Boats and Ho's

So. I'm in the middle of writing this amazing blog about what I like to call the 'bromantic comedy' and what it reveals about representations of masculinity onscreen and particularly representations of heterosexual masculinity. I wasn't always in the middle - last night, after weeks of thinking about it, random moments for the last two years when I thought it might be an interesting subject to pursue after I wrote an essay on traditional representations of masculinity and couldn't find any literature that actually spelled them out, choosing instead to shout MASCULINITY IS IN CRISIS. Ha, yeah. It is. Because instead of tracing the historical development of representations of masculinity in film people have just been using it as the norm and defining everything else around it. Silly gooses.

I had an awesome lead-in quote from Robin Wood about critically analysing films from all different approaches to discover all the ways in which the film is communicating particular ideologies. I used the theory that everyone derives based on Joe Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces - you know, in Western civilisation the initiation rituals other cultures have for adolescent boys to transition into manhood have been, for want of a better way to say it, replaced with the myth of the quest and how these myths are proliferated through films like Star Wars - essentially, society in effect learns how to interact on a social level through popular culture and subsequently that means that we get most of our cultural and social information from the cinema.

Aaaaaannnnndddddd.....back to the whole masculinity thing. I'm seeing a whole bunch of films that seem to be expressing this confusion over representations of masculinity. What they suggest to me is that these films appear to suggest that heterosexual men don't know how they're supposed to act and these representations of masculinity are confused, which may make straight dudes even more confused? Sure, there is one genre of film that doesn't seem to be confused about heterosexual masculinity, but I think they make it even more confusing - well, I watched one example recently Crank 2 with Jason Statham. It both sucked and blowed. I'd be offended if I was a guy.

Maybe it's just as confusing for women, but I feel that there is a lot of film and television that present a confusion on the part of heterosexual men and the way they're supposed to behave, particularly around each other. It manifests itself in a lot of gay jokes and similar (watch the 'you know how I know you're gay?' scene in the 40 Year Old Virgin for an incredibly obvious example), but a lot of films that present male relationships in interesting ways.

Cue awesome analyses of Superbad and I Love You, Man and how they seem to be in a genre I like to call the bromantic comedy. I Love You, Man in particular seems to be about how heterosexual men negotiate the balance between relationships with their partner and with other men. And this film, to me, represents the way two men developing a friendship can be just as awkward and intense as developing a sexual relationship - and heterosexual men always seem to be ill at ease at the thought that their feelings toward other heterosexual men are being mistaken for sexual desire. I love this film because it seems entirely aware of this constant state of confusion and tension that guys live in sometimes.

And I talked about this moment in Superbad where Evan and Seth profess their love for each other and how the film sort of suggests that their relationship is becoming too codependent and it's time to move on with girls. But there's this look between them at the end that suggests that they're aware that they'll probably never be as close as they were ever again.

And now, photos of bro-love from each film:





AWESOME. Yeah, except that after working on it for two days, I was logged in to a different email address to the one I use for this blog and I....LOST IT. I finished it, went to publish and it wouldn't do it - was unable to process my request. Fuck you, motherfucker! And when I went back to the last-saved draft, it was just after I'd written a synopsis of the plot of I Love You, Man. How the fuck am I supposed to use that to go on to my awesome, awesome theory?!? Hence, this lazy version of the sheer brilliance I produced last night.

"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.