Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television

Introduction

Introduction Michael DeAngelis August 2011 marked the release of a new iPhone and Android app designed for straight males in major metropolitan areas who were searching for opportunities to connect, meet, and hang out with other straight men. App users could develop personal files in which they indicated common interests to be shared with potential contacts . According to Kira M. Newman, Tech Cocktail app co-developer Jeffrey Canty suggests that the app “was partly inspired by his own experience: he had endured a breakup, a death in the family, and a move to a new city, and he found himself ten pounds over his target weight but without a workout buddy to motivate him.”1 The use of “Bromance” as the name of this convenient app marks the ubiquity of a term that has been circulating in popular cultural discourse since the middle of this century’s first decade. Skateboard magazine editor David Carnie is often credited with having originated the term in the 1990s,2 but “bromance” did not begin to appear regularly in American media until 2005, around the time of the release of Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. “Bromance” has come to denote an emotionally intense bond between presumably straight males who demonstrate an openness to intimacy that they neither regard, acknowledge, avow, nor express sexually, and this definition already begins to point to some of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the phenomenon: bromance involves something that must happen (the demonstration of intimacy itself) on the condition that other things not happen (the avowal or expression of sexual desire between straight males). Accordingly , as the phenomenon is presented to audiences, bromance depends upon an elegant yet complex play with what popular media 2 Introduction culture has consistently posited as the anticipated and desired outcome of intensifying interpersonal intimacy in heterosexual relationships . In popular relationship discourse, the progression from “just friends” to “lovers” has become such a naturalized “given” in culture that its absence is seen as either a mark of failure (“What prevented the couple from taking it to the ‘next level’?”) or the cause for sorrow or regret (“If only it had happened”). Bromance’s manipulation of this progression is evident in many of the phenomenon’s earliest manifestations in which the perception of the “bromance”-defined relationship as inherently asexual was not always assumed to be a “given” by those who applied the descriptive term to other samesex pairs—or even sometimes by the bromancers themselves. For example, when popular media reports about the close relationship between the “suddenly single” Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConaughey began to develop into rumors that the men were gay, the media introduced the term “bromance” in an attempt to secure the nonsexual nature of their relationship, providing both the celebrities and the media with a means of dispelling sexual intimacy while also highlighting the “innocence” of the male-male bond. “I mean, we all have buds,” Armstrong explained, “we all take guy trips, but you take something very normal and you put in a magazine, and people start talking.”3 It was not long before the term “bromance” captured widespread public attention through its suggestion of an edgy and risky version of same-sex social intimacy, playing with sexual distinctions between “is gay/is not gay” that remain so ripe for gossip and scandal. The phenomenon rapidly spread across media boundaries, and by 2006 the term was already being applied to relationships between characters of several dynamic duos on network and cable television, including Alan Shore (James Spader) and William Shatner (Denny Crane) in Boston Legal, Drs. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) and Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) in House, and Drs. Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) in Nip/Tuck.4 In 2008 MTV released the short-lived reality television series Bromance, in which a group of men competed for the chance to become host Brody Jenner’s Number 1 Bro, with weekly elimination ceremonies held in a communal hot tub. 3 Introduction Even the arena of professional sports has not been exempt from the bromance phenomenon. The year 2008 witnessed the rise of the “Tom Brady Man Crush,” with (presumably) straight male football fans blurring the lines between identification and desire in expressed fantasies of hanging out with the handsome and charismatic New England Patriots quarterback. The Brady bromance would soon find additional outlets of expression through YouTube videos and...