simpson, “Here come.” 60. Simpson, “Here come”; Miller, “Metrosexual Eye,” 112; Colman, “Gay or Straight?,” H1–H6; “Metrosexual,” last modified 13 July 2010, http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Metrosexual. 61. On the personification of penises in male buddy comedies (M*A*S*H and Porky’s), see Paul, Laughing Screaming, 105–106, 117–18. 62. See Greven, “Dude,” 20. 63. Edelstein describes him as “feminine.” See “An Affair.” 64. Simpson, “Here come.” 65. Jeremy Gutsche, “Top 50 Fashion Trends for Men in Q1 2009,” Trendhunter, 2 April 2009, www.trendhunter.com/slideshow/top-50-fashion-trends-formen-in-q1-2009#37. 66. Thanks to Michael Kaminsky for encouraging a closer look at Jackass. 67. Paul, Laughing Screaming, 114–16, 121; Alilunas, “Male Masculinity”; Sean Brayton, “MTV’s Jackass: Transgression, Abjection and the Economy of White Masculinity, Journal of Gender Studies (March 2007): 58–63, 69–70. 68. Brayton, “MTV’s Jackass,” 57. 69. Ibid., 64, 69–70. 70. Alilunas, “Male Masculinity”; Brayton, “MTV’s Jackass,” 62. 71. Carl Swanson, “Boys Gone Wild,” New York, 2 December 2002, http:// nymag.com/nymetro/urban/gay/n_8062/. 72. Kaja Silverman, quoted in Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 200. 73. Swanson, “Boys Gone.”

190

Ken Feil

74. The film Team America: World Police provides a perfect example of this when the chief tests the male hero’s loyalty and patriotism by demanding fellatio. 75. DeAngelis, Gay Fandom, 232. Interestingly, in an interview with The Advocate just a few weeks later, Knoxville states flatly that their “favorite review” of Jackass called it “the gayest film of all time.” See “The Advocate’s Coolest Straights,” The Advocate, 24 December 2002, 52–53. 76. John Fletcher, “Freud and his uses: Psychoanalysis and gay theory,” in Coming On Strong: Gay Politics and Culture, ed. Simon Shepherd et al. (London: Unwin Hyman), 114–15. 77. Eric Spitznagel, “The Stars of Jackass 3D On God, Cancer, and Homosexuality,” Vanity Fair, 14 October 2010, www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2010/10/the-starsof-jackass-3d-talk-about-god-cancer-and-homosexuality.html. 78. “a #jackasslive wrap-up in briefs,” dickhouse.tv, 2 June 2011, www.dickhouse. tv. 79. Alonso Deralde, “Kicking It With Johnny Knoxville,” The Advocate, 12 October 2004, 62. 80. Brayton, “MTV’s Jackass,” 69; Spitznagel, “The Stars of Jackass.” 81. “happy birthday to johnny knoxville!” dickhouse.tv, 11 March 2011. www.dickhouse.tv/dickhouse/2011/03/happy-birthday-to-johnny-knoxville.html. 82. See “Games and Restrictions by Steve Klein,” Homotography, 12 February 2010. http://homotography.blogspot.com/2010/02/steven-klein-arena-hommeplus.html.

chapter 7

Rad Bromance (or I Love You, Man, but We Won’t Be Humping on Humpday) Peter Forster

The word “bromance” is amusing mainly because of its dissonance. By declaring that bros can have a romance, it denies something in the precise instant that it admits it. The Station’s “Rad Bromance” (posted on YouTube, November 27, 2009), a parody of Lady Gaga’s hit song “Bad Romance,” wittily catches the cultural trends, erotic tensions, and semantic contradictions inherent in the notion of the romance between what it playfully characterizes as beer-drinking, knuckle-punching, Knicks-watching, chick-scoping bros: We were just male bonding and shit, just don’t trip . . .  Don’t understand why people get sick When we’re just two dudes in a rad bromance I would date you if you were a chick ’Cause you know I just love this rad bromance

Three questions immediately present themselves: which is more powerful—the admission of the romantic/erotic impulses in male bonding or the denial of any nonheterosexual impulses in the bros? Why does it matter? Why is an entire genre of films dedicated to the exploration of this admission/denial? The answer to all three questions is a preoccupation with heteronormativity. Anya Strzemien gestures toward a rationale for this: “Homosexuality used to be known as the love that dared not speak its name—until, thanks to the gayification of pop culture, it became the love that wouldn’t shut

192

Peter Forster

the hell up.”1 While the bromance genre obviously capitalizes on— admits to—the recent attention to masculinity and male sexuality in popular culture, it also definitively reacts against—denies—the idea of gayification. If, as David Greven contends, Hollywood masculinity became self-aware during G.H.W. Bush’s presidency (1989–1993), when “a profound shift in gendered representation occurred” and “an explosion of films that foregrounded non-normative gendered identities and sexualities transformed Hollywood film’s representation of gender and sexuality,”2 then the bromantic comedy is a self-conscious push back against this trend to bisexualize/homosexualize/ metrosexualize the contemporary Western male. According to Japhy Grant, “The great thing about the idea of ‘bromance’ is that it accurately reflects the shifting sands of sexuality under the American male’s feet.”3 These shifting sands lie within the treacherous territory of homosociality, where same-sex intimacy cannot be reduced to sexual desire but where the desire that might inflect this intimacy cannot be discounted or denied. How will the bromantic comedy help its hero—“just a dude in a rad bromance”— traverse these sands? It will set him on a trajectory at the end of which he will reclaim the stability of his heteromasculinity from the ambiguity of homosociality. It will, finally, separate the bro from the romance. It is characterized by its two interlocking preoccupations, transacted within and around the central male/male relationship: first, the conflict between the homosocial and the homoerotic, which involves the bros’ managing their relationships with each other; and, second, the conflict between the homosocial and the heteroromantic, which involves their managing their relationships with women. “I would date you if you were a chick”: The Conflict between the Homosocial and the Homoerotic The bros in the bromantic comedy must identify as heterosexual. They might to the casual (and open-minded) observer appear to be dating, but of course, strictly speaking, they are not (“I would date you if you were a chick”). There can be no bromantic comedy if male-male desire leads to male-male sex (“I would date you if you were a chick”). But there can be no bromantic comedy if there is no

Rad Bromance

193

male-male desire, however sublimated or disowned (“I would date you if you were a chick”). These bros are, in the spirit of Daniel Maurer’s satirical Brocabulary, bromoerotic: they do not—or dare not— experience homosocial desire as homoerotic, even if there are signs that it leans in that direction. In the bromantic comedy, heterosexuality, a stable identity, exists on the extreme end of a continuum of homosocial desire that has, at its other extreme, another stable identity, homosexuality. Todd W. Reeser describes the instability of what lies between: The main point about thinking about male desire as a continuum is not that desire can be given a mathematical location on a line (to say something like “his desire for his buddy is a four, but his is a six” is impossible). Rather, the point would be that desire cannot be located as discrete in this model: to say for sure that he and his friend are heterosexual friends would not be possible, but to say that he and his friend are homosocial friends would be, since homosociality constitutes a fuller spectrum of male-male desire.4

The bromantic comedy insists that it finally be possible to “say for sure that he and his friend are heterosexual friends.” Andy Samberg’s description of I Love You, Man as a “dude-on-dude romantic story that straight guys can feel comfortable watching”5 provides the reason for this: heterosexual male comfort. Lauren Bans widens the scope of Samberg’s description, elevating the idea of comfort into the nobler one of wholesomeness, asserting that “bromances are generally good for straight male sociality, if only because they self-consciously carve a place for openly compassionate male-male friendship.”6 Straight is the operative word in both these statements because, in both, the normative mechanism of the bromantic comedy is laid bare: male homosociality functions to bolster male heterosexuality. What is comfortable for straight guys and ultimately “good” for straight male sociality, even “openly compassionate” straight male sociality, then, is the reductio ad absurdum of the homoerotic ick factor. 7 To this end, the ambiguously nonheterosexual implications of homosocial desire and their threatening relation to the gay/straight binary become the comic fodder of bromantic comedy

194

Peter Forster

narratives’ structure and content. Homoerotics may be jokingly implied or suggested, but they are not openly admitted and never seriously investigated in the unfolding of the homosocial narrative. They will be entirely eliminated by the heterosexual resolution. In John Hamburg’s I Love You, Man (2009), Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) has just proposed to his girlfriend of eight months, Zooey (Rashida Jones), with whom he is “madly, insanely, ridiculously in love.” Peter who, according to his father, “always bonded better with women” (a red flag for the man’s man) has a problem: he has no male friends. He needs a best man for his wedding. More importantly, he needs a friend to butch up his reputation with his fiancée’s friends, one of whom he overhears saying “A guy without friends can be really clingy” (the most unattractive of stereotypically female traits). He is, alas, more of a sis than a bro: he even gate-crashes Zooey’s “girls’ night,” presenting the dismayed group with frothy cocktails that he has secretly (and deftly) whipped up in the kitchen. Poor Peter. He sees the writing on the wall: “I gotta get some fuckin’ friends,” he tells himself. The film’s mischievous foray into the vicissitudes of homosocial bonding begins. I Love You, Man is bold: Peter turns for help to his worldly gay brother, Robbie (Andy Samberg), who starts to set him up on dates. (No, of course, not dates.) He gamely complies, but when one of his dates/not-dates misunderstands his intentions and kisses him good night (he has to brush his teeth twice to get the stink of that kiss out of his mouth), he moves on to Internet dating. (No, of course, not dating. And, no, definitely not hooking up. Friending?) The film glibly conflates the notions of making a friend and finding a lover or getting laid. Nobody seems either amused or troubled; in fact, nobody really notices. Even Robbie seems unaware of the erotic double entendre. Zooey and her friends are delighted when Peter lights on a possibility, Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), whom he has nervously called to ask out on a “man date.” “Peter’s got a boyfriend!” exclaims one of the women, without irony. The film’s bromance is born: it will be remarkably like dating (because it is dating, as the homosocial conceit of the film suggests, with a wink), only obviously without any sex (because it is not dating, as the heterosexual agenda of the characters insists, with no wink at all). Peter will make a friend, become proficient in masculinity, and quit being clingy. I Love You,

Rad Bromance

195

Man’s playing off of its homosocial structure against its heterosexual imperative contains the homoerotic element of male-male “dating” by cheerfully trivializing or blatantly ignoring it; it serves the normative message of I Love You, Man, which is abundantly clear: a man wants a real woman and will go to any lengths to get her. A woman wants a real man, a guy’s guy. Yes, she wants a sweet, caring man who will curl up and watch Chocolat with her on a Sunday night (as Peter and Zooey do) but only if he is not the type to be sweet, caring, and willing to curl up and watch Chocolat on a Sunday night. Lynn Shelton’s Humpday (2009), which dabbles in the ideas and conventions of low-end amateur male-male pornography, plays a higher-stakes game with conventional (“real”) masculinity, homosociality, and homoeroticism than I Love You, Man. Rather than merely toying with the conventions of the male-male hookup, it has the male-male sex act as its central symbol. Ben (Mark Duplass) is a conventional man married to a conventional wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore), living a conventional life. The film opens with them in bed but too tired to have sex. Ben: Tomorrow, though, yeah? Anna: I’ve got it on the calendar.

That very night, Ben’s old friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard), a free spirit, arrives and at Ben’s invitation installs himself on a makeshift bed in their storage room. They have not been in touch; though they now have little in common, they are bonded by affection and a mutual “respect.” Free-wheeling Andrew introduces buttoned-up Ben to his new Bohemian friends. Worlds collide. The plot of Humpday is built on a scheme, hatched by Andrew during a drunken evening, for him and Ben to make a gay porno movie for a local underground amateur film festival called “Humpfest.” When one of the Bohemians notes the abundance of gay porn, Andrew says, “But there’s not a lot of dude-on-dude who aren’t gay.” “It’s beyond gay,” agrees Ben. Andrew insists that it will be an “awesome art project”: “I will make the raddest, most awesome, most beautiful, most profound, most poetic . . .” When Ben interrupts with a conventional response, he says, “Don’t hate because you can’t play, because you’re all fuckin’ locked up . . .”

196

Peter Forster

Predictably, Ben strikes back against the stinging chastisement: “I can make porn if I want to.” This setup exemplifies the central bromantic paradox of admission and denial. Andrew imagines that his filmed sexual encounter with Ben will be beautiful, profound, and poetic (there is the romance). He immediately recoups his heteromasculinity, “de-gaying” the enterprise by rationalizing that “there’s not a lot of dude-on-dude who aren’t gay . . . it’s beyond gay” (there is the bro). Any whisper of sexual deviance is silenced—at least for the bros—by the integrity and radicalism of their artistic expression. “That will be an incredible piece of art,” he says. Ben agrees: “it’s weird but it pushes boundaries and that’s what a good piece of art should do.” Not gay—weird. Weird is safely outside the province of desire. The budding auteurs, galvanized, can now even indulge in a little joking dirty talk. Or is it wishful thinking? Andrew: I should just fuck you. Ben: Nah, we do that all the time.

Anna is immediately jettisoned from the loop. Ben and Andrew enter into standard issue bro behavior: they get drunk together, deal with their hangovers together, and play some aggressive basketball together. They talk about their project, and, in the face of Andrew’s sporadic reluctance (“I’m not going to force you to have sex with me; that is over . . .”), Ben is insistent about his autonomy and the unassailable strength of his marriage: Ben: If that is something that I wanted to do, I would do it. I’m not limited because I’m married. Anna and I have a strong relationship. You don’t really understand what a marriage is because you’re single. And I appreciate that you think you have an idea, but you don’t. And we have the type of relationship where if we want to do things we will do them . . . 

It is not that simple, of course. There is “doing things,” and there is “doing things.” Ben lies to Anna, who has begun to understand Andrew’s status as her rival (“I just want to be . . . us”), by telling

Rad Bromance

197

her that he has agreed to “assist” Andrew on a film project for a festival—which she recognizes immediately as “Humpfest”—by just making copies, providing coffee, and breakfast. During an evening of bonding between Andrew and Anna (“Dude, you’re cool,” he says, according her, one supposes, temporary bro status), he spills the beans: “Me and Ben having sex on film—it’s kind of crazy.” When the shocked Anna confronts Ben about it, apparently realizing that she doesn’t know him very well at all, he shines her on: “I don’t know why I’m doing this. I know it’s important to me and I don’t know why we have to get all worked up about it.” Andrew, chagrined by his overshare with Anna, asks Ben, “Should I go somewhere else?” Ben, in a telling move, answers, “You’re fine.” He has made his choice. The show—and the bromance—must go on. But why this show? Why do these men persist in wanting to make, of all things, a “dude-on-due who aren’t gay” porno movie? In going “beyond gay,” where exactly do they think they are going? Caroline Hagood suggests that, for Ben and Andrew, what lies beyond gay is “extra straight”: “The thing that is so striking about the gay porno gag . . . is that these guys are doing it to prove their manhood. . . . That’s right, it’s a case of gay sex to prove one’s heterosexuality, folks.”8 This reading of the film, though counterintuitive (they want to have sex with each other to prove that they do not want to have sex with each other), provides the normative reassurance central to the bromantic comedy’s intention. It figures Humpday as a “dude-on-dude romantic story that straight guys can feel comfortable watching” in two ways, both of which distance the protagonists and the audience from the more unsettling implications of the homosociality that might drive it. First, it dismisses certain basic realities of amateur gay porn production and reception—hotel-room amateur porn is almost certainly not intended to be art; it actively solicits the homoerotic gaze (thereby undermining the heteromasculine subjectivity of its participants); it ubiquitously features the “dude-on dude who aren’t gay” trope (compromising rather than reinforcing the players’ “manhood” by problematizing the boundaries of sexual identity). Second, it encourages a smug condescension to nonnormative desire: disconnected from authentic masculinity, it is just something—like ballroom dancing or a night at the opera—that

198

Peter Forster

a bro can try, either on a whim or under pressure, to prove to himself what he always knew: he does not like it.9 In this reading, then, nonnormative desire galvanizes rather than threatens male heterosexuality, “because,” as Lauren Bans notes, tongue-in-cheek, “seriously, nothing proves you’re straight like being comfortable enough to jokingly insinuate that you’re not.”10 But Ben and Andrew are not comfortable. If the gay porno is the film’s gag, they do not seem to be in on it. Rather than jokingly insinuating anything, playing off with humor any attraction they might feel for each other, these bros agonize. During one of their many exchanges, sharing their misgivings about going through with their project, both admit to nonnormative longings. Ben confesses to Andrew—though one suspects that he has never confessed to Anna—that he once had romantic fantasies about a video-store clerk. “I imagined kissing him,” he admits. “I had a moment with that guy . . . I felt something.” It was only when his thoughts turned truly erotic, when he thought of the man’s “hairy balls,” that he transgressed his own normative boundaries and, terrified or repelled, never went back to the video store. Andrew laments that he has never had such a “moment”: “I almost get embarrassed that I haven’t been with a guy . . . that my mind’s not open in that way.” Ben: I don’t think I’m gay. Andrew: I wish I was more gay.

Regardless of what he thinks or wishes, desires or fears, probably neither man is actually gay. Homoeroticism is the elephant in the room in Humpday. In not thinking he is gay, is Ben implying that he only thinks he is straight? In admitting to some closed-mindedness, and wishing that he were “more gay,” is Andrew suggesting that he is denying his erotic impulses because of an allegiance to conventional thinking? Are both men foreclosing on their desires because of their inability to liberate themselves from the constrictions of the gay/ straight binary? These questions, though integral to the admission and denial inherent in the bromance, are discomfiting to the bromantic comedy. Mark Graham’s definition of homoeroticism sheds some light on both the bromantic comedy’s agenda and Ben and Andrew’s inchoate statements:

Rad Bromance

199

Homoeroticism is . . . an unstable concept that attempts to signify relations between men that are poised precariously between homosexuality, which is socially and culturally recognized and fixed within dominant discursive frameworks, and heterosexuality, in which the homosocial ties of male bonding and friendship are strong but expected to exclude and disavow all forms of sexual interest between men.11

The bromantic comedy knows exactly what to do, in the interests of heterosexual male comfort, with gay characters. In Dennis Dugan’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) the gay firefighter, Fred (Ving Rhames), is a sham: at first intimidatingly tough, he is revealed as a sentimental sissy in search of a husband; in I Love you, Man, Peter’s gay brother, Robbie, a seemingly well-adjusted and charming freewheeler, is revealed as a serial seducer of straight and often married men. As long as the homosexual is clearly categorized, he can be relegated a place in the bromantic comedy’s narrative. He is the outsider, the Other, and his Otherness can serve to energize homosocial bonding, most obviously by inviting homophobia into it. But the queer man, the homoerotic man, “poised precariously between homosexuality and heterosexuality,” is harder to read. “The problem with queers,” argues Richard Dyer, “is that you can’t tell who is and who isn’t.”12 Uncertainty is the enemy of the bromantic comedy, and it is this uncertainty in which Ben and Andrew find themselves mired. Ben’s rambling speech to Anna about his “different sides” and his need to follow through with the porno film sounds like the clumsy struggle of a confused man trying desperately not to come out: Ben: I don’t really understand why I want to do this. I just know that I feel pretty deeply compelled . . . um . . . and the only way I can think to explain it is, like, I have, you know, different sides to me, different sides to my personality, you know, and when we met one of those sides in particular really connected with you and it was exciting and I was excited to build a life with you and to get married and to buy a house and to have children, and that side swelled and grew so big that it became an ogre and crushed all the other sides to me, and I think that’s fine in general . . . actually, you know what? It’s

200

Peter Forster probably not fine because I’m here right now wanting to do this, and . . .  Anna: And you should do it. Ben: Really? Anna: Yeah. Ben: Are you serious? Anna: You know, you talk about how you’ve got all these other sides to your personality as though I’m a cardboard cut-out that, you know, stands in the kitchen and makes dinner. There’s just as much to my world that doesn’t involve you as there is to yours. There are just as many parts to me that aren’t necessarily fed by this.

Ben has a real bromantic problem. His obtuse refusal—or inability—to admit any erotic component to his desire to make this porno film reveals once again the animating paradox of the bromance: he must deny—or, in this case, obfuscate—his desire (“I don’t really understand why I want to do this”) at the very moment that he admits—or, in this case, alludes to—it (“I feel pretty deeply compelled”). Finding himself in the throes of crisis as the liberating ambiguity of untethered homosociality faces off against the crushing predictability of domesticated heterosexuality, he does no more than reference the “different sides” to his “personality” (sides brought out by his homosocial bonding and his pornographic project with Andrew); he does not, or cannot, declare his heterosexuality. In order to accomplish its mission, Humpday must shore up the heteromasculinity of its protagonists. It must rescue them from the jaws of queerness, where they (Ben especially) seem dangerously lodged. And rescue them the narrative does, in a series of discrete and legible maneuvers. No longer just an enterprise that pushes artistic boundaries, their project has become an enterprise that pushes the boundaries of their own sexual self-definitions. “I don’t think I’m gay” and “I wish I was more gay” must be put to the test. When, finally, Andrew and Ben meet in the hotel room in which they are going to shoot their porno, their awkwardness prompts some serious, though belated, analytical conversation. Ben asks the first obvious question: “How the fuck are they going to know we’re straight unless we tell them?” Immediately, “not gay,” “beyond gay,” and

Rad Bromance

201

Ben (Mark Duplass, left) and Andrew (Joshua Lennard, right) in the hotel sequence at the close of Humpday (2009), directed by Lynn Shelton, Magnolia Pictures/Seashel Pictures. Courtesy of Photofest.

“weird,” their reasons and justifications for embarking on the project, are sidelined by their need to define themselves as “straight.” And “straight” has clear (and, for the bros, reassuring) parameters. So, redefined, reorganized, and relieved, they film the declarations of their straightness. Soldiering on, they attempt a chaste kiss: “It was okay”; “It wasn’t terrible”; “It was awful.” They agree there will be no kissing. They undress. They dress again. They talk about letting their “bodies take over.” They undress again. They try hugging without their shirts on; it feels reassuringly like hugging a buddy at the swimming pool. They speculate on how they will manage to maintain their erections. They discuss art and the relationship between art and reality. Eventually, Ben asks the question that has inexplicably gone unasked: “What exactly about two straight dudes having sex on camera is a great piece of art?” Stripped of the pretext that their motivation is legitimately artistic and confronted with the physical reality of their undertaking, they have an opportunity to confront the other possibility: desire. But because the bromantic comedy disowns any serious exploration of homoerotic desire, it immediately displaces it and instates its corollary, anxiety: Andrew says

202

Peter Forster

“We’re doing this because it scares us more than anything else.” This consolidates the notions of their inherent bravery (read masculinity) and their (heterosexual) horror of deviance. Ben is impressed: “That is a really good point,” he says. Disowning any sense of feeling “pretty deeply compelled,” Ben reverses his former position: “There is nothing in the world that I want to do less than what we’re talking about doing.” Having extricated themselves from the transgressive project that at first excited them, the men are (from the nonnormative point of view) saved from themselves, or (from the normative point of view) restored to themselves. Homoeroticism, first presented in abstract, “artistic” terms, has been reconfigured into something alien, then something impracticable, then something embarrassing, then something frightening, and then something repulsive. The crux of the matter, as both men concede (“We’re pussying out,” admits Ben), is fear. Ben has been a man with nonnormative desires who has been too squeamish to act on them, choosing instead a conventional life; Andrew has been a normative poseur without the wherewithal to connect his actions to his fantasy of himself. To resolve the ambiguity of whether the men are restored to themselves or saved from themselves, and to allay the specter of fear, one final narrative piece is necessary. Ben provides it: “Something just hit me,” he says. “I think we might be morons.” Homoerotic desire—whether experienced (in Ben’s case) or just wished for (in Andrew’s case)—becomes, finally, moronic. Regardless of how much energy they might have wasted on it, they are, when put to the test, incorruptibly straight. They couldn’t be gay, or “beyond gay,” even though they, in their past moronity, might have wanted to be. Though the narrative takes them to the brink of sexual transgression, the characters will never really transgress. Humpday ultimately reassures its audience that these bros are straight. Ben, restored to his right mind, leaves the hotel room en route back to his normative life, saying, “I think I’m in deep shit with Anna.” The bros are out of danger. Regardless of what has happened (and, more to the point, because of what has not happened), everything is restored to its rightful, heteronormative place. They will live happily ever after. Or will they? The bromantic comedy, though it trumpets heteromasculinity, disclaims any allegiance to the fairy-tale

Rad Bromance

203

ending. Ben has a companionable but passionless life with Anna in which he (a) postpones having sex with her because they are both too tired, (b) finds himself mounted by her—she is trying to conceive— while he is asleep, and (c) prefers to hang out with Andrew, thrilling to the “crazy” idea of having sex on camera with him. Andrew has a rootless life in which he fantasizes about having risqué sexual encounters (a) with two attractive bisexual women who prove to be too risqué after all—he cannot cope with the presence of a dildo to enhance the three-way experience—and (b) with Ben who claims to be adventurous. Both men’s renegade fantasies eclipse the dreary conventionality of their daily lives. There is no humping in Humpday— not for Ben or Andrew, anyway. “We were just male bonding and shit, just don’t tr ip”: The Conflict between the Homosocial and the Heteroromantic The bro is a guy’s guy. He is the foil to the metrosexual, who will go to lengths at the boutique, the spa, and the salon—and then the gallery opening, the wine tasting, and the dance club—to be desired. The bro does not aspire to be the object of desire; he is the desiring subject. He favors Coors over cosmos, and extreme sports over extreme makeovers. In the urban vernacular, “bro” is interchangeable with “dude, “guy,” “man,” and the other tags designed to signify recognition and affection in the male-male bond, but it is, of course, an abbreviation of the word “brother.” Aye, there’s the rub. The nonsibling/nonsexual brother/lover players in the bromance are more than mere friends. Their bond is intense and intimate. “I respect the fuck out of you, and . . . you’re, like, my brother . . . I fucking love you, man, I love you so much” says Andrew to Ben in Humpday. They have a special bromantic understanding, a particular bromantic bond. They brommunicate. They understand each other, according to the Urban Dictionary, in a uniquely masculine way, “in a way no woman could ever realize.”13 This definition implicitly situates the bromantic bond in a competitive relationship with the heteroromantic bond: men have bromances that are incomprehensible to women and distract men from their romances; they also have, or aspire to have, romances, which

204

Peter Forster

are hostile to the mutual understanding that characterizes their bromances but that fulfill a rudimentary condition of their heterosexual identities. “Expressing heterosexual desire provides a sort of base line masculinity.”14 Whether they can have (or will choose to have) both is the question that permeates the homosocial/heteroromantic conflict of the bromantic comedy’s rising action. The answer, revealed in the heterosexual denouement, is a qualified yes. The homosociality of the narrative will concede to the primacy of heteroromance when the bromantic relationship will—in order to separate the bro from the romance—be forfeited or reconceived. Part of recouping the heteromasculinity of its protagonists is the positioning of the woman as the prize for the bro. Whatever he thinks of her, she is his destiny. So, in spite of the intensity and the superiority of the bromantic bond, he seeks a heterosexual union. The bro, thanks to—or in spite of—his bro, gets the girl (as Peter does in I Love You, Man), or gets to keep the girl (as Ben does in Humpday). Indeed, in the world of the bromantic comedy, thanks to and in spite of turn out to be the same thing: Peter gets to the altar with Zooey because, despite Sydney’s disruptive and almost catastrophic influence, he has made the friend he so desperately needs; Ben returns to Anna because presumably his marriage-threatening escapade with Andrew has taught him his priorities. I Love You, Man’s Sydney mentors Peter in manliness. He teaches him how to scream his manly aggression into the world, he acquaints him with the real man’s need for privacy by introducing him to his “man cave,” complete with a “masturbation station” (“No one’s allowed here,” he decrees, by which he means no woman is allowed there), and, most importantly, he describes the basic homosocial tenet of the bro code—dividing lines: “I never lie to women, but I mean there are some things I choose not to share with them . . . there are dividing lines, that’s all I’m trying to say . . . I love to take a girl out to dinner, but I’m not gonna golf eighteen holes with her.” You never play sports with a woman. When Peter sets up a four-ball for them with Zooey and her friend, it is, in Sydney’s anguished words, “a nightmare.” You never share an evening at a rock concert with a woman. Peter learns this the hard way. In the full bloom of the bromance—even after the disastrous golf game, he has not mastered the dividing lines concept—he persuades her to go with

Rad Bromance

205

A dismayed Zooey (Rashida Jones) watches Peter (Paul Rudd, right) and Sydney (Jason Segel, left) rock out at a Rush concert in I Love You, Man (2009), directed by John Hamburg, Paramount Pictures. Courtesy of Photofest.

him and Sydney to a Rush concert. The homosocial/heteroromantic competition that has been simmering comes to a boil. The exhilaration and exclusivity of homosocial bonding shocks Zooey. “I’m totally weirded out by what’s going on between the two of you . . . It’s like I don’t even exist . . . I feel like I’m losing you a little bit” she complains. She now thinks of Sydney as a rival, as “this guy who’s stolen you away from me.” Heteroromance jostles for position with homosociality. Sheely makes this point about the “pithy and pervasive social norm” of the bro code, “bros before hos”: The assumption behind this “code” . . . is that male bonds are permanent, deep, and premised on mutual understanding and respect, whereas male-female bonds are capricious, shallow, and ultimately unfulfilling. Therefore if a man sacrifices his homosocial friendships in favor of a romantic relationship with a

206

Peter Forster woman, he will be left in the lurch when she inevitably abandons, betrays, or tries to change (“pussywhip”) him.15

The dramatic misogyny of this assumption, though it clearly lies at the heart of the bromantic paradigm, is too sinister for the bromantic comedy, which—in the interests of presenting “a dude-on-dude romantic story that straight guys can feel comfortable watching”— approaches misogyny with almost as much tentativeness as that with which it approaches homoeroticism. It introduces sexist or misogynistic themes but does not openly admit or seriously investigate them during the development of the homosocial narrative. Unlike homoeroticism, however, sexism cannot be entirely eliminated from the heterosexual resolution. The bromantic comedy torques the “permanent, deep”/“capricious, shallow” antagonism into something less cynical. Lauren Bans, writing about Greg Mottola’s adolescent bromance Superbad (2007), says, “the girls are boring or underdeveloped, so there’s a tradeoff: give up fun for sex.”16 The heteroromantic/homosocial struggle is constructed around this binary: fun (which includes not only sports and rock concerts but other “crazy” adventures) with him, or sex (which includes marriage and domesticity) with her. Adam Sternberger, comparing bromantic comedy directors Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips, concurs, widening the scope of the fun/sex dichotomy: “In Apatow, the enemy is adulthood, which ruins life; in Phillips, the enemy is women, who ruin men.”17 Brohood is characterized—precisely because it is endangered—by the presence of two intrepid adversaries: maturity, which requires the bro’s growing up (and therefore settling down), and women, who insist upon the bro’s growing up (and therefore settling down). If a man must grow up (and settle down) and sacrifice fun to have women—or a woman—who will ruin his life, how will he manage? The bromantic comedy’s answer, like the bro code’s answer (“bros before hos”), is that he will use exclusionary tactics. Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality,18 arguing that the term heterosexuality both describes a repertoire of sexual desires and practices and represents a politically endorsed system of gender inequality, is the bedrock of the bromantic comedy: women buy into—even encourage—the bromantic convention even as they are

Rad Bromance

207

consigned to a world in which they are inevitably disempowered. Zooey and Anna are both marginalized, and both are complicit in their marginalization. In actively pushing Peter to find a friend, Zooey has engineered the bromance herself, although of course she never thought that it would lead to her being shifted into second position. How could she? The bromantic comedy presents a relationship between men, the intensity of which “no woman could ever realize.” In her quest to make him more normative and less “clingy”—because she must have four bridesmaids—she has facilitated a situation that could eliminate her need for any bridesmaids at all. In passively allowing Andrew to install himself in her home and her marriage, Anna has—in spite of her misgivings—helped make herself into a doormat for both her husband and Andrew. The bromantic comedy bros privilege their relationships with one another over their relationships with their sexual partners; however, many bros are firmly attached to the rituals and routines of domesticity, a domesticity which, per the heteronormative imperative, necessarily includes women. Attracted to the very things that endanger him, the bro falls back on the most reactionary of syndromes: male chauvinism. Is the bromantic comedy afraid of women? Does it set out to punish them? Not necessarily. It does, however, respond to the threat of women’s agency and their power to control—“change (‘pussywhip’)”—their men. Ben cannot bear the idea that he has become “all fuckin’ locked up”; Sydney is outraged that Zooey withholds oral sex from Peter. And the women do, along the way, get punished. They become simply objects in the bros’ institutional heteronormative still lives: necessary objects, but objects nonetheless. When Andrew bursts in on Ben in the middle of the night, his first comment casually but brutally dismisses Anna and places her among Ben’s possessions: “You’ve got the car, you’ve got the wife, you’ve got the coffee table books.” Later, when Ben is giving his preamble on camera before he and Andrew attempt to shoot their porno movie, he echoes Andrew’s dismissive sentiment: “I have a really nice house and wife and stuff.” Anna’s recognition of her objectification into a “cardboard cut-out that stands in the kitchen” sheds an interesting light on Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s theory of homosocial triangulation, the phenomenon whereby homosocial men bond

208

Peter Forster

with each other by making a third party, almost always a woman, abject.19 This triangulation is crucial to the bromance. The woman may be the catalyst-turned-enemy of the bromance (as Zooey is) or the bystander-turned-hostage of the bromance (as Anna is), but she remains an essential point of reference. She may be an object, an obstacle, an excuse, a diversion, or a mediator in the homosocial relationship, but as the institutionalized object of normative male desire, she offers bros the opportunity to have a level of intimacy and liberty with each other—ironically, “in a way no woman could ever realize”—while at the same time providing them the assurance (or the loophole) that they do not feel any desire for the same sex in general and for each other in particular. The difference between Anna and Ben is that she knows that she wants a conventional life. She tells him that, after a transgression in which she made out with someone (probably her friend Molly) in a bathroom at a party, “I knew what I was coming home to and I knew what I wanted.” “You have to see this through,” she tells Ben, “because I don’t want to live with you with that buried in you.” What is it that Anna suspects lies buried in Ben? Certainly his hyperbolic language about feeling “deeply compelled” and about normativity (with her at the center of it) being “an ogre” who has “crushed” part of him suggests at the very least a deep desire to break the bonds of conventionality. In insisting that Ben see his project through, Anna is encouraging him, at her own peril, to confront the two threats that define the bromance and to make choices: if it is immaturity that lies buried in him, Ben must grow up by deciding whether “fun” is what he wants or “adulthood”; if it is sublimated homoeroticism, he must choose between the reassuring stability of heterosexual masculinity with her and the treacherous ambiguity of homosocial bonding with Andrew. Ben must decode the bro code and decide, as Anna has, what he’s coming home to, and what he wants. Zooey, too, has an experience of abjection: “totally weirded out” by the relationship between Peter and Sydney, she complains “I feel like I don’t even exist.” She does exist, though, as an important placeholder in Peter’s new-born, old-fashioned masculinity. But what place is she holding? Anna occupies a debased but concrete space in the composition of Ben’s compulsory heterosexuality (“car . . . wife . . . coffee table books”), but where or what is Zooey for

Rad Bromance

209

Peter? Peter himself seems not to know. When Sydney asks him why he wants to marry her, his answer is vacuous: “I don’t know . . . we’re in love . . . it’s a hard question to answer.” Even at his wedding he does no better, either because he does not know or because he does not seem to care. He tells Zooey, “There are so many reasons that I want to marry you, I can’t even tell you.” There is one powerful reason, whether Peter wants to think about it or not: she is a woman and he is a man. Heterosexual masculinity is the destination and homosocial bonding is the journey of the bromantic comedy; heterosexual romance is a complication, albeit a necessary one, and (because both homosociality and compulsory heterosexuality inevitably inculcate the misogynistic) it is sidelined. Fun wins out over sex until, at the narrative resolution, sex must take precedence over fun. Heterosexual coupling is both the bonus and the burden that must, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, be borne. The moment of impact, as heteroromance and homosociality collide, reveals this: it is at the intersection of immaturity with (a) adulthood (which “ruins life”) and (b) women (who “ruin men”) that heterosexual masculinity finally reveals itself. Peter surrenders to Zooey’s rebellion against his bromance (she moves out when Peter agrees to lend Sydney money) by “breaking up” with Sydney. Using the language of courtship, Peter tells Sydney, “I think we should spend some time apart.” He apologizes to Zooey, using the same vocabulary: “I’ve ended it with Sydney.” Zooey, discerning the end of her rivalry with Sydney, is suitably mollified. Observing Peter in his postSydney decline, she asks, “Why don’t you just call him?” “Because guys don’t do that,” Peter answers. Zooey, secure in the masculinity of her fiancé and restored to first position in his life, takes control and secretly invites Sydney to the wedding; “I couldn’t let you get married without your best man,” she tells Peter. Ben scurries back to Anna, with whom he realizes he is “in deep shit,” as soon as he and Andrew have talked themselves out of making their porno film. Anna, one assumes, will be moved by Ben’s groveling apology and forgive him. In the final act, in the interests of finessing “a dude-on-dude romantic story that straight guys would feel comfortable watching,” the women are not only rescued from their object—and abject—status,

210

Peter Forster

they are also put nominally in charge and restored to their stereotypical place of policing the foibles of their bros. The heterosexual male returns to himself, untarnished. Brommunication triumphs in the sense that it has restored him to an awareness of his normative place. The meaning and purpose of the bromantic comedy reside in the unseating of any queerness from the narrative resolution only to insist, finally, unequivocally, upon traditional masculinity and the ongoing—but culturally endorsed—tribulations of heterosexuality. Perhaps, to co-opt Bans’s statement about nonnormativity and transpose it into the arena of compulsory heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity, “nothing proves you’re in charge like being comfortable enough to jokingly insinuate that you’re not.” Notes 1. Anya Strzemien, “Bromance Comes Out of the Closet,” The Huffington Post, 26 March 2008, accessed 6 August 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/26/ bromance-comes-out-of-the_n_93560.html. 2. David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 4. 3. Japhy Grant, “Some of My Best Friends Are Straight: Why Bromance Works Both Ways,” Queerty, 19 March 2009, accessed 8 June 2010, www.queerty.com/ some-of-my-best-friends-are-straight-why-bromance-works-both-ways-20090319/. 4. Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2010), 59. 5. Joshua David Stein, “Andy Breaks Caricature: in I Love you, Man, the SNL Wunderkind Plays Gay . . . Straight,” Out, March 2009, 86. 6. Lauren Bans, “Bromance,” The Perfect Ratio, 24 March 2009, accessed July 14, 2010, http://theperfectratio.blogspot.com/search?q=bromance. 7. David Weiss, “Making Sense of the Brokeback Paraphenomenon,” in The Brokeback Book: from Story to Cultural Phenomenon, ed. William R. Handley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 245. Writing about Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), a film that confronts the intersection of the homosocial/homoerotic with the homosocial/heteroromantic in a manner entirely antithetical to the bromantic comedy in the sense that the film has no intention of instating heteronormativity or reifying heterosexuality, Weiss makes this point about the use of humor to neutralize this ick factor: “Why, to begin with, were there so many Brokeback jokes, told for so many months, and with so many different targets? Why did they last as long as they did and have the ubiquity that they had? It doesn’t seem farfetched to suggest that one of the motivators of Brokeback humor may well also

Rad Bromance

211

have been a motivator of Brokeback resistance—something geneticist Dean Hamer calls the `ick factor.’ As Hamer (perhaps most famous for his claim that a `gay gene’ is what predisposes some people toward homosexuality) comments in a January 2006 San Francisco Chronicle article, `It does seem to be almost culturally universal that heterosexual men can have a deep revulsion to overt homosexuality. During the time of Brokeback Mountain’s theatrical run, some straight men expressed this revulsion through humor.’ ” See Dru Sefton, Beating that queasiness/Straight, liberal and gun-shy about Brokeback,’ ” San Francisco Chronicle, 15 January 2006, accessed 15 July 2010, www.sfgate.com/default/article/Beating-that-queasiness-Straight-liberaland-2543275.php 8. Caroline Hagood, “Bruno and Bromances: Modern Masculinity Goes to the Movies,” The Huffington Post, 10 March 2010, accessed June 8, 2010, http://huffington post.com/caroline-hagood/bruno-and-bromances-moder_b_493286.html. 9. By this argument—“gay sex to prove one’s heterosexuality”—Ben and Andrew’s project is essentially, though not necessarily consciously, homophobic. Reeser explains: “Different male-male relationships express a homophobic threat differently; in one relation it might be expressed [as] a classic fear of homosexuality (calling certain men faggots, gay bashing), but in another relation, it might be expressed as an attraction to the possibility.” Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: an Introduction (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons), 2010: 59. 10. Bans, “Bromance.” 11. Mark Graham, “Homoeroticism,” in The International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, eds. Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease, and Keith Pringle (New York: Routledge, 2007), 307. 12. Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002), 97. 13. The Urban Dictionary (accessed 25 July 2010, www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=bromance) has fun with its hundreds of definitions of “bromance.” Bromance, it claims, “describes the complicated love and affection shared by two straight males”; it is “a non-sexual relationship between two men that [sic] are unusually close.” “This bond is normally only shared between two males that [sic] have a deeper understanding of each other, in a way no woman could ever realize.” Some definitions are more irreverent and less insistent on the heterosexual aspect of the bros’ relationship: bromance is “possibly the queerest thing two men could call their friendship” and “occurs when brotherly love gets a little too intimate.” One contributor is adamant: bromance is “the cover up term used by two males who are obviously gay, but are too afraid to admit it.” These nonnormative implications are precisely what the bromantic comedy sets out to discredit, limiting its scope to the idea that the bromantic relationship is built on a particularly male kind of understanding, an understanding that no woman could ever realize. 14. C. J. Pascoe, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 87.

212

Peter Forster

15. Sheely, “The Bromantic Gaze,” Overthinking It, 5 January 2010, accessed 14 July 2010, www.overthinkingit.com/2009/01/05/the-bromantic-gaze/. 16. Bans, “Bromance.” 17. Adam Sternberger, “Shrieking, Squirming, Beatings, Panic, a Severed Finger and a Facial Tattoo: Todd Phillips, Judd Apatow and the rise and stifling reign of the jokeless comedy,” The New York Times Magazine (29 May 2011), 26. 18. Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (London: Onlywomen Press, 1980), 32. 19. Typically, homosocial triangulation occurs when two men desire the same woman as a means to detour an unacknowledged but deeply theatening desire for each other. However, as Reeser points out, “these kinds of triangles do not always function in a neat or stable way and rarely do the examples conform to the model” (64). In this case, Anna mediates the bond between the two men not because they both desire her but because she represents the normative prohibition against their entertaining any thoughts of desiring each other.

chapter 8

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad Michael DeAngelis

Cinematic “queerness” was for quite some time thought to be a matter of representation, confirmed by such evidence as the fact that a film featured gay or lesbian characters as central protagonists, or that it dramatized the relationship between such characters. Since the start of the new century, however, many critics and filmmakers have striven to expand the definition of queerness in cinema beyond matters of representation, such that “queerness” has now come to encompass filmmaking strategies that challenge many of the narrative structures and expectations that mainstream Hollywood cinema has established and sustained as natural or “normal.” As early as 1993, American filmmaker Todd Haynes had begun to articulate the notion of a “gay” cinematic structure directly opposed to the conventions of Hollywood: I have a lot of frustration with the insistence on content when people are talking about homosexuality. People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film. It fits into the gay sensibility, we got it, it’s gay. It’s such a failure of the imagination, let alone the ability to look beyond content. I think that’s really simplistic. Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?1

214

Michael DeAngelis

Several recent theoretical works have explored such structural components of queerness as a way of being and living in the world— one that is opposed to the principles of what has come to be described as “heteronormativity.” And some of the most radical and challenging queer theorists have focused their opposition to the demands of the heteronormative by proposing differences between the straight and the queer experience of time, focusing especially upon the relationship between the present and the future. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, for example, Lee Edelman proposes that heteronormative conceptions of the future are invariably linked to the figure of the child, who “has come to embody for us the telos of social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”2 Disrupting this notion of heteronormativity, Edelman theorizes a future that rejects the demands of generation, lineage, and legacy and operates through the embrace of a queer resistance and refusal of identity, of meaning making, and of the logical historical progression that secures the seeming integrity of any heteronormative version of time. In Cruising Utopia: The There and Now of Queer Futurity, Jose Esteban Muñoz reverses the polarities of present and future to distinguish between a “straight time that tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life” and an “ecstatic time” of queerness that “is essentially about the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility of another world.”3 Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure suggests a clinging to “immaturity and a refusal of [the demands of ] adulthood”4 as a queer means of correcting the “inevitable force of progression and succession”5 that structures a heteronormative conception of time that is characterized by notions of responsibility and definitions of success. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman theorizes a heteronormative “chronobiopolitics” that structures time teleologically as a sequence of key “events and strategies of living” that includes marriage, the accumulation of wealth, reproduction, child rearing, and death.6 And Dustin Goltz examines how popular cultural representations of gay males regularly (though not exclusively) remain complicit with the linear progression of straight time as well as the ideologically enforced connections of parenthood and reproduction with notions of futurity.7

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad

215

This chapter examines how such theoretical concepts of futurity, straight time, and queer time can help illuminate the strategies that some contemporary bromances use to embrace and explore the homosocial, and even the potentially homoerotic, connections between their male protagonists. If, at the level of representation, the contemporary bromance most often asserts the incontestable heterosexuality of its central protagonists while simultaneously making them entirely obsessed with all things “gay,” theories of queer futurity offer a way of exploring new structures of meaning in a set of narratives that might seem on the surface to epitomize both the privileges and the anxieties of heteronormativity. While this exploration begins by addressing some of bromance’s complex and often contradictory “queer” representational strategies—which posit straight characters who are much more intimate with each other than they are with women—it ultimately places these matters of representation within the context of bromantic structures of time and temporality, discerning how they signal a dissatisfaction with the demands of heteronormativity while simultaneously inducing a sense of longing for a version of the future in which homosocial intimacy might be harbored or sustained without judgment—what Muñoz describes as a “not-yet-here”—where heteronormative structures might not wield such force and control over male-male relationships. Greg Mottola’s 2007 film Superbad provides an especially wellsuited bromantic test case for the application of these theories of futurity because of the complexity with which its narrative structure organizes time. Central to this experience is the “in-betweenness” of its two male protagonists, adolescents who still have an immediate sense of how it feels to immerse oneself in the pleasures of remaining young even as these pleasures are slowly beginning to yield to the necessity of contemplating a series of “adult” commitments that begins with choosing the “right college” and progresses through stages including professional success, marriage, and the securing of legacy through reproduction. Indeed, many bromance narratives featuring older and more “committed” male protagonists structure the inevitable surrender to the demands of “straight time” more overtly and conspicuously as part of the temporal punctuation of their narrative structures, constituting such commitments to heteronormativity as a “given” and situating homosocial relationships

216

Michael DeAngelis

primarily as plot complications whose anticipated resolutions serve to reinforce the integrity of the contractual commitments and obligations (first unspoken, then written, testified, and sanctioned by the courts) between man and woman. From the beginning there is little doubt, for example, that the bromancers of The Hangover, Humpday, or I Love You, Man will decide that their commitments to their fiancées will ultimately take precedence over their homosocial relationships. Alternative possibilities of the present and future are rarely articulated within the bromance. The homosocial “intruders” in these narratives are fellow bachelor partygoers, candidates for “best man,” and long-lost friends passing through town on the way to someplace else, and the marriages themselves (or the anticipated reunion of husband and wife) are the events that form the basis of deadlines and end points. While the place of that bromantic “other” friend is integral to each plot, he will ultimately remain marginalized in relation to the primary heterosexual relationship, if indeed his presence turns out to be required at all. Both The Hangover and I Love You, Man adhere to plot structures of “marriage time” and its promise of the stable and heteronormatively grounded relationship. The first part of The Hangover rushes its fiancé and groomsmen through a series of goodbyes before they set off for a feature-length bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas, but the narrative trajectory is from the outset one of an anticipated and timely return home (preferably, with the lost groom) where the wedding is scheduled to take place on time immediately afterward. I Love You, Man creates an even firmer anchoring to “marriage time,” with its “girlfriend guy” Peter (Paul Rudd) already lovingly situated within the secure domestic space of home with his fiancée, Zooey (Rashida Jones), so securely that he manages to tear himself away from its comforts only when the lack of a close male friend to select for his best man (not to say anything about additional groomsmen) begins to mark him as strange and possibly too “clingy” in the eyes of Zooey’s female friends. With its heterosexual couple already grounded in marriage, Humpday follows the structure of “baby time” as the narrative commences with Ben and Anna (Mark Duplass and Alycia Delmore) comfortably settled in bed, bemoaning the fatigue that has once again subverted their plans to conceive a child that night, only to be interrupted by the unanticipated, late-night arrival of Ben’s friend Andrew (Joshua

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad

217

Leonard) who, over the course of the next several days, lures Ben away from the domestic space before what turns out to be the requisite return, when, presumably, he and his wife can get back to the business of starting a family. But Superbad conceives time and inevitability differently, and an overview of the film’s plot will provide a useful starting point for examining this difference. The film concerns the relationship between high school seniors Evan (Michael Cera) and Seth (Jonah Hill), lifelong best friends who from the very start of the film are shown to be facing (albeit through disavowal) a not-so-distant future when they will no longer be together, since they will be attending colleges in different cities. The plot is confined to a period of slightly more than twenty-four hours (a single school day and night, and the following morning and afternoon). On the first day, the two “nerdy” friends encounter a series of mishaps in their quest to secure liquor for a party at which they hope to fulfill their goal of having sex with women—a goal that they have mutually determined to be essential to fulfill before going off to college. After a confrontation reveals that Evan will be rooming with high school friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) at Dartmouth the following year, Seth and Evan find themselves at a tense impasse in their relationship. After their opportunities for sex at the party are thwarted, Seth “rescues” Evan from a police raid, and the two guys proceed to Evan’s house for a sleepover where they openly discuss their feelings for one another and appear to reconcile. The final sequence of the film takes place the next day, when Evan asks Seth to accompany him on a journey to the shopping mall, at which point they have an initially awkward but ultimately reconciling encounter with their two intended sexual partners of the night before. The end of the narrative finds the boys paired up with their female friends, saying a short-term good-bye to each other that sorrowfully prefigures the anticipated and much longer separation that is soon to come. At the level of plot, character, and representation, Superbad shares many of the common elements that have come to be generically associated with bromance’s strategy of the “gay tease.” The film features numerous references to what looks, sounds, or seems “gay,” including the “Kyle’s Killer Lemonade” that Jules (Emma Stone) asks Seth to purchase for her and that Seth describes as “kinda

Jonah Hill (Seth, left) and Michael Cera (Evan, right) in Superbad (2007), directed by Greg Mottola, Columbia Pictures/Apatow Productions. Courtesy of Photofest.

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad

219

gay” presumably because of its fruity nature.8 Phallocentric obsessions are central to this strategy, and Superbad indulges in them to a considerable extent: Officer Michaels (Seth Rogen), one of the two policemen who end up serving as Fogell’s escorts for the evening after his thwarted attempt to purchase liquor with a fake ID, boldly exclaims that “I dream of a world where everything is covered in semen,” presumably not because of the erotic nature of such a vision of hyper-ejaculation but because it would make his DNA-based detective work so much easier to conduct. When Fogell excitedly asks Officer Slater (Bill Hader) to describe the experience of holding a gun, Slater explains that “it’s like having two cocks.” Seth fantasizes about a culture in which women would want to see “boners,” and he is quite fascinated by the outline of the division sign that his genitals appear to make in the drastically overtight jeans into which he squeezes his body at the mall. Other phallic references are more suggestive and sexually weighted, even while they remain too brief and underarticulated to constitute any overt crossover into the realm of the homoerotic. “He’s the sweetest guy,” Seth offhandedly comments to Evan in reference to what he perceives as the undeniable physical beauty of a fellow male student. “Have you ever looked into his eyes? It was like the first time I heard the Beatles.” In response to Evan’s recommendation that Seth seek out his Internet porn from less hardcore and more inconspicuously named Internet sites, Seth protests that “they don’t really show dick going in, which is a huge concern. Have you ever seen a vagina by itself? Not for me.” While such representational elements of the narrative certainly play with ambiguities between “gay” and “straight” in a way that may not necessarily controvert assumptions of the male protagonists’ heterosexuality (for the first two thirds of the film, Seth and Evan are, after all, very excited about and determined to have sex with women at the party that night), a primary difference between Superbad and many twentysomething-and-beyond bromances lies in its structuring of time, in the formal sense of the narrative’s temporality, and also in relation to the experience or imagining of how time progresses and is “spent” from the perspective of its characters. One aspect of this experience of time involves the movement toward adulthood and responsibility—Freeman’s “chronobiological” progression of “straight time”—and how the film determines and assigns value to

220

Michael DeAngelis

adult-oriented responsibility through differences in characterization between the two teenagers. In her analysis of Dude, Where’s My Car?, Judith Halberstam suggests that the queerness of the characters and of the film itself operates less at the level of the identity of its male protagonists (since actors Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott so freely joke about how ‘gay’ they were in the film) than “as a set of spatialized relations that are permitted through the white male’s stupidity, his disorientation in time and space.”9 Superbad manages to extend these notions of stupidity and “failure” to accept adult responsibilities to almost every primary male character of the narrative.10 The instances of irresponsibility that are most clearly over the top in the film involve the two male figures who have crossed over into the realm of adulthood (that is, if adulthood is signaled by chronological age)—the police officers whose ineptitude resonates more blatantly with every scene. Both of them are oblivious to effective interviewing techniques when they question a liquor store clerk who has just been the victim of a robbery. Stripped of its law enforcement function, their breathalizer becomes a toy that is used in a game to see which of them can attain the highest on-the-job blood alcohol content. Distractedly blinding each other with their flashlights while driving, they end up hitting Seth with their police car. Bringing their day to a close with a shooting contest whose goal is to make their already wrecked vehicle explode, the officers ultimately succeed in their career goal of converting daily work time into playtime. The protagonists of Superbad may not attain the level of forgetful stupidity that is perfected by the heroes of Dude, Where’s My Car?, but if, as Halberstam suggests, “there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing,”11 then the “nerd factor” of the Superbad heroes definitely propels them to the level of Supermen. Seth is especially deserving of this title, framed as he is from the start as an outcast, and constantly confronting his sense of difference from classmates who are either smarter like Evan or more socially skilled like the other kids in school who always get invited to parties that Seth only hears about afterward. Generally unkempt and noticeably overweight, he always seems to be coming in last, as we witness him struggling to catch his breath as he runs laps in gym class. His lack of social skills even denies him the assignment of a lab partner in home economics class, and when he is paired by default with the

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad

221

similarly unmatched Jules, their assigned attempt to make tiramisu appears especially sloppy and halfhearted in comparison with the cookbook-picture version perfected by Evan and classmate Miroki (Roger Iwami). In addition to the social awkwardness that he shares with Evan— an awkwardness that makes both of them the constant target of bullies and their hateful homophobic slurs—the root of Seth’s failure, according to the standards of straight time, at least, is that he has not yet attained a sense of “direction” in his life, a common condition among male protagonists of the bromance. Seth has developed no sense of what Elizabeth Freeman describes as the “teleologies of living,”12 of those signposts and milestones that will guide him toward a version of the future that others might call “productive.” He doesn’t progress. Evan has gotten himself admitted to Dartmouth, but Seth will have to settle for a state college. While Evan appears to have set out a plan of next steps in the logical progression that his life constitutes, Seth’s logical predicament is epitomized by his struggle to devise effective strategies to prevent his parents from finding out that he has purchased Internet porn with their credit card. Seth has a seemingly limitless capacity for distraction, evidenced most emphatically by his revelation to Evan that he got into trouble years back for his curious compulsion to draw penises in his school notebook. When Evan shows his friend the condom and spermicidal lube he has purchased, Seth is totally shocked—not by the accessories themselves, but because, as he confesses, despite all of his anticipation of sex at the party, he has never been able to imagine himself getting so far with a girl that he would actually find opportunity to use a condom and lube. If Seth is pegged as a “failure,” it is because his actions are nonlinear and his thinking entirely nondirective. At the same time, however, this aimlessness is exactly what is special and unique about Seth, and he seems entirely uninterested in adapting to the normative temporal structure of chronobiopolitical “straight time.” Seth is never arrogant or self-congratulatory about his “different” way of perceiving time and the world that structures it, and consequently his perception and experience of time is perfectly “queer” in the sense that it offers him no choice but to actively resist the forces that insist that he should be or become otherwise. Seth does not perceive himself as a failure; instead, it is the world

222

Michael DeAngelis

of structure, order, and “life milestones” that has failed him. Seth’s queer experience of time shares aspects of the version of queer temporality formulated by both Edelman and Muñoz. If Edelman’s version of the queer involves a refusal to look toward the future as a site of redemption, Seth conceptualizes the future as a continuous present, as an extension of the “now” that he is already experiencing— a future that lacks heteronormative goals and responsibilities but that prominently includes his friend Evan in the picture. If Muñoz perceives the queer future as the horizon—as a “not-yet-there” that precipitates a rejection of the here and now of straight time in anticipation of someplace else—in Seth’s experience of time (or at least in his imagination of this experience), this present is the only time and place where he and Evan might still avoid being constrained by the normative expectations of others. In effect, then, Seth’s experience is not a rejection of the here and now but the embrace of it: the present exists for him as a land without boundaries that fluidly extends beyond the horizon of the queer future that Muñoz posits. With the impending “expiration date” of their togetherness, the narrative structure of Superbad alerts its viewers to the point where Seth’s conception of time will have to be disrupted. From the start of the film, we are told that time is running out—first by Evan’s mother, who admits to the boys that she doesn’t know how they will survive away from each other in the following year, and later by Evan’s friend Jules, who asks, “So, are you like, cutting the cord? What’s gonna happen?” Neither boy seems comfortable talking about this impending separation, and for much of the narrative the friends refrain from mentioning it. In fact, Seth’s nonchalant remark to Evan after Jules’s inquiry—“I gotta take a piss—my dick’s not gonna shake itself. Come on, Babe”—comprises both another attempt to dispel the notion that they are inseparable and an ironic confirmation of this very inseparability. It is only when a confrontation between the two boys leaves Seth feeling rejected by Evan that the anxieties surrounding their impending separation are finally drawn to the surface. It is revealed that Seth’s resentment of Evan’s decision to go to Dartmouth extends beyond any form of jealousy or envy: he is angry primarily that Evan even decided to apply to Dartmouth given that he must have known that Seth would never get admitted there, in violation of the unspoken agreement that they would always go to college together.

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad

223

Yet the most pronounced threat to Seth’s conception of the continuous present comes with Evan’s retort that “I’m not gonna let you slow me down anymore”—a seeming admission that he regrets having wasted the last several years of his life on Seth when he could have been chasing girls and making friends. The reference to time wasted is an especially hurtful blow, since from Seth’s perspective it suggests that his own desire to remain with his friend—a desire that he has taken as a given and a constant and one that he also assumed was being reciprocated—is now being rendered susceptible to measurement and correction. Evan’s remark suggests that he perceives time as less of a constant than a progression leading up to something, a progression in which a past experience or intimate connection might readily be replaced by some other one in a future version of his world where Seth might have no place at all. Whether as a sign of his thick-headedness or his unyielding conviction that he is justified in stabilizing his presence within Evan’s perception of his own future, Seth refuses to give up or reconcile himself to the inevitable. When Evan explains that because of Seth he now may have to resign himself to the prospect of entering college as a “friendless virgin” if the current plan for sex with his friend Becca (Martha MacIsaac) does not succeed that night, Seth reaches his limit: “What—are you going to go out with her for two years? What about after that?” Perceiving his relationship with Evan as a lifelong constant, and highlighting this constant (now in danger of being lost) to draw attention to the necessarily short-term, passing, and finite nature of any heteronormative relationship in which Evan (or indeed Seth himself) might ever engage, Seth’s retort here comprises one of the most radical manifestations of resistance to the dictates of “straight time” ever formulated by a bromantic hero. The friends’ confrontation is indeed centered upon conflicting conceptions of present, future, and temporal progression. Even though up to this point in the film Seth has appeared to be just as heavily invested as Evan in having sex at the party that night, the confrontation reveals that Seth perceives the sexual rite of passage that they have both been anticipating as nothing more than that—a requisite heteronormative ritual that might get either of them somewhere but that ultimately leads nowhere, since the “value” of such a heterosexual experience could never measure up to the more real and lasting

224

Michael DeAngelis

sense of time that governs Seth’s relationship with Evan. If Evan uses his impending escape from Seth as a temporal weapon of “straight time,” Seth’s reply that it would be better for both of them to remain in this continuous present—that, indeed, this is their ideal “future”— is one that signals a quite subversive manifestation of queerness, especially in the context of mainstream Hollywood cinema. So, “what about after that?” The narrative’s contained time frame complicates this question by referencing its two “deadlines” or reminders that time is running out, and through two resultant trajectories of time that ultimately become intertwined. The first deadline involves the short and quickly passing two weeks that the friends have left together, marking a way of perceiving the passage of time that the confrontation between the two boys renders paradoxical. Yes, one boy will go to Dartmouth and the other will “stay back,” and time will certainly go on for both boys once the separation occurs. It will not, however, go on in the same way, since the direction of temporal movement in the future must be a direction forward (for Evan, at least), a “looking ahead” that will ultimately require some strategic and inevitable forgetting of the past. The second deadline occurs within the diegetic framework of the narrative, comprising the party that promises to provide the only remaining opportunity for the boys to have sex before they go to college, and it turns out to have its own set of complications. One of these is signaled by the same confrontation in which Seth forces Evan to question the hierarchy that he appears to have constructed between the time “wasted” with Seth and the time that he presumes to be more advantageously spent in heterosexual pursuits. After the confrontation, the two boys do proceed to the party, but along the way there is never any further mention of the forthcoming prospect of a heterosexual encounter. Instead, it is simply as though after a long, rough day that is coming to a close, they are now going to a party, and they have managed to bring some alcohol with them. Ironically, opportunities for sex do indeed arise that night for both boys and even for Fogell (who has changed his name to “McLovin” on the fake ID that he uses to purchase the liquor for the party); indeed, their unbelievable-but-true exploits over the past several hours have elevated all three boys to celebrity status. In each case, however, the sexual act never occurs. When Fogell/McLovin is in bed with his

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad

225

date at the party, his two officer friends barge in and interrupt the act. (One of them later tells McLovin “I’m really sorry that I blocked your cock.”) Becca is more than ready to have sex with Evan (she’s been waiting for him to arrive), but her advanced state of inebriation—one that ultimately involves some projectile vomiting in a trajectory that Evan keenly manages to avoid—reinforces Evan’s feeling that while the opportunity is there, the timing is all wrong. For Jules and Seth, the problem is the reverse: Seth finds it necessary to get very drunk before he can confess his attraction to her, but for Jules the drunkenness is entirely a turnoff, especially since it culminates in Seth accidentally headbutting her as he passes out and falls to the ground. For both Evan and Seth, then, the progression to the moment when heterosexual manhood will be confirmed is indefinitely deferred. At the point when Seth rescues Evan from the police raid by literally carrying him off to safety (though he does drop him once), the narrative’s temporal scheme becomes quite complicated, largely because the construction of time here shares several common elements with the temporal structuring of a genre that might at first appear to bear no resemblance to the bromance—that is, melodrama. As Linda Williams argues, melodrama unfolds through narrative structures that engage a fantasy of connectedness between its central protagonists, “a utopian desire that it not be too late to remerge with the other who was once part of the self.”13 In another context, Steve Neale describes this promise of reemergence and connectedness as a “fantasy of oneness, therefore total and effortless and mutual understanding.”14 The fantasy operates not only between protagonists within the narrative but also between protagonist and viewer, whose desire to witness (and in the process, to experience) this feeling of connectedness is similarly thwarted by the sense that it might already be “too late.” Melodramatic narratives are often structured to bring their audiences to the point of tears by denying the protagonists the opportunity or the requisite narrative “scene” in which to secure these emotional connections by either acknowledging them to one another or acting upon them in some way. In such cases the audience is left stranded in the peculiar realm of the “if only,” helpless to effect the desired connection between the protagonists but still wishing for the connection to have materialized.

226

Michael DeAngelis

One of the most remarkable aspects of Superbad’s temporal structure is in its treatment of these melodramatic emotional resonances of the “too late.” The aforementioned confrontation between Seth and Evan and its effect upon the two “deadlines” of the plot are central to this aspect of the film’s temporality. Once Seth demystifies the heterosexual rite of passage by identifying it as, after all, just a rite, the question of whether or not the two boys will get to have sex that night ceases to be essential to the narrative’s successful resolution. And just as crucially, the film does not conclude with the representation of these failed attempts at heterosexual “scoring.” Certainly it could be said that by identifying the root of the sexual misfires as problems of timing, Superbad leaves open the possibility for its protagonists to engage in other heterosexual encounters at some future time beyond the parameters of this narrative. In another sense, however, by moving beyond the scene of missed opportunities for heterosexual sex, the narrative decentralizes the importance of this established plot trajectory and its “deadline,” doing so specifically so that it can confront the more crucial and central time problem that has structured the narrative from its opening scene—that is, the one that will be marked by a disconnection, featuring the sad good-byes that must be said when the boys move off to separate colleges. Reinforcing this narrative shift in emphasis back to the “off to college” deadline is the fact that, as Seth confirms by his own admission, the connection between the two boys has from the start been conveyed as deeper and much more intimate than either of their relationships with women—or least with the two women who serve as their sexual prospects here. Accordingly, the failed opportunities for heterosexual intimacy do not curtail the desire for connection for either boy or for the viewer; instead, this desire is recentered upon the more conspicuous homosocial couple, and given the already demonstrated vulnerability and sensitivity of the two boys by this point in the narrative, the prospect of this re-connection (in whatever form it might take) anticipates a much more intense narrative pleasure. And as the plot surpasses one deadline, moving on to approach the next one where much more is at stake, Superbad responds to the melodramatic inquiry of the “if only it were not too late,” and also to straight time’s compulsion to move on to new future goals and accomplishments, by letting time stop, and by offering the narrative

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad

227

“scene” that might accommodate a reconnection of the protagonists somewhere within the continuous present that Seth has been inhabiting throughout the film. It is not too late. There is still a chance for the boys to express their intimacy to one another, and for the few minutes of plot time that comprise the sleepover scene, followed by several unemplotted and unrepresented hours in the middle of the night, the friends relish an immersion in the present, unconcerned about what may or may not have been wasted or lost, not anxious about boundaries, rules, or what will come next—both anchored and liberated in what Muñoz describes as “moments of queer relational bliss.”15 The scene plays out both as a confession (that Evan is afraid to live with strangers, that they missed each other while Seth was away on Easter vacation with his parents) and as an emotional symphony of sorts, one in which the companions are revealed to be so close that they echo each other’s thoughts and calm each other’s fears, boldly oblivious to any potential reactions or interpretations of their feelings or actions that might be registered by a world that continues to punctuate time quite differently outside their safe haven. In a series of intimate medium close-ups and overhead shots, softly and indirectly lit, the boys maintain eye contact across their adjacent sleeping bags throughout a scene in which the phrase “I love you” is proclaimed no less than ten times, concluding as we witness Seth and Evan falling asleep in each other’s arms. Both despite and because of the fact that the plot does not reach its conclusion with this scene, the temporal structure of Superbad manages to retain a sense of queerness until the film ends. The final sequence begins with what initially appears as an awkward moment when the boys wake up next to each other the following morning and Seth attempts to break the tension and the mood of the previous scene by reinstating between them the presumption of heteronormativity, echoing his already established refrain, “Your mom has huge tits.” This time, however, it is Evan who sets out to make things right, urging his friend not to rush off and marking his desire to sustain the present scene by saying “I don’t really have anything going on.” Their journey to the mall to find Evan a new comforter references the blanket-thick protections from the world that the sleepover of this now-passed time has just provided. It also references a sense of inevitable loss and separation, since a new source of comfort

228

Michael DeAngelis

must be secured now that Evan’s friend will soon no longer be there with him. At the mall they unexpectedly meet Jules and Becca, and after a few uncomfortable moments, they are separately paired with these two female friends with whom they “failed” the night before. Curiously, however, these heterosexual configurations that conclude the film do not negate the homosocial intimacy that Evan and Seth have just so tenderly affirmed, nor do they retroactively construct the sleepover scene as a mere stopping point in the progression of heteronormative temporal development. Accentuated by the opening verses of Curtis Mayfield’s “P.S. I Love You” (“I guess I’ll always feel the same / Love is strange”), the film’s ending intensifies the queer bond between the two bromancers by rendering the familiar strange. There is first the awkward “see ya” handshake that registers to both boys as a forced, disingenuous, and almost toxic gesture, an alien sign whose marked difference from the warm embraces of the previous night intensifies the peculiarity of such routine nods to heteronormativity. And the final “action” of the narrative turns out to be both a “moving beyond” and no movement at all; as Seth and Jules part from Evan and Becca, Seth looks longingly as he retreats from his friend on a mall escalator, a device of constant motion that offers both him and the viewers the sense of going nowhere, ushering Seth away without any effort or intention of his own. Forcing Seth to witness the image of the object of his homosocial affection gradually receding, an escalator in a shopping mall becomes the ultimate and most appropriate device for marking a most peculiar collision between straight time and queer futurity, for this narrative world offers its male protagonists no joy in the act of moving forward or “getting over it.” Instead, the ending of Superbad sustains a sense of discomfort with the notion that the protagonists now appear to have no choice but to embrace a “future” that can no longer accommodate their intimacy, and it does not mark such a progression as in any way a natural or logical inevitability. Segmenting the continuous present into the harshness of a now, before, and after, the narrative closes with an inquiry, an interrogation that refuses to be reconciled to the way that events are accustomed to unfolding according to the logic of straight time. If, as Muñoz asserts, “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that something is missing,”16 the steady, backward movement of the escalator ends

Queerness and Futurity in Superbad

229

up providing both Seth and the viewer with a glimpse of that other world, where Seth has been residing all along, but that for others still lies just beyond the horizon. Notes 1. Justin Wyatt, “Cinematic/Sexual Transgression: An Interview with Todd Haynes,” Film Quarterly 46.3 (1993): 8. 2. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 11. 3. Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1. 4. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 73. 5. Ibid., 70. 6. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 7. Dustin Bradley Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity (New York: Routledge, 2010). 8. Joel Stein makes a pertinent and astute observation about “gay teasing” across films with which Judd Apatow has been associated: “His films are about men growing up and men helping men grow up and men being just shy of gay as they tease one another about being gay as they help one another grow up.” See “Judd Apatow, Seriously,” Time, 10 August 2009: 46–52. 9. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 65. 10. Testaments to the male protagonists’ embodiment and embrace of “failure” extend to publicity discourses surrounding the film. In a New York Times interview, Michael Cera confessed that “I always end up in situations where I don’t know too many people, and I’m not very social, and I feel, you know, extremely uncomfortable. But there’s some secret pleasure I take in things like that, in things going horribly wrong.” See Joe Rhodes, “Michael Cera Wants to Make You Squirm,” New York Times, 8 July 2007, A25–A26. 11. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 120. 12. Freeman, Time Binds, 5. 13. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991): 11–12. 14. Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” Screen 27.6 (1986): 19. 15. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 25. 16. Ibid., 1.

III Bromance and Television Narrative

chapter 9

Becoming Bromosexual Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV Ron Becker

In December of 2008, MTV debuted Bromance, a six-episode reality series that featured nine men vying to be one of pseudo-celeb Brody Jenner’s go-to guy friends. “I found out the hard way that it’s tough to find a true friend,” Brody explains in the show’s introductory sequence, alluding to the well publicized break up between himself and Spence Pratt, his former friend and costar on The Hills.1 “So I decided to do something a little—a little crazy,” he confesses with some embarrassment. “I searched the entire country for guys looking for friendship.” Modeled on dating competition shows, episodes were structured around challenges ostensibly designed to help Brody discover “a real bromance” and included tear-filled one-on-one mandates and hug-filled elimination ceremonies. Besides winning Brody’s friendship, the last bro standing also won Brody’s lavish Los Angeles penthouse condo and, or so the show repeatedly promised, access to Brody’s Hollywood lifestyle (i.e., expensive cars, exclusive nightclubs, and hot women). Part Entourage, part The Bachelor, Bromance was unusual in its open embrace and exploitation of the bromance “phenomenon” (as Brody calls it). It was, however, far from the only show exploring the dynamics of intimate male bonding in the early 2000s. Spotting TV’s bromances had become something of a game for both popular press critics and TV scholars. The most commonly cited examples included JD and Turk on Scrubs, Alan Shore and Denny Crane on Boston Legal, House and Wilson on House, Ted and Barney

234

Ron Becker

A screen in the opening title sequence of Bromance (2008) establishes the series’ premise. Ryan Seacrest Productions/MTV.

on How I Met Your Mother, Eric and Vince on Entourage, and Sean and Christian on Nip/Tuck. But many others were “detected”: Hiro and Ando on Heroes, Abed and Troy on Community, Dwight and Michael on The Office, Chuck and Nate on Gossip Girl, McSteamy and McDreamy on Gray’s Anatomy, Matt Lauer and Bryant Gumbel on The Today Show, Regis Philbin and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm on Live with Regis and Kelly, and Justin Timberlake and an anonymous male fan on the TV Land Awards. After an adoring male audience member gave a shout out to Timberlake during the show, Timberlake stated, “That’s OK. Nothing wrong with a little bromance.” As the list above suggests, the concept of bromance has been applied in a wide range of contexts on television. Many observers, especially those focused on the spate of bromantic film comedies, discuss bromance as a genre. Television’s varied formats (e.g., talk shows, news programs, sports coverage, scripted sitcoms and dramas, semi-scripted reality shows) encourage me to approach the

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

235

bromance not as a genre but as a cultural discourse—a way of talking and thinking about male friendships that helps produce specific ways of feeling and experiencing homosocial intimacy and masculinity; as a discourse, the bromance helps produce the very thing it claims merely to describe. Although bromance is consistently used to refer to an intense bond between two guys, the specific contours of that intense bond remain somewhat nebulous. Such ambiguity is no doubt part of the discourse’s appeal and helps make its usage highly elastic. Thus, I cannot hope to exhaustively map its usage here. Instead, I hope to draw out what I see to be one important factor fueling this still emerging discourse. Discourses have histories and here I want to connect the bromance discourse of the early 2000s to the dramatic increase of gay and lesbian visibility in the 1990s and the shifting politics of sexual identity created by that era’s gay civil rights battles. Debates about gays in the military, marriage rights, and anti-gay ordinances didn’t always result in immediate political victories, but they did undermine the social stigma attached to homosexuality. Being gay friendly, I have argued elsewhere, became de rigueur for Americans invested in a hip, socially liberal identity.2 The increase of gay material on 1990s television was imbricated within this political context. As network executives used gay-themed programming to target a “quality” demographic of upscale, urban-minded adults, gay characters became relatively common fixtures in the increasingly narrowcast media environments of many Americans. The growing social acceptance of homosexuality and increased cultural visibility of gay men have had ongoing consequences for the discourses that regulate straight masculinity and male homosocial relations. Scott Fabius Kiesling identifies four key assumptions/ imperatives that scholars argue have long structured hegemonic masculinity: gender difference (that men and women are “naturally and categorically different in biology and behavior”); dominance (that men ought to be “strong, authoritative, and in control”); male solidarity (that men want and need homosocial bonding); and heterosexism (that men are heterosexual). These imperatives, however, have been experienced as “inherently contradictory,” placing men in a double bind.3 Intimate relationships with other men are highly desirable, promising access to patriarchal privileges. At the same

236

Ron Becker

time, such intimacy can draw men’s heterosexuality into question, threatening their access to those privileges. Friendships have been particularly fraught homosocial relationships for straight men, existing as they do outside of the legitimating contexts of the family or workplace. Historically, this double bind was often managed by expressions of homophobia. Making casual fag jokes while hanging out with your buddies, for example, helped reassure everyone that nothing gay was going on. As homosexuality became less socially stigmatized and expressions of homophobia less culturally acceptable (at least in certain circles), discourses surrounding masculinity and male bonding have shifted. In the 1990s, such changes fueled the spate of mistaken sexual identity plots that became a common feature of many primetime sitcoms. These narratives negotiated growing anxieties about the legibility of sexual identity and the pitfalls of male homosociality at a time when widespread gay visibility and the social acceptance of homosexuality were relatively new. By the second decade of the 2000s, however, such social changes had become a new normal—a development that altered cultural constructions of masculinity and male bonding yet again and fueled the rise of the bromance discourse. In the bromance discourse, representations of male bonding no longer serve to foreground straight men’s anxieties about being misread as gay. Instead, the bromance discourse appropriates cultural codes connected to homosexual bonding as a means of acknowledging the possibilities of homosocial bonding. I juxtapose these two programming trends here to highlight the distinct cultural work the bromance discourse might be doing. The bromance discourse, I want to suggest, reflects and advances a reconfiguration of how the imperatives regulating constructions of masculinity are experienced—one in which effeminacy, rather than homosexuality, becomes the most salient threat to male bonding. Given the limited space I have here, I will focus narrowly, contrasting gay-themed episodes from quintessential 1990s sitcoms such as Seinfeld, Friends, and Frasier with MTV’s reality series Bromance (one of the most self-referential examples of the more recent bromance discourse). I also briefly examine Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow’s Brokeback Mountain-inspired music video “Shame” and end with a few thoughts about the sitcom Happy Endings; both

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

237

texts provide valuable insights that help flesh out and extend my argument about the role of gay men and masculinity within the contemporary bromance discourse. “We’re Not Gay” On the February 11, 1993, episode of the hit NBC sitcom Seinfeld (“The Outing”), Jerry Seinfeld and George Constanza’s troubles begin when they sit down for lunch with gal pal Elaine Benes. When Elaine spies a young woman at the next table eavesdropping on their conversation, she decides to give the woman something worth listening to and motions to the guys to play along. “Just because you two are homosexual, so what?” she exhorts loudly, “I mean, you should just come out of the closet and be openly gay already.” So the plot begins. In typical sitcom fashion, coincidence and confusion ensue when the eavesdropper later shows up at Jerry’s apartment to interview him for a newspaper profile. The guys fail to recognize her, but she remembers them, leading to an interview filled with comic miscommunication between her questions (“How did you two meet?” “Do you live together?” “Do your parents know?”) and their answers (“We met in gym class,” “No, I have my own place,” “My parents, they don’t know what’s going on”). When Jerry and George finally catch on, they panic: “We’re not gay,” Jerry exclaims. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Jerry and George were not the only straight male characters on 1990s U.S. television to unexpectedly discover that people thought they were in a gay romance. The mistaken sexual identity plot became a prime-time staple, appearing in sitcoms such as Frasier, Friends, The Single Guy, and The Drew Carey Show, to name but a few. These narratives presented straight men navigating a new world— one where openly gay men existed (a new reality for most television series at the time) and where their own heterosexuality was neither presumed nor self-evident. Given these conditions, interacting with other guys became a tricky affair for many straight male characters. Characters, for example, often stumbled into a new semiotic landscape—one where more and more same-sex interactions were read as seemingly self-evident signs of gayness. On the November 2, 1995, episode of Friends (“The One with the Baby on the Bus”), for

238

Ron Becker

example, Joey and Chandler attempt to use Ross’s baby as a chick magnet. Their plan fails miserably, however, when the woman they try to hit on assumes that they are a gay couple with an adopted child. Similarly, the humor in a key scene from Seinfeld’s “The Outing” relies on the fact that the reporter (and the viewer) could so easily read Jerry and George’s interactions as the dynamics of a longtime gay couple (e.g., they bicker over whether Jerry had washed a pear; George complains that Jerry doesn’t like his shirt) rather than as a typical exchange between longtime platonic friends. Characters also got into homosocial “trouble” when they misread certain signs themselves. On the October 10, 1994, episode of Frasier (“The Matchmaker”), for example, Frasier tries to play secret matchmaker for his live-in housekeeper, Daphne, but ends up on his own gay date. When he meets his new boss Tom, Frasier is intrigued. Tom loves the theater, has “a soft spot” for people who are “a bit eccentric,” and is recovering from “a bad break-up.” Frasier thinks he’d be perfect for Daphne and invites Tom over for dinner. What Frasier doesn’t know, but the viewer soon discovers, is that Tom is gay. Needless to say, confusion follows when Tom arrives for the dinner party, assuming he is there as Frasier’s date. After an evening of farcical misunderstandings, they finally get their wires uncrossed and Frasier apologizes, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it never even occurred to me that you might be gay.” In response, Tom admits: “Wow, it never even occurred to me that you might be straight.” On the November 2, 1995, episode of The Single Guy (“Neighbors”), two straight guys ended up on a gay date with each other. While having dinner with his gay neighbors, Jonathan meets Ross (from Friends appearing in a cross-promotional casting stunt). The two hit it off and make plans to see Hamlet the next night. As each looks back on the situation, they both assume the other is gay and spend their date trying to figure out how to set things straight with the other one. Such scenarios relied on and reinforced the idea that sexual identity could be highly illegible. While 1990s television included many representations of gay men that clearly established their sexual identity through stereotypical signifiers, many mistaken identity plots suggested that those stereotypes were, in the end, comically inadequate for determining whether a guy was gay or straight. When the

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

239

reporter’s story “outs” Jerry, for example, friends and family aren’t entirely shocked; after all, they point out, Jerry fits the profile: thin, neat, and single. Similarly, on the November 10, 1994, episode of Friends (“The One where Nana Dies Twice”), a coworker sets Chandler up with another guy, and Chandler discovers that a lot of people actually thought he was gay. “So, what is it about me?” he asks the gang. “You have a quality,” Monica replies, to which everyone agrees. “Great, I was afraid you were going to be vague,” Chandler jokes in frustration. Producers also played up the illegibility of sexual identity by casting, dressing, and directing actors who played gay characters in ways that challenged preconceived notions about the supposed differences between gay and straight men’s mannerisms, speech patterns, or other markers of difference. Many of the straight men in such narratives found themselves in what could be called a gay-friendly straight-man’s double bind. On the one hand, faced with the dynamics of a new gay-inclusive world, these straight characters were forced to establish their heterosexuality and were usually very anxious to do so. When Jerry and George finally figure out who the reporter is, they visibly panic, leap off the couch, and desperately try to explain the situation. “Oh God, you're that girl in the coffee shop that was eavesdropping on us. I knew you looked familiar!” Jerry exclaims. Joey has a similarly paranoid response after he and Chandler are mistaken for gay parents. When the guys strike up a conversation with two beautiful women later in the episode, one of the women asks them what they are doing “out”; a hyper-sensitive Joey anxiously exclaims, “We’re not out. No, no, no. We’re just two heterosexual guys hanging with the son of our other heterosexual friend doing the usual straight guy stuff.” At the same time, however, most of the straight men were equally anxious to make clear that they didn’t have a problem with gay people. Jerry and George’s claim—“We’re not gay! Not that there’s anything wrong with that”—captured the double bind well. When Tom admits to Frasier that it never occurred to him that Frasier could be straight, Frasier replies, “Thank you.” As The Single Guy’s Jonathan tries to figure out how to tell Ross that he isn’t gay, he is also worried about finding a way to do so that won’t hurt his friendship with Ross or offend the gay neighbors he has come to like. Much of the humor in these narratives was rooted in these gay-friendly straight

240

Ron Becker

guys’ awkward attempts to wiggle out of the ostensibly paradoxical position they found themselves in as they tried to reconcile their contradictory desires. Jerry and George may claim that they don’t think there is anything wrong with homosexuality, yet George is so desperate to establish his heterosexuality that he absurdly insists that the reporter have sex with him right then to prove it. After Joey’s excessive preemptive coming-out-straight speech, Chandler looks at him and asks in embarrassed exasperation, “Are you done?” While expressions of homophobia became increasingly taboo in certain social circles during the 1990s, constructions of hegemonic masculinity remained firmly tied to heterosexuality. The era’s mistaken sexual identity plots foregrounded the pitfalls of male bonding for straight men trying to navigate this shifting and contradictory terrain. These episodes relied on (and reinforced) the perceived illegibility of sexual identity and focused on the anxieties it produced for straight male characters. In the newly gay-inclusive world of these sitcoms, homosocial relationships easily got tangled up in homosexual ones (e.g., Fraiser’s surprise gay date, Joey and Chandler’s gay dads outing). Such scenarios forced straight men to establish their heterosexuality—and to find a way to do so without appearing homophobic. By the beginning of the 2000s, however, the mistaken sexual identity plot had all but disappeared from prime-time television—perhaps because writers saw it as an overused formula and/ or because the premise no longer tapped into the shifting politics of gender and sexual identity as powerfully as it had in the 1990s. By the second decade of the 2000s, however, new narratives selfconsciously focused on the dynamics of male bonding appeared. “I Consider Myself a Little Bromosexual. How about You?” In the opening episode of MTV’s reality series Bromance, the nine candidates looking for a chance at bromance with Brody Jenner face their first mission: to get at least two “hot chicks” to attend that night’s Fredericks of Hollywood lingerie party.4 The guy with the hottest chicks would win. The challenge is an important test, Brody tells the viewer. “If you have guy friends that can’t pick up chicks,” he warns, “you’re gonna have a lingerie party with dudes.” Luckily

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

241

for Brody, all but two of the candidates succeed. At the end of the party each guy has to deliver a toast to Brody to commemorate their first night out together. For his toast, Alex, a self-proclaimed country boy from Maine, reads a poem he has written: “Roses are red. Violets are blue. I consider myself a little bromosexual. How about you?” Like the mistaken sexual identity plot of the 1990s, the bromance discourse of the early 2000s self-consciously focuses on male bonding and the construction of straight masculinity in a gay-friendly era. Unlike those older narratives, however, the bromance discourse is not particularly preoccupied with the illegibility of sexual identity. Within its logic, the growing social acceptability of homosexuality and visibility of gay men no longer pose the same problems for the security of straight men’s sexual identity or the same type of pitfalls for male bonding. Instead, the bromance relies on the cultural awareness of and general positive associations connected to gay love to reframe straight masculinity and male homosocial relations. Homosexual relationships become an elucidating analogy or reference point that helps identify and, in many instances, validate the genuine affection and deep friendship that can exist between two (typically straight) men. Beyond the term bromance (which also encourages comparisons to conventional heterosexual relationships), the discourse enables men to go on “man dates,” be “gay for” another man, have “man crushes,” and, as Alex points out, be bromosexual. The common use of references to Brokeback Mountain to frame straight male relationships might be the clearest example of how cultural codes specifically connected to gay romance get appropriated to communicate a distinct kind of straight male friendship. The function of homosexuality within the bromance discourse, however, can be complicated and contradictory. The discourse’s definitional energy—its frisson—lies in the social risk taken in framing straight male friendship in gay terms and thus exploits the social stigma connected to homosexuality—a stigma that may be merely residual for some but still highly dominant for others. Because of this dynamic, the bromance discourse is highly polysemic. It can easily be deployed or read in ways that punish rather than validate unusually intimate straight male friendships, producing both a flexibility and an ambiguity that explains much of the discourse’s popularity. Even when it relies on a relatively positive view of gay love,

242

Ron Becker

the discourse’s structuring logic often works to exclude gay men from the privileges of hegemonic masculinity by reinscribing rigid gender norms. Rather than providing a broad survey of the bromance discourse on TV, I will focus narrowly, paying close attention to how the discourse got deployed in MTV’s Bromance. The show is unusual in its explicit use of the term “bromance.” Many other series selfconsciously represent unusually intimate straight male friendships in ways that reflect the bromance discourse but do so without ever explicitly using the term. Bromance’s reality-TV format and target audience also distinguish it from many other bromance texts. Nevertheless, I believe the series reflects features common to the wider bromance discourse: it works hard to establish its gay-friendliness; it deploys the discourse with strong irony; and it offers a reformulation of hegemonic masculinity that naturalizes the exclusion of gay men even as it relies on a generally positive regard for gayness. Having said that, far more analysis remains to be done in order to understand the nuanced differences in how the bromance discourse has been deployed and read across TV’s diverse genres and in texts targeting different audiences; such comparisons, however, are beyond the scope of this chapter. Bromance works hard to establish that Brody Jenner and the show itself are cool with gay guys. Michael, one of the nine candidates vying for a bromance with Brody, for example, is openly gay, and the show frames his presence as unremarkable. Michael’s sexual identity is revealed with no fanfare, and none of the other guys comment on the fact that there’s a gay guy in the house. At the start of the first mission (to persuade random “hot chicks” to come to a lingerie party), Michael is a bit uneasy (though so, too, are a number of the straight guys who don’t have the “swagger” that the more confident guys claim to have), but he soon gets on board with the challenge, pointing out that women love hanging out with gay guys. When the women Michael invites are, in fact, among the first to arrive, Brody affirms Michael’s logic and offers viewers a rationale for adding a gay guy to his entourage. “Gay guys get all the chicks. I’ll surround myself with a bunch of gay dudes,” he states, with a why-the-hell-not shrug.

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

243

While the show seems to have no trouble including Michael, he struggles to fit into the show. After a hazing-esque opening sequence (Brody and his entourage drag blindfolded candidates from their hotel rooms in the middle of the night) and after seeing the Bro Mansion (where women’s panties decorate the walls), Michael tells viewers that this was not the glamorous reality-show experience he had expected. “I thought I was in Animal House,” he states. “I thought it was going to be like an episode of The Hills, but we weren’t in the Hills, we were in Compton.” Despite doing well in the first mission, Michael doesn’t adapt well to the emerging dynamics of the group. When Brody stops by the Bro Mansion for breakfast on Day 2, for example, the guys start talking about what L.A. girls are like. Cutaway shots to Michael show him silent and uneasy, and before they head out for the day’s next mission, Michael pulls Brody aside for a private chat. Michael: I appreciate being here, but I just don’t think this is the place for me. Brody (concerned): Are you not getting along with some of the guys? Michael: No, everyone’s cool. Brody: You fit in last night. You were killing it. Michael: Yeah, I kicked ass in the mission. I just thought it’d be something different and it wasn’t. I mean, you talk about sex with girls all day. What am I . . . I’m sitting here . . . I loved The Hills and thought it would be like that.

By the end of the scene, Michael decides to leave the show. Brody, sad to see him go, offers to give Michael a ride to the airport. The moment essentially serves as the elimination ceremony for the show’s only gay contender. As constructed, the scene does key discursive work for the series. It saves the show from having to figure out a way for Brody to reject Michael without suggesting that Brody might be doing so because he’d be uncomfortable being in a bromance with a gay dude. In fact, the conversation reinforces rather than undermines Brody’s and the show’s gay-friendly credentials. Brody’s concern that the other guys might be causing problems for

244

Ron Becker

Michael and Michael’s response establishes that the Bro Mansion (and, by extension, the show) was a gay-safe space. And at the end of their conversation, Brody tells Michael, “I have a lot of respect for you—that you even have the courage to come up and tell me this.” While we don’t see Michael saying good-bye to the other guys, one of them, Gary, a likeable nerd, tells the viewer: “I think he’s a really great guy and he’s gonna be missed.”5 Finally, in a web-extra clip in which Brody consults with his entourage about whom to eliminate and why, he fills them in on Michael’s decision and assures them (and the viewer): “He wasn’t going home today. I’ll tell you that.” Michael and the show’s acceptance of him may have worked to establish Bromance as gay friendly, but his presence also threatened to draw attention to the conflict between that supposed gay friendliness and the show’s investment in a narrowly (hetero)sexist construction of masculinity. As the panty-clad walls and lingerie-party mission illustrate, Bromance’s vision of “The Ultimate Hollywood Lifestyle” that the guys were supposedly aspiring to existed at the intersection of a frat party and an episode of Entourage. In the second episode’s mission, the guys compete in the Lazy Boy Slalom (riding a souped-up recliner downhill while trying to pick up pizza boxes and six-packs of beer on the way) and the Bro-MX challenge (riding through a BMX course on a girl’s pink bike). The elimination ceremony in the fourth episode ends with each guy gleefully sharing a bathtub with a bikini-clad female model. The over-the-top (hetero) sexism of such scenes does complex work. The exaggeration might provide enough irony-created wiggle room for the show and its viewers to claim it’s all a joke—that they’re all just playing at being crazy frat boys gone wild in LA. At the same time, however, these repeated rehearsals of heteronormative masculinity likely offset some of the queer discomfort of the show’s bromantic premise for straight cast members and viewers. Given Bromance’s panty-filled milieu, it is convenient, though certainly not coincidental, that Michael leaves early. It is convenient because Michael’s continued presence and visible discomfort would have undermined the show’s claim to gay friendliness; it was not coincidental because heterosexist masculinity is structured into the design of the game—a point that helps highlight the fact that this deployment of the bromance discourse is actually about acknowledging and validating straight male bonding.

While the guys talk with Brody about what L.A. girls are like, editing clearly establishes Michael as out of his element (above). After Michael decides to leave, the show intensifies the homosocial intimacy by having the first elimination ceremony take place in a Jacuzzi (below). Ryan Seacrest Productions/MTV.

246

Ron Becker

Michael’s departure, then, enables the series to explore its bromantic possibilities more fully.6 After Michael leaves, the show immediately cuts to the first “official” elimination ceremony, which (to the obvious chagrin of the candidates) takes place in a hot tub. With Brody sitting on one side, the remaining contestants file in and sit across from him. “I wasn’t expecting it, personally,” Luke confesses. “We have eight guys, one Jacuzzi; kind of uncomfortable, knees touching and all.” Chris F., capturing the mood the producers seemed to be going for, reports, “The awkward level just went up from five to 28.” His line is punctuated by dramatic music. Brody lets the guys he is keeping leave the highly charged hot tub one by one until only three guys are left. Although the Jacuzzi is huge, the three sit hip to hip as they explain why they want to stay. The producers clearly designed the moment to push the homosocial boundaries and maximize the guys’ discomfort for viewers’ pleasure. This hazing scenario would have been hard to pull off had Michael remained on the show. The homoerotic undertones would have shifted with an openly gay dude in the Jacuzzi. So, too, would the meanings connected to the guys’ obvious discomfort. Their visible unease would more easily be read as homophobic concern about the gay guy rather than as general anxiety about overly intense homosocial intimacy between straight guys. While the latter discomfort may be fueled by a form of the former, Bromance works hard to establish a distinction. The remaining five episodes consistently present male intimacy and homosocial bonding in a bromantic frame. The first episode ends with a preview montage of upcoming scenes that echoes the conventions of heterosexual dating shows. Gary admits, “I truly love these guys.” Alex asserts, “Honestly, Brody’s never met a guy like me before.” Jared maintains, “I’ll pretty much do anything, whatever it takes.” And all of the guys are shown crying. In the second episode, Brody holds Bachelor-style one-on-ones with each guy in the warm glow of the poolside fire pit. Overly nervous to impress, Chris P. has trouble being himself; several of the guys, on the other hand, feel comfortable enough with Brody that they let themselves tear up. In the fourth episode, things get even more personal when Brody brings in a counselor to lead a group therapy session in which everyone reveals his deepest fears. After everyone has a good cry, the session concludes with some trust falls and an emotional group hug.

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

247

In the final episode, Brody introduces the finalists to his mom and flies to Boston and Jacksonville to meet the finalists’ families. In presenting Brody’s search for bromance, the series walks a fine line between the ironic and the heartfelt. In the opening sequence, for example, Brody gives a definition of the term that simultaneously celebrates it as Hollywood cool and mocks it as a juvenile fad. “Bromances have been around for ever,” he tells the viewer in a voice-over as a photograph of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Matt Damon appears, “but now I feel like you see them everywhere [cuts to photographs of Michael Cera/Jonah Hill and Jimmy Kimmel/ Adam Carolla]—a phenomenon like the girls with the little baby chihuahuas. A bromance is a bond between you and your go-to guy” [cut to an image of Beavis/Butthead]. As Alex’s “I’m a bromosexual” toast reveals, the contestants also play their bromantic parts—with tongues often firmly in cheek. While the guys get ready for their fireside one-on-ones with Brody in the second episode, for example, Luke looks skyward and, in an earnest tone, asks Alex: “Do you ever just, like, stare up and look at the moon and think that Brody’s looking at that same moon?” Laughing, Alex responds, “Keep it in your pants there, bud.” Meanwhile, Brody’s current friend, Frankie, makes repeated appearances, playing the role of the jealous bro who’s hurt and threatened by Brody’s search for a new bromance. Despite such ironic winks, the producers also work to show that Brody and the guys sincerely want to find a true friend. The framing and editing don’t undermine the moments when the guys cry; Brody seems to take his responsibility to pick the right guy very seriously; and the guys all repeatedly state how much the experience means to them. Whether or not Brody was looking for anything more than another MTV paycheck or whether the guys were in it for anything more than the chance to win a hip downtown L.A. penthouse is not the point. What is significant is that the show encouraged the viewer to believe that, even with the ironic winking, the enterprise was not just a sham. The function of ironic humor in Bromance—and its relationship to the function of homosexuality in the bromance discourse—are worth reflecting on a bit more. Some critics have focused on the way jokes or scenarios involving straight men presented in gay contexts can work defensively to reestablish (rather than problematize) a

248

Ron Becker

character’s heterosexuality. Such humor, Margo Miller asserts, functions as a form of “ironic dismissal,” and the increase of such comedic situations on 1990s television, she argues, “reflected a new hostility toward queerness in straight male characters.”7 Hanna Hamad makes a similar argument in analyzing the highly bromantic 2010 video for Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow’s pop song “Shame.” Williams and Barlow, one-time bandmates in the highly successful 1990s British boy band Take That, waged a decade-long feud after Williams’ acrimonious departure from the group.8 The two reconciled later. In their duet “Shame,” the two reflect regretfully on the wasted years they spent fighting: “What a shame we never listened. / I told you through the television. / And all that went away was the price we paid. / People spend a lifetime this way and that’s how they stay. / Words come easy when they’re true.” The accompanying video heavily references Brokeback Mountain, the 2005 film about the secret, decades-long love affair between two cowboys. The video is filled with Brokeback Mountain iconography (e.g., a smalltown main street, rusted pickup trucks, country and western bars, mountain landscapes), and its opening moments include the sound of clopping horse hooves and guitar chords that evoke the movie’s score. Dressed in jeans and flannel shirts, Williams and Barlow steal intense glances over the shoulders of the women they slowdance with. They eventually connect over drinks at a bar and go on a fishing trip to a secluded mountain lake. For Hamad, the reference to the gay cowboy love story, especially when combined with Williams’ references to his wife in press interviews, functions as a form of ironic dismissal; the excessive framing of the relationship in gay terms, she argues, works to dispel the queer elements of the men’s intimate friendship (and longtime rumors about Williams’ bisexuality). In the end, the video does work to establish the men’s heterosexuality. Alone in the mountains, Williams and Barlow strip as they run up a hill in order to jump into the water (and, within the video’s Brokeback logic, to go further). When they get to the top, however, they chicken out and walk back down the hill. The humorously shot moment breaks the homoerotic tension that the video had been building and defines the couple as friends, not lovers. But what if we were also to think about the video’s Brokeback Mountain references as a form of ironic acknowledgment or even

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

249

ironic validation? Yes, the tongue-in-cheek humor in “Shame” helps establish the men’s heterosexuality and introduces gay desire only to disavow it in the end. At the same time, the Brokeback Mountain reference provides a visual language and cultural analogy that give deeper meaning to Williams and Barlow’s renewed friendship, representing their feelings for each other as something more—something queer. I bring up “Shame” here because its use of Brokeback Mountain provides a clear example of how the bromance discourse can use gay analogies to frame homosocial bonding in ways that acknowledge and, at times, validate relationships between men that might transgress norms of traditional masculinity. I say “validate” because the ironic humor in “Shame,” and I would argue in many bromance TV texts, would be best described as warm rather than biting or derisive. Although it can be difficult to pin down the tone and preferred readings of ironic texts, I would point to the synergy between the song’s heartfelt lyrics and the specific ways that Brokeback is invoked in the video; references to the film, for example, are presented “straight”—that is, in a realistic (i.e., not exaggerated or parodic) style. In Bromance, I would point to the show’s excessive effort to establish its gay-friendly credentials and signs of Brody’s sincerity (e.g., sharing his personal history and feelings with the guys, talking with his mother about who to eliminate, etc.). The bromance discourse’s ironic use of gay analogies to acknowledge intense male bonds intersects with research into male homosocial communication. Researching male bonding within a college fraternity, Scott Fabius Keisling argues that the men in his study relied on a wide range of “indirect speech genres, acts, and stances” as a way to negotiate the contradictory imperatives of hegemonic masculinity: bond with other men and be different than women, but be straight and remain in control. Keisling found that men created homosociality and expressed a desire for male bonding by the following: translating affection into conflict via insults, boasts, and competitions (social indirectness); talking about impersonal subjects like sports (topic indirectness); and expressing affection for a guy by talking positively about him to someone else while he is present (addressee indirectness).9 Keisling observed that the men in his study also negotiated the pitfalls of homosociality by adopting a “cool” stance, which “allows for the expression of homosocial desire

250

Ron Becker

without the speaker’s coming across as ‘too earnest’ in his desire.”10 By playfully translating homosocial bonding into the cultural codes of homosexual bonding, the bromance discourse functions similarly, offering straight men another indirect way to express affection for other men. In contrast to the mistaken sexual identity plots of the 1990s, which focused on straight men’s anxieties about being read as gay, the bromance discourse seems interested in exploring what being read as gay can do for straight masculinity. The cultural codes connected to homosexuality are no longer a pitfall for the gay-friendly straight man; instead, they become a meaningful analogy appropriated to express homosocial intimacy. In this way, I would argue, Bromance and the bromance discourse are imbricated within the emerging logics of our post-closet era.11 As the cultural visibility of gay men and social acceptance of homosexuality become a new normal for many (rather than just new), it becomes easier to operate under the assumption, however naïve, that all gay men are out and that any man who is not out is straight. Within this logic, straight masculinity and straight men become less threatened by homosexuality and by accusations of being gay. As Bromance’s frat-boy sexism reveals, constructions of hegemonic masculinity may remain thoroughly linked to heterosexuality and even more so to rigid notions of gender difference, but the bromance discourse suggests that the perceived tension between the imperatives to bond with other men and to be heterosexual may be abating.12 So, two young men today can admit, with just enough of a “cool” (read: ironic) tone to give them the necessary cover, “Yeah, we’re totally in a bromance, dude.” And MTV can sell ad spots for Axe body spray and the latest Vin Diesel movies with a reality series like Bromance. Happy Ending? I want to end with a brief discussion of the ABC sitcom Happy Endings, its representation of a friendship between a gay guy and two straight guys, and the insights it provides about bromantic constructions of gay masculinity. Like Friends and How I Met Your Mother, Happy Endings focuses on a group of close friends from college who are now in their late twenties. Unlike Friends and How I Met Your

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

251

Mother, however, the gang in Happy Endings includes an openly gay guy, Max. The rest of the cast includes Brad and Jane (an interracial straight couple), Alex and Dave (one-time fiancées, then ambivalent straight ex-es), and Penny (a single straight woman). While his relationship with Penny has some Will and Grace–style overtones, Max has closer friendships with Brad and Dave. When Dave gets left at the altar, he moves into Max’s loft, and when Max tries to tell his parents that he’s gay, Dave goes along for support. Brad and Max are equally close; they go out to eat with each other, bond over football, and share a humorously intricate handshake-and-hug greeting. As their frequent use of the term indicates, they are each other’s “bro.” Representations of such intense friendships between gay and straight men have been extraordinarily rare. For the bromance discourse’s gay-friendly straight man, as Bromance suggests however, having one (or at least believing you are open to having one) seems entirely reasonable. The post-closet logic of the bromance discourse claims to be beyond concerns about mistaken sexual identities and passé stigmas attached to homosexuality. If you can “play gay” with a straight guy without having to worry that people might think things will go further, couldn’t you do the same with a gay guy? No and yes. No, because of course such concerns are not really resolved but continue to lurk in the background, helping give the discourse its risky edge. And no, because the value and clarity of the gay analogy would weaken if one of the guys were actually gay. Thus, it is not surprising that television’s bromances are almost always between two straight men. Michael’s presence on Bromance could have been a notable exception, yet it offers only the never-fulfilled possibility of a gay-straight bromance. Michael’s fish-out-of-water experience in the panty-festooned house and his preemptive exit makes it easy to see his role on the show as paving the way for the gay-friendly straight-on-straight bromance that followed. Happy Endings, on the other hand, suggests that, yes, straight guys can be in a bromance with a gay guy. How? First, script straight guys like Brad and Dave. Exemplars of the post-closet straight man, they are utterly secure in their sexual identity. They hug Max and lie on the couch with him. They encourage him to hit on a hot dude at the bar and talk with him about gay sex with ease. Brad, for example, curiously asks: “So, when gay guys hook up, do they call each

252

Ron Becker

other dude? Like, ‘Dude, your lips are so soft.’ Or ‘Dude, your moustache is tickling my naval, dog.’ ” Max tells him: “You’re an idiot, but yeah, we do that.” Second, script a gay guy who isn’t “too” gay. Max’s defining character feature is the fact that, as Penny puts it, he’s “a straight dude who likes dudes.” Max is a self-admitted gay stereotype buster: he’s pudgy, likes 1990s hippie rock bands, loves the Bears, and calls his friends “bro” and “dog.” Being “in wet clothes and watching Schindler’s List” sounds more fun to him that shoe shopping and doing brunch. His “scary” apartment contains a basketball hoop, dartboard, exposed wires, and bird poop. Far more than Brad or Dave, Max fits the stereotype of the “bro.” And yet, his sexual interest in guys is a common element in the series. He hits on guys, gets hit on, goes on dates, and reports on his sex life.13 With his straight-dude version of homosexuality, Max functions as something of a wish fulfillment for the bromance discourse. Unlike Michael who just didn’t fit in, Max is the kind of gay guy a straight man can actually hang with—the kind of gay guy who can help his straight bro establish both the gay-friendly credentials and the post-closet-era straight confidence needed to fully enjoy the benefits of self-conscious bromantic male bonding. According to Happy Endings, then, there is a place for a gay guy in bromantic male bonding—and perhaps even a place for a version of gay masculinity within the emerging construction of hegemonic masculinity that the bromance discourse is helping shape. The only requirement? Make sure you really act like a straight dude. (It seems only fair, since the same is required of straight guys.) Within the emerging dynamics of the bromance discourse, expressions of homosocial male bonding are, it seems, no longer structured by the abjection of the gay Other, but they remain firmly structured by the abjection of effeminacy. Whether that is a happy ending, I will leave up to the reader. Notes 1. A picture of the two from happier times Photoshopped to look torn in half appears for uninformed viewers. 2. Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

Straight Men, Gay Men, and Male Bonding on U.S. TV

253

3. Scott Fabius Kielsing, “Homosocial Desire in Men’s Talk: Balancing and Recreating Cultural Discourses of Masculinity,” Language in Society 34:5 (2009): 696. 4. The six episodes of Bromance originally appeared on MTV between the end of December 2008 and the beginning of February 2009. Episode 1 “A Taste of the Good Life”; Episode 2: “The Bro-Athalon”; Episode 3: “Who’s Got Game?”; Episode 4: “Bros in the Wild”; Episode 5: “Little Jeans, Big Hearts”; Episode 6: “Moment of Truth.” 5. The only other commentary about Michael’s departure comes in a brief confessional from Jacob, who states, in a derisive tone, “Mike? Who’s Mike?” This brief scene gets included, I would argue, to help establish Jacob as a sleazy, untrustworthy guy (the argument Brody makes later in the episode to explain why Jacob is the first to be eliminated). 6. The show seems interested in maintaining its gay friendly tone even after Michael leaves. In Episode 5, the guys must help Brody promote his new signature line of designer jeans by modeling them on a red carpet at a Hollywood party. The guys are a bit apprehensive about the challenge, however, when they try them on. The jeans are extremely tight, low-riding, and bedazzled with the letters “BJ.” Unbeknownst to the guys, of course, the jeans line and the event are fake—another test of their bromantic potential. What I find notable is that none of the guys are shown making even the slightest homophobic comments. While they are all uncomfortable in the excessively feminine jeans, no one says the jeans are “fag-y” or even “gay,” and they all enthusiastically model them at the event. The nonhomophobic tone continues even after Brody reveals the ruse. 7. Margot Miller, “Masculinity and Male Intimacy in Nineties Sitcoms,” in The New Queer Aesthetic on Television: Essays on Recent Programming, eds. James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 148. 8. Hannah Hamad, “ ‘My Wife Calls Him My Boyfriend’: Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams’ Reconciliatory Bromance,” Flow 13.9 (2011), http://flowtv. org/2011/02/my-wife-calls-him-my-boyfriend/. 9. Keisling, “Homosocial Desire,” 703. 10. Ibid., 721. 11. Ron Becker, “Guy Love: Heteronormativity and a New Straight Masculinity after the Gay 90s,” in Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics, eds. Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (London: Routledge, 2009), 121–39. 12. Straight masculinity’s “comfort” with homosexuality (as it is produced within the bromance discourse) might be dependent upon an exaggerated sexism and rigid idea of gender difference. In other words, the imperative that men are clearly and naturally different from women becomes all the more important, compensating for any weakening in the heterosexual imperative. If this increased demand to conform to rigid gender norms means that many (all?) gay men get excluded from the bromance discourse and from hegemonic masculine privilege, it makes that exclusion

254

Ron Becker

seem self-chosen by obscuring the ways in which that exclusion is as structurally inevitable as Michael’s early departure from Bromance. This logic helps gay-friendly straight masculinity out of its own double bind and lets it have it both ways—i.e., it can claim that it’s cool with homosexuality but retain its exclusive access to the privileges of hegemonic masculinity. If gay guys don’t fit in, after all, it’s because they like The Hills, not because they’re gay. See the following discussion about Happy Endings for more on gay masculinity and the bromance. 13. In “The Quicksand Girlfriend” (13 April 2011), a clearly happy Dave walks in and says, “Raise you hand if you got laid last night.” Brad, Penny, and Max all do. Dave says, disappointed, “Really?” Brad: “Yeah, Jane gets really horny when we use our pizza stone.” Penny: “I slept with my allergist.” Max: “Confused college student.”

chapter 10

The Bromance Stunt in House Murray Pomerance

“Didn’t it occur to you that something was amiss when I didn’t come home last night?” Watson (James Mason) to Holmes (Christopher Plummer) in Murder by Decree (1979)

Writing in 1925 about the modern appeal of travel, Siegfried Kracauer noted among the bourgeoisie a “preference for the exotic, which one is eager to discover because it is completely different and not because it has already become an image in one’s dreams.”1 He continued on to speculate that exoticism in itself becomes relativized as the world becomes smaller, thanks in part to cinema. “Though at present the exotic may still cling to the pyramids and the Golden Horn, someday it will designate any spot in the world whatsoever, to the extent that the spot appears unusual from the perspective of any other point in the world.”2 Unusual, yet one might add, readable, as we learn early on in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) at a moment shortly after Sherlock Holmes has started to become friendly with his new flatmate, Dr. John Watson: I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, “Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of

256

Murray Pomerance his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.” The whole train of thought did not occupy a second.3

In his observations, diagnoses, and feats of detection generally, Holmes is obsessed with the exotic in what Kracauer might have thought a thoroughly bourgeois engagement. I feel I myself have a distinct understanding of Kracauer here; not long ago cinema scholarship brought me, in fact, to the Golden Horn, which did indeed seem as exotic as anything I could have wished for. But not long afterward I visited the Université de Montréal, an institution perched in the city where my father was born and that I had visited numerous times in my youth: it, too, seemed exotic to me, and when I rode back to my hotel along the Avenue Wilder Penfield, I felt I was in a delicious, strange, and thoroughly unknown part of the world. I mention travel here, however, not to point to the deliciousness of being in a strange place but to draw attention to an accomplishment that is ours when we seek “less the particular being of a landscape than the foreignness of its face.”4 That accomplishment, managing to find one’s bearings and seek out the necessities of life where everything has been systematically, so to speak, hidden, is something we might reasonably call a stunt. Bourgeois travel is in general a stunt, bringing us the opportunity to show how we can manage and control ourselves when routine sources of natural support are invisible or unknown. My aim is to explore the structure of stunts, particularly that of the bromance stunt as effected through Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard’s performative work in House and apotheosized there in a 2010 episode titled “The Down Low.” Stunts Social activity very often involves stunts. The stunt attitude, the stunt as construction, and social engagement and performance through stunt work are all central to our flitting interactions in modernity,

The Bromance Stunt in House

257

especially since widespread acceleration has forced us to treat time increasingly as a resource to be economized, and stunting is typically a way of managing complex activity through relatively simple, and attenuated, commitments of energy and focus. In a television commercial running currently as I write, for example, a young woman slides through a doorway with her hands full and a quart of milk tucked precariously (but securely) under her arm. She is showing off how the inside of her bicep can be used to wedge an object against her ribs, thus replacing the activity of the hand; in her motion she can allow the milk to move, too, but without succumbing to the laws of gravity. Consider also that on almost any street in any city at any moment of the day, a driver holds a doughnut or coffee (if not a cell phone) in one hand while negotiating an automobile with the other, thus giving plain demonstration that he can do two things at once—that he can sip his coffee without spilling it while in fact having no stable point at which to rest it. A teenager makes his way down a sidewalk, simultaneously texting a vital message on his smartphone; he manages not to bump into anybody as he walks and not to goof up with his fingers and send an ambiguous message. This is perhaps a limiting case of moving without looking where one is going. So full is our everyday experience with exemplifications of stunting, so many are those around us who have devoted themselves to stunt work that we take stunts for granted as happenstance occurrences rather than the significant achievements they are. As stunt work has become progressively naturalized, the activity we deem worthy of openly calling “stunt work” becomes more and more elaborate and dangerous. Briefly, for each of the above examples: If one wedges a quart of milk underneath one’s arm, rather than holding it in a bag or in one’s hands, it is relatively unstable, more likely to drop to the ground and becomes the “spilled milk” that one shouldn’t “cry over.” Carrying generally involves some calculation of balance, posture, weight, shape, and probability. In The Errand Boy (1961), Jerry Lewis gives a good example of the stunt work involved in trying to deliver too many parcels in one journey. Navigating a body or an automobile forward in a thoroughfare requires astute concentration of perception upon other vehicles

258

Murray Pomerance

and bodies, upon traffic signals such as they might be, and upon the limits and responses of one’s own vehicle or body as it moves through space and time. Ryave and Schenkein have insightfully detailed some of the navigational, tactical, and status issues at stake in walking down a sidewalk.5 Working to “drive” a self or a car is already an achievement, but doing this while being distracted by a secondary activity—eating a doughnut, drinking coffee, texting “Hi”—increases the difficulty and the danger since the secondary activity demands a temporary realignment of sensory focus. Consider James Dean struggling to see the road ahead and simultaneously freeing his sleeve from a door handle as he drives speedily toward the edge of a cliff in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).6 The central issue with stunting for Erving Goffman is that, as a “maintenance of guidance and control by some willed agency under what are seen as nearly impossible conditions,” it typifies one type of “cosmological” interest, which category he considers “in some ways the largest we can have.”7 In the stunt, happenings that may be thought “natural” fall into the province of “guided doings,” subject to social organization and shaping of some kind. From action and eventuation, a game is created, with operating rules. Every stunt can be seen as an artful evasion of the sort of circumstance in which gravity, chemistry, and biology take over. Some stunts involve equipment and machinery—Kevin Bacon dancing in the driver’s seat while he propels a tractor across a field in Footloose (1984)—and others are purely interactional. For a nice diegetic example of the latter not only physically manifested and eminently visible but indeed witnessed as a stunt by diegetic personnel, consider a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) in which a nubile young ballet dancer, Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy), is entertaining a gaggle of businessmen in her tiny apartment one summer evening. Observed across the courtyard by “Jeff” Jefferies (James Stewart) and his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), Miss Torso deftly weaves between the men, taking a moment to give each the sense that he is the center of her attention before abandoning him to his own narcissism and ducking away to play with another. “I’d say she’s doing a woman’s hardest job,” says Lisa pointedly, “juggling wolves.” It is soon enough clear that none of these well-buttered Lotharios is the beau Miss Torso truly cares for, and her evening cannot

The Bromance Stunt in House

259

be a success until she has misled each and every one of them and then handily disposed of the entire group. Bromance Stunting, then, can be a way of handling one’s relationship to other people, finding them comprehensible and manageable even when they are exotic, as it were. I want to consider a particular case of stunt work, the interactional pattern now increasingly well known, at least by movie fans, as “bromance.” My proposal, simply put, is that the game of bromance, in which males symbolically play out romantic attachments to one another while artfully maintaining assiduous control of social and interactional distance, is a stunt form of affective or passionate human relationship. In passion, be it homo- or heterosexual, the state of desire is given full opening and can flower regardless of propriety, etiquette, or courtly manners. But the form of flirtation that is bromance works by erecting and then perpetuating defenses against the clutter of unfettered interaction—defenses, indeed, that are game tactics. I take men who are engaged in bromance to be saying, in effect, “Note with what stunning verisimilitude I can mount all the telltale signals of homosexual feeling and interplay, all the while without committing myself to a single tangible production of evidence,” or “You can’t possibly really establish me as gay, but look how gay I seem!” It should be noted that the essential strategy in bromance is a contradiction of the essential strategy in closeted homosexuality, where the principal challenge is to fail at giving open evidence of same-sex engagement while in secret actually being so engaged. (We will return to a fascinating take on this theme.) Bromance is a similar guardianship against such telltale evidence but without the closeted intimacy that “in” homosexuals experience. To be bromantic is to pretend to an intimacy one has no intention of ever proving— and every intention of preventing oneself from proving—and thus to gain some of the social benefits of homosexual status from— essentially, to be treated as exotic by—an audience that would be signally unlikely to tolerate actuated homosexuality. We might think of this audience as homophobic, and I suspect it frequently is that, although theoretically it remains necessary only that the sexuality of

260

Murray Pomerance

the audience is itself unrevealed. Boyfriends in bromance can have all the cachet of seeming sophisticatedly other, even transgressive and alien, without concomitant punishment, since they can persist in claiming heteronormative identity for themselves even when they embrace, fondle, kiss, or verbally tickle other men. The screen bromance—Judd Apatow’s films are celebrated for being full of this—stages such fondling, embracing, and tickling as standard activities between males who position themselves in such a way as to always be capable of making heteronormative claims. While the sexual politics of bromance are beyond my strictest concerns here, it is worth noting that the open fakery of homosexual commitment may itself play to the detriment of gay liberation as every subtle nuance of affirmation, or announcement, of homosexual connection is in bromance taken as a prelude to ultimate denial. Men who love one another do not, and need not, play out an elaborate ritual of “fake love” in the way that the heteronormative studs in bromance movies typically do. But it is also true that there is more than one way in heteronormativity to be a stud. You Love Me Because I’m Neurotic Intelligence can be used to show dominance and valor, especially in a capitalist context where rationality is praised over feeling, logic and efficiency over sentiment and sensibility.8 Even what Freud called nontendentious wit can be the basis of an interactional display aimed at showing control, strength, and virility and thus exhibit its own subtle tendentiousness.9 And if the strength of a man can inhere in, and be shown through, his systematic and unfailing brilliance, razor-sharp wit, perceptual acumen, and superior logic, a powerful male-male attachment and attraction can appear as one character’s high regard for, and adulation of, another’s genius—yet also through a competitive irritation and chafing, a tickling annoyance. This is what we find with Dr. Watson’s estimations of Holmes: “ ‘This fellow may be very clever,’ I said to myself, ‘but he is certainly very conceited.’ ”10 More to the present point, this sentiment holds true in the unendingly vexed and often infuriated annoyance felt by Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) at the provocations of Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) in the Fox televison series House.

The Bromance Stunt in House

261

House, as he insists on calling himself, is chief of diagnostic medicine at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, a rather modern structure under the general management of Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein). Over the first seven seasons of the series, House has moved from a playful and often exasperated subjection to Cuddy— who has used every bureaucratic means at her disposal to “tame” his persistently snarky, typically brilliant, out-of-the-box attitude to the practice of medicine—through various stages of infatuation (first denied and later confessed) to a somewhat attenuated, committed, loving relationship that broke apart largely due to Cuddy’s complete refusal to accept his drug abuse. House is a drug abuser of the first water, addicted to Vicodin because of a botched surgery that has left him with continuous and intolerable leg pain. This agony he complains about either through pantomime, as he hobbles with a cane around the mint green hallways of the hospital, or vociferously, in a twangy American accent that British actor Laurie admits he found painful and taxing to effect (but that he summoned with consummate skill). Wilson, the local specialist in oncology, is House’s best friend and frequent collaborator in diagnosis and a rather stuffy young man who has no problem showing Cuddy the proper respect (even if he has a crush on her himself). Filling out the basic cast is a group of residents assigned to work under House’s tutelage, each of these a personality case of remarkable weirdness and charm. These (relative) youngsters do lots of drudge work, routinely suggest useless diagnoses, and in many other ways fill the need for pleasant-looking bodies able to regard their mentor with a more or less consistent look of twinkly admiration. House loves to tease and embarrass the starchy Wilson, however—indeed to tease and embarrass without alienating, since House is nothing if not a master stuntman in his own right. And soon enough the two have become (somewhat improbably) roommates. Every other character seems to continually—and subtly—wonder, Exactly how close are these two? What is really going on between House and Wilson? Blithely ignoring the ongoing seasonal structure of the program’s often inchoate and fragmented plotlines prior to the intensification of the House-Wilson “relationship” as well as a number of piquant dramas that were staged during the sixth season (2009– 2010)—an African dictator dies on the operating table; a teenaged

262

Murray Pomerance

girl cannot distinguish fact from fiction (!); a brilliant physicist is convinced he’d be less depressed if he were less intelligent—I want to focus on some particular domestic scenes as one way of demonstrating how a network series television show like this, aimed at a mainstream audience and equipped with the services of some stellar performers, has the capacity to handle the particular stunt of bromance. To be pointed: my focus here is the bromance stunt and how it can be made to work, not on House more generally or on the greater glory of network TV. It need be said specifically that although the normal plot structure of any one House episode (airing inside one hour) contains several stories, each of which is stated and minimally developed, with one of these at least involving a complex diagnosis that demands the peculiar talents of House and his team (very frequently with Wilson’s assistance), the plot strands are not typically interwoven around a common central theme of stated significance, the sincerest attempt of the writing staff being, apparently, to show off the characters in increasingly fascinating combinations while they are stuck in increasingly problematic interpersonal or diagnostic predicaments. House, then, isn’t about anything so much as House and his disciples; as with the Sherlock Holmes stories, the major preoccupation is to demonstrate over and over the apparently unlimited brilliance, acumen, perceptual acuity, and doggedness of the (medical) detective. His brilliance is his sexiness. To fiddle with his brain is to love him. This particular medical detective, however, has an emotional problem. Not only are loving relationships difficult if not impossible for him (in great part because of his brutal, often scathing, refusal to dissemble in a socially normative manner) but the continuing agony of his injury, his Vicodin addiction, and his penchant for wiliness and trickery all combine—in a way that fans of the program find endlessly amusing—to make him a predictably unpleasant guest for tea. Naughty Dr. House is always provocative, and also, by the time the sixth season rolls around, continually obsessed with guarding his friend Wilson, who seems about to fall now, as once before he had fallen, into a disastrous marriage (again to the same woman). Just as Wilson goes far out of his way not only to enable House’s addiction (through signing illegally for the prescriptions) but also to persuade House to come off the drug, House has set himself to keeping

The Bromance Stunt in House

263

Wilson safe from the wiles of the femme fatale. Wilson’s concerns for House, then, and House’s for Wilson are both implicated with the physical well-being—thus the bodily experience—of the other and with a tactical campaign for the other’s protection and benefit. The issue of bromance is raised in the program through House’s ongoing plan to save Wilson, but it is Wilson’s ongoing plan to redeem House that provides the setup. They have fashioned between them a mini-network of mutual protection, which is, of course, friendship. In order to keep an eye on House and attempt to control his Vicodin abuse, Wilson has brought him to live in his apartment, but the situation has become considerably more than cramped, and by the middle of the sixth season the two men have taken a new space together: something rather lavish, indeed the very space Cuddy had set her eyes upon. It is expensive, it is contemporary, it is a designer’s idea of heaven. And now, with an episode titled “The Down Low” written by Liz Friedman and Sara Hess, directed by Nick Gomez, and first airing on 11 January 2010, we are treated to a knot of interactional explosions: if for several years and in countless tiny screen moments House and Wilson had been expressing irritated affection for one another, had been smiling a little too enigmatically into one another’s faces, the lobby of this new apartment now becomes the setting for an incontrovertible and definitive step into bromance, a spectacular stunt accomplished in eight brief scenes interwoven through the episode. “The Down Low” [1] Nora (Sasha Alexander), a pretty girl living in the same building as our heroes, emerges from the elevator with Wilson. The two have been chatting about the best local coffee, dry cleaner, and pizza shop, and she makes it plain not only that she’s heterosexual but that she’d be happy to go for sushi sometime if he promises to bring “that good-looking guy with the cane.” “House?” says he. She rejoins, a little tickled, “Your boyfriend’s name is House?” Wilson is flummoxed. “He’s not my . . . boyfriend.” “Oh!” says she, pantomiming buttoning up her lips. Clearly she doesn’t believe him and takes his surprised stuttering to indicate that he is trying to keep something secret. “What do you call each other? Husband? Partner? Lover?”

264

Murray Pomerance

She is just trying to be polite, to adapt to proprieties. “We’re not gay!” he says with a frown. And, disbelieving again, she asks, “Seriously?” Alexander and Leonard here play the scene with a precisely tuned and timed patter, their statements padded with delicate little pauses to indicate that the other is slightly incomprehensible. Wilson takes Nora to be coming out of the blue; she takes him to be defending his modesty. She is apparently outlandish; he is apparently a prude. What fans of the show are in a position to admire about this is that, generally speaking, Wilson is a prude, and apparently Nora is outlandish—in all the best ways. She is fresh, attractive, open, direct, and smart. But Leonard’s surprise cues us to the fact that the scene is written in such a way as to put his character in a peculiar predicament: his sexual orientation, we are being told, is here under fire because it is being systematically misread. More bluntly still: Nora cannot possibly be right. So, perceptive and intelligent though she is, she has seen gayness where there is no gayness. To see a homosexual relationship where no evidence of one has been presented would be quite another thing: one’s perception might or might not be mistaken, and the situation would be inherently ambiguous. Here, the expressions of dumbfoundedness on the familiar face of our familiar friend Wilson (he appears in virtually every episode of the series) constitute the signal that this new character need not (and should not) be interpreted as correct in her reading. The irony, of course, is that as an intelligent and perceptive person she may indeed be correct, and Wilson may indeed be shamming. He may have been covering an identity for five and a half seasons, and the cover may be falling off now. [2] House is questioning Eddie (Nick Chinlund), the associate of Mickey (Ethan Embry), his patient for the week (a young man injured during a drug buy): Eddie is nothing if not smart, streetwise, and a little tough, and sitting with House in an empty green-tiled examination room his taciturn behavior nicely mocks what House in choosing this setting has been mocking himself—the police procedural. Wilson interrupts, addressing House a little dourly: “Everybody in our building thinks we’re gay.” From the background, Eddie listens in, interested enough. “Oh, come on,” says House, without much concern or attention, “we’re two grown men who moved in together. We’re two tigers away from an act in Vegas. They’ll figure

The Bromance Stunt in House

265

out we’re straight eventually.” A perfectly matter-of-fact tone, indicating perfect matters of fact (and a nice little pivot off the sexually ambiguous identities of Siegfried and Roy, who performed in Las Vegas with tigers until Roy was injured by one of them on October 3, 2003). “Eventually,” whines Wilson, “is not when I want to go out with the cute girl in 3-B . . . We were chatting, having fun, there was definitely a spark—” House nods, “—when she thought you were gay.” House turns his mind back to his investigation, in which he has been asking Eddie about “culottes.” (Eddie and Mickey, it turns out, are undercover cops who have been working a garment operation where drugs are being transacted, and “culotte” is their private code for cocaine.) “What is a culotte?” he suddenly wants to know—a typical tangential House-style question with no real connection to the plot but evidencing his boundless curiosity—and Wilson, indeed, has the answer. Eddie, we notice, notices that Wilson knows what a culotte is. Because Eddie is listening in with such interest to this conversation, we begin to wonder whether perhaps he is gay, too. He has a tightly bonded working relationship with the good-looking young Mickey: is there more to it than meets the eye? At any rate, is Eddie’s astute and knowing read of the Wilson-House conversation a signal that he has some special capacity to read their relationship as well? When Wilson signals House that people in their new building consider them lovers, and House shrugs it off as nonsense, might it be that from Eddie’s canny point of view these two are dissembling, closeting themselves? We must also wonder just a little whether, since Nora and Eddie both seem intelligent and streetwise and also so personable in their different ways, Wilson might be wrong about his own sexual orientation. House does not raise the same doubt for the viewer largely because he has been almost exclusively celibate due to obsession with his work; he also has been blatantly, even crudely, heterosexual in his relatively few lustful moments in the series until now. In this scene, House keeps commenting to Wilson about the people who think “you’re gay.” Meanwhile, all this conversation about homosexuality is precisely that, conversation—which is to say, given that we are given no clear-cut and open display of sexual behavior between these men, a social game.

266

Murray Pomerance

[3] House and Nora are in the lobby getting their mail. House introduces himself as “Greg” and thanks her for the tips about the neighborhood in a completely friendly but gender-neutral way.11 Then he says, “I hear you thought that Wilson and I like to polish one another’s swords.” She looks at him without denial but then shows embarrassment—“Of course he told you about that!”—perfectly appropriate since she is guilty of having speculated about the privacy of a person she is only now meeting for the first time. Standing next to them in the lobby has been a huge wrapped package, which he examines. “Actually”—a slightly elevated vocal tone—“I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.” Then, in a deeper voice: “We’re both straight.” He tears the brown paper off the huge package. It is a framed original lobby poster of A Chorus Line, a Broadway show that originally opened 25 July 1975 and is frequently read as iconic of flamboyant gay stage performance. Clasping his hands together, he utters in rapturous singsong and adds hand gestures: “Oh . . . my . . . God, that is beautiful! We finally have the room to display it the way it deserves.” Cut to Nora, smiling a symphony of tentativeness and confusion. We are to assume that from Nora’s point of view it is an indeterminate matter—a perfectly balanced riddle—whether “Greg” is admitting that he is gay or performing a masquerade in order to cater to her preconceptions and miscalculation, perhaps mock her a little, perhaps tease her, perhaps provoke her to go further. We, by comparison, stalwarts of the series, are to know irrevocably that Greg is as straight as he claims. We are to see no riddle, no ambiguity. This is consistent with our long-standing reading of House, and in order to further it now, we must let Nora, charming as she is, tumble a little in our estimation. Stammering a little, and with a smile of too much innocence, House begs Nora to help him get the poster upstairs: in one gesture he manages to signal his weakness and unthreatening posture (read: “I am gay”) and stage a tactic to lure her into his apartment (read: “But not really”). As she bends to pick up her end of it, he performs the coup de grâce: “Nice shoes, by the way. Louboutin?” This, too, is for Nora and for us. Nora will calculate his knowledge of feminine shoe details in the same way that Eddie calculated Wilson’s knowledge of culottes. But we will see the extent of House’s wiliness

The Bromance Stunt in House

267

and also the patent falseness of his comment—a falseness that helps us understand beautiful Nora as a beautiful patsy. [4] Wilson comes into House’s office and informs him that Nora has told him about their Evita listening party—Evita, of all things!, that rallying point for camp sensibility like so many Andrew Lloyd Webber productions. House puts on a pouty face full of “sincerity”: “The London and New York recordings are so different!” Wilson reminds House that he was supposed to tell Nora that they are straight. With mock sincerity, House pouts, “She didn’t believe me, either!” Wilson grins knowingly: “You’re doing this to mess with me.” He started that way, House admits, but now, honestly, “I’m trying to hit that.” Wilson doesn’t get it: “By pretending you’re gay and you’re in a relationship with me?” But House has an answer for everything: “We’re in a relationship. But we’re really unhappy.” He proceeds to reveal a strategy: they cannot communicate “because we’re so closeted”; he’ll spend the next few weeks hanging out with Nora, “become best girlfriends . . . and then one night we get drunk . . . a backrub turns into a front rub . . . and next morning: ‘I’ve never felt this way about a woman before!’ ” Wilson’s rage has been building and now explodes. “I saw her first.” House cannot believe his friend is “invoking the Guy Code.” Wilson is nonplussed. “We’re guys. It’s a code.” More crucial than pretending articulately to be gay, then, is showing conclusively that the gayness was only pretense: the real state of affairs is war practiced by two men committed to dominating the same woman. (See, for a more elaborate and literary example, Homer’s Iliad.) The major function and strength of this scene is its structural role in the bromance stunt being dramatized in this episode and established more generally in the series as a whole: to show how vital it is that the performer not tumble to destruction from the performative heights to which his playing has elevated him—that is, how important that he reveal to a knowing and believing other (the viewer) that deeply, really, “in truth” he is not what he has been pretending to be. As House is called out to deal with his patient, Wilson murmurs, “She’s never going to fall for it,” to which House barks, “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about, sweetie.” With House at this moment is Dr. Chase (Jesse Spencer), the youngest, blondest, and most masculinely soft of his team, a figure House likes teasingly

268

Murray Pomerance

to call a “woman.” Chase has heard all this sniping before a million times; he appears not to notice. For the punch, however, we cut back to a silent shot of Wilson looking down with perturbation and concern. House, he apparently suspects, will win this battle of masculine power unless he arms himself and climbs onto his horse. [5] Wilson comes into the apartment to find House and Nora sitting on the floor, she between his legs getting a (precisely calibrated) shoulder rub. (The subtext here is that House has special knowledge of women, because he gets rubbed, too; or House has special knowledge of women, because he is a medical man.) She offers some Kung Pao chicken. Candles burn on the floor. The television is on. “Oh! God! Right there!”—he has indeed found the right spot. House announces with innocent pleasure, “We’re having a picnic.” (House seems to be saying, “This isn’t and couldn’t possibly be sexual, because, as Nora knows, I’m gay!” but also, and at the same time, “See the progress I’m making!”) When Nora offers Wilson wine, House tries a thrust: “He doesn’t drink.” Wilson parries, squatting on a box and helping himself to the food. Behind the unobservant Nora’s back, House is ticked off. Stalemate. This scene takes the strategic plans articulated in [4] and plays them out in diegetic time. The boys are fighting over Nora. Nora doesn’t have a clue. Standard heteronormative geometry. [6] In a secluded and charming little restaurant, House is giving Nora dinner. As they drink their Chardonnay, he “confides to her” about the difficulty of living with Wilson’s insurmountable jealousy. “He cares about you very much,” she offers, but House is “at his wits’ end”: “Why can’t he show it in a . . . in a normal way?” He presses his tactic in a whisper. “I’m so tired of the whole silence and resentment. I don’t know if I can go back there tonight.” Puppy-dog eyes. Tears begin. “I need some time.” Nora is the model of practicality, waving her spoon and offering, “Come stay at my place.” House, polishing the performance with a raised eyebrow: “Really?” She suggests it would be fun, “like a sleepover.” He gives her the face of consummate sincerity: “That would be such a help. Thank you!” But now Wilson has entered and is interrupting them. He stands at the tableside for a moment. House tries to seal off this playwithin-a-play with a one-liner to Wilson: “Nothing you can say is going to change anything,” which has, of course—and yet again—a

The Bromance Stunt in House

269

beautifully matched pair of meanings: read through House’s stable underlying heterosexuality, we see him telling his friend to get lost, that he has Nora sewn up for the night. Read through Nora’s vision of House as gay, the statement means, “Living with you has become so taxing that there is nothing you can say that will change my feelings of wounded alienation.” With Nora swiveling to follow his moves as the perfect audience, Wilson proceeds to make a stentorian speech, as in Shakespeare. Looking around the restaurant and pointing to House, he declaims, “I love this man! And I am not wasting another moment of my life denying that.” He falls to his knees. “Gregory House, will you marry me?” House gazes directly through Wilson’s skull. “Wow. This is unexpected.” A moment goes by, Wilson with the “wedding ring” open in its tidy little case. A neighboring diner, a woman in mid-age, barks, “Say yes!”—a nod to the restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally (1989). But Nora has come awake to the situation’s best and worst possibilities for these lovers. “You two obviously have some talking to do.” She rises and leaves. Wilson slaps the ring case shut and slides triumphantly into a seat at the table, where he and House can glare at one another in a pose straight out of a Warner Bros. cartoon. They coolly drink the Chardonnay. As the episode progresses, we cannot avoid seeing that the homosexual liaison being feigned by Wilson and House is subject to more and more extreme modes of performance, even parody, all of this emphasizing the exclusion of the female love interest in malemale configurations typical of most popular representations of gay life and thus demonstrating, even through their anger at one another, the bromantic connection between these two men while simultaneously diminishing Nora’s view of the situation as real. Given that her view is that these are genuine lovers, every time her viewing position comes under negative light—as here—that homoerotic bonding becomes more and more evanescent for us. This scene thus articulately conflates the impression of male-male involvement with the impression that having any impression that these two are in love is false. [7] Nora visits House in his office. He tells her with a straight face about the masquerade that has been unfolding—that in truth they are not closeted, because they are not gay. He was spending

270

Murray Pomerance

A marriage proposal and a response. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) and Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) stunting in “The Down Low” in House. Nick Gomez, Heel & Toe/Shore Z/Bad Hat Harry, 2010.

time with her “because I wanted to touch your boobs, enough to listen to Evita . . . twice, and I really hate Evita.” (Telltale evidence of heteronormality!) “That’s how much I like your boobs.” (Icing on the cake.) Wilson, on the other hand, is a “really good guy.” She walks out but not before throwing in House’s face that he was only trying to sleep with her and still is. Now there is no further reason

The Bromance Stunt in House

271

for him to be “nice,” so he tells her what a jerk Wilson really is. She thinks maybe she’ll give Wilson a try. Bromantic male-male affiliations can only work if they are ultimately resolved through some definitive commitment to heteronormativity, and the stunt aspect of bromance is precisely inherent in the threat that performed male bonding might be so successful as performance that its undergirding in the “real world” of heteromasculinity might become permanently inaccessible or invisible. In a homophobic culture, the underlying presumption is that homosexuality cannot in fact be performed, so that any putative homosexual “act” is truthfully homosexuality itself, situated on-screen or onstage. Bromance toys with homophobia, but with the utmost care, since performers tend to behave as though cautious against their ostensible guise being taken for deep reality. The performance says, “Look how close we can be!” coupled with “But we are really not that close at all!” In this episode of House, the bromance resolved in this little conversation in House’s office is actually reopened to ambiguity in [8] the final scene. Here, Wilson and House are on opposite ends of a sofa in their apartment having a (nonheteronormative) spat about the furniture while (with macho flair) watching a hockey game (between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings, of all teams: series creator David Shore hails from London, Ontario, midway between these two cities and loyalties). The spat ends with Wilson singing, without warning, and of all things, “One” from A Chorus Line, at first very much as though this music is in the back of his head, now and always, and he cannot help humming it, but soon enough with real professional panache, as though in his deepest self he is not a staid doctor but a Broadway actor who does this onstage night after night and twice on Wednesday and is here just having a quiet run-through. (Robert Sean Leonard, who really is the deep self beneath Wilson, did star on Broadway, in The Music Man, in 2000– 2001.) Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban’s “One” is not only an invocation of gay sensibility—indeed, a gay anthem—but also a testament of fondness for musical performance and performance in general and one that is often interpreted as pointing to a discernably homocentric male experience. This scene makes it possible for us to see a culmination of brilliant acting technique: the contradictory

272

Murray Pomerance

stances toward masculinity in bromance films are typically played out seriatim in a chain of successive scenes, but Laurie and Leonard have here been acting out multiple positions and alignments simultaneously in every scene. This finale also opens us to believe, if we would like to, that there really is something nonheteronormative about either or both of these men. Gay fans can continue to watch the series with growing anticipation while straight fans can see Wilson teasing House (who hates the song “One”) as yet one more playful form of heteromasculine aggressiveness. The punch line of the song, after all, is “She’s the one!” It’s a song adulating a special female but also Broadway showmanship, which can have a fey side. “She no longer thinks we’re gay,” says Wilson. “Now she thinks we’re mendacious dirtbags.” But the critical matter is what we think. We think that House and Wilson, stars of this program to which we have real attachment, are hardly mendacious dirtbags. And so, since Nora’s (putative) supposition is incorrect, they are also not gay, as she took them to be. The bromance stunt is grounded at the frameline of the episode. “One moment in his presence / And you can forget the rest / For the guy is second best / To none”—Wilson singing and shooting a sly gaze at House, indicates clearly that at this culminating moment, he is singing about himself. Notes With thanks to Michael DeAngelis and Matt Thompson 1. Sigfried Kracauer, “Travel and Dance,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 65. 2. Ibid., 65–66. 3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 24. 4. Kracauer, “Travel and Dance,” 66. 5. A. Lincoln Ryave and James N. Schenkein, “Notes on the Art of Walking,” in Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, ed. Roy Turner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 265–74. 6. Something of an homage to the crisis moment at the end of Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), when another door handle complicated and obstructed another precarious driving moment: terrified that her husband is trying to kill her by skirting

The Bromance Stunt in House

273

a cliff road too quickly in their roadster, Lina (Joan Fontaine) grapples for the door handle that seems to have opened. Is Johnnie (Cary Grant) reaching across her to close the door or to push her out? We never know. 7. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 30. 8. On the link between capital and rationality, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. by David Jacobson (New York: Vintage, 1993). 9. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). 10. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 25. 11. This is the rare—if not the only—time in the entire series when House is referred to by anyone, including himself, as “Greg.”

chapter 11

“This ain’t about your money, bro. Your boy gave you up” Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire Dominic Lennard

At the height of the show’s critical popularity, Sophie Jones’s was a rare dissenting voice in the discussion of HBO’s crime drama The Wire: “Democracy is at the heart of the program, to the extent that viewers find themselves caring about 20 characters almost equally. But so few of these characters are women, and the female characters that do emerge aren’t at stake. In The Wire, it is boys who are at stake. Women and girls are bit parts in a compelling drama played out by men.”1 With The Wire’s essay-like focus through various seasons on Baltimore’s docks, newsroom culture, the upper echelons of the city’s political apparatus, and—especially—its drug trade and the police who range themselves against it, one might reasonably expect the show’s male-centric focus to merely reflect the patriarchal composition of the institutions depicted; however, even in the fourth season—committed to the school system with this same focus—of the group of ten students whose often dispiriting trajectory the show charts, not one is female (as Jones herself aptly points out). Moreover, the show demonstrates a consistent lack of interest in investigating with comparable detail the nuances of its male characters’ lives beyond the masculinized sphere of work (in the form of either shiploading, drug dealing, newspapers, police work, or politics). We never see the regularly cheated-on wife of detective Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce); the homelife of his buddy and key protagonist Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) is framed as a series of briefly addressed frustrations that unravel in his work time. The comment

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

275

The Wire makes here, that police work is so consuming (at least for this one detective) that it contaminates and resubstantiates his private, domestic life, cannot accommodate the show’s subordination of any other domestic life to its broader social and political focus. (So distant is the show’s interest in domesticity that when Jimmy’s two sons appear again in the fourth season after a long hiatus, they might have been played by different actors for all the regular viewer would have noticed or cared.) It is hardly surprising that Jimmy’s (short-lived) domestication in the fourth season, after he forms a relationship with a detective who is a single mother, is synchronous with his ejection from the show’s main drama. With few female characters of significance, relationships between women and women, or women and men, are consistently eclipsed in interest and dramatic force by homosocial (or even homosexual) relationships between male characters. The Wire abounds with close male partnerships, including that of central protagonist Jimmy McNulty and Bunk Moreland; police officer Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) and gung-ho partner Herc (Domenick Lombardozzi); stick-up artist Omar (Michael K. Williams) and his gay lovers (a striking disruption of the macho culture of black masculinity otherwise depicted); and, most centrally and critically celebrated, the relationship between drug kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his right-hand man, Russell “Stringer” Bell (Idris Elba), which is phrased in terms of family but consolidated in a series of romantic and quasi-sexual gestures. The term “bromance”—a nonsexual relationship between men that may nevertheless verge into the sexual—is regularly associated with the comedy genre, manifesting most self-consciously in films like Superbad (2007) and I Love You, Man (2009). The Wire, however, constantly reminds us of its seriousness. Its moments of humor (many of which nevertheless rely on bromantic play, as this chapter will illustrate) never threaten to dilute the dispiriting—even harrowing—tone of the series as a whole; seasons frequently conclude with panoramic crosscutting that details (with overwhelming concurrency) Baltimore’s social degeneration. Whereas the comedy bromance might be read in relation to a relaxation about fears of homophobia,2 The Wire’s overt displays of homosocial affection are also managed by the hyper-masculine (and routinely homophobic) ambience of almost every tier of the show’s milieu. In the context

276

Dominic Lennard

of homosociality’s relationship to definitions of “quality” television, this chapter explores how, much like the comedy bromance, The Wire offers a haven for erotic attachment outside of the feminine it consistently excludes, fantasizing beyond the perceived limits of a heterosexual male world; however, this chapter also discusses how its focus on male partnerships leads the show to evoke the limits and tragedies of male closeness. “You were real gentle”: Tough Guys, Soft Touches As Sophie Jones’s lament indicates, The Wire is foremost a show about men. Its male characters are voluminous and developed while its women are few and of minor dramatic importance. In discussing The Wire’s representation of women in the show’s otherwise admiring official “series guide,” The Wire: Truth Be Told, detectivefiction writer Laura Lippman confesses that in their characterization “there are false notes here and there—[for example] a line of dialogue that clanks because it’s better suited to a eunuch as opposed to a woman.”3 In an interview on the website Mystery One, series creator David Simon responded to his interviewer’s flattering suggestion that his female characters were “strong people” with his own suspicions that they were, in fact, “to quote a famous criticism of Hemingway, men with tits.” He continued: “I think it [writing female characters] is among my weaknesses and I work harder on those scenes, I think, because I feel vulnerable.”4 With little in the show’s characterizations to emotionally, ideologically, or habitually distinguish women from men, it is difficult to suppress the feeling that Simon’s self-deprecation might be well founded. This male focus is deeply linked to changes in television’s cultural value, including a remasculinization of what is considered “quality television”—a renaissance in television that, with fervent critical validation, eschews the medium’s traditionally feminine associations with melodrama. Michael Kackman points out that while it contains plenty of female characters, ABC’s Lost (“an idealized urtext of television’s aesthetic possibilities”) focuses on crises central to men, and “Most of the program’s characters are driven to reconcile a patriarchal crisis.”5 According to Kackman, a show like Lost,

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

277

with its ‘quality’ narrative complexity, communicates the impression that its result is “something more broadly meaningful,” whereas this focus on narrative sophistication can obscure “the relationship of its narratorial mode to its gender politics.” The rise of ‘quality television’ is emblematized by premium cable network HBO, which, with its catchline—“It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.”—as Kackman points out, “has branded itself as the preeminent site of quality television, most neatly encapsulated in its claim to, well, not be TV at all.” In the critical appreciation of male-focused shows, the celebration of a return to “elitist aesthetics,” Kackman observes a shift away from television’s traditional association with the feminine and domesticity and a critical chorus that legitimizes the retrograde gendered hierarchies that entails. This remasculinization of quality television is at its zenith with The Wire, whose paucity of female characters is complemented by a demandingly distended narrative flow that asks us to disavow TV’s traditionally melodramatic and “feminine” pleasures. The Wire’s drawn-out narratives are complemented by a realism that strays into the semi-documentary and a social, political, and criminal focus that evokes the traditionally “masculine” news format.6 The show’s heternormative male focus is further reinforced by an extraordinary—even obsessive—dialect of homosexuality that pervades the police force but also extends across the show’s various strata. The language of homosexual rape is routinely applied to professional situations; male characters endlessly refer to “fucking” one another. To be disadvantaged professionally is to be “fucked in the ass.” “Fuck with my ass, will ya?” grumbles craggy police goblin Major Valchek to himself upon having his surveillance van stolen by the very dockworkers he ordered surveilled (Season 2, “Undertow”). “This finger is going in your narrow Irish ass” Major Rawls, with middle finger extended, informs underling Jimmy McNulty in the first of several dressings-down the refractory detective receives (Season 2, “The Target”). In the third season, Commissioner Burrell complains that he will be “bent over in public.” “You seem awfully happy today,” Detective Bunk Moreland comments to a fellow detective, who replies “I got laid last night.” Initiating us into this homophobic humor, Bunk replies: “Oh yeah? Your asshole still hurt?” Upon being reunited on a new detail, gung-ho officers Herc and

278

Dominic Lennard

Carver share a boisterous embrace, although when the burly Herc barges Carver into a nearby couch Carver seeks to repel his bromantic embrace with the protest: “Don’t be touchin’ my dick, faggot!” In a later episode, the two imagine themselves as Batman and Robin although they cannot decide which is which. “Batman’s white,” the white Herc points out to the black Carver before reinforcing the point by suggesting, “Hey, Boy Wonder, why don’t you suck my bat-dick?” Superficially, this vocabulary illustrates a violently masculinist, phallic sexuality in which sex is imagined only as an act of male conquest, something that aggrandizes the male’s power; thus it is easily co-opted to the brutal subordination of other men without signifying “homosexuality” (which, to this same masculinist logic, is inherently passive and feminized). Rather than merely articulating a conventional homophobia, however, this fascination with anal sex forms a key facet of the show’s “bromantic” elements and offers a number of moments that complicate its homophobic routines—queering the homosocial intimacy wrapped up in them. In his discussion of the buddy action movie, Richard Dyer writes that homosexual attraction is occluded by “badinage” and “toughness between men” and thereby ever-present in the form of disavowal: The buddy movie presented a male-male relationship that was composed of humour, tacit understanding and, usually, equality of toughness between men. This relationship was constructed by a disavowal of the very thing that would appear to bind the men together—love. The elements that compose the relationship actually effect this disavowal—badinage as a way of not expressing serious emotions, silent communication as a means for not articulating or confronting feelings, toughness as a sign that one is above tenderness.7

This process of disavowal can be seen to play out in the “tough” and comedic bantering of the The Wire which—paradoxically—too clearly represses homosexuality. Take, for instance, the following scene at a bar in which a dispirited, drunken Jimmy professes his admiration for partner Bunk (Season 1, “One Arrest”); Jimmy turns to Bunk and commences, in intimate close-up:

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

279

Jimmy: Know why I respect you so much, Bunk? Jimmy: It’s not ’cause you’re good police, because—you know, fuck that, right? Bunk: Hmm, fuck that, yeah. Jimmy: It’s not ’cause when I came to Homicide you taught me about all kinds of cool shit about like . . . well, I dunno, whatever. Bunk: Yeah, whatever . . . Jimmy: It’s ’cause when it came time for you to fuck me . . . you were very gentle. Bunk: You damn right. Jimmy: See ’cause you could’ve hauled me out the garage, and bent me over the hood of a radio car, and . . . But no—you were very gentle. Bunk: I knew it was your first time . . . I wanted to make that shit special. Jimmy: It was, man. It fuckin’ was.

With its wide eyes and receptive brow shrugs, this is nevertheless a performance that depends profoundly on the men’s ability to recognize that even while some portion of their affection is certainly sincere, the homoerotic language that expresses it is, in fact, a performance. The exchange offers its participants the opportunity to dismiss homosexuality through its self-parodic obviousness (that is, according to Bunk and Jimmy, they cannot be gay, because their intimacy is encased in a joke about how gay Bunk and Jimmy are), thereby offering a tenuous and delightfully dissatisfying disavowal. Their exaggerated language (affection automatically becomes “fucking”) comfortably cushions the characters’ insecurity at the intensity of their feelings, denying that their affection could be construed as sublimated homosexuality. Within this game, within their selfconsciously theatrical play with this metaphor, the two men also safely entertain the idea that they could fuck (or have already). Moreover, the totality of Bunk and Jimmy’s understanding of each other and the humorous persistence and continuity of their act suggest its underlying reality: that is, their respective performances of “gayness” are so perfectly intuited and understood (and thus so effortlessly

280

Dominic Lennard

“You were real gentle”: the drunken Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), with considerable sexual nostalgia, recalls his initiation into police politics by his colleague Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce). The Wire, “One Arrest,” Season 1, Episode 7. HBO Productions, 2002.

prolonged) that the two men seem intimately interlocked. (We might even say “made for each other.”) In fact, until a moment ago, the head-down drunkenness of Jimmy, especially, seems to preclude or at least question the self-reflexivity of his comments—whether he is at this moment capable of a performance of such virtuosity or whether there is not some substance in his skillfully maintained metaphor. While in the masculinist discourse of The Wire getting fucked seems to mean, simply and automatically, being feminized (and thus shamed and rendered passive), episodes like these suggest that its bromance offers the fantasy of homosexuality wrapped up in its too obvious disavowal. The show’s seemingly capricious and undeveloped identification of Major Bill Rawls (John Doman) as homosexual in its third season additionally illustrates this process of pleasurably conspicuous/

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

281

concealing linguistic play. The suggestion of Rawls’s homosexuality as we spot him leaning casually over the bar in a gay club (Season 3, “Reformation”) offers to reconfigure the entire hyper-masculine milieu of the police force and its homoerotic/homophobic vocabulary. The regular viewer of The Wire knows Rawls to be the most foulmouthed, aggressive wielder of homosexual insult, the most prolific and thoroughgoing “fucker” of his colleagues and underlings. In several scenes in the third season, in which district lieutenants are charged with reducing the statistics of serious crimes by any means necessary, Rawls grandstands his ability to pinion and verbally penetrate those who report to him. That Rawls is homosexual demonstrates to us both that the show has an interest, however undeveloped, in displays of overt and aggressive machismo obscuring (or expressing) homosexual desire and that his obsessive and apparently persecutory interest in Jimmy along those same lines might indicate such an attraction. This mental experimentation with homosexuality within the confines of a “safe” heternormative domain is exemplified, more riskily for its participants, by Herc and Carver’s conversation in which the two (with especial hesitation on Herc’s behalf) each contemplate sex with any woman of their choice with the proviso that they also participate in a sex act with a man of their choice. The selection of the female fantasy-figure is perfunctory: the real intrigue and deliberation (and, thus, actual fantasy) of the fantasy is focused around the male object-choice, a confession of homosexual meditation that must be received with unshakeable trust and discretion. Thus the precarious entertainment of homosexual fantasy provides a striking instance in which male intimacy becomes the security concealing a fantasy of . . . male intimacy, a pleasurable only just sanctioned experimentation with homosexuality. The pleasure of this play is complemented by what James S. Williams calls “an eroticization of the hood.”8 Williams is clearly concerned that The Wire is in fact “propelled by the crude and sordid vocabulary or homophobic innuendo.”9 For him, however, its magnetic appeal for viewers is partly attributable, paradoxically, to a shooting style that tends to eroticize black male bodies: “[a] homoerotics of style is created by the very way the camera ‘takes’ its young male figures. We are drawn into rituals of spectatorial desire through the

282

Dominic Lennard

stylized representation and mise-en-scène of the black body.”10 While the show’s dialogue often engages a homophobia bereft of reflexive comment or questioning, its shooting style—its lingering preoccupation with black male bodies—draws us closer to the homoerotic possibilities that dialogue (however tenuously) disavows. Additionally, the pleasurably too obvious disavowal of malemale attraction in The Wire is undergirded by a widespread but unacknowledged misogyny that manifests in revulsion for spaces in which women are dominant. We can see the talky, clingy, and generally encumbering feminine appear in a variety of minor manifestations throughout the series. After detective Kima Greggs’s (Sonja Sohn’s) lesbian partner becomes pregnant, not a moment of their relationship is shown that does not work to evidence Kima’s annoyance with domestic life (e.g. her desire to work on the street; her boredom when purchasing baby toys). A plunge into late-night drinking brings this tension to its climax while aligning her with her male colleagues (especially Jimmy, with whom she eventually buddies up). With the show’s panderingly idealized depiction of the lesbian relationship between Kima and her partner in one of its earliest episodes (Season 1, “Old Cases”), it first appears that homosexuality is the only province in which love in The Wire can thrive. (This notion is complemented by occasional depictions of the relationships between gay gangster Omar and his lovers, along with a wreckage of heterosexual partnerships.) However, Kima’s gradual suffocation by domesticity serves to privilege, instead, the love between men, be it homosocial or homosexual. Rather than operating as the refreshing and subversive representation of a lesbian character some critics have identified,11 Kima serves ultimately to augment and disguise the preference for an exclusively masculine sphere. Kima, ultimately, is a bro—likened to her male colleagues in her avoidance of domesticity; yet, she circulates in the male world of the show as an object of desire. (Multiple references are made across the series to her sexual attractiveness.) This dual role situates her as a comfortingly attractive female figure for her male colleagues, one with whom an (imagined) sexual pleasure may take place (several male characters fantasize sex with her), while her sexuality nevertheless ensures the stagnating dangers of a

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

283

feminine domesticity that might accompany an actual relationship are kept comfortably at bay.12 A particularly maternal predacity comes to the fore in the show’s fourth season, in which we are introduced to the harpy mother of budding drug dealer Namond; her affection for her son is cruelly whimsical and ultimately subordinate to his displaying, for her (criminal) signs of the masculinity of his father—incarcerated Barksdale organization killer Wee-Bey Brice (Hassan Johnson). Meanwhile, the mother of Namond’s friend Michael runs her family into the ground through addiction, selling the family’s food for drug money. In a resolution that strains credulity yet remains in accordance with the masculinist gender politics of the show, it is Namond’s father who eventually demands that the boy’s mother allow him to pursue a life beyond what he chose for himself—a move that mends the rift between father and son while freeing the latter from feminine encumbrance. In the third season, Bernard (Melvin Jackson, Jr.), a minor player in Barksdale’s drug crew, is sent around Maryland to purchase disposable cell phones from a variety of outlets in order to prevent easy tracking of the devices. Unfortunately for Bernard, his attractive but nagging girlfriend, Squeak (Mia Arnice Chambers), not trusting her beau’s mobility, insists on accompanying him. Several references are made to Squeak’s sexual desirability; however, the show makes it thoroughly clear that Bernard pays for every bit of it. Following his arrest, and under the tireless rebuke of his girlfriend, Bernard turns to a fellow suspect, saying, “I can’t wait to go to prison.” Through these instances, The Wire depicts women and traditionally feminine spaces as an exhausting impediment while masculine spaces and companions provide a haven for mobility and secure love. Still in the honeymoon period of his relationship with a female officer, Jimmy affectionately portrays his lover with a reference to his male colleague, describing her as “like Freamon, with tits” (ironically endorsing David Simon’s self-perceived failings with female characters). The Wire gives us a consistent blurring of friendship and fucking that conjures the fantasy of a totalizing masculine autonomy in which even heterosexual desire can be managed by bros. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously argues that Western culture is organized by a “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition,” complicating

284

Dominic Lennard

any easy distinction between the two.13 Sedgwick places male homosocial and homosexual desire on a continuum, one that is largely barred from consciousness in Western culture through a homophobic panic that serves to protect heterosexual identity formation. Male homosexual panic emerges through an irreconcilable fear of homosexuality that finds its origin in the male’s anxiety about his desire for other men. In Between Men, Sedgwick writes that: From this point of view, another phenomenon that begins to make sense in a new way is the tendency toward important correspondences and similarities between the most sanctioned forms of male homosexual bonding, and the most reprobated expressions of male homosexual sociality. To put it in twentiethcentury American terms, the fact that what goes on at football games, in fraternities, at the Bohemian Grove, and at the climactic moments in war novels can look, with only a slight shift of optic, quite startlingly “homosexual” . . . is the coming to visibility of the normally implicit in terms of a coercive double bind. . . . For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already-crossed line from being “interested in men.”14

Conversations in The Wire consistently blur the distinction between homo and heterosexual, providing the fantasy of homosexuality wrapped up in the security of (even aggressive) heteronormativity. In this context, however, the disavowal is hardly a repression so much as an exploratory and idealized “playing” at repression, behind which lies the show’s abhorrence of a stultifying feminine domesticity. The bromance within The Wire offers its characters the fantasy of desire that would not breach the boys’ club: we talk about fucking all the time, in fun, but wouldn’t it be handy if we really could fuck. . . . “Your boy gave you up”: When Bros Break Up The bromantic exchanges detailed above are largely characterized by their humor, a phrasing that succeeds in deflecting critical address and frequently interpellates the viewer into the show’s homophobic/ homophilic cultural terrain. However, the very serious bromance

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

285

between Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell, the breakdown of which forms the climax of the show’s third season, can be seen to demonstrate The Wire’s self-reflexivity about its male relationships. Avon, a creature of “the game” of drug dealing, describes himself as “just a gangster” (Season 3, “Homecoming”) and cannot come to grips with his partner’s attempt to expand, corporatize, and gradually legitimize their business endeavors. Close attention to the bromantic breakup between Avon and Stringer demonstrates not only a mere falling out between friends, one of whose ambition exceeds the other’s—as the superficial narrative would suggest—but the homosexual possibilities of their friendship and the limits placed on how those possibilities can be ‘legitimately’ expressed. The Wire takes considerable steps to ensure that we recognize the closeness between Avon and his second-in-command: the two frequently part with a fraternal fist bump and the declaration “Us.” After the death of Stringer Bell, the shot floats pensively above the gangster’s body, bringing into focus through the window a billboard advertisement mourning his and Avon’s partnership: “exciting residential opportunities coming soon from B&B Enterprises” (Season 3, “Middle Ground”). “We brothers, B,” remarks Stringer; Avon solemnly affirms: “Always, baby” (Season 3, “Straight and True”). The couple’s gestures of solidarity also frequently cross over into the romantic. In one of the show’s earliest episodes (Season 1, “Lessons”), Stringer is referred to as the queen to Avon’s king as part of an extended chess analogy explaining the drug trade’s hierarchy. In Season 3, as Stringer provides the tip that will put his partner away, the personal narrative seems to eclipse the legal one for the police officer receiving the information. He questions, with an empathetic need to know, as if Stringer were a heartbroken lover: “He must have done somethin’ to ya . . . ?” (“Middle Ground”). Upon his release from prison in Season 3 (outside the gates of which Stringer doted with a new set of clothes), we see Avon enjoying the spoils of wealth at his gentleman’s club (“Straight and True”). Through the misty neon lights of the club, his eyes scan over a gaggle of dancing beauties before resting momentarily on Stringer Bell holding court with a group of underlings—his animated hand gestures echoing the sultry dancing of the women. Avon progresses toward a dancing girl in a different part of the room only to have Stringer swoop

286

Dominic Lennard

in from behind, calling “Hey yo!” and ushering him away. “Some downtown suits wanna holla at you.” Avon complains, “Ahh shit, I’m tryin’ to see some skirts.” When we return to the scene of the party a few minutes later, the moment is repeated; Avon’s overture to the woman is interrupted as Stringer swings in, laying a hand on his shoulder and whisking him away, saying, “I gotta show you something.” In the penthouse apartment that Stringer has just gifted his friend, they confirm their brotherly closeness with an embrace. The grateful Avon is nevertheless frustrated by that which Stringer, with his fraternal gift giving, cannot satisfy. After leaving, Stringer, clairvoyantly in tune with his partner’s desire, knocks again at the door, saying, “Yo, man, it’s me. I forgot something.” Avon opens the door not to his friend but to two women who sway inside to satisfy him. In this scene, the women become the medium through which Stringer can express his desire and have it comfortably acknowledged in a tidy demonstration of what Sedgwick, in Between Men, identifies as the triangulated structure of homosocial desire. In this formulation the apparently desirous relationship between a man and a woman is eclipsed by the relationship between two men to the extent that women are demoted to the role of mere objects of exchange— effectively disqualified from relations of desire. The women here have no intrinsic value or identity (they do not even speak); rather, they serve as expressions of Stringer’s willingness to accommodate his bro. Stringer calls out from behind the door, yet we do not see Stringer waiting with the women once it is opened. Logically, we can assume that, having called out to his bro, he has run away. (Although since Avon nearly lunges to open the door, Stringer must have run away with an uncharacteristic and thus implausible silliness and alacrity.) Nevertheless, the effect is one in which Stringer’s voice is momentarily reassigned, as if the Stringer we expect to see has been resolved into the women who saunter in ready to please Avon. “My man . . .” Avon murmurs as he watches the girls enter, transfixed by both their swaying bodies and the generosity of the man who provided them—or perhaps more accurately, transfixed by the fusion, the unfixable transference, the very pleasing continuum between his buddy and his babes. Stringer and Avon’s poignant final attempt to recapture their affection for each other, while nevertheless contemplating each

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

287

“My man . . .”: Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) contemplates the generosity of his crime partner, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), who swiftly switches himself with two beautiful women in the name of satisfying his bro’s every need. The Wire, “Straight and True,” Season 3, Episode 5. HBO Productions, 2004.

other’s betrayal, further enhances the romantic overtones of their friendship. Overlooking a dreamily lit Baltimore cityscape in a scene that positions the balcony as a locus of romantic expression (e.g. Romeo and Juliet; Barry Lyndon [1975]), the two reminisce about their shared childhood. Suspended in an array of light—fuzzy blues and golds that never quite come into focus—the couple converse in intimate reverse shots. However, after Stringer hits the wrong note with his, “We don’t have to dream no more, man; we got real shit” (Avon surely wants to dream, wants a childish realm of inconsequence), the two are then captured in medium long shot from behind, their backs to each other, the conversation unsteadily continuing from this more distanced arrangement. As Avon inquires after Stringer’s whereabouts in order to most punctually book his killing, the guiltily self-absorbed Stringer blinks and contemplates something outside

288

Dominic Lennard

the frame. When Avon pronounces what they do as “just business” in an ugly verbatim reverberation of the words with which Stringer has justified his tip-off to the police, Stringer is visibly haunted— the force of their intimacy transformed into a liability. After Avon uses these words, the sudden reverse cut shows us Stringer—eyes nervously askance—behaving like the perfidious lover who fears, against all reasonable logic, that his betrayed partner may already know. The closeness of their friendship, we might say, implies a shared essence, a mirroring of each other (“B&B Enterprises”), an identification, which psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache reminds us is a “hidden process . . . always implying some degree of confusion between subject and object.”15 Thus, in Stringer’s face, in the insecure aversion of his moistened eyes, we see his panic that their intimacy might navigate his interior with omniscience, steal spectrally inward, reconnoitering his most secret runnels and reserves—the fear that his closeness to his man means he is always already found out. The encounter is punctuated by the couple’s usual sign off: they bump fists, reaffirming their partnership—“Us, motherfucker”—as they awkwardly throw arms around each other. Stringer’s sudden subtle break from the embrace, however, indicates his alarm at his own hypocrisy, his disgusted panic that his performance of intimacy might continue a second longer than necessary. Stringer has, we know, been responsible for the death of Avon’s nephew D’Angelo (Larry Gilliard, Jr.). Avon preaches the impervious bond of family in particular; however, the loyalty of Stringer and his devotion to transforming their enterprise cannot ultimately be seen in the same terms—challenged as this relationship is by its distance from the secure channels of homosocial devotion offered by “family.” In their physical altercation over the death of D’Angelo (in which Stringer easily subdues a wounded Avon), Stringer explicitly denounces Avon’s irrational focus on family, both constructing it as an emotional weakness (disposing of D’Angelo is something Avon needed to but “couldn’t do”) and, in the force of his renunciation, excluding their friendship from the familial: “you want to talk that blood is thicker than water bullshit?” What Stringer confesses, when he confesses to murdering D’Angelo, is that he and Avon are not real brothers, dispensing with the importance of family and invalidating the vocabulary Avon uses to understand their closeness. This

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

289

paranoia of male friendships that fall outside of accepted paradigms, of the possibility that homosocial intimacy might cross into the homosexual, is enhanced by this altercation in which Avon stertorously exhales under the heaving Bell who, holding him down, explains why he did what he did. Williams draws attention to the scene’s sexual overtones, describing the two as “wrestling on the floor in sweaty close-up, the movement of the camera suddenly suspended when blood seeps through Avon’s white vest and all one hears for a good half minute is the throbbing sound of intense exhalation and physical ache.”16 We might say that this scene, however, does not signal a homoerotic closeness between the two so much as it alerts us to its impossibility for them. Given the aggressively masculinist conditions that these men use to define, manage, and understand their friendship, the event injects a tension into the couple’s relationship from which it will never recover. As they separate, the episode terminates, leaving us with their figures captured in a distant long shot through a window with a frame that forms a visual barrier between the two men, preserving their disconnection. The embrace is precipitated by anger and thus tied up in the show’s routine association of sex and power: having been “subordinated” by Stringer, the collision serves to emasculate Avon, who, subdued and humiliated, grunts at Stringer to “let him up.” The episode’s immediate conclusion means that this unrepaired conflict between the two hangs over their future. The threat of closeness combined with masculine dominance, in the homophobic lexicon of the characters, brings the two too close, polluting the terms of their friendship. “Gay-ass gangster s” The homosexual possibilities of Stringer and Avon are brought into sharp relief by the spectral yet charismatic figure of Omar Little who stalks the perimeter of their operation, watchful for opportunities to rob incautious underlings of money or drugs—and who eventually (along with New York hitman Brother Mouzone [Michael Potts]) kills Stringer. Dismissively labeled a “gay-ass gangster” (Season 3, “Mission Accomplished”) by dull-witted Mouzone bodyguard Lamar (DeAndre McCullough), Omar nevertheless is feared by the drug community, his arrival heralded through the streets like the surprise

290

Dominic Lennard

approach of an army: “Omar comin’!” Gender studies often speaks in terms of hauntings and specters; homosexuality is something that “haunts” heterosexuality’s attempts to define itself. In his discussion of black masculinity, E. Patrick Johnson argues that “Despite the imperialism of heteronormativity in black culture . . . it cannot disavow the specter of the black fag within.”17 For Johnson, black heterosexual masculinity is sustained through revulsion of the lost Other of homosexuality; the performance of heterosexuality, however, hints toward this Other and consequently can be seen to queer that masculinity. While Omar is hardly a threatening specter for the audience, who delights in his wit, his heists of Barksdale money and drugs, and his fondness for Honey Nut Cheerios, this openly homosexual bandit certainly serves as a hated Other for Avon and Stringer, threateningly manifesting all that is unannounced in their partnership. Thus, for the viewer, the explicit homosexuality of Omar can be seen to interrogate and critique the couple’s bromance. For Sedgwick, the homosociality, even as it includes and apparently polices its boundaries through homophobia, always complicates the gaystraight binary. Unlike the often humorously self-reflexive homosexuality already discussed, the bromance of Stringer and Avon is openly expressed by both men without any trace of irony. Homosexuality is never brought into consciousness, and consequently it seems hardly surprising that the world of the series immediately ranges the Barksdale organization against the lupine gay bandit Omar. In Omar’s relationship to his boys, we see bromance in all its explicit homosexuality—all that is quarantined, unreferenced even through nervous or desiring parody, in the relationship of Avon and Stringer. The scene in which Stringer is killed explicitly brings to consciousness the intimacy of his relationship with Avon. In his final minutes, Stringer is pursued up flights of stairs by the shotgunwielding Omar, the reviled homosexual bandit whose boyfriend was tortured and killed in the Barksdale organization’s attempt to locate him—a search that was led by Stringer. Blocking Stringer’s path is hyper-professionalized hitman Brother Mouzone. “I ain’t strapped,” the panting Stringer informs his pursuers. “I ain’t a part of it—I ain’t into that gangster bullshit no more.” The gangster’s cornering in his unrenovated complex is symbolic of his derelict position

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

291

between worlds: prior to being chased, he explodes aggressively on his business partners, having been naively unaware of the systems of exploitation that pursue him with equal predacity in his whitecollar endeavors, and yet, in this “street,” physical confrontation, he is unarmed and unprepared. However, his symbolic entrapment also subtly illustrates the impossibility of his and Avon’s bromance because of its denial of the homosexuality it otherwise resembles; Omar, seconds before shooting him, explicitly connects Avon with his own murdered gay lover: Stringer: What’d y’all niggers want? Is this about money? ’Cause if it is, I can be a better friend to y’all alive. Omar: You still don’t get it do you? Huh? . . . This ain’t about your money, bro. Your boy gave you up. And we ain’t had to torture his ass neither!

The specific language Omar uses is suffused with a suggestivity that invites closer interrogation. Avon’s “giving up” the information overlaps into the more romantic associations of “giving up” the man himself. Moreover, the reference to Brandon—Omar’s “boy”— whose torture was directed toward tormenting Omar and ascertaining his location, conspicuously queers Avon and Stringer’s relationship and separation. In his initial response Stringer reverts to his economic schema, indicating his homosocial value as economic: to “be a [good] friend” is to prove financially useful. However, just as he misinterprets Omar’s motive in hunting him (the loss of his male lover), either suppressing or missing its obviousness, he is blind to the nature of his relationship with Avon—which Omar evokes on a homosexual continuum with his own. The viewer knows very well that Omar hunts Stringer to avenge his murdered lover. Stringer’s failure to realize this is implausible (as is his failure to realize that his botched plan to assassinate Brother Mouzone isn’t the cause of that man’s retribution): in questioning his attacker’s motives, Stringer is of course playing dumb. However, the response of Omar (who is scarcely one to be lured by any last-minute performance), constructs Stringer’s ignorance as transcending the merely strategic or self-protectionist, diagnosing in it some more profound repression: I thought you might be

292

Dominic Lennard

playing dumb, but I am now amazed to realize that you really don’t get it. . . . His pursuer’s remark thus directs attention to Stringer’s curious unknowingness—his disavowal, the repression of the queer in his friendship with Avon, now so vitriolically evoked by the couple’s homo bogeyman. What is news to Stringer—what rushes him before the bullets—is not merely the betrayal but the romantic intensity through which he had totally assumed his own security. What Omar’s response manages to suggest is that not only did the tip-off come from the least likely place, the place of apparent loving security, but that in its very security it was also the site of a disavowal, of a repression, an unknowingness, of uncharted and unquestioned intimacy. Earlier, above the glowing city, as Avon had inquired about Stringer’s future whereabouts in order to arrange his assassination, Stringer with distracting whimsy referred to the man he was meeting (his development consultant) as a “little faggot.” Again in their intimate breakup, the specter of homosexuality is just on the threshold—and at the precise moment that the couple’s closeness is mournfully disengaged. Having disavowed sexual affection so strenuously, The Wire presents us with a male-male affection that is left with only a language of nothingness, of inarticulacy and disconnection. Conclusion The critical legitimization of “quality” television, of which HBO is the most recognized signifier, is inseparable from gender politics that designate, in Kackman’s words, “what kinds of characters, settings, dilemmas, can be seen as cleverly complex, deserving of the ‘quality’ label, and which will be relegated to the scrap heap of soapy excess,” and those shows most celebrated have tended to prioritize narrative focus on issues central to masculinity.18 For Kackman, television scholarship’s removal from feminist criticism, which elevated it to a legitimate object of study, has tended to coincide with a shift back to “the gendered hierarchies that made the medium an object of critical and popular scorn.” Framed by HBO’s gendered self-definition of “quality television,” The Wire is perhaps the most rigorous of the network’s critical darlings to ensure the insulation of its narrative from “feminized” styles and genres while locating

Bromance and Breakup in HBO’s The Wire

293

female characters on its margins or finding ways of incorporating them into a hyper-masculinized environment that ensures their compatibility with it. Because of romance’s association with the soapily “feminine,” the eroticized homosociality of the show, despite its comedic phrasing, offers a way of keeping its drama serious, in keeping with the gendered hierarchies to which Kackman refers, by replacing heterosexual “romance” and curtailing the threat of the “melodramatically” feminine. Nevertheless, especially through the relationship between Barksdale and Bell, this retrograde narrative preference for masculine spaces and the confinement of romantic expression within those environs leads the show to more critical exploration of the limits of straight male-male friendship: the silences behind bromance’s celebratory loudness and the delicacy with which announced accounts of male love sanctify the pleasure and manage the fear of deeper attractions.

Notes With thanks to Corinna Giblin and Murray Pomerance. 1. Sophie Jones, “Women and ‘The Wire,’ ” PopMatters, 25 August 2008, accessed 30 January 2012, www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/women-and-the-wire/. 2. For example, see Katherine Bindley, “Here’s to Bromance,” AZ Central, 24 March 2008, www.azcentral.com/ent/pop/articles/0324bromance-CR.html. 3. Laura Lippman, “The Women of The Wire (No, Seriously),” in The Wire: Truth Be Told (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2009), 58. 4. Quoted in John Jordan, “Interview with David Simon,” Mystery One, www. mysteryone.com/interview.php?ID=658. 5. Michael Kackman, “Quality television, melodrama, and cultural complexity,” Flow, 31 October 2008, accessed 2 March 2012, http://flowtv.org/2010/03/flowfavorites-quality-television-melodrama-and-cultural-complexity-michael-kackmanuniversity-of-texas-austin/. 6. See John Fiske, Television Culture, 2nd ed. (1987; London: Routledge, 2011), 283. 7. Richard Dyer, “Papillion,” in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 103. 8. James S. Williams, “The Lost Boys of Baltimore: Beauty and Desire in the Hood,” Film Quarterly 62.2 (2008): 59. 9. Ibid., 58.

294

Dominic Lennard

10. Ibid., 59. 11. See, for example, Hillary Robbie, “The Subversion of Heteronormative Assumptions in HBO’s The Wire,” Dark Matter. 29 May 2009, accessed 4 March 2012, www.darkmatter101.org/site/2009/05/29/the-subversion-of-heteronormativeassumptions-in-hbos-the-wire/. 12. In his Mystery One interview, Simon confesses that “Fictionally, Kima Greggs is based on a couple lesbian officers I knew, but largely, I write her as a man and then, I confess, its Sonja Sohn who adds all the subtlety in her performance. So, if it’s thin ice, I'm still above it, at any rate.” See Jordan, “Interview with David Simon.” 13. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 1. 14. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 89. 15. Daniel Lagache, “Some Aspects of Identification,” International Social Science Bulletin 7.1 (1955): 36. 16. Williams, “The Lost Boys of Baltimore,” 61. 17. E. Patrick Johnson, “The Specter of the Black Fag,” Journal of Homosexuality 45.2–4 (2003): 220. 18. Kackman, “Quality television, melodrama, and cultural complexity.” http:// flowtv.org/2010/03/flow-favorites-quality-television-melodrama-and-culturalcomplexity-michael-kackman-university-of-texas-austin/.

works cited

Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto R. “Sex, Class, and Mexico in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television 34.1 (2004): 39–48. Adarsh, Taran. Review of Dostana (Mansukhani, 2008). Bollywood Hungama (14 November 2008). Accessed 8 July 2011. www.bollywoodhungama.com/movies/ reviews/type/view/id/400/Dostana. “The Advocate’s Coolest Straights.” The Advocate (24 December 2002): 52–53. Alilunas, Peter. “Male Masculinity as the Celebration of Failure: The Frat Pack, Women, and the Trauma of Victimization in the ‘Dude Flick.’ ” Mediascape (Spring 2008). www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Spring08_MaleMasculinity.html. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. “Ann Margret [sic] Sings: Heat Wave in 1959.” Accessed April 6, 2012. www. richsamuels.com/nbcmm/ann_margaret/ann_margaret_index.html. Amaya, Hector, and Laura Senio Blair. “Bridges Between the Divide: The Female Body in Y tu mamá también and Machuca.” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 4.1 (2007): 47–62. Archerd, Army. “Just for Variety.” Variety (15 August 2001). Arnold, Kevin. “On Masculinity: A Brief History of the Bromance.” Guyism (1 June 2011). Accessed 22 May 2012. www.guyism.com/lifestyle/on-masculinity-abrief-history-of-the bromance.html. Aufderheide, Pat. “Y tu mamá también.” Cineaste (Winter 2001): 32–33. Babuscio, Jack. “The Cinema of Camp.” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, 117–35. Edited by Fabio Cleto. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Baer, Hester, and Ryan Fred Long. “Transnational Cinema and the Mexican State in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también.” South Central Review 21.3 (2004): 150–68. Bailey, Beth L. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Bans, Lauren. “Bromance.” The Perfect Ratio (24 March 2009). Accessed July 14, 2010. http://theperfectratio.blogspot.com/search?q=bromance. Bart, Peter. “Calling Out the Sex Police.” Variety (8–14 April 2002): 6+.

296

Works Cited

Basinger, Jeanne. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995. Basoli, A. G. “Sexual Awakenings and Stark Social Realities: An Interview with Alfonso Cuarón.” Cineaste (Summer 2002): 26–29. Becker, Ron. Gay TV and Straight America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. ———. “Guy Love: Heteronormativity and a New Straight Masculinity after the Gay 90s.” In Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics. Edited by Glyn Davis and Gary Needham. (London: Routledge, 2008): 121–39. ———. “Post-Closet Television.” Flow 7.3 (2007). http://flowtv.org/2007/11/ post-closet-television/. Benshoff, Harry M. “Representing (Repressed) Homosexuality in the Pre-Stonewall Hollywood Homo-Military Film.” In Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, Politics, 71–95. Edited by Jeffrey Sconce. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Benson-Allott, Caetlin. “Sex Versus the Small Screen: Home Video Censorship and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (Spring 2009). www.ejumpcut.org. Berlant, Lauren Gail. The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. ———. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Berry, Gemma. “Bromance Patchy.” Townsville Bulletin (22 January 2009): 406. Bindley, Katherine. “Here’s to Bromance.” AZ Central (24 March 2008). www. azcentral.com/ent/pop/articles/0324bromance-CR.html. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Aristocracy of Culture.” In Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, 164–93. Edited by Richard Collins. London: Sage, 1986. Brayton, Sean. “MTV’s Jackass: Transgression, Abjection and the Economy of White Masculinity.” Journal of Gender Studies (March 2007): 58–63, 69–70. “Bromance.” Cracked. Last modified December 2009. www.cracked.com/ funny-1969-bromance/?profanity=on. “Bromance.” handbag.com. Last modified 27 July 2009. www.handbag.com/ celebrity/lives/male/bromance-102855. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Burr, Ty. “ ‘Ted’ a Crass but Hilarious Bromance.” The Boston Globe. 29 June 2012. Accessed 13 January 2013. www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2012/06/27/ ted-crass-but-hilarious-bromance/8w8diabZ11rJcnO8TZG58L/story.html. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Works Cited

297

Buzzsugar. “The Best Movie Bromances.” buzzsugar.com. 13 March 2012. Accessed 26 March 2012. www.buzzsugar.com/Best-Movie-Bromances-5657069?slide=16. Chaudhury, Sohini. “Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television and Queer Sexuality in India.” In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, 207–21. Edited by Ruth Vanita. New York: Routledge, 2001. Cleto, Fabio. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Colman, David. “Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell.” New York Times, 19 June 2005, H1–H6. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur. A Study in Scarlet. In The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005. Creekmur, Corey, and Alexander Doty, eds. Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Cross, Gary S. Men to Boys: the Making of Modern Immaturity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Cuarón, Alfonso, and Carlos Cuarón. Y tu mamá también. Screenplay. Guadalajara: Producciones Anhelo, 2001. Cury, James Oliver. “The Cure: How Not to Be a Metrosexual.” Esquire (December 2003): 46. Dash, Madhulika. “Movie Review: Ted.” techtree.com. 25 October 2012. Accessed 13 January 2013. www.techtree.com/content/reviews/2058/movie-review-ted.html. Dawtrey, Adam. “Cuarón Pic Finds Gear at Machine.” Daily Variety (17–23 April 2000): 19. DeAngelis, Michael. Gay Fandom and Crossover Fandom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. de la Dehesa, Rafael. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Dean, Tim. “Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness.” In Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, 120–43. Edited by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

298

Works Cited

Deralde, Alonso. “Kicking It with Johnny Knoxville.” The Advocate (12 October 2004): 62. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Dyer, Richard. The Culture of Queers. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Papillion.” In The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations, 2nd ed. 103– 9. London: Routledge, 2002. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Edelstein, David. “An Affair to Remember.” New York, 15 March 2009. http:// nymag.com/movies/reviews/55344/. Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Epstein, Edward Jay. The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2010. Farber, Stephen. “I Love You, Man.” Hollywood Reporter (16 March 2009): 8. Feil, Ken. “ ‘Talk About Bad Taste’: Camp, Cult and the Reception of What’s New, Pussycat?” In Convergence Media History, 139–50. Edited by Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake. New York: Routledge, 2009. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997. Finnegan, Nuala. “ ‘So What’s Mexico Really Like?’: Framing the Local, Negotiating the Global in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también.” In Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market, 29–50. Edited by Deborah Shaw. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Fiske, John. Television Culture, 2nd ed. 1987. London: Routledge, 2011. Fletcher, John. “Freud and his uses: Psychoanalysis and gay theory.” In Coming on Strong: Gay Politics and Culture, 90–118. Edited by Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Frook, John Evan. “One Billion Reasons for ‘Men’ Move.” Variety (12 November 1993). Fugate, Douglas L., and Joanna Phillips. “Product Gender Perceptions and Antecedents of Product Gender Congruence.” Journal of Consumer Marketing 27.3 (2010): 251–61. Foster, David William. Queer Issues in Latin American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Works Cited

299

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983. ———. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1990. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1996. Gates, Philippa. “The Buddy Film.” In Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1. Edited by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Glitre, Kathrina. Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union 1934–1965. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. “Going Too Far With the Winfrey Diet.” New York Times, 30 August 1989. Accessed 7 April 2012. www.nytimes.com/1989/08/30/arts/going-too-far-with-the-winfreydiet.html. Goldstein, Patrick. “It’s Still a Guy Thing: The Evolution of the Buddy Movie.” Los Angeles Times, 9 October 2001. Accessed 23 March 2012. http://articles.latimes. com/2001/oct/09/entertainment/ca-54963. Goltz, Dustin Bradley. Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity. New York: Routledge, 2010. Gopinath, Gayatri. “Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema.” Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, 283–98. Edited by Andrew Grossman. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000. Graham, Mark. “Homoeroticism.” In The International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. Edited by Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease, and Keith Pringle. New York: Routledge, 2007. Grant, Barry Keith. “Experience and Meaning in Genre Films.” In Film Genre Reader IV, 133–47. Edited by Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. ———. Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Grant, Japhy. “Some of My Best Friends Are Straight: Why Bromance Works Both Ways.” Queerty. 19 March 2009. Accessed 8 June 2010. www.queerty.com/someof-my-best-friends-are-straight-why-bromance-works-both-ways-20090319/. Gray, Brandon. “Weekend Report: Knowing Digs Up the Digits.” Box Office Mojo. 23 March 2009. Accessed 14 May 2011. www.boxofficemojo.com. Green, Emily. “A History of Celebrity Bromance at Lakers Games.” Guest of a Guest. 3 May 2011. Accessed 14 May 2012. http://guestofaguest.com/los-angeles/ celebrities/a-history-of-celebrity-bromance-at-lakers-games. Greven, David. “American Psycho Family Values: Conservative Cinema and the New Travis Bickles.” In Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American

300

Works Cited

Cinema. Edited by Timothy Shary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. 143–62. ———. “Dude, Where’s My Gender? Contemporary Teen Comedies and New Forms of American Masculinity.” Cineaste 27.3 (2002): 14–21. ———. Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. ———. Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Grove, Martin A. “Hollywood Report.” Hollywood Reporter (4 February 1994). ———. “Hollywood Report.” Hollywood Reporter (6 December 1993). “Grumpy Old Men.” The Outlook (24 December 1993). Gutsche, Jeremy. “Top 50 Fashion Trends for Men in Q1 2009.” Trendhunter. 2 April 2009. www.trendhunter.com/slideshow/top-50-fashion-trends-for-menin-q1-2009#37. Hagood, Caroline. “Bruno and Bromances: Modern Masculinity Goes to the Movies.” The Huffington Post. 10 March 2010. Accessed 8 June 2010. http://huffington post.com/caroline-hagood/bruno-and-bromances-moder_b_493286.html. Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Hamad, Hannah. “ ‘My Wife Calls Him My Boyfriend’: Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams’ Reconciliatory Bromance.” Flow (2011) 13.9. http://flowtv.org/2011/02/ my-wife-calls-him-my-boyfriend/. Handy, Bruce, and Julie Weiner. “Zooey Deschanel on New Girl.” VF Daily: Culture, Society, Politics. 9 November 2011. Accessed 6 April 2012. www.vanityfair.com/ online/daily/2011/11/Zooey-Deschanel-on-emNew-Girlem-Adorkable-or-Twee pulsive-Male-and-Female-Perspectives-on-Episode-Five. Hansen-Miller, David, and Rosalind Gill. “ ‘Lad Flicks’: Discursive Reconstructions of Masculinity in Popular Film.” In Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema. Edited by Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer. New York: Routledge, 2011. “happy birthday to johnny knoxville!” dickhouse.tv, 11 March 2011. “Has the Bromance Lost Its Passion?” Chicago Tribune, 30 July 2010, 33. Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Higa, Ryan (nigahiga). “Bromance,” 21 March 2012. Accessed 4 January 2013. www. youtube.com/watch?v=EJVt8kUAm9Q. “The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood.” Time (31 October 1969): 56, 61–67. Hutchinson, Guy. “Jack and Walter,” bunchojunk.com. 27 April 2005. Accessed 27 March 2012. http://bunchojunk.blogspot.co.nz/2005/04/jack-and-walter. html.

Works Cited

301

Hymowitz, Kay S. Manning Up: How the Rise of Women has Turned Men into Boys. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Israel, Lee. “Notes on Stoop.” Esquire (August 1966): 90–91. “a #jackasslive wrap-up in briefs.” dickhouse.tv. 2 June 2011. www.dickhouse.tv. Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Jha, Priya. “Lyrical Nationalism: Gender, Friendship, and Excess in 1970s Hindi Cinema.” Velvet Light Trap 51 (Spring 2003): 43–53. Johnson, E. Patrick. “The Specter of the Black Fag.” Journal of Homosexuality 45.2–4 (2003): 217–34. Jonas, Larry. “Grumpy Old Men: Cumodgeon Capers.” Entertainment Today (7 January 1994). Jordan, John. “Interview with David Simon.” Mystery One. www.mysteryone.com/ interview.php?ID=658. Kackman, Michael. “Quality television, melodrama, and cultural complexity.” Flow 31 October 2008. Accessed 2 March 2012. http://flowtv.org/2010/03/ flow-favorites-quality-television-melodrama-and-cultural-complexity-michaelkackman-university-of-texas-austin/. Katz, David. “Ways to Improve the World.” Esquire (December 2003): 48. Kazmi, Fareeduddin. “How Angry is the Angry Young Man? Rebellion in Conventional Hindi Films.” In The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, 134–56. Edited by Ashis Nandy. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kearnan, Scott. “Boston Bromance.” Stuff (20 April 2010). Kielsing, Scott Fabius. “Homosocial Desire in Men’s Talk: Balancing and Re-creating Cultural Discourses of Masculinity.” Language in Society 34 (2005): 695–726. Kimmel, Michael. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, Understanding the Critical Years between 16 and 26. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. ———. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Klein, Steve. “Games and Restrictions by Steve Klein.” Homotography 12 February 2010. http://homotography.blogspot.com/2010/02/steven-klein-arena-hommeplus.html. Kracauer, Sigfried. “Travel and Dance.” In The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 65–73. Kroll, Juli A. “The Cinergetic, Experimental Melodrama: Feminism and NeoMachista National Consciousness in Mexican Film.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 26 (October 2007): 27–46. Krutnik, Frank. “Love Lies: Romantic Fabrication in Contemporary Romantic Comedy.” In Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and

302

Works Cited

1990s. Edited by Peter William Evans et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Lahr-Vivaz, Elena. “Unconsummated Fictions and Virile Voiceovers: Desire and the Nation in Y tu mamá también.” Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 40 (2006): 79–101. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Penguin, 1971. Levi, Antonia, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliasotti, eds. Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre. London: McFarland, 2008. Lim, Dennis. “Jack Lemmon’s Earlier, Lighter Side.” Los Angeles Times, 7 June 2009. Linhard, Tabea Alexa. “Unheard Confessions and Transatlantic Connections: Y tu mama también and Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto.” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 5.1–2(2009): 43–56. Lippman, Laura. “The Women of The Wire (No, Seriously).” In The Wire: Truth Be Told, 54–60. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2009. Lowry, Brian. “Grumpy Old Men.” Variety (6 December 1993). Lyman, Peter. “The Fraternal Bond as a Joking Relationship: A Case Study of the Role of Sexist Jokes in Male Group Bonding.” In Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, 148–63. Edited by Michael S. Kimmel. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987. Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. Middletown: A Study in American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. Maurer, Daniel. Brocabulary: The New Man-i-festo of Dude Talk. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Max, Tucker. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. New York: Citadel Press, 2006. Mazumdar, Ranjani. “Rage on Screen.” In Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, 1–40. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007. McCarthy, Todd. “A Tortured Bromance.” Variety (16 March 2009): 26–29. McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower, 2007. McNamara, Mary. “Actresses Lost in Land of Bromance.” Boston Globe (31 July 2009): 33. Meers, Erik. “Love and Kisses, and Your Mama, Too!” The Advocate (11 June 2002): 36–38, 40. Menne, Jeff. “A Mexican Nouvelle Vague: The Logic of New Waves under Globalization.” Cinema Journal 47.1 (2007): 70–92. “Metrosexual.” Last modified on 13 July 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Metrosexual. Meyer, Richard. “Rock Hudson’s Body.” In Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, 259–58. Edited by Diane Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. Miller, Margot. “Masculinity and Male Intimacy in Nineties Sitcoms: Seinfeld and the Ironic Dismissal.” In The New Queer Aesthetic on Television: Essays on Recent

Works Cited

303

Programming, 147–59. Edited by James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Miller, Toby. “A Metrosexual Eye on Queer Guy.” GLQ 11.1 (2005): 112–17. Mishra, Vijay. “The Actor as Parallel Text: Amitabh Bachchan.” In Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, 125–56. New York: Routledge, 2002. Mitchell, Juliet. Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Mitchell, Sean. “A Slice of Lemmon.” Premiere (November 1992). Montgomery, Poppy. “Ten Things You Don’t Know About Women.” Esquire (May 2004): 74. Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009. Musto, Michael. “Old Camp New Camp.” Out (April/May 1993). Neale, Steve. “Melodrama and Tears.” Screen 27.6 (1986): 6–23. Newman, Kira M. “Let the Bromance Begin: App for ‘Bros’ Launching Today.” Tech Cocktail 24 August 2011. Accessed 25 May 2012. http://techcocktail.com/ bromance-app-launching-today-2011-08#.T85vhnZwdFQ. Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P. “The Alexander Bromance: Male Desire and Gender Fluidity in Oliver Stone’s Historical Epic.” Helios 35.2 (2008): 223–51. Noble, Andrea. Mexican National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2005. Nolletti, Arthur, Jr. “Male Companionship Movies and the Great American Cool.” Jump Cut 12/13 (1976): 35–36. O’Connor, John. “Film Group Tribute to Lemmon.” New York Times, 30 May 1988. Olderberg, Ann. 2006. “Comedy or drama, show plays it straight.” USA Today, Life section, p. 1–D, 26 October. Oropesa, Salvador A. “Proxemics, Homogenization, and Diversity in Mexico’s Road Movies: Por la libre (2000), Sin dejar huella (2000), and Y tu mamá también (2001).” Hispanic Issues On Line 3.5 (2008): 92–112. Pascoe, C. J. Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Paul, William. Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Peter. “we’re having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave.” LarsonsWorld, 1 February 2011. Accessed 7 April 2012. www.larsonsworld.com/?q=node/46. Pinto, Laura “Pineapple Princess,” & Don “Stuffed Animal” Charles. “Ann-Margret: RCA’s Kitten With a Whip.” chachachacharming: a journalistic tribute to girl powered pop past, present and future and from all over the globe. chachacha.com. Accessed 7 April 2012. www.chachacharming.com/article. php?id=18&pg=1. Pramaggiore, Maria. “Fishing for Girls: Romancing Lesbians in New Queer Cinema.” College Literature 24.1 (1997): 59–75.

304

Works Cited

Prasad, Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Radner, Hilary. Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge, 2011. Raj Rao, R. “Memories Pierce the Heart: Homoeroticism, Bollywood Style.” In Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, 299–306. Edited by Andrew Grossman. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000. Rajadhyaksha, Ashis. “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in the Global Arena.” In City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, 113–39. Edited by Preben Kaarsholm. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004. Reed, Rex. “Grumpy Old Men.” Beverly Hills, 12 January 1994. Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. “The Return of Batman.” Time (26 November 1965): 60. Rhodes, Joe. “Michael Cera Wants to Make You Squirm.” New York Times, 8 July 2007, A25–A26. Rich, Adrienne. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. London: Onlywomen Press, 1980. Rich, B. Ruby. “New Queer Cinema.” Reprinted in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Anthology, 15–22. Edited by Michele Aaron. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Robbie, Hillary. “The Subversion of Heteronormative Assumptions in HBO’s The Wire.” Dark Matter. 29 May 2009. Accessed 4 March 2012. www.darkmatter 101.org/site/2009/05/29/the-subversion-of-heteronormative-assumptionsin-hbos-the-wire/. Robertson (now Wojcik), Pamela. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp From Mae West To Madonna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Roof, Judith. All about Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Rose, Charlie. “A Panel Discussion with Three Mexican Filmmakers: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuarón.” By Charlie Rose. The Charlie Rose Show, PBS (20 December 2006). Rosin, Hanna, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012. Rothenberg, Randall. “The Swank Life.” Esquire (April 1997). Row Kavi, Ashok. “The Changing Image of the Hero in Hindi Films.” In Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Towards an Anthropology of Women, 157–210. Edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review, 1975.

Works Cited

305

Ryave, A. Lincoln, and James N. Shenkein. “Notes on the Art of Walking.” In Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings. Edited by Roy Turner. Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1975. Salamon, Julie. “A Young Con Artist, Old Men on Ice, and a Weird Lady.” Wall Street Journal (December 9, 1993). Saldana-Portillo, Maria Josefina. “In the Shadow of NAFTA: Y tu mamá también Revisits the National Allegory of Mexican Sovereignty.” American Quarterly 57.3 (2005): 751–77. Samuels, Rich. “Stagestruck Class of ’59.” Chicago Tribune, 1 March 1994. Accessed 7 April 2012. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-03-01/features/ 9403010026_1_ann-margret-heat-wave-gomer. Santorum, Rick. “5 Characters Reject Abortion in a Cultural Shift in Movies.” Philadelphia Inquirer. 3 January 2008. http://articles.philly.com/2008-01-03/ news/24988807_1_pop-culture-movies-abortion/2. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Translated by David Jacobson. New York: Vintage, 1993. Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. “The Crisis of American Masculinity.” Esquire (November 1958): 64–66. Scott, Kevin Conroy. Screenwriters’ Masterclass: Screenwriters Talk about Their Greatest Movies. New York: Newmarket Press, 2006. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. ———. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. ———. “from Between Men.” In The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, 586–604. Edited by Dorothy J. Hale. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Setoodeh, Ramin. “Isn’t It Bromantic?” Newsweek (6 August 2009): 73. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Caulfield, Australia: Edward Arnold, 1984. Sharma, Ashwani. “Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Amitabh Bachchan: Urban DemiGod.” In You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men, 167–80. Edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993. Sheely. “The Bromantic Gaze.” Overthinking It 5 January 2010. Accessed 14 July 2010. www.overthinkingit.com/2009/01/05/the-bromantic-gaze/. Silverman, Stephen M. “Lance Armstrong & Matthew McConaughey: We’re Not Gay.” People, 18 October 2006. Accessed 12 May 2012. www.people.com/ people/article/0,,1547724,00.html. Simpson, Mark. “Here Come the Mirror Men.” Independent 15 November 1994. www.marksimpson.com/pages/journalism/mirror_men.html. ———. “The Straight Men of Comedy.” In Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics, and Social Difference, 135–43. Edited by Stephen Wagg. New York: Routledge, 1998.

306

Works Cited

Smith, Paul Julian. “Transatlantic Traffic in Recent Mexican Films.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 12.3 (2003): 389–400. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Spitznagel, Eric. “The Stars of Jackass 3D on God, Cancer, and Homosexuality.” Vanity Fair 14 October 2010. www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2010/10/the-starsof-jackass-3d-talk-about-god-cancer-and-homosexuality.html. Stabiner, Karen. “Tapping the Homosexual Market.” New York Times, 2 May 1982, Section 6, 34+. Stadler, Gustavus T. “Queer Guy for the Straight ‘I.’ ” GLQ 11.1 (2005): 109–11. Stein, Joel. “Judd Apatow, Seriously.” Time (10 August 2009): 46–52. Stein, Joshua David. “Andy Breaks Caricature: in I Love you, Man, the SNL Wunderkind Plays Gay . . . Straight.” Out (March 2009). Sternberger, Adam. “Shrieking, Squirming, Beatings, Panic, a Severed Finger and a Facial Tattoo: Todd Phillips, Judd Apatow and the rise and stifling reign of the jokeless comedy.” New York Times Magazine (29 May 2011). Strickler, Jeff. “Impress Your Friends: Here’s Trivia on ‘Grumpy Old Men.’ ” Minnesota (1993). ———. “Lemmon Was No Grumpy Old Man about Minnesota.” StarTribune.com, 28 June 2001. Accessed 29 March 2012. www.startribune.com/templates/ Print_This_Story?sid=11521401. Strzemien, Anya. “Bromance Comes Out of the Closet.” Huffington Post, 26 March 2008. Accessed 6 August 2010. www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/26/bro mance-comes-out-of-the_n_93560.html. Stuart, Jan. “Bye-bye, American Pie.” The Advocate (16 April 2002): 65. Sutter, Mary. “ ‘Mother’ of all B.O. in Mexico.” Daily Variety, Gotham Edition (18 June 2001): 18. Swanson, Carl. “Boys Gone Wild.” New York, 2 December 2002. http://nymag.com/ nymetro/urban/gay/n_8062/. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. “In Focus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies.” Cinema Journal 44.2 (2005): 107–32. Taylor, Greg. Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Tegel, Simeon. “South of the Border, Box Office is En Fuego.” Variety (30 July–5 August 2001): 10. Thomas, Linda. “Grumpy Old Men.” LA Weekly, 31 December 1993. Torres, Sasha. “ ‘The Caped Crusader of Camp’: Camp, Pop, and the Batman Television Series.” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, 330–40. Edited by Fabio Cleto. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Works Cited

307

Travers, Peter. “True Bromance.” Rolling Stone (2 April 2009): 92. Tucker, Reed. “This Is Your Destiny.” Esquire (January 2006): 41. Tyler, Parker. “Double into Quadruple Indemnity.” Reprinted in American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, 249–57. Edited by Phillip Lopate. New York: Library of America, 2008. ———. Screening the Sexes. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972. Urban Dictionary. Accessed 25 July 2010. www.urbandictionary.com/define.php ?term=bromance. Vasudevan Ravi. The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010. “Viva Straight Camp!” Esquire (June 1993): 92–95. Wagner, Amanda. “College Candy’s Favorite Bromances.” College Candy. Last modified Spring 2009. Accessed 8 June 2011. http://collegecandy.com/2009/05/04/ collegecandys-favorite-bromances/#more-27888. Weiss, David. “Making Sense of the Brokeback Paraphenomenon.” In The Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon, 229–48. Edited by William R. Handley. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Westphal, Bob. “The Odd Couple.” bullz-eye.com. Accessed 22 March 2012. www. bullz-eye.com/mguide/reveiws_1068/the_odd_couple.html. Wexman, Virginia Wright. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Williams, James S. “The Lost Boys of Baltimore: Beauty and Desire in the Hood.” Film Quarterly 62.2 (2008): 58–63. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991): 2–13. ———. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Wolf, Sergio. “No Turning Back.” Sight & Sound 20.9 (2010): 14–17. Wood, Daniel B. “Should ‘Bromance’ Really Be in the Dictionary? Merriam-Webster Thinks So.” Christian Science Monitor (25 August 2011). Wood, Jason. The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. ———. “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic.” Film Comment 14.1 (1978): 12–17. Wyatt, Justin. “Cinematic/Sexual Transgression: An Interview with Todd Haynes.” Film Quarterly 46.3 (1993): 2–8. Zoltow, Maurice. “The Many Faces of Jack Lemmon.” Reader’s Digest (August 1981): 57.

contributors

Ron Becker is Associate Professor of Media and Culture at Miami University of Ohio. He is the author of Gay TV and Straight America and has published work on television history and the mediated politics of sexuality and gender in The Television Studies Reader; How to Watch Television; The Historical Journal Radio; Film and Television; Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics; and Television & New Media. Nick Davis is an Associate Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University. His teaching and research encompass narrative cinema in several eras and traditions, with particular emphasis on queer theory, feminism, popular film criticism, and twentieth-century American literature. His book The DesiringImage uses Deleuzian film theory to construct a new model of queer cinema produced in the U.S. and elsewhere since the 1980s. He has also published essays on such films as Brokeback Mountain, The Wild Party, and The Incredibles and is the author of the film reviews at www.NickFlickPicks.com. Ken Feil is Senior Scholar-in-Residence in the Visual and Media Arts Department at Emerson College. Author of Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination, Ken has contributed to the collections Convergence Media History; Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker; and Queer Love in Film and Television. His book about Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In will be published by Wayne State University Press in 2014. Peter Forster serves on the adjunct faculties of the College of Communication and The School for New Learning, DePaul University, where he teaches a course titled “Queer Fear: Film, Politics, Culture, Sexualities.” He has taught workshops and courses in Dramatic

310

Contributors

Literature, Textual Analysis, and Performance in universities across the U.S. and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor on the Performance faculty of The Theatre School, DePaul University, in 2006– 2007. As a theatrical director, he has directed over forty professional and academic productions in the U.S. and U.K. As an acting teacher, he has taught in studios in Chicago and Los Angeles. He is a contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal. David Greven is Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina. His books include Psycho-Sexual, on masculinity, Hitchcock, and his influence on De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin; Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema; The Fragility of Manhood, on Hawthorne and Freud; Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush; and Men Beyond Desire. His essay on Scream develops out of his current book project, Ghost Faces, about post-millennial masculinity and Hollywood film. Dominic Lennard is at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania (UTAS), Australia. From 2009 to 2012 he worked as a lecturer in film and literature at UTAS, where he has also taught media studies and sociology. Currently he lectures on academic writing, research, and study skills. He has published essays on celebrity, horror, and Batman. His book Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film is forthcoming from SUNY Press. Murray Pomerance is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and the author of Alfred Hitchcock’s America (2013), The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (2013), Tomorrow (2012), Edith Valmaine (2011), Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Meditations on Cinema (2010), The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory (2008), Johnny Depp Starts Here, Savage Time (both 2005), and An Eye for Hitchcock (2004), as well as editor or co-editor of more than a dozen volumes including The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema (2013), Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (2012), A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home (2008), City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (2007), Cinema and Modernity (2006), and American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations (2005). He

Contributors

311

edits the Techniques of the Moving Image series at Rutgers and the Horizons of Cinema series at SUNY Press and co-edits the Screen Decades and Star Decades series at Rutgers. Hilary Radner is Professor of Film and Media Studies and coordinates the Visual Culture Programme in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago. Her books include Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure and NeoFeminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture as well as six co-edited volumes. Meheli Sen is Assistant Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and the Cinema Studies program at Rutgers University. Sen’s work has been published in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Cinema Journal, The Journal of the Moving Image, and South Asian Review as well as in Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora. She is co-editor of Figurations in Indian Film, forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan. Sen is currently working on a monograph on commercial Hindi cinema. Jenna Weinman is a PhD candidate in the Visual Studies Department at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation, titled “The Not So Tender Trap: Romantic Comedy and Revolt in the Fifties and Fifty Years Later,” explores the surprising generic and ideological intersections between the mid-century sex comedy and the millennial brom-com.

index

Abbott and Costello, 6 Affleck, Ben, 113–14, 116, 166–67 Ajooba (Shashi Kapoor, 1991), 161 Altman, Rick, 14 Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977), 143, 148–49 American Pie (Paul and Chris Weitz, 1999), 102, 121, 174 Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000), 113 Anand (Hrishikesh Mukjerjee, 1971), 144 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Adam McKay, 2004), 168, 177–78, 180; homophobia in, 177–78 “Angry Young Man” of Hindi commercial cinema, 142–44, 161 “animal comedy,” 43–44 Animal House, 243 Ann-Margret, 55, 72–73; as sex symbol, 68–69 Apartment, The (Billy Wilder, 1960), 60–61 Apatow, Judd, 30, 206, 260 Armstrong, Lance, 2 Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006) 116, 123–24 Bachchan, Abhishek, 157–61 Bachchan, Amitabh, 139–61; mass appeal of, 140; star discourse of, 142–43. See also “Angry Young Man” Bachelor, The (series), 233 bachelorhood, 31, 39. See also playboy Bacon, Kevin, 258 Bang the Drum Slowly (John D. Hancock, 1973), 8–9 Bateman, Jason, 3 Batman, 166, 173

Beckham, David, 3, 176–77 Bemisaal (Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1979), 144 Berlant, Lauren, 33 Billy Budd (Herman Melville), 130–31 “Bollywood.” See Hindi commercial cinema Boston Legal (series), 2, 233 Bourdieu, Pierre, 166–67 boys’ love manga, 23–24 Boys’ Night Out (Michael Gordon, 1962), 36 Brady, Tom, 3 breadwinner ethic, 42 Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), 50n6 Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), 129, 173–74, 210n7, 236–37, 241, 248–49 bromance: app, 1; as discourse, 13–15, 235–37, 241–52; female characters in, 12, 22–23, 112–13, 124, 128–32; female sexuality and, 244; gendered audiences of, 129–30; as genre, 13–15; homophobia and, 9–10, 22, 43–4, 47, 175, 176, 177–78, 199, 221, 246, 259–60, 271, 275, 278, 281, 282, 289; origin of term, 1; queerness of, 24 Bromance (series), 2, 173, 233, 240–48, 251; gay characters in, 242–46; homophobia in, 246 buddy film, 7–10, 11, 52–56; disavowal of homosexuality in, 278–79; homophobic representations in, 8–9; role of women in, 8, 55–57, 128 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), 6–7 Butler, Judith, 72

314

Index

California Split (Robert Altman, 1974), 8–9 camp, 166, 168–74, 177, 183; “straight” camp, 166, 170–74 Carolla, Adam, 247 Cera Michael, 247, 229n10 Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, 1997), 125 Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), 116 Chorus Line, A (stage), 271–72 cinephilia, 89 Clooney, George, 247 closeted homosexuality: in the 1950s sex comedy, 40 Clover, Carol, 81, 96, 99–100 Cohan, Steven, 36, 57–58, 69 college campus films, 15 Columbine massacre, 87 Community (series), 234 Conversation, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), 7 Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1983), 153, 163n17 Craven, Wes, 81. See also, Scream Creed, Barbara, 82 Crime of Father Amaro, The (Carlos Carrera, 2002), 113 Crosby, Bing, 6 Cross, Gary, 43 Cruise, Tom, 3 Cuarón, Alfonso, 110, 114, 115, 116, 123, 128 Cuarón, Carlos, 115, 116, 120, 121 Damon, Matt, 114–15, 116, 166–67, 247 Day, Doris, 29, 37–39 Dean, James, 258 Del Toro, Guillermo, 116 Desperate Housewives (series), 59 Devil’s Backbone, The (Guillermo del Toro, 2001), 116 Dharmendra, 143 Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975), 112, 127, 131 Dostana (Raj Khosla, 1980), 157 Dostana (Tarum Mansukhani, 2008), 157–61; homophobia in, 160 dostana film, 19, 141–61; anti-heroism in, 146; centrality of family in, 147–53, 159; class struggle in, 152–57; formal

and stylistic features of, 141–42; individual desire in, 159–60; loyalty in, 152; marginalization of female characters in, 145, 154, 162n9; masculinity in, 144; queerness in, 141, 145; sacrifice in, 159–60; women’s roles in, 145 Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), 109 Drew Carey Show, The (series), 237 Dude, Where’s My Car? (Danny Leiner, 2000), 102, 174, 220 Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), 6–7, 9 Edelman, Lee, 214, 222 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 40, 49 Entourage, 167, 233, 234, 244 Esteban Muñoz, José, 214, 215, 222, 227 Evita, 267 Exorcist, The (William Friedkin, 1973), 89 family values: in 1950s culture, 35 Farrell, Will, 3 Father Knows Best (series), 35 female sexuality: in the horror film, 100; and marriage entrapment, 39, 42; in the 1950s sex comedy, 37 Fiedler, Leslie, 4–5 Fonda, Peter, 7 40-Year-Old Virgin, The (Judd Apatow, 2005), 1, 17, 45, 49 Frasier (series), 21, 236, 238, 239, 240 Freeman, Elizabeth, 214, 219 Freud, Sigmund: homophobia in, 94–95; hysteria, 95–96; mimetic desire, 95; narcissism, 95–96; nontendentious wit, 260; Oedipus complex, 93–95; oral stage of development, 93 Friends (series), 21, 236, 237–38, 240, 250–51 Fugate, Douglas L., 54 Funny People (Judd Apatow, 2010), 47, 104 furies, 96, 101 García Bernal, Gael, 115, 122, 131 “gay chicken,” 47, 49 gay rights movement in Mexico, 133n11 Goltz, Dustin, 214

Index Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997), 114–15, 116, 125 Gopinath, Gayatri, 144–45 Gossip Girl (series), 234 Grant, Barry Keith, 79 Gray’s Anatomy (series), 234 Green Hornet, The (Michel Gondry, 2011), 180 Grumpier Old Men (Howard Deutch, 1995), 58, 73 Grumpy Old Men (Donald Petrie, 1993), 17–18, 23, 55–60, 63–73; BBC series, 58–59; casting of, 63; homosexual/ heterosexual divide in, 66–67; midwestern setting of, 64, 77n47; role of women in, 65, 70–72 Gumbel, Bryant, 234 Halberstam, Judith, 214, 220 Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), 96–97 Hamad, Hanna, 248 Hamm, Jon, 234 Hangover, The (Todd Phillips, 2009), 11, 45, 47, 216 Happy Endings (series), 236–37, 250–52; gay characters in, 251–52 Hardy, Oliver, 5, 13 Hark, Ina Rae, 57–58, 69 Hawks, Howard, 110 Haynes, Todd, 213 “Heat Wave” (song), 69 Heroes (series), 234 Hill, Jonah, 247 Hills, The (series), 233, 243 Hindi commercial cinema: centrality of the family in, 147–53, 159; female audiences of, 146–47; genre differentiation in, 162n2; homosexuality in, 160–61; influence of economic factors upon, 140–41; influence of globalization upon, 157–61; melodrama and, 144–52, 157, 159. See also dostana film Hoffman, Dustin, 3, 7 Holmes, Sherlock, 255–56, 260, 262 homoeroticism: and heteronormativity, 191–203; and the horror film, 86–87; and violence, 91, 97–98

315

homophobia: in culture, 236, 240, 284, 290; in mistaken identity plots, 240. See also bromance homosexuality: in 1950s culture, 39–40. See also Freud, Sigmund Hope, Bob, 6 Hopper, Dennis, 7 horror. See Scream; slasher film House (series), 2, 233, 260–72; homophobia in, 259–60, 271. See also Laurie, Hugh; Leonard, Robert Sean How I Met Your Mother (series), 234, 250–51 Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), 5 Hudson, Rock, 30, 37; and closeted homosexuality, 40. See also Rock Hudson’s Home Movies Humpday (Lynn Shelton, 2009), 11, 12, 20, 22, 121, 128, 216; gay pornography in, 197–98; homoeroticism in, 195–203; homophobia in, 199; representations of femininity, 100; role of women in, 196–97, 203 I Love You, Man (John Hamburg, 2009), 11, 17, 20, 22, 112, 121, 173, 178–82, 216: adolescence in, 103; audience of, 129; gay characters in, 199; heteronormativity in, 193–95; marketing of “bromance” in, 110; race in, 127–28; and redemption of white masculinity, 48–49, 53–54; role of women in, 73, 100, 204–6; urban setting of, 126–27; vulgarity in, 168, 178–81 immaturity: in contemporary bromance, 206–9; in contemporary culture, 43, 45, 49; and 1950s masculinity, 31–32, 43 I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (Dennis Dugan, 2007), 168, 175–77; gay characters in, 199 Irma La Douce (Billy Wilder, 1963), 60 It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), 50n6 It Started with a Kiss (George Marshall, 1959), 37 Jackass, 168, 182–86 Jackass 3D (Jeff Tremaine, 2010), 182, 185

316

Index

Jackass Number Two (Jeff Tremaine, 2006), 185–86 Jameson, Fredric, 112, 127 Jenner, Brody, 2, 233, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247 Jurmana (Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1979), 144 Kaala Patthar (Yash Chopra, 1979), 143, 152–57 Kapoor, Shashi, 143 Khan, Amjad, 143 Khanna, Vinod, 143 Kiesling, Scott Fabius, 235–36, 249–50 Kimmel, Jimmy, 247 Kimmel, Michael, 53, 72, 73 Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007), 17, 44–48, 49, 104, 128 Knoxville, Johnny, 182–86. See also Jackass Kracauer, Siegfried, 255–56 Lacan, Jacques, 94 Lauer, Matt, 234 Laurel, Stan, 5, 13 Laurie, Hugh, 261, 272 Leatherstocking Tales, The (James Fenimore Cooper), 5 Lemmon, Jack, 55, 58–63, 66–68 Leonard, Robert Sean, 264, 271–72 Leopold and Loeb murders, 87–88; and Compulsion (Richard Fleischer, 1959); and In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967); and Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), 88 Lewis, Jerry, 6, 257 Lianna (John Sayles, 1983), 10 Lillard, Matthew, 90–91, 95 Living End, The (Gregg Araki, 1992), 126, 128 Lost (series), 276–77 Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961), 17, 38, 39, 46 Luna, Diego, 115, 122, 131 Lyman, Peter, 66 Madonna, 171 Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh, 2012), 80 Making Love (Arthur Hiller, 1982), 10

male sexuality: and object of gaze, 80; and violence, 84 Marky Mark. See Wahlberg, Mark marriage cycle of films, 15–16 Martin, Dean, 6 masala film, 139 masculinity: discourse of, 235–37; and discourse of male bonding, 249–50; in the new millennium, 79; in 1950s culture, 36, 61 Matthau, Walter, 55, 58–63, 67 McConaughey, Matthew, 2 melodrama, 33–34 metrosexuality, 167–68, 173, 175–77, 203 middleness as queer space, 34 Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969), 6–7, 9 millennium: fears associated with, 84–87; homosexuality as pathology in, 90–92, 101 Miller, Margo, 248 misogyny: in the horror film, 91–92 mistaken identity plots, 236–40, 250 Moby Dick (Herman Melville), 5 Modern Family (series), 59 Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Prakash Mehra, 1978), 157 My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), 125, 126 Namak Halal (Prakash Mehra, 1982), 152 Namak Haram (Hrishikesh Mukerjee, 1973), 144, 146 Naseeb (Kirti Kumar, 1997), 143, 157 Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975), 8 National Emergency period, 142–43, 145–46 New Girl (series), 59 Newman, Paul, 7 New Queer Cinema, 79, 124–26, 128, 132; role of women in, 128 Nigahiga, 3 Nip/Tuck (series), 2, 234 Odd Couple, The (Gene Saks, 1968), 54, 60, 62 Odd Couple II, The (Howard Deutch, 1998), 58, 62 Office, The (series), 234

Index Pacino, Al, 127 Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006), 116 Parallax View, The (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), 8 Partners (James Burrows, 1982), 10 Parvarish (Manmohan Desai, 1977), 151–52 Paul, William, 43 Personal Best (Robert Towne, 1982), 10 Philbin, Regis, 234 Phillips, Joanna, 54 Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959), 17, 34, 35, 38, 41 Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, 2008), 47, 104, 105, 173, 180 Pitt, Brad, 176–77, 247 playboy, 31, 37, 38, 40; and fear of homosexuality, 39–40 Playboy (magazine), 36 Poison, 125 Porky’s, 115 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 83, 89–90, 91, 92 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (series), 169 queerness, definition of, 213 queer time, 214–28 Randall, Tony, 30, 38, 40 Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), 258–59 Redford, Robert, 7 Reilly, John C., 3 Renoir, Jean, 110 road movie, 126–29 Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992), 6 Roof, Judith, 34 Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), 88, 92–93 Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973), 8–9 Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), 252 Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), 18, 81–105; adolescent masculinity in, 102–4; doubling in, 96–99 Scrubs (series), 233 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: continuum between homosocial and homosexual,

317

22, 284, 290; homosociality and male power, 72; on minoritizing and universalizing aspects of homosexuality, 109–10; triangulation of homosocial desire, 123, 130–31, 207–8, 286 Seinfeld (series), 21, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964), 17, 29–31, 41 setting, politics of, 125–29 Seven Year Itch, The (Billy Wilder, 1955), 36–37 Sex, Shame, and Tears (Antonio Serrano, 1999), 113 Sex in the City, 56, 80 Shaan (Ramesh Sippy, 1980), 143, 144 Shahenshah (Tinnu Anand, 1988), 161 “Shame” (music video, Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow), 236, 248–49 Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011), 80 Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975), 147, 157, 161 Silence of the Lambs, The (Jonathan Demme, 1991), 89 Single Guy, The (series), 237, 238, 239 Sinha, Shatrughan, 143 slasher film: homophobia in, 82, 85, 86–87, 91–92, 93, 95, 96 Sólo con tu pareja (Alfonso Cuarón, 1991), 125 Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), 60 Sontag, Susan, 169–70 Stadler, Gustavus T., 169 Step Brothers (Adam McKay, 2008), 47 “stoop,” 166, 170–71, 173, 177 stunt, 256–72; bromance as, 259–72; as performance, 271 Suhaag (Manmohan Desai, 1979), 149–51 Superbad (Greg Mottola, 1997), 12, 20–21, 22, 45, 47, 104, 105, 111, 112, 121, 128, 180, 206, 214–28; adolescence in, 215; deadlines in, 224, 226–27; failure in, 220–22; “gay tease” in, 217; homophobia in, 221; marketing strategies of, 115–16; melodramatic fantasy in, 225–26; mistimings in, 223–24; phallic references in, 219; queer temporality of, 214–28; sexual

318

Index

Superbad (continued) anxiety in, 227; social awkwardness in, 221; teleology and, 223 Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992), 125 Taylor, Rip, 185 Ted (Seth MacFalane, 2012), 73–74 Tender Trap, The (Charles Walters, 1955), 39 That Touch of Mink (Delbert Mann, 1962), 17, 38, 40–41 Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Michael Cimino, 1974), 8–9 Timberlake, Justin, 234 Today Show, The, 234 Ulrich, Skeet, 90 Vasudevan, Ravi, 147–48 Verdú, Maribel, 128–29 Victor Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982), 10 Voight, Jon, 7 vulgarity in male homosocial relations, 19–20, 167–70, 173, 174–86 Wahlberg, Mark, 171–72 Waters, John, 185–86 Wedding Crashers (David Dobkin, 2005), 112, 121, 128, 180 When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989), 269 Williams, Linda, 33–34, 102 Wire, The (series), 21–22, 274–93; black masculinity in, 290; discourse of homosexuality in, 277–80, 290–93; domestic life in, 274–75, 282, 284; eroticization of black bodies in, 281–82; female characterizations in, 274–77, 286; and gendered aspects

of “quality” television, 276–77; homophobia in, 275, 278, 281, 282, 289; homosexual characterizations in, 280–82, 289; misogyny in, 282–83; romantic aspects of homosocial relations in, 284–89 Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), 61 Women in Love (D. H. Lawrence), 5 Wood, Robin: on attributes of the buddy film, 7–8; on mainstream cinema’s challenges to heteronormativity, 109–10; the return of the repressed, 84 Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001), 18–19, 23, 110–32; audience and exhibition, 113–15, 119–20; class issues, 111, 118, 123, 127; distribution, 110–11; female characterization in, 112–13, 124, 128–32, 137n42; and globalization, 121–23; homophobia in, 120–21; homophobic censorship of, 131; homosexual encounter in, 111; ideology in, 110–11, 125, 132; industry policy and, 113–14; marketing and promotion of, 114–17, 122, 135n24; nation and national identity in, 110–11, 118–21, 123, 124, 131, 133n8, 134n16; and New Queer Cinema, 124–25; production, 110–11, 113, 118–21; as queer road movie, 126; race in, 127–28; rating controversy, 134n15, 136n32; setting in, 126–27, 137n45; union of art and commerce in, 118–19 Zanjeer (Prakash Mehra, 1973), 147 Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Zoya Akhtar, 2011), 164n20