Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television

6. From Batman to I Love You, Man: Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre

Chapter 6 From Batman to I Love You, Man Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre Ken Feil A recent issue of the Boston rag Stuff magazine features Scott Kearnan ’s story “Boston Bromance,” which examines the contemporary bromance as a hetero-male lifestyle, taste code, and media phenomenon , as well as its comedic proximity to queerness. Crowned by a photo of two dreamy dudes who are tastefully coiffed and clothed, slumbering tête-à-tête, “the ABC’s of platonic dude-dating” unspool through stories of Beantown’s “metrosexual” man-couples who “dress well,” “stay groomed,” “enjoy cooking,” “keep fit as gym buddies,” maintain long-standing, intimate relationships, and often cohabitate.1 Kearnan characterizes bromance as a comedy of incongruity, masquerade, and mistaken identity,2 an inherently funny sensibility arising at a time when the assimilation of queer perspectives in popular culture render the distinction between “straight” and “gay” evermore confusing. A dated, camp example concretizes the bromance ’s playful, comedic dance around the closet door: a photo of Batman and Robin from the 1966 series. Once the “wish dream of two homosexuals living together” (as Dr. Wertham so hysterically warned in 1954) and “high-camp folk heroes” (as Time magazine celebrated them in 1965),3 the dynamic duo, pictured in Kearnan’s article, pose akimbo, demonstrating “Bromance Rule #27: Always coordinate outfits when fighting crime.”4 Next to them, local heroes and bromantic pioneers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are pictured posing in tuxes, their Oscar statuettes’ heads touching; Kearnan not only acknowledges the queer connotations here but also factors them 166 Ken Feil into defining “bromance”: “Inevitable ‘Are they or aren’t they?’ ribbing from late-night talk show hosts was quick to follow, but Affleck and Damon . . . were always good sports, owning the jokes instead of getting defensive. (That’s hallmark of modern bromance: smiling self-awareness, amused acknowledgment, and tongue-in-cheek selflabeling .)”5 Just as quickly as bromance invokes the campy, queer connotations of male intimacy combined with self-conscious stylishness , it subsequently negates actual queer desire. Consider Kearnan ’s definition of the bromantic “man-crush”: “a heterosexual (seriously !) appreciation for another dude, socially acceptable as a ‘free pass’ for fawning and often reserved for a celebrity of unattainable stature.”6 In theory, bromance is comically queer, but in practice, its adherents assert, bromance remains “(seriously!)” hetero. Bromance is rooted in a lineage of sensibilities attributed to heterosexual men during time periods when queer culture was widely perceived as impacting popular taste: in the 1960s, “stoop,” the heterosexual, implicitly male taste for “low” culture; and in the 1990s, “straight camp,” pretty much the same as stoop. These sensibilities comically invoked their proximity to gay taste in order to deny it and, by extension, belied any hint of queerness creeping into red-blooded American masculinity.7 The similarities and differences among these generations of hetero-male sensibilities enable a historical understanding of bromance as a lifestyle, taste code, and comedic film cycle, along with the anxieties, pleasures, and power struggles underpinning it.8 Two principles forwarded by Pierre Bourdieu apply to all three sensibilities : that lifestyle and taste remain discursively intertwined, and that taste operates through “negation”—“disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘sick-making’) of the tastes of others.”9 “Aversion to different lifestyles,” Bourdieu explains, drives “aesthetic intolerance ,” and, likewise, disgust toward particular taste codes coincides with repugnance toward other lifestyles.10 Stoop and straight camp devalued gay taste’s self-conscious style and gender-bending as inextricably linked to a homosexual lifestyle, but the metrosexual bromance invests gay taste with value—in Bourdieu’s words, “conferring aesthetic status on objects or ways of representing them which are excluded by the dominant aesthetic of the time.”11 Attributing “aesthetic status” to the male body as a vehicle to attract and deliver 167 Queer Taste, Vulgarity, and the Bromance as Sensibility and Film Genre homosocial affection,12 metrosexual bromance embraces the gay sensibility that stoop and straight camp outright refused, a gesture that reinforces the incongruous proximity of hetero and homo. “Coordinating outfits,” staying groomed, fit, and having “man-crushes” provide vehicles to express hetero-masculine affection, the queerness of which renders the scene of metrosexual, hetero-male bonding funny. The metrosexual bromantic relationship materializes as a comedy of incongruity that juxtaposes and approximates heterosexual masculinity with gay taste and the image of a feminized lifestyle of...