Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film

by Robert Lang

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231113007
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/02/2002
Series:	Film and Culture Series
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1440L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Masculine Interests
2. Oedipus in Africa: The Lion King
3. To "Have Known Ecstasy": Hunting Men in The Most Dangerous Game
4, Friendship and Its Discontents: The Outlaw
5. Looking for the "Great Whatsit": Kiss Me Deadly and Film Noir
6. Midnight Cowboy's Backstory
7. Innerspace: A Spectacular Voyage to the Heart of Identity
8. Batman and Robin: A Family Romance
9. My Own Private Idaho and the New Queer Road Movies
10. "The Things We Think and Do Not Say": Jerry Maguire and the Business of Personal Relationships
Concerning Happiness: An Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Thomas Waugh

Masculine Interests is a queer road movie through seventy years of Hollywood constructions of maleness. This long awaited book on a quirky canon of guy movies from Tarzan the Ape Man to Being John Malkovich challenges, convinces, and breaks through. Robert Lang marshals theorists from Freud to Judith Butler for the task, lucidly and with an intense personal investment, without betraying the pleasure, thegrain and the truth of what's on the screen.

— Thomas Waugh, author of Hard to Imagine

Peter Lehman

Lang subtly analyzes the manner in which movies generally attempt to offer a normative account of sexuality while insightfully stressing the rich potential that some offer for opposing this effort to marginalize alternative sexualities. The argument is timely and important.

— Peter Lehman, Arizona State University

Editorial Reviews

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

Gay & Lesbian Review