Masculine Interests

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.

Until Masculine Interests not much had been written about men "as men" in the cinema. Now Robert Lang considers how Hollywood articulates the eroticism that is intrinsic to identification between men. He considers masculinity in social and psychoanalytic terms, maintaining that a major function of the movies is to define different types of masculinity, and to either valorize or criticize these forms. Focusing on several films—primarily The Lion King, The Most Dangerous Game, The Outlaw, Kiss Me Deadly, Midnight Cowboy, Innerspace, My Own Private Idaho, the Batman series, and Jerry Maguire—Lang questions the way in which American culture distinguishes between homosexual and nonhomosexual forms of male bonding. In arguing for a much more complex recognition of the homosocial continuum, he contends that queer sexuality is far more present in American cinema than is usually acknowledged.

Robert Lang is associate professor of cinema at the University of Hartford. He is the author of American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli, and editor of The Birth of a Nation. He is currently a Fulbright scholar at the University of Tunis.

Articulates the big screen's dedication to eroticism between men, especially in movies that now belong to the film canon.