Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television

1. Second Bananas and Gay Chicken: Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now

Chapter 1 Second Bananas and Gay Chicken: Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now Jenna Weinman After a frenzied marital dispute over accusations of infidelity, George finds himself soaking wet, pajama-clad, and locked out of his home. Still clutching the bottle of champagne that had been intended for a romantic evening with his wife, George offers it to his next-door neighbor and friend, Arnold, in exchange for a place to crash. Conveniently , Arnold’s wife and kids are out of town, leaving the sizable suburban home to the two temporary bachelor-husbands. While Arnold is delighted by the unexpected visit, the soggy and besmirched George darts up the stairs, heads straight into the master bedroom, and plops himself down at the foot of the rumpled bed. As George begrudgingly explains his domestic dispute, Arnold offers his only clean nightshirt and the two men begin to disrobe. In the foreground, George casts off his wet shirt, exposing his muscular torso as he squeezes himself into Arnold’s tiny garment, which is at least two sizes too small. In the background, the comparatively puny Arnold removes his outer robe, wedges the champagne bottle between his legs, and excitedly pops the cork as George approaches him, the borrowed shirt still halfway up his back. George first suggests that he sleep in the kids’ bedroom, but because it is being repainted, Arnold insists they have no choice but to share the master bedroom. Without pausing to consider the alternatives such a spacious home could afford, George agrees. In between heavy swigs of champagne, Arnold assists George in pulling the shirt down over his bulk and offers his wife’s side of the bed. As they nestle into their respective sides, more swigs of Jenna Weinman 30 champagne and quips about their wives temper their bickering about one another’s cold feet and jagged toenails. The next morning, however , the men appear soundly asleep. An empty champagne bottle and midnight snack remnants litter the nightstand; George’s ample body is haphazardly sprawled across the mattress; and though Arnold is left pillowless, blanketless, and contorted into a fetal position, he nonetheless appears rather content curled up beside his dear friend. In a twenty-first-century context, the above description likely reads as an extraction from any number of contemporary comedies directed or produced by Judd Apatow, which contain no shortage of insobriety, domestic disputes, and, most of all, man-love. However, this delightful sleepover scene between two married men belongs to the 1964 comedy Send Me No Flowers—the final installment in a trilogy of dizzying sex comedies starring Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, and Doris Day. As a phenomenon now enthusiastically and pervasively labeled “bromance,” the comedic treatment of queer antics between purportedly straight men is often conceptualized as unique to twenty-first-century romantic comedy, and, increasingly, popular culture more generally. However, queer-straight male pairings between a fetching male lead and a neurotic sidekick, also known as a “second banana” (e.g., Hudson and Randall, respectively), were Send Me No Flowers (1964), directed by norman Jewison, Universal pictures. Bromancing the Rom-Com in the Fifties and Now 31 a prevalent, albeit nameless, narrative fixture in the Hollywood sex comedy, a fairly short-lived cycle of the romantic comedy that thrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although Send Me No Flowers represents a particular, suburban variation within the mid-century sex comedy cycle, many sex comedies worked to fashion sex and marriage from the vexing struggles between dapper, free-loving playboys and prudish career women who were afforded little currency in the period’s sexual economy besides their virtue—or a carefully guarded semblance thereof. The couple’s long-awaited sexual union, then, was made possible by the bachelor’s last-minute resignation to marriage, breadwinning, and, sometimes, imminent fatherhood. Although a half century or so has passed since the sex comedy’s heyday, many of its instabilities, excesses, and complaints curiously anticipate the dominant mode of the romantic comedy in the twenty-first century: the millennial “brom-com.” The two cycles’ shared conventions most expressively coalesce around the narrative privileging of the immature male, his homosocial bonds, and his strained trajectory into proper adulthood—the markers of which have ostensibly remained the same despite decades of irrevocable change, though their exact sequence has become less important. As a romantic/raunch comedy hybrid, the brom-com slathers...