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“I Love You, Brom Bones”: Beta Male Comedies and American Culture

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 30; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509208.2011.575669

1543-5326

David Greven,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Kay Hymowitz, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Kathleen Parker, Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010). Of special interest is that these are books written by women about the afflictions of men in a post-feminist age. 2. While horror has come to dominate almost all representation, ranging from the police procedurals that abound on television, with their often shockingly grisly crime scenes, to the glut of science-fiction films made by Hollywood today that eschew the cerebral in favor of blood and guts, comedy has been the chief site for explorations of Beta Male anxieties. Horror, comedy, and pornography, which Linda Williams famously called the three “body genres,” share a predilection for submitting the body to extremes. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” in Film Genre Reader 2, Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 3. While his particular sensibility as an auteur is not the main focus of this essay, Judd Apatow's work needs special mention because it has been so crucial to the genesis and popularity of this new genre. As Steven Gaydos, executive editor of Variety magazine, has been quoted as saying, “Judd has had a bigger impact on the film comedy scene than anybody in a long time,” says. “The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a break-out hit, Talladega Nights was a break-out hit, Knocked Up was a break-out hit, Superbad was a break-out hit. Step Brothers was a solid hit, Pineapple Express was a solid hit, Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a solid hit. I can't think of anybody in the business who's had five years like that. His comedies have grossed well over $1bn between them.” Gaydos is quoted in Tim Walker, “King of Bromance: Judd Apatow,” The Independent, August 19, 2009. 4. For a discussion of the “double-protagonist” film, see David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009). In that the crop of more adult-focused comedies that has flourished in the wake of the teen comedies of the late 1990s focuses on two male stars, this new comedic form evinces some of the trends that Greven locates in “Bush to Bush” cinema—a focus on pairs of men, rather than the hero or the male group, and, in that the themes inform the very nature of masculinity in contemporary comedy, a split between narcissistic and masochistic modes of male identity. 5. For discussions of the buddy film, see Robin Wood, “From Buddies to Lovers,” Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986; New York: Columbia UP, 2003); Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (4th Edition): Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 6. Carol J. Clover provocatively argued in 1992 that the horror film places the viewer—typically gendered male—in the masochistic position of identifying with the female victim. The Final Girl is the masculinized, virginal young woman who is the only one ultimately able to outwit, slay, and/or escape the monster—a kind of intermediary figure between the female victim and the young male spectator. See Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992), passim. 7. This topic in cinematic terms has attracted surprisingly little interest. For a definitive discussion of the homosocial, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). This topic in cinematic terms has attracted surprisingly little interest. 8. See Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960: New York: Dell, 1966). 9. For a discussion of the racial buddy film, see Cynthia J. Fuchs's essay “The Buddy Politic,” Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993). 10. For an excellent discussion of the social function of marriage in terms of masculinity, see Jonathan Rauch, “For Better or Worse,” Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con: A Reader, ed. Andrew Sullivan (New York: Vintage, 1997). 11. For a discussion of the emergence of a newly visible queer identity from the 1990s forward, see Suzanna Danuta Walters, All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2001). 12. Laura Mulvey's deeply influential and important theory of the straight male gaze remains relevant, despite the numerous challenges to it over the years. But the gaze has been reconfigured as varied and multiple, and come to be understood as coming from all desiring directions—gay male, female, raced, ethnic, class, and so forth. At the very least, Mulvey's influential paradigms have been exhaustively revised. 13. One is reminded as well as the stock antebellum narratives in which northern visitors to southern plantations provided an “objective” view of slavery and plantation life. Usually, such narratives were concocted for the benefit of the slavocracy. 14. As Valerie Rohy reminds us in her 2010 study Anachronism and Its Others (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), a fascination with the primitive suffuses treatments of both homosexuality and racial otherness in classical psychoanalysis especially. If blackness and homosexuality have both been framed as primitive “throwbacks,” what is particularly interesting about masculinity in Beta Male comedies is that it is this form of white masculinity that is now being framed as such. Yet these films offer progressive developmental narratives. As Tim Walker discusses in his Independent article on Judd Apatow films, “Bromantic protagonists tend to be immature and ambition-free beta males, stuck in a spiral of pornography and junk food, and forced to grow up when they encounter women, children and responsibilities.” The key word here is “forced,” as the protagonists must inevitably climb out of their sloughs of male despond and become responsible, married, child-rearing adults. 15. Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998). 16. For an excellent discussion of the confluence of Gothic themes and male relationships in American literature, see Robert K. Martin's essay “Knights Errant and Gothic Seducers: The Representation of Male Friendship in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: Plume, 1990). 17. Brom is the template for characters such as football player and resident bully Dave Karofsky (Max Adler) on the smash Fox TV series Glee , who torments the show's openly gay teen character Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer). “There's this Neanderthal who's made it his mission to make my life a living hell,” Kurt tearfully confesses at one point in the second season as he explains why he has had to transfer schools. Of particular interest to me is the way that Glee frames Karofsky's persecution of Kurt as not only menacing but erotically charged, and precisely menacing because erotically charged—Karofsky's desperate kissing of Kurt on the mouth in the second season episode “Never Been Kissed” (11/9/2010) changes the entire theme of gay bullying into the closeted homosexuality of the homophobe. In a later episode, Karofsky bullies Kurt in a way that especially terrifies him and leads him to transfer schools; the extreme of terror reached in this moment, in which Karofsky stands before Kurt, staring at him intently, and takes away one of his possessions, derives precisely from the erotic intensity of its depiction, as Karofsky presents his overpowering physical menace as a sexualized menace as well. Glee takes the template of “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to a twenty-first century extreme of explication, transforming Brom Bones’ murderous fascination with loner, outsider Ichabod into a murderous erotic fascination. And, given the extraordinary plethora of fan mash-ups of the Kurt-Karofsky relationship on such sites as YouTube, this is a fascination hardly the bully's alone. Indeed, from my estimation, the number of mash-up videos celebrating the sweet anguish of this ill-fated pairing, often linked to songs such as Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, exceeds that of homages to the much more benign relationship Kurt develops, over the course of season two, with Blaine (Darren Criss), the openly and much more confidently gay teenager at a boy's prep school who befriends the lost and frightened Kurt, leading to his transfer to Blaine's school and to his joining its glee club, The Warblers. 18. The narrator offers several competing theories as to what befell him, and the commonly accepted one in criticism is that Crane goes to New York City to pursue a law career. Yet this theory is no more textually supported than any other; one of the aspects of the tale that has been almost completely overlooked is the violence of Brom's attack against Ichabod. The blow to his head is unmistakable physical trauma; it is possible that Brom not only managed to rid Ichabod from his town but also from the world. 19. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone Books, 2001). 20. See Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2006). 21. Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). The phrase “clever, funny girls” was used by Pauline Kael to describe the women of 1930s comedies, such as Jean Arthur. 22. Corliss, Review of Superbad, Time, August 2007. 23. Wood, “From Buddies to Lovers,” 203. 24. Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2009). 25. The title refers to Sarah's crime sleuth-heroine's powers. In the preview, she looks at a dog, whose thoughts she can read, and her eyes as well as the dog's light up a bright blue, signifying their telekinetic link. It's like Brian De Palma's 1978 film The Fury without the poetry. 26. See Rosenberg, Legacy of Rage (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 27. Fung, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video, eds. Cindy Patton, et al (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 145–161. 28. As Ed Guerrero writes, “we hear her [the Mammy's] echo today as she smiles at us (in a less caricatured version) from pancake boxes or contemporary films like Clara's Heart.” Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African-American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993), 16. I assume Guerrero is referencing the corporate makeover of Aunt Jemima, pancake batter-goddess, who has transformed from kerchief wearing slave mammy to businesswoman.