For months, I couldn’t bear the word “bromance” without rolling my eyes in disgust. Articles like this one were some of the offenders. Why was I so put off by men having guy time with their buds?
It took me some time to sort all this out, but I finally did - at the movies.
Male-oriented comedies have been everywhere in recent years. And since I love movies, I’ve seen a lot of them. There’s a question of life imitating art or art imitating life that I won’t delve into too much, but film is often a high-profile participant in cultural discourse. And what we’re seeing in these stories are men, their problems, and their friendships, all couched in some variation of the of men-behaving-badly ethos: the bromance, once an innocent enough expression of male bonding and friendship, has gained such traction in our culture as to become a prescriber of and apologist for bad behavior. This aspect of the bromance trend bothered me so much because these behaviors ultimately hurt women, though in recent films that hurt has rarely been shown, let alone examined.
Earlier slacker movies (Kevin Smith’s work, et. al.) portrayed the impotence and ineptitude, sometimes painfully paralyzing, experienced and to some extent embraced by a certain kind of person, often middle-class white men. In time, of course, these male slacker movies melded with raunch comedies (anything from Judd Apatow), and the failures of these men were conveyed through crass humor and gross-out hilarity.
For me, the characters in Knocked Up illustrate the bromance problem the best and most poignantly. (I really like this film, in part because it does feature women dealing with their partners‘ bromance behavior.) Seth Rogen plays a schlub who with his loser friends is banking on an ill-conceived going-nowhere website (typical) while Katherine Heigl’s character is successful, smart, and hot (of course). Watching Seth Rogen screw around with his bros, I thought, I’m not sure at what age one should be labeled Too Old for This Stuff (at least regularly and recurring), but he qualified.
Rogan’s character does manage, by the end of the movie, to claw his way out of the craphole life he’d made for himself. He proves himself to be the funny, sweet, and kind man we knew was in there somewhere because he pops up from time to time before the ending.
That’s actually the problem with the slacker dude: on some level they’re nice guys, which is why we like them and root for them in the first place; but they tend to do some downright foolish, inconsiderate, and immature stuff. And that’s a major issue when we want a happy ending.
What message does it send that a guy spends half the movie jerking around, usually with his buddies, and still manages to get the girl in the end? In a recent profile in The New Yorker, Anna Faris talks candidly about the role of women in comedy. She describes what a jerk the Luke Wilson character is to hers in My Super Ex-Girlfriend and says, “These roles are destroying a generation of boys, who think we’ll forgive any kind of assholey behavior.”
And the behavior in more recent films has gone beyond careless slacker to no-questions assholey. The raunch continues to be a major element, but the men aren’t losers who can’t get a purchase on adult life, whose bad behavior might be explained away by their being stuck in a state of arrested development. Now, they’re just jerks. Some are actually successful in their careers, if not in their romantic lives (The Hangover, Due Date). In these raunch comedies, male bonding is the goal, women are periphery, and as long as the bromance survives the movie intact, the men seem happy. What the women gain or lose by being with these guys who prioritize them last is never shown.
Now Bridesmaids has come along. Even though we were told women are now getting in on the raunch comedy, I questioned whether allowing women to be crass and disgusting too would solve any of the larger inequalities that are brought into relief by male slacker/raunch comedies. Are women in their movies going to be selfish and inconsiderate, too? Will they treat others, particularly husbands and boyfriends, like crap and be forgiven in the end? In Bridesmaids, the answer is yes, but this film does more than just plop a woman and her friends into stereotypically male territory. Bridesmaids is refreshingly women-centered, but there is a character straight from a bromance: Kristen Wiig’s non-boyfriend, played by Jon Hamm. Not only is the movie not about him and his buds (they aren’t even seen), but also he gets what he deserves when she ditches him. A creep who acts like a jerk and doesn’t get the hot girl at the end: that alone made me love this movie.
And the relationship between Wiig’s character and the nice guy she does end up with also made me realize something else: nice guys do exist. After years of movies about men being jerks, it was a relief to see a portrayal of masculinity that doesn’t mean acting like an adolescent well into adulthood.
The success of Bridesmaids has given me a good feeling about the death of the bromance, and just in time, too: we’re now elevating male binge drinking and acting the fool to an art form. I’m hoping that women will see Bridesmaids and realize that men don’t have to act this way. More importantly, I hope men see it and realize that, too.
The Basement Boys
ReplyDeleteThe making of modern immaturity.
Current economic hardships have had what is called in constitutional law a "disparate impact": The crisis has not afflicted everyone equally. Although women are a majority of the workforce, perhaps as many as 80 percent of jobs lost were held by men. This injury to men is particularly unfortunate because it may exacerbate, and be exacerbated by, a culture of immaturity among the many young men who are reluctant to grow up.
Increasingly, they are defecting from the meritocracy. Women now receive almost 58 percent of bachelor's degrees. This is why many colleges admit men with qualifications inferior to those of women applicants—which is one reason men have higher dropout rates. The Pew Research Center reports that 28 percent of wives between ages 30 and 44 have more education than their husbands, whereas only 19 percent of husbands in the same age group have more education than their wives. Twenty-three percent of men with some college education earn less than their wives. In law, medical, and doctoral programs, women are majorities or, if trends continue, will be.
In 1956, the median age of men marrying was 22.5. But between 1980 and 2004, the percentage of men reaching age 40 without marrying increased from 6 to 16.5. A recent study found that 55 percent of men 18 to 24 are living in their parents' homes, as are 13 percent of men 25 to 34, compared to 8 percent of women.
What do you think about this theory? I'm tired of men with the Peter Pan syndrome!-Wendy
This is fantastic! I'm not normally a George Will fan, but this is great...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/07/the-basement-boys.html