Masculine interests
Subtitle: homoerotics in Hollywood films
By: Robert Lang.
Series: Film and culture
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 381
Subjects: Homosexuality in motion pictures.; Men in motion pictures.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [353]-368) and index.
Table of contents: title: Masculine interests; title: Oedipus in Africa : The lion king; title: To "have known ecstasy" : hunting men in The most dangerous game; title: Friendship and its discontents : The outlaw; title: Looking for the "great whatsit" : Kiss me deadly and film noir; title: Midnight cowboy's backstory; title: Innerspace; title: Batman and Robin; title: My own private Idaho and the new new queer road movies; title: "The things we think and do not say" : Jerry Maguire and the business of personal relationships.