Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film

Conclusion: Buddies, Then and Now

148 In a brief analysis of war films from the silent era to the present in which he discusses their themes, conventions, generic continuities, and connections to the historical moment, Steve Neale observes: “Coinciding with a renewed interest in the topic of masculinity in Film, Media and Cultural Studies, war films of all kinds have been studied . . . not only in terms of their Oedipal dynamics and their sado-masochistic scenarios, but also in light of the fact that the war film is one of the few genres in which, as Saving Private Ryan ([Steven Spielberg,] 1998) has recently confirmed, male characters are permitted to weep as a means of expressing their physical and emotional stress and hence their physical and emotional vulnerability.”1 Neale’s point about the way recent war films have been studied in relation to a particular critical emphasis has even broader implications. Just as narrative elements can move from one genre to another, so, too, has the question of what male bonding between buddies is really about emerged over time as a topic of concern in relation to films that focus on male relationships in a variety of genres, including the war film. For people in the 1920s, the noun “buddy” was innocuous and unambiguous: it referred to a soldier who fought in World War I. As we saw in chapter 1, reviewers regularly used it in commentaries on war films. “My Buddy,” a song written for the composer’s dead fiancée, was appropriated as a signifier for male soldiers. Now the term “buddy” is inescapably embedded in a complex linguistic, sociocultural matrix that is most certainly not innocuous or unambiguous. The noun can refer to a kind of genre, “the buddy film,” or a semantic feature that crosses over from one genre to another. But now it has a sexual valence. Ironically, a term used initially to refer to a dead female lover, and subsequently to a man, has gone through an even more complex transformation. In Mark Simpson’s essay “Don’t Die on Me Buddy, Homoeroticism and Masochism in buddies, then and now
c o n c l u s i o n conclusion: buddies, then and now 149 War Movies,” the term refers to both to a male soldier and a dying lover. Like the fiancée of the songwriter who memorialized her, buddies are seen as the objects of desire. But unlike the woman in the heterosexual relationship, who was intended as a lover,the men are unattainable lost objects over whom one can weep copious tears precisely because death protects one from the problem or suspicion of sexual interaction . Simpson argues that death in a film like A Midnight Clear (Keith Gordon, 1992)“makes love between men eternal by removing it from the male body; by canceling forever the threat of its consummation it ensures that boyish love is immortal , and that queer love, transformed into a cadaver, is buried on the battlefield.”2 This is not the place to begin a history of criticism of gays in films, but it is possible to suggest that recent discussions such as Simpson’s of the meaning of male bonding between buddies occur in a context inflected by a different episteme than that of the 1970s and early 1980s, which saw the appearance of the early feminist criticism of Molly Haskell and Joan Mellen and the first histories of gays in film by Parker Tyler and Vito Russo. Emanuel Levy describes the advent of buddy films depicting “[m]ale friendships , with their robust macho romanticism. . . . A spate of male buddy movies was produced in the 1970s, as a backlash against the Women’s Movement. According to Molly Haskell, the emotional intensity of these films exists between the men; feminism gave filmmakers the freedom to drop the token women from the narrative altogether.”3 Obviously, Leslie Fiedler provided a major impetus for arguments about homoerotic subtexts in “buddy” relationships in films. His earlier reading of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn posited a subtextual homoerotic relationship between Huck and Jim and other figures in American literature.4 Haskell acknowledges him as she explores how buddy films and relationships confirm the authority of male hegemony: [T]he buddy system that Fiedler uncovers in literature with obsessive (and depressing) regularity is just as present in American film. Once the backbone of the genre film, the male friendship has become, in recent womanless melodramas … the overt and exclusive“love interest”as...