Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film
Robert Lang considers how Hollywood articulates the eroticism that is intrinsic to identification between men. He considers masculinity in social and psychoanalytic terms, arguing that it is an ideological-generic construction and that a major function of the movies is to define different types of masculinity, and to either valorize or criticize these forms. Focusing on nine films (The Lion King, The Most Dangerous Game, The Outlaw, Kiss Me Deadly, Midnight Cowboy, Innerspace, Batman and...
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Until Masculine Interests not much had been written about men "as men" in the cinema. Using nine Hollywood genre films from 1932 to the late 1990s, Lang shows how Hollywood's chief function to define, codify, valorize and critique varieties of masculinity reveals contradictions with its surface norms of heterosexual masculinity, particularly in those films that cover the troubled terrain of male-male relationships. Despite Hollywood's normative narrative conventions, these films involve a spectrum of primary bonds among men, sexual and nonsexual, conscious and unconscious. Lang questions the way our culture distinguishes between homosexuality and non-homosexual forms of male bonding, and argues for a more complex notion of a homosocial continuum.
Preface1Masculine Interests12Oedipus in Africa: The Lion King143To "Have Known Ecstasy": Hunting Men in The Most Dangerous Game524Friendship and Its Discontents: The Outlaw805Looking for the "Great Whatsit": Kiss Me Deadly and Film Noir1216Midnight Cowboy's Backstory1407Innerspace: A Spectacular Voyage to the Heart of Identity1808Batman and Robin: A Family Romance2069My Own Private Idaho and the New Queer Road Movies24310"The Things We Think and Do Not Say": Jerry Maguire and the Business of Personal Relationships263Concerning Happiness: An Afterword303Notes307Bibliography353Index369
\ Gay & Lesbian ReviewArticulates the big screen's dedication to eroticism between men, especially in movies that now belong to the film canon.\ \ \
