"I love you, man": The Bromantic Comedy

Oh. Em. JESUS.

I was going through my posts and I discovered I'd written a little about the bromance in film before (I recently wrote a list of the best ones in honour of Robert Pattinson needing a good bro in the wake of his embarrassingly public cuckolding at the hands of Kristen Stewart and Ruper Sanders.

I wrote this ages ago and for some reason it didn't post and I was devastated and too tired to start again so I wrote another post about it all (how self-reflexive) and I. JUST. FUCKING. FOUND. IT.

I also noticed that I didn't even finish it. Geez. And I also noticed that I thought I was the first person to use the term 'romantic comedy.' What a fucking moron.

Here goes:

One of the main theses of the late, great Robin Wood was that the goal of critical film analysis was to examine a film from more than approach, in order "to suggest something of the complex interaction of ideology, genre, and personal authorship that determines the richness, the density of meaning, of the great Hollywood masterpieces."

And I think that ole Woodsy was onto something, and not only that, I think there is a meaning to be found within not just the great Hollywood masterpieces, but also some of the recent 'blockbusters' and films considered 'below' the high purpose of critical analysis - I believe in my very half-hearted research into something one of my lecturers once told the class I stumbled upon an article championing indie films over blockbusters because it was so difficult to apply Wood's approach to formulaic and repetitive commercial films. Pretty sure Wood would turn in his grave if he knew - considering the Hollywood films theorists like Bordwell, Thompson and his good self developed a particular set of patterns and formulas to communicate certain ideologies. Massive fail for you, modern film critic.

You may have noticed recently that there have been more than a few films that would initially present themselves as 'guy movies.' My examples are films like Step-Brothers, Role Models, Superbad, The Hangover, and I Love You, Man. Films that feature little to no female characters, and if there any they're either screaming harpies hellbent on crushing the male characters' soul or objects of sexual obssession.

But are they really? On the one hand you could argue that yes, these women are symbols of the hideously narrow view of femininity, but if we stick with Wood's way of thinking, the message being communicated is one primarily for the men watching the film; a way of showing the male audience member the most desirable heterosexual union - in layman's terms: This is the wrong kind of girl, this is the right kind of girl. Which brings me back to why I was investigating my admiration for Wood - the thing my lecturer David Boyd told our class once. I wish I could remember who he was talking about - it may have been Wood - that every Hollywood film was about the reformation of the couple. Every single genre, this argument goes, is essentially a romance.

And yes, almost all Hollywood films feature a (let's face it) heterosexual union, no matter what the plot or genre, but this isn't really what this argument is referring to. If you look closely at a lot of films, the main line of action involves two characters meeting in an interesting manner (what we call 'the cute meet'), often hating each other immediately. But through the course of the film, they learn to value one another and become united. Does this sound familiar?

It's not just the plot of every romantic comedy, it's the plot of Lethal Weapon. On the director's commentary of Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright mentions that in the original script the character of Danny Butterman had a girlfriend, but in the end they decided the relationship between Nick and Danny was more important and scenes that were originally between Danny and his girlfriend sort of became incorporated into the scenes between Nick and Danny. And to me, it's a very deliberate decision.

One way to read these films is to look for the obvious homosexual subtext. And that is a perfectly valid analysis, one that I would like to research in the context of these films. But what interests me at the moment is the way in which these films seem to be expressing something about male relationships to a male audience.

The films that interest me the most, or the ones that seem to lend themselves rather well to this term 'bromantic comedy' (god, I hope I invented this)are Step-Brothers, Superbad, Pineapple Express, and of course I Love You, Man. The latter film is essentially the blueprint for the generic conventions of the Bromantic Comedy.

I should probably stop just reading the first section of Daniel Chandler's An Introduction to Genre Theory and actually read it properly before I research this further, because as he observes, "the attempt to define
particular genres in terms of necessary and sufficient textual properties is sometimes seen as theoretically attractive but
it poses many difficulties. For instance, in the case of films, some seem to be aligned with one genre in content and
another genre in form." So while it would be tempting to group these films together and pretend I've invented (or at the very least identified) a new genre, I must first ask; what are the common themes, devices, stylistic choices that bring all of these films under one umbrella? The magic Bromantic Comedy umbrella?

Well, Mr Chandler and members of the filmgoing public, I shall tell you. Well, I'll try, anyway. And I must point out that because this is a blog and not my PhD thesis, I'm being really lazy and just spewing forth random wisdom. And as you may have guessed, not referencing academically. But shout outs to Robin Wood, Chandler and of course, my secret boyfriend (so secret he and his wife know nothing about me), David Bordwell for making me the lazy writer on film I have become.

The common theme is pretty apparent - all of these films focus on the relationship between men. Or teenage boys becoming men in the case of Superbad. Superbad is sort of an interesting point of comparison with I Love You, Man, actually because each film deals with a lack in a male character's life in completely opposite ways. The second thing that unites these films, I Love You, Man and Stepbrothers, more so than Superbad, and I Love You, Man most of all, is its adherence to the generic conventions of the Romantic Comedy.

I Love You, Man, directed by John Hamburg, is most unashamedly a romantic comedy. It's just the couple united at the end that's different. The story is essentially this; Peter, played by Paul Rudd, gets engaged to his girlfriend, Zooey (Rashida Jones). When she tells all of her friends about the happy news and discovers Peter doesn't really have anyone to tell, she realises that he doesn't have any male friends and subsequently no best man. So Peter decides he needs to find a best man for his wedding. After a serious of tragic meetings that seem more like disastrous blind dates than attempts to find mates, Peter finally meets Sydney (Jason Segel) and a friendship begins to bloom.