Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television ed. by Michael DeAngelis

From its beginnings in 1990s skater culture, the term “bromance” has been increasingly used in the popular press to describe a loving, non-sexual relationship between two (typically heterosexual) men. Within media culture, the portmanteau has been used to describe close celebrity friendships (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are perhaps the first to come to mind) and different male characters’ relationships in films and television shows like Humpday (2009), I Love You, Man (2009), and Scrubs (2001–10). The term has entered academic film and television studies over the past few years in the form of conference panels and journal articles, but Michael DeAngelis’s Reading the Bromance provides the first book-length study of the topic. As the author of the first book to investigate the bromance in film and television, DeAngelis is left with the difficult task of both defining and surveying the most well-known interpretations of the field, as well as questioning and expanding it simultaneously. It is a task that DeAngelis certainly achieves, as he weaves these various essays together to form this collection about how the relationships between twenty-first-century men are represented on film and television.

DeAngelis’s introduction provides a thorough and diverse approach to the topic by examining bromances across different areas of American culture and detailing a sociohistorical trajectory that explains why the bromance is occurring at this place and time. While focusing on how film and television represents the bromance, DeAngelis broadens his discussion to include “nonnarrative arenas as politics, sports, and sports fandom” (13). Using examples from these areas, DeAngelis identifies a fundamental paradox about the bromance: it can be construed as gay but actively denies the presence of any homosexuality, which renders it as a queer heterosexual masculinity. It is this paradox that underscores the essays in this collection and becomes the theme behind the book’s main questions. How should media scholars consider and evaluate the presentation of this type of queer heterosexual masculinity? What happens when the bromance does or threatens to become sexual (as in Y tu mamá también [2001] or Humpday)? What are the various social, cultural, and historical reasons for its existence? As DeAngelis observes, the cultural shift presented by the queer heterosexual masculinity found in the bromance “has undoubtedly signaled a broader acceptance of nonheteronormative cultural expressions as well as the prospect of a same-sex intimacy that transcends matters of sexual orientation” (9). To analyze the bromance genre, DeAngelis separates the collection into three parts, each utilizing a different approach: first, a “prehistory” that traces the roots of the bromance by reinterpreting earlier films or genres through the bromance discourse; second, detailed analyses of contemporary film bromances; and third, presentations of the bromance on television.

The opening section establishes the various origins of the bromance genre, with the author of each chapter concentrating his or her analysis on a different era. Jenna Weinman begins by comparing and contrasting rom-coms from the 1950s and 1960s with contemporary “brom-coms.” She finds that both genres privilege white, heteronormative, middle-class values such as marriage and fatherhood. They are built around the male protagonist’s “strained trajectory into proper adulthood” by keeping the narrative focus on “the immature male [and] his homosocial bonds” (31). As a result, both genres maintain a shift from a queer space of the homosocial bromance into the heteronormativity of marriage. Hilary Radner continues the rereading of older films by analyzing Grumpy Old Men (1993) as a bromance. She constructs her interpretation of the bromance from global sociological theorists like Michael Kimmel (particularly his read of American manhood from ages sixteen to twenty-six as “Guyland”) and David Hansen-Miller and Rosalind Gill (and their consideration of British “lad culture”). This provides an important grounding for her research, and her analysis of Grumpy Old Men expands the bromance discourse from its traditional focus on male-male relationships among teens and emerging adults...