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women cinema

• L e s s o n 7
  Bromance at the Movies

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• The Buddy Film Series
• Superbad
• Smoke Signals
• Thelma and Louise

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• From the Urban Dictionary
• 1. Bromance
• Describes the complicated love and affection
  shared by two straight males.

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• How does Hollywood separate homoeroticism from
  the sanctioned male bonding that upholds
  patriarchy?
• How can you constantly show men in love with men
  while upholding mandatory heteronormativity and
  strictly prohibiting homosexuality?
• Pretty tricky!
• The male buddy film has been a perennial
  Hollywood formula. The recent crop of buddy films
  are particularly interesting.

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• What formulas has Hollywood developed to tell
  stories of relations between the following
  couplets
• men with women?
• (built around mens pursuit of the
  phallus/maternal replacement/voyeurism/narcissism/
  fetishism/reproduction of the nuclear
  family/maintenance of Oedipal logic.
• Animosity between couple until the end).
• men with men?
• (A perennial favourite! Fun, laughter, support,
  comradery, relations, time together, shared
  interests, emotions, play, memories, enjoyment,
  recreation, shared desires.)
• women and women?
• (chick flick? fun, laughter, support, comradery,
  relations, time together, shared interests,
  emotions, play, memories, enjoyment, recreation.)

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• Differences? In the chick flick formula, women
  are often looking for and/or have been
  disappointed by relationships with men. These
  films often dont attract a mixed gender
  audience. They often affirm the womens
  relationships to men by the end. If they dont do
  this they are really chick flicks and they are
  rarely made and given minimal financial backing
  from studios and thus make little money. The
  romantic comedy centers around the womans
  perfect marriage by the end, whereas male
  driven comedies and dramas suggest the loss of
  the superior relationship, even if they too, in
  order to manage the anxiety of homosexuality,
  must reproduce men attached to women by the end.
• Men lament the loss of each other
• women cherish the departure.
• No other filmmaker has staged this dynamic more
  successfully in recent Hollywood history than
  Judd Apatow.

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Can you distinguish the following terms sex
acts, sexuality, erotics, libido and desire?

• Now how do these terms relate to the stories
  about desire that we generally see in films like
  American Pie, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,
  Zoolander, Old School, Wedding Crashers,
  Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up,
  Superbad (to name only a few of the films by the
  new kings of comedy)?

How are our bodies shaped erotically?How are our
relationships determined libidinally?
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D e s i r i n g B o d i e s

• Forget categories of gay and lesbian, abandon all
  notions of unchanging, naturally occurring sexual
  identities, what these films affirm is love
  between men.
• The more interesting question, then, is not do
  they love each other acceptably (as heterosexual
  life partners, to quote Jay and Silent Bob) or
  unacceptably (as sexual partners) but what do
  these films tell us/teach us about desire,
  erotics and bodies?
• Are these films themselves certain about
  heterosexual masculinity. Remember, there is not
  a single self-acknowledged gay character in them.

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• For Freud, desire was produced through the
  repression of drives and sexuality was the story
  told about how to manage these desires.
  Sexuality, for Freud, is about the development of
  gender identity.
• Freud is one of the first thinkers to emphasize
  the modern conflation of sex, gender and
  sexuality.
• Heterosexuality and Homosexuality as conceived in
  the dominant patriarchal culture are about
  masculinity as phallocentricity. Freud makes
  clear for us that heterosexuality is centered
  around an identification with masculinity while
  homosexuality is the failure to renounce the
  feminine. Paradoxically, then, hetersexuality
  requires a narcissistic, homoerotic affection for
  masculinity, alongside a rejection of femininity.
  
• Under this system, men learn that their desires
  are met symbolically through the affirmation of
  their phallic power and physically through
  phallic-focused intercourse with women.
• Apatows films stage these dynamics beautifully.
  Both Knocked Up and Superbad beg the question
  what is most desirable to men? The sexual
  conquest of women or the intimate, libidinally
  charged relationships with other men?

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Knocked Up

• Before we turn to Superbad, lets consider one of
  Apatows most commercially successful films,
  Knocked Up.
• Consider the preceding terms in relation to the
  following scenes.
• Scene 1 Intro
• Scene 2 4000
• Scene 3 5122
• Scene 4 10000
• Scene 5 10913

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s c r e e n i n g

• S u p e r b a d (2 0 0 7)

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R e a d i n gRobert LangInnerspace A
Spectacular Voyage to the Heart of Identity

• Hollywood seems to be leaning towards the idea,
  first espoused by the ancient Greeks, that a
  friendship between two obviously virile males is
  the most desirable of all human relationships,
  and that it can be a far more fulfilling
  experience than the love relationship between a
  man and a woman (Kathleen Carroll in Lang 180)
• Prankster Pals The Appeal Never AgesFrom Gunga
  Din to Stakeout, buddies involved in good-natured
  mischief have proved an irresistible mix (181).
• What are the conditions under which men are
  allowed to express their feelings of love for one
  another?

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Innerspace meets Superbad

• By the end the films cocky confidence wavers,
  and it offers an overdetermined and contradictory
  discourse on the repression of homosexuality
  (183).
• Innerspace read Superbad must resolve the
  problem inherent in every buddy film You see
  my problem. How to have the two leading men wind
  up in each others arms and not make them look
  like a couple of fairies?
• But until Jack read Seth and Evan feels he has
  achieved a decisive degree of masculinity
  guaranteed by a resolute heterosexuality, he is
  implicated in a discourse that betrays an anxiety
  about homosexuality. The anxiety is there because
  the desire is there (190).

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• For men under this model, desire is a form of
  masturbation or autoeroticism more than an
  encounter/experience of difference or otherness.
  Men are told to have sex with women to ensure
  their masculinity, to put their penises in as
  many vaginas as they can to affirm, under the
  gaze of their friends who stand in for the
  watchful eyes of patriarchy, that they are in
  fact properly male. They bond with each other
  because what is being celebrated in all instances
  is this particular form of masculinity. As Luce
  Irigaray says, it is hom(me)osexuality that is
  being constructed and celebrated.
• Women are the objects of exchange within this
  symbolic order, and thus the personalities of the
  women matter little. They need only be hot, nice,
  and ready to play (though not too ready if they
  are to be the central Maternal stand in figure).
  The film ends with this message in mind, each boy
  reconciled to their mandated life with women but
  lamented the loss of each other. It is clear
  throughout the film that Seth and Evan represent
  the most meaningful, loving relationship,
  mirroring their older counterparts who have found
  an idealized place in the symbolic order of the
  adult world as cops spending each and every day
  together.
• Each boy also captures part of the narrative of
  masculinity. Where Evan worries about his
  performance of masculinity (superego), Seth (ID)
  emphasizes the need to put the p in the v. This
  helps explain why having any other body please
  the penis is not acceptable. The penis should
  not only experience ejaculation whichever way it
  can, it must be activated for use in such a way
  that confirms the boundaries between the genders,
  marks the border between inside/outside, between
  who will do the penetrating/dominating and who
  will be dominated/penetrated hence the severe
  prohibition around men being the penetrated ones
  (the phobia of homophobia is clearly not around
  penetrating the anus as anal sex has long been a
  mainstay of mainstream heteronormative
  pornography, so long as it is the male
  penetrating the female anus).

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• What matters is that the male body be marked as
  impenetrable. Homophobia, then, is a fear of
  femininity, a fear of failed masculinity.
  Femininity becomes that which is dominated,
  vulnerable, repressed within a symbolic order,
  and most importantly consumed by masculinity to
  affirm masculinity.
• Libidinal energies are invested in connections
  among men, intimacy between men. Pleasure is
  experienced by the male body through the
  acquisition of a vagina that will permit
  penetrative stimulation. Pleasure, henceforth, is
  not about touch, is not about skin, is not about
  vulnerability to an other pleasure is about
  penetration and ejaculation, ultimately with a
  male audience in mind.

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• What do male bodies do?
• How are they coded?
• - organs
• - penetrating
• ingestion
• looking
• tasting
• touching
• fucking

• What do female bodies do?
• How are they coded?
• cavity
• receiving
• - digestion
• being looked at
• being tasted, unwrapped,
• undressed, opened.
• getting fucked

Male buddy films are especially concerned with
reproducing these corporeal boundaries.
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• For the patriarchal notion of masculinity to
  obtain, homosexual relations between men must be
  forbidden. They are forbidden because, as
  Irigaray observes, they openly interpret the law
  according to which society operates. That is,
  once the penis itself becomes merely a means to
  pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses
  its power (202).
• Clearly, heterosexuality and homosexuality work
  together (in a network of desires and symbolic
  exchanges that Irigaray calls hom(m)o-sexuality)
  to serve the interests of masculinity (202).
• In the end the line separating homoeroticism
  from the sanctioned male bonding that upholds
  patriarchy is fine one. Where Innerspace read
  Superbad seeks both to confirm homosexual desire
  as a perversion and true masculinity as
  heterosexual, it also denies this (205).
• Is not the message by the end one of masculine
  mimicry (all men follow the same path), in which
  men must learn that their lives must appear to be
  heterosexual while they remain connected to each
  other within a phallocetric economy. They may
  learn to get erections for the hot girl but their
  hearts remain forever with each other.