Masculine interests : homoerotics in Hollywood films / Robert Lang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lang, Robert, 1957-

Series:

Film and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Homosexuality in motion pictures.

Men in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xii, 381 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2002]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Masculine interests

Oedipus in Africa : The lion king

To "have known ecstasy" : hunting men in The most dangerous game

Friendship and its discontents : The outlaw

Looking for the "great whatsit" : Kiss me deadly and film noir

Midnight cowboy's backstory

Innerspace : a spectacular voyage to the heart of identity

Batman and Robin : a family romance

My own private Idaho and the new new queer road movies

"The things we think and do not say" : Jerry Maguire and the business of personal relationships.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [353]-368) and index.

ISBN:

0231113005

0231113013

OCLC:

49250040