Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy: Gender as Genre 9781136222900, 1136222901

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy: Gender and/as Genre
2 I Love You, Man: Gender Genre Instability in the Bromance
3 The Emergence of the Anxious Romance: Mumblecore, Neorealism, and Gender Play
4 Greenberg: The Anxious Romance and the Future(s) of the Romantic Comedy
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy: Gender as Genre addresses the perceived crisis in the current state of the mainstream American romantic comedy in terms of the growing obsolescence of traditional understandings of masculine identity. Combining performative theories of gender and genre, Alberti proposes understanding gender as genre in the contemporary romantic comedy, an approach that connects the romantic comedy to larger cultural concerns about the “end of men.” Specifically, Alberti sees this crisis as part of a process of generic experimentation that includes both gender and narrative, one that challenges traditional binary constructions of gender performance based on masculine centrality. Through close readings of mainstream bromances and independent mumblecore movies, Alberti traces the development of what he calls the “anxious romance,” a style of romantic comedy embracing more egalitarian and playful genres of masculinity. John Alberti is Professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies at Northern Kentucky University.

Routledge Advances in Film Studies

1 Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema Homeless at Home Inga Scharf 2 Lesbianism, Cinema, Space The Sexual Life of Apartments Lee Wallace 3 Post-War Italian Cinema American Intervention, Vatican Interests Daniela Treveri Gennari 4 Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America Edited by Victoria Ruétalo and Dolores Tierney 5 Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear Julian Hanich 6 Cinema, Memory, Modernity The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema Russell J. A. Kilbourn

9 Neoliberalism and Global Cinema Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique Edited by Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner 10 Korea’s Occupied Cinemas, 1893–1948 The Untold History of the Film Industry Brian Yecies with Ae-Gyung Shim 11 Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas The Reel Asian Exchange Edited by Philippa Gates and Lisa Funnell 12 Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas Alka Kurian 13 Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal Public Daydreams Anna Siomopoulos 14 Theorizing Film Acting Edited by Aaron Taylor

7 Distributing Silent Film Serials Local Practices, Changing Forms, Cultural Transformation Rudmer Canjels

15 Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Italy Ora Gelley

8 The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema Raz Yosef

16 Postwar Renoir Film and the Memory of Violence Colin Davis

17 Cinema and Inter-American Relations Tracking Transnational Affect Adrián Pérez Melgosa

22 Cinema as Weather Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change Kristi McKim

18 European Civil War Films Memory, Conflict, and Nostalgia Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou

23 Landscape and Memory in PostFascist Italian Film Cinema Year Zero Giuliana Minghelli

19 The Aesthetics of Antifascism Radical Projection Jennifer Lynde Barker 20 The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film Plus Ultra Pluralism Matthew J. Marr 21 Cinema and Language Loss Displacement, Visuality and the Filmic Image Tijana Mamula

24 Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy Gender as Genre John Alberti

This page intentionally left blank

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy Gender as Genre John Alberti

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of John Alberti to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alberti, John. Masculinity in the contemporary romantic comedy : gender as genre / by John Alberti. pages cm. — (Routledge advances in film studies ; 24) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Romantic comedy films—United States x History and criticism. 2. Masculinity in motion pictures. I. Title. PN1995.9.C55A35 2013 791.43′617—dc23 2012048640 ISBN: 978-0-415-63065-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-09746-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Kristin, my partner in romantic comedy

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy: Gender and/as Genre

xi

1

2 I Love You, Man: Gender Genre Instability in the Bromance

25

3 The Emergence of the Anxious Romance: Mumblecore, Neorealism, and Gender Play

44

4 Greenberg: The Anxious Romance and the Future(s) of the Romantic Comedy

75

Notes Bibliography Index

105 115 119

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by generous personal and institutional support. I am grateful to Northern Kentucky University (NKU) for the sabbatical leave that allowed me to begin initial work on this project. My colleagues at NKU could not have been more supportive, particularly my friend and department chair Dr. Jonathan Cullick, who is a tireless and enthusiastic advocate for the importance of faculty research and scholarship. Thanks also to my colleagues in cinema studies at NKU, especially Dr. Andrea Gazzaniga, who generously read a draft of the early version of chapter 1 and who alerted me to the court ruling of Judge Vaughn Walker, which plays such a useful role in my argument. I also want to recognize the students in my graduate course in romantic comedy, who helped me try out ideas and provided insights I otherwise would have missed. Outside of NKU, I also wish to thank Dr. Kelli Marshall, who likewise read a preliminary draft and provided keen advice to help me focus and organize my argument. At Routledge, I am indebted to Felisa Salvago-Keyes, the Routledge research editor for media and cultural studies, who has been nothing less than supportive and helpful, especially in shepherding the project through the initial readers’ reviews and revision process, including my decision to focus the book specifically on romantic comedy. The book is so much stronger as a result. As always, my deepest gratitude is saved for the love, support, and insight of my partner, Kristin Dietsche, and our daughter, Martha Dietsche-Alberti. This project is rooted in our mutual love of the romantic comedy. They are both keen cultural critics in their own rights, and if others find value in this study, it is mainly due to their influence.

This page intentionally left blank

1

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy Gender and/as Genre

In 2009, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis began her review of the critically panned but commercially successful romantic comedy The Ugly Truth (Robert Luketic, 2009) by observing, “That tap-tap-tapping sound you hear is another nail being driven into the coffin of the romantic comedy.”1 The review testifies how her critical disappointment with this specific romcom—one she sees as typical of other contemporary versions of the genre—tied in with a larger aesthetic and cultural crisis: the credulity of the genre itself. For if the romantic comedy is indeed dying, it is not just being killed by inept filmmaking; it would have to be because traditional genre expectations find themselves in increasing dissonance with larger cultural narratives about romance, love, sexuality, and gender, a dissonance that disrupts enough of our individual experiences of the genre to cause us to question the cultural efficacy and pleasure of the genre as a genre. Consider, for example, the following plot summary of another romantic comedy that appeared just two years before The Ugly Truth: A smart, attractive, ambitious, talented, and successful television entertainment reporter becomes pregnant after a drunken one night stand with an ill-kempt, unemployed, emotionally immature stoner and aspiring Internet pornographer. Not only does the reporter decide to carry the child to term, she embarks on a relationship with the sperm provider, finally inspiring him to find legal employment and attempt the responsibilities of parenting. Most movie goers will recognize that I am describing one of the new century’s most commercially successful and iconic Hollywood releases: Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007). My effort to defamiliarize this synopsis away from the style of the press release or the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) plot summary highlights the issue of gender in this movie in order to suggest a possible source for Dargis’s crisis over genre credulity, a logical paradox that strains the genre expectation of this movie, a paradox obvious to most viewers, critics, and even filmmakers and one that even adds to the aesthetic pleasure and power of Knocked Up. Put simply, would the character of

2

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

Alison (played by Katherine Heigl, who also stars in The Ugly Truth) ever consent to even a brief sexual liaison with the character of Ben (Seth Rogen), no matter how drunk or depressed? And would she really not terminate the pregnancy? Most incredible of all, would she then embark on a romance with a self-absorbed, emotionally stunted, and unhygienic character whose only redeeming “virtues” seem to be a relaxed attitude toward personal responsibility and a misogynist sense of humor? Credulity, of course, is more than just a simple matter of verisimilitude. When we say that a movie strains credulity, we refer less to whether the story does or does not fit empirical reality, but instead the various complex and evolving social codes and narratives that constitute our sense of social reality. Movie narratives do not exist outside and apart from these social codes and narratives; they are themselves constituent parts and cultural expressions of them. One particular set of social codes and discourses that we have created to organize, understand, discuss, debate, and manage cultural narratives themselves comprises the codes of genre, metacodes we most often apply to artistic narratives but that can extend beyond the realm of particular media into the larger social imagination. Genre and genre expectations play a crucial role in our sense of artistic credulity, beginning with our assessment, whether consciously or intuitively, of how well or effectively a given cinematic text meets those expectations. The more problematic we find the fit between our generic expectations and our reception experience of a cinematic narrative, the more we are led to what we might call metageneric awareness, an assessment of those generic expectations themselves that stems from how self-aware a text makes us of those expectations. It is just this metageneric awareness that Dargis wrestles with in her review, one she connects to her experience of The Ugly Truth, a movie she describes as “a cynical, clumsy, aptly titled attempt to cross the female-oriented romantic comedy with the male-oriented gross-out comedy” in the fashion of Knocked Up and the subgenre of “movies about funny, smutty but sincere man-boys puzzling their way through adult heterosexual relations,” movies where “the women aren’t romantic foils, much less equals: they’re either (nice) sluts or (nicer) wives, and essentially as mysterious and unknowable as the dark side of the moon.” As we will look at in more detail later, The Ugly Truth shares with Knocked Up an opposites-attract approach, pairing another attractive, successful, young woman in the media industry with, in Dargis’s vivid words from her review, “professional ape . . . who delivers loutish maxims on camera about the sexes that basically all boil down to this: Men have penises, and women should accommodate them any which way they can, preferably in push-up bras and remote-controlled vibrating panties.” That finally she “succumbs to his coarse ways, even adopting his crude language” derives for Dargis not from any internal narrative logic but from a kind of tired generic inertia, a rote follow-through of the rules of genre, or as Dargis puts it, “because, well, that’s what the public wants.” The genre (and the public,

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

3

or at least the filmmakers’ understanding of the public) demands that she succumbs, but Dargis isn’t buying it, and we return to the same questions I posed for Knocked Up: why, other than as the result of strict cultural mandates, would these women involve themselves with these men? The problem of the contemporary romantic comedy as a genre, I argue, is the problem of men as a genre; specifically, what use are men in the contemporary romantic comedy? In approaching this question, I draw on the parallels between gender theory and genre theory to understand the relationship between the crisis of genre in relation to the romantic comedy that Dargis describes and the cultural crisis surrounding the perceived obsolescence of traditional conceptions of masculinity. Drawing on performance-based versions of both gender and genre theory, I hope to demonstrate the interpretive usefulness of looking at gender through the lens of genre, of analyzing the crisis of masculinity in the movies as part of the evolution and eventual obsolescence of various genres of gender. My thesis suggests that the evolution of the genres of masculinity in the contemporary romantic comedy can be read as a form of growing pains, of the ongoing pressure to develop both narrative and gender genre conventions that connect with the larger cultural struggle involved in the development of a more egalitarian understanding of gender identity and relationships in the United States. In the rest of this chapter, I will briefly explore the larger cultural meme of the obsolescence of masculinity in terms of the difference between an essentialist understanding of gender—one that conflates the obsolescence of certain expressions of masculinity with the obsolescence of people identified as men—and a more performative approach to gender, one that views these various expressions of masculinity in terms of how well they serve cultural and social structures based on a strictly binary gender hierarchy. These performative expressions of gender I identify as genres of masculinity, and the next section of the chapter defines the theory of gender as genre in more detail by drawing on performance-based theories of gender and genre—in particular, those by the gender theorists Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam and the cinema genre theorist Rick Altman—to emphasize the radically dynamic, evolving, and playful status of all systems of social and cultural categorization. In terms of romantic comedy, this study identifies the growing pains that define the current crisis in romantic comedy as an uneasy but productive tension between the poles of neorealism and parody, between cinematic expressions of gender genre and narrative genre that stake a claim for the congruence between artistic representation and cultural reality and movies that aim for the comic exaggeration of gender and narrative stereotypes. In general terms, these two approaches are associated in the current cinematic environment with indie film on the one hand (neorealism) and the mainstream Hollywood film (parody) on the other. What both approaches depend on, however, is the idea and ideal of culturally stable expressions of gender performance, stable enough to allow

4

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

audiences to experience these two approaches as either realistic or parodic. Contemporary romcoms of all kinds oscillate between generic unconsciousness and self-consciousness, between wish-fulfillment narratives that try to disguise their generic machinery and self-conscious metanarratives that foreground that machinery, just as their genres of gender—especially masculine gender—swing between the reactionary and the progressive. These ambiguous and even contradictory genres of gender and narrative performance reveal the strains of constructing new genres of masculine identity that escape the ideology of male centrality and revising the conventions of the romantic comedy that have long depended on these obsolete performances of masculinity. It is just this sense of cultural strain that leads an astute critic like Dargis to experience a movie such as The Ugly Truth not only as a successful or unsuccessful expression of the romcom as genre but also as a kind of cultural harbinger, one signaling the end of the genre as a whole. The final section of the chapter compares The Ugly Truth with the equally contemporary but much more critically successful teen romcom Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010) to show how this cultural destabilization of traditional genres of cinematic masculinity can lead either to generic crisis or generic revision and renewal. The ambiguous persona of the actor Gerard Butler, the male lead of The Ugly Truth, serves as a useful model of the unsettled and even contradictory genres of masculine identity that define the contemporary romcom. A movie star whose celebrity is paradoxically defined by a lack of definition, Butler has become both a mainstay of the contemporary romantic comedy as well as a central target for critics who despair of the genre. Using the concept of gender minstrelsy, a version of the historic instability between realism and parody, I argue that the conflicting star persona(s) of Butler illustrate the increasing obsolescence of those genres of masculine performance that insist on the cultural centrality of masculinity. The reluctance of The Ugly Truth to either fully embrace or abandon these obsolete genres creates the generic incoherence to which Dargis responds. Easy A, on the other hand, exploits the instability of gender and narrative genres to feature adolescent characters who play with the genres of gender in ways that suggest new models for the development of both the romcom as narrative genre and for the genres of gender on which it depends. The remaining chapters trace how the instability of the genres of cinematic masculinity manifest themselves in terms of a radically ambiguous relationship between neorealism and parody in the contemporary romantic comedy, resulting in the emergence of an improvisatory form I call the anxious romance. Chapter 2, “I Love You, Man: Gender Genre Instability in the Bromance,” focuses on the ongoing reconstruction of gender identities within the narrative framework of the ostensibly parodic male-centered romantic comedy known as the bromance. Focusing in particular on Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) and Knocked Up (2007), as well as related films in the bromance movie cycle such as I Love You, Man (John Hamburg, 2009) and Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007), the chapter argues that while

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

5

these movies respond to the same cultural anxieties over the confused, even contradictory genres of masculinity that (fail to) define the masculine persona of Gerard Butler in The Ugly Truth, they make this anxiety more directly the focal point of their narrative conflicts. Functioning as outrageous parodies and comic exaggerations of the genres of contemporary cinematic masculinity, bromances at the same time make claims for truthfulness and honesty, a potential contradiction that accounts for the marked critical ambivalence over these movies. Alternating between endorsing and ridiculing the misogynist and homophobic gender representations that define gender minstrelsy, the bromance reads as both a reactionary and a progressive response to the obsolescence of genders of masculine centrality as well as the heteronormative structure of the narrative genre of the romantic comedy. Chapter 3, “The Emergence of the Anxious Romance: Mumblecore, Neorealism, and Gender Play,” traces a parallel line of gender and narrative genre evolution within the neorealist indie movies of the early 2000s loosely and sometimes pejoratively described as mumblecore. While the contemporary indie movie has become something of a genre all its own, the ultralow budgets and semiguerilla filmmaking style of mumblecore created greater freedom to experiment not only with constructions of gender but also with highly conventionalized narrative genres such as the romantic comedy. In this way, mumblecore movies participate both in the tradition of the independent auteur John Cassavetes as well as the revisionist romcoms of the 1970s—most famously, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977)—that Frank Krutnik famously labeled “nervous romances,” resulting in the emergence of what I call the anxious romance, a version of the romantic comedy that explores not only whether the genre is able to adapt to changing social ideas about gender roles but also the radical inescapability of genre, both in terms of narrative and gender. The chapter focuses on how two representative mumblecore movies— Aaron Katz’s Dance Party, USA (2006) and Lynn Shelton’s Humpday (2009)—deploy the signifiers of indie neorealism (handheld camera, improvisational acting, and the use of the emotionally subdued and digressive dialogue that gave the movement its name) while simultaneously foregrounding the gender performativity and minstrelsy inherent in all cinematic narratives. Katz’s Dance Party, USA, a take on the teen coming-of-age romantic comedy, dramatizes how the main character of Gus begins to chafe against the constraints of the dominant misogynist genres of masculine performance he and his friends inhabit. In his take on the teen comedy, however, Katz’s goal is neither easy parody nor the neorealist expression of “authentic” adolescent psychology. Neither the characters within the movie nor the filmmakers themselves can ever transcend genre. Instead, the more relevant point is the ongoing negotiation and revisioning of genres, both of narrative and gender. Shelton’s Humpday similarly takes a high-concept plot structure more commonly associated with the mainstream bromance—two longtime but

6

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

recently estranged “straight” male friends who challenge themselves to win a local adult movie competition by making and starring in a gay porn movie— to create a subtle exploration of performativity in relation to genres of gender and sexual identity. Again, the point of this anxious romance is not to parody the high-concept approach to genre in the name of a greater realism, but the understanding that genres of gender expression are all equally high concept and equally inescapable. There is no “outside” of genre, because the structures of genre are precisely what allow for meaning and coherence. The final chapter, “Greenberg: The Anxious Romance and the Future(s) of the Romantic Comedy,” uses Noah Baumbach’s 2010 movie as a case study of a contemporary anxious romance that takes on the gender genre instability and anxiety over masculine obsolescence that mark the mainstream contemporary romcom and both its bromance and mumblecore variations. Easy A, a movie clearly marketed as a mainstream teen romcom, uses its generic status to provide a happy ending that forestalls questions of marriage and the long-term functionality of heteronormativity in relation to its adolescent characters. The at once indie and mainstream Greenberg more clearly engages these larger structural generic questions in terms of two adult characters, albeit from different generations, who each face a crisis concerning the performance of “adult” gender identities. In its refusal to provide definitive closure, Greenberg creates a utopian space out of the indeterminacy of gender and narrative genres, a space that requires viewers to explore whether that “tap-tap-tapping sound” is a death knell or the opening of a new door of generic possibility.

THE OBSOLESCENCE OF MEN In August 2010, Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a landmark ruling that declared unconstitutional California’s notorious Proposition 8, the referendum against allowing gays and lesbians to legally marry. Walker based his ruling in large part on the inability of the Proposition 8 defenders to offer compelling empirical evidence for the social benefit of preventing same-sex marriages. On page 113 of his ruling, Judge Walker neatly summarizes his argument with the statement: The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding samesex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. . . . Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.2 “That time has passed.” With these four simple words, Walker confidently asserts as self-evident social fact what has been a central point of feminist

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

7

theoretical and activist struggle for decades.3 Implicit within his ruling is the acceptance of some key points of a broad theoretical consensus of poststructuralist feminist and queer theory, such as the social construction of gender; the connections linking gender, identity, sexuality, and social power; and the radical historical and cultural contingency/specificity of gender formation.4 The larger social implications of his opinion are even more profound, for if the time when “genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and marriage” has “passed,” then the question arises: why do we need genders at all? What use are they? What need do they fulfill? At the time, Judge Walker’s reasoned legal opinion appeared, a cultural meme had already developed in the mass media centered around the idea of the obsolescence of gender, specifically, the obsolescence of men. Instances of this cultural thread range from scientific studies on new developments in reproductive technologies to reports on how the U.S. economy is focusing more on service and less on manufacturing jobs. Popular nonfiction books on the subject appear at regular intervals, including those by Maureen Dowd (Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide [2005]), Kathleen Parker (Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care [2008]), and Hanna Rosin (The End of Men: And the Rise of Women [2012]).5 This diverse, heated, and often incoherent discussion articulates a common concern: that the rapidly changing contours of gender and sexuality are creating a new crisis point in gender identity. While the question (Are men necessary?) is meant to be sensational, it does express an ongoing uncertainty about the future of gender roles. Of course, this more tendentious framing of the question turns on a neat logical evasion. The invocation of the terms men and women in these book titles and in the larger popular conversation presuppose that we already know what we mean by men and women, that these are relatively stable and even empirical terms. But a careful parsing of Judge Walker’s opinion reveals that gender roles and gender identities are not so neatly separable. Walker makes his argument on the basis of functionality and utility, borrowed in part from opponents of same-sex marriage: what is the social purpose of establishing and maintaining a contractual institution such as marriage? Quickly dismissing the need for procreation as ever having served as the primary justification for marriage, Walker goes a step further to invalidate the social usefulness of gender binarity itself—the idea that the genders serve “distinct roles”—as a notion whose “time has passed.” Walker’s ruling, in other words, proceeds from the assumption that our understanding and definition of gender derives from the need to meet social needs, not that society is structured to accommodate the supposedly intrinsic attributes of gender. Are men necessary? It depends what you mean by men. Again, the problem of gender is the problem of genre. The metaphor of gender roles, of course, invokes the idea of gender performance. The question is not what a man is, but what actions and behaviors are read as masculine. As Judith Butler argued in Gender Trouble, “gender is an identity

8

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”6 While the ontology of her position remains a subject of critical debate, the epistemology is inescapable for cinematic representations of gender. In the movies, all we have is performance. Gesture, intonation, costuming, behavior—these are the only markers we have to establish gender identity. Even recourse to the star identities of the actors proves problematic, as we will see in relation to Gerard Butler subsequently, for star persona is equally a performance.7

GENRE AND/AS GENDER THEORY The development of cinematic genre theory mirrors the debate over performative versus essentialist definitions of gender. On the one hand, essentialists try to pin down the key structural and iconographic elements of a given narrative genre that exist apart from any specific example of that genre. On the other hand, performative theorists see genre as social, artistic, and interpretive practice, as rhetorical arguments and cultural expectations that shape and influence our experiences of movies rather than static, objective features of cinematic texts.8 From this second, process-oriented perspective, the path to understanding what we mean by “the western,” for example, lies not in trying to create ever more detailed lists of specific visual elements, definitive plot outlines, or central themes, a practice that wrestles with the paradox of coming up with a definition so precise that it applies to no single actual movie. Instead, “the western” can be understood as a series of culturally dynamic and constantly evolving assumptions, expectations, and marketing practices, conceptual categories that include iconography, plot, and theme but that are also inherently unstable and never uniform from viewer to viewer, from any one given marketing campaign to another. The essentialist approach seeks to define the inherent qualities of The Western as a kind of Platonic ideal; the performative approach investigates the social circumstances that cause producers, viewers, and critics to invoke the descriptor, “the western,” in relation to a particular movie experience. In his Film/Genre, Rick Altman perceptively connects this debate over how best to define genres with similar efforts to come up with precise definitions of species in biology. Much of Darwin’s Origin of Species, for example, concerns itself with the structural question of exactly when evolutionary processes create a distinct new species and not just a variation of an existing species. Similarly, many genre theorists have struggled to distinguish between full-fledged genres and various hybrid forms and anomalies. In both cases, scientists and film critics focus on drawing the borders between the larger conceptual groupings of life-forms or cinematic texts that we call “species” or genres. Altman instead argues for a dynamic, process-oriented approach to genre less concerned with isolating stable species than with exploring the complex

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

9

processes of generic definition and redefinition across the wide spectrum of social practices we call cinematic culture. These practices range from the marketing strategies of studios to weekly reviews to online fan communities. Stressing the critical advantages to be gained from adopting this more social constructionist approach, even at the risk of abandoning the goal of a scientific (or at least quasi-scientific) certainty about genre, he makes this final distinction: Working simultaneously with overlapping generic maps is the price we must pay for recognizing the continuous, process-based nature of generic creation. Zoologists working in the Linnaean tradition may succeed in convincing themselves that they are dealing with a fixed grid, but we have seen the process of genrification at work too clearly to return to a rigid, immutable model.9 Zoologists “may succeed in convincing themselves that they are dealing with a fixed grid” (emphasis mine). In this subtle qualification, Altman turns the comparison between species and genre on its head. Genres are not like species; if anything, species are like genres. In so doing, he opens the way for the understanding of genre not only as a subspecialty of film (or literature or any other representational art) but also as the master trope for the interpretation and the making of cinematic meaning itself. The logic involved works as follows. Strictly speaking, there are really no such things as species, genres, or even genders. All we have are individual, genetically unique examples of life-forms; individual, specific, and structurally unique cultural texts; or individual, genetically unique people. Species, genres, and genders are mental constructs, imaginative cultural narratives used, in Altman’s words, to “facilitat[e] the integration of diverse factions into a single, unified social fabric.”10 Such cultural categories are unavoidable and indispensible, like language itself. Altman’s approach shares with other poststructuralist theory the idea that our understanding of reality is always mediated through various dominant, subordinate, and resistant conceptual frameworks, from culture to ideology to the Symbolic Order. Altman further extends his analysis from biology to linguistics, suggesting that languages—especially Ferdinand de Saussure’s sense of languages as stable, unified, and coherent structures—also, strictly speaking, don’t exist. Altman’s approach more resembles that of Wittgenstein and versions of speech act theory: instead of trying to identify and capture a single set of rules defining “English,” he focuses instead on the various examples of speech acts understood by speakers and listeners as “speaking English.” Suppose we were to substitute for Saussure’s emphasis on langue—the overall language system—a notion of language based instead on parole and the commutation process through which individual speech acts are assessed by real language users. Whereas a langue-based linguistics

10

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy assumes a single stable system, a parole-based understanding of language would at first concentrate instead on an ongoing system-learning process, since each new utterance potentially opens the way, through commutation, to new conclusions about the way the language is constructed.11

As each speaker of English develops her unique linguistic experience and expertise (parole), she also develops her own individualized sense of English as a coherent structure (langue) that is no more a complete match for any other speaker’s sense of English than, as Judith Butler argues, any particular example of an individual’s performance (parole) of gender ever replicates a culturally generic ideal of gender (langue). Instead, our sense of a language— or a gender—develops out of specific instances of language use or gender performance: “Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.”12 This, however, does not mean that the concepts of English, genre, or gender have no cultural force as unified structures and regulating schemes. Quite the contrary. As a professor of English, my institutional status depends on the maintenance and social power of the fiction of English, both as a language and as a discipline, just as my status within a patriarchal social system derives from my performance—and, even more crucially, the audience reception and interpretation of that performance—as a man. But, and this is the key point in making the connection between narrative and gender genres, these cultural genres are thoroughly narrative and rhetorical, in constant negotiation with and response to the parole-based expressions and understandings of these genres exhibited by others. In making the connection to a rhetorical, performance-based approach to gender in the movies, consider the implications of substituting the term gender for genre in these following statements from Altman: • What if genre [gender] were not the permanent product of a singular origin, but the temporary byproduct of an ongoing process?13 • Genres [genders] are not just post facto categories, then, but part of the constant category-splitting/category-creating dialectic that constitutes the history of types and terminology.14 • The perceived nature and purpose of genres [genders] depend directly and heavily on the identity and purpose of those using and evaluating them.15 • Ironically, a more satisfactory understanding of genre [gender] may be built around generic [gender] miscommunication, for it is precisely in the apparent contradictions between differing genre [gender] practices that genre’s [gender’s] discursive investment becomes apparent.16 • Generic [gender] meaning depends on a correct alignment of text and audience. If the text fails to serve as a memorial both to a collective past

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

11

and to a current collectivity, then it is not fulfilling a generic [gender] role.17 Altman’s eloquent description, “a memorial both to a collective past and to a current collectivity,” provides a provocative and critically innovative definition of both genre and gender—of the genres of gender—especially if we remember that by “collective past” and “current collectivity,” we refer to cultural narratives that are themselves produced, influenced, and evoked by the rhetorical processes of genre. We can thus understand genres of gender as examples of what Altman calls “temporary byproduct[s] of an ongoing rhetorical process”: insisting that particular, transitory examples of gender performance represent essential, immutable expressions of identity. Combining a performance-based approach to gender with a process-based approach to movie genres lets us view cinematic texts—texts again composed entirely of performance—as rhetorical narrative strategies that operate as integral parts and instances of larger cultural narratives and genres. Specifically, we can understand gender identity in the movies as inherent features of their narrative syntax. Cinematic texts, with their combinations of verbal and visual codes as well as the way our experience of these texts constantly modulates between the private and the social (sometimes akin to the privatized experience of the silently read novel when watching a DVD on our laptops, sometimes more like the group experience of live theater when sitting in a multiplex), retain a valorized and almost mythic cultural position as expressions of the generic “regulatory schemes” to which Altman refers. They thus serve as a crucial location for the exploration of generic and gender transformation, in particular, those moments of cultural crisis that Altman refers to as “generic miscommunication”—what I call generic growing pains—when efforts at generic consistency or coherence become especially fraught. It is at such moments that the distinction between realism and parody, the norm and the exaggeration, begins to collapse. This moment of transformation for the romantic comedy is the both a potential moment of obsolescence and a moment of renewal, the final nail in the coffin, as Dargis fears, or a crucial turning point.

THE THREE FACES OF GERARD BUTLER AND THE CRISIS IN ROMANTIC COMEDY As I mentioned earlier, Dargis’s plaintive reaction to The Ugly Truth registered not only aesthetic disappointment with this specific movie but also a crisis of genre credibility and credulity, the result being a heightened genre meta-awareness.18 This explains the significance of reviewers of romantic comedies who feel compelled to render critical judgment not only on the artistic success of individual movies but also on the state of the genre in general, as in Dargis’s “coffin of romantic comedy.” Crucially, this intuitive sense

12

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

of narrative genre equally includes the sense of cinematic gender as well. The standard romcom formula of “boy meets girl,” for example, depends on the relative stability or instability of the gender genres of “boy” and “girl.” If a critic as perceptive and attentive to issues of gender representation as Dargis finds herself frustrated with the genre status of a purported romantic comedy such as The Ugly Truth, this frustration is inextricably linked with her experiences of the genres of gender at work within the movie. Such frustration leads not only to the specific question Dargis poses—is the romantic comedy genre dead?—but also to the metacritical questions of “just what is a romantic comedy”? “What made me think this movie is a romantic comedy?” And finally, “Maybe no movie is a romantic comedy anymore.” Dargis herself recognizes that this crisis of genre is equally a crisis of gender. Indeed, the gist of her complaint about the state of the contemporary romantic comedy rests on a historical comparison with what she refers to as “the old straight-boy-meets-straight-girl configuration with big-studio production values.” It is this traditional, implicitly more stable incarnation of the romantic comedy that, according to her review, has least well adapted to the changing social roles of men and women. Yet in her telling reference to the gender genre of “the old straight-boy,” the tension between understanding gender as a cultural constant and gender as an evolving genre emerges, for strictly speaking there was no “old straight-boy” romantic comedy, at least not expressed in those particular gender generic terms. You would search in vain, for example, for contemporaneous reviews of Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), or Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) that identified the two lead characters as “straight.” The descriptor/genres of “straight-boy” and “straight-girl” as historical back formations along the lines of “acoustic guitar.” Issues of sexuality have always been a part of the generic and discursive history of the romantic comedy, but the genre of “straight” as a version of “heterosexual” (itself a genre famously only little more than a century old) is of more recent vintage. As we will see in more detail below, the ostensible high concept driving the plot and marketing of The Ugly Truth hinges on the effort of the male lead to insist on the “ugly truth” of the essential and unchanging nature of male identity. Such an overdetermined insistence inevitably implies its opposite: that “male heterosexuality” in particular and the strict binary differentiation of gender in general are both more fragile and unstable than they seem, an instability that found surprisingly unequivocal expression in Judge Walker’s ruling. The instability of genres of masculinity has always been a feature of the Hollywood romantic comedy. The key theoretical point, however, is that in invoking the instability of something called “masculinity,” we risk reinforcing the idea that such an essence as masculinity actually exists, that the genre of the “straight boy” inhabited by Gerard Butler in The Ugly Truth shares a common structural core with how that gender genre is activated by Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby or Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year,

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

13

19

not to mention Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk. In fact, Butler and his star persona have emerged as a focal point in recent discussions about the death of the romantic comedy.20 The blogger Linda Holmes, for example, titled her counterresponse to the despair over the romcom, “Don’t Worry: The Romantic Comedy Is Not Dead at the Hands of Gerard Butler,” an essay that also contains a nice overview of the main critical concerns about the current state of the genre.21 The most comprehensive expression of concerns over the genres of masculinity dominating the contemporary romantic comedy may be Neal Gabler’s “Day of the Lout,” the title of which refers to the gender genre that Gabler fears is emerging as “a primary model for young manhood in America today.”22 Gabler describes the genre of the lout as not exactly a reversion to the old macho stereotype. He isn’t tough, muscular, steely, monosyllabic, able to build a car engine or a house singlehandedly or sail around the world solo. He’s not a sophisticate either, a Dos Equis most-interesting-man-in-the-world type. He doesn’t dress to the nines or know his wines or drive a Porsche, and he isn’t able to make witty cocktail party repartee. A lout is someone who is proudly stuck in a kind of adolescent parody of manhood that conflates insensitivity and machismo. Gabler specifically indicts “the beefy Scottish actor Gerard Butler” as the “real personification of movie loutishness.”23 Referencing The Ugly Truth and the similarly critically reviled The Bounty Hunter (Andy Tennant, 2010), Gabler describes Butler as portraying “a smug, self-satisfied male chauvinist beaming at his ability to irritate women with his caddishness and to attract them with it.”24 Yet in looking at the evolution of Butler’s screen persona over the course of his career, we see that he has inhabited a wide range of potentially incompatible masculine genres, from the atavistic brooding Byronic title character of the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera to the cartoonishly overdetermined comic book hero of 300 to the misogynist lout with a supposed heart of gold that Gabler decries in The Ugly Truth. Significantly, each of these different genres of masculine identity also conveys conflicting signifiers of sexuality as well, beginning with the cultural stereotypes that already attach to the narrative genres of the musical, the action adventure movie (especially those as homoerotically charged as 300), and the romantic comedy. It is exactly this inconsistency and incompatibility among the various genres of gender inhabited by Butler that complicates Gabler’s identification of the actor as “the real personification” of the lout. In fact, the salient point here is exactly the contradiction between authenticity and representation embedded in the oxymoronic phrase, “real personification.” Gabler’s claim asserts a stable, instantly recognizable screen persona for Butler; I argue instead that Butler remains a cipher, an

14

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

example of what we might call, with equal paradox, an anonymous movie star. Gabler’s essay does cogently respond to the destabilization of current gender genres of masculinity, but I see Butler not as suggesting the crystallization of a new, dominant form of masculinity, however pathological. Instead, Butler’s very lack of definition in The Ugly Truth makes him an apt case study for the implications of a performance-based approach to cinematic genders of genre. First, a brief plot summary follows. Contemporary romcom mainstay Heigl plays the main character of Abby Richter, an ambitious, driven producer of a local Sacramento TV morning show that faces cancellation. She is stereotypically portrayed as a control freak both on and off the job, the gender genre found across the contemporary romantic comedy landscape of the modern career woman that links female ambition inevitably with emotional coldness. She meets her opposite in Butler’s character of Mike Chadway, the host of a cable access show about relationships called The Ugly Truth who counsels his female viewers to accept the “truth” that men are only motivated by sex in any romantic relationship. Abby is appalled by Mike’s arrogance and sexism, a reaction that only grows—and, in the narrative logic of the genre, also indicates her fundamental attraction to Mike—when the station insists she feature him on her own show, a move that results in dramatically improved ratings. What follows is a Cyrano de Bergerac sequence in which Mike bets Abby that his coaching can help her woo the hunky and sensitive doctor who has just moved into her apartment complex. After much ritual humiliation of Abby, Mike’s advice seems to work, and she begins a relationship with the doctor. She soon discovers, however, that Mike’s advice ultimately falters in the face of her fundamental incompatibility with her new lover. Meanwhile, through his paternal affection for his young nephew we are led to believe that Mike’s boorish behavior really masks his own sensitive side as well as a broken heart, a point of character development meant to prepare the audience for the inevitable realization on the parts of both Abby and Mike that they are meant for each other, a conclusion they reach as the result of a climactic on-air argument.25 In looking more closely at the inconsistencies that characterize Butler’s performance of various genres of gender—inconsistencies that foster criticism of both The Ugly Truth and Butler in particular as symbols of everything wrong with the contemporary romantic comedy—we can see these inconsistencies as examples of the generic growing pains that have always marked the genre. For example, while initially insisting on the radical difference and simplicity of “straight” male identity, Butler’s character of Mike Chadway then assumes the narrative position associated with the gay best friend that emerged explicitly in 1990s romantic comedies such as My Best Friend’s Wedding (P. J. Hogan, 1997) but that traces its genealogy to the third-wheel characters portrayed by Tony Randall and Gig Young in the Rock Hudson/ Doris Day sex comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s (movies that are

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

15

themselves paragons of gender genre instability and irony).26 Ostensibly an expert in the sexual conquest of women, Mike is never happier or more excited than when he eagerly coaches Abby in how to win the heart of the metrosexual Colin (Eric Winter). Mike’s fixation on “what men really want” intentionally or not destabilizes his gender genre performance in a way that makes the movie’s title irreducibly ambiguous (what is the ugly truth, and who is it really about?) and that no doubt contributed to Dargis’s frustration with the movie as a genre text. These three iconic roles—the Phantom, King Leonidas, and Mike Chadway—hollow out the idea that Butler’s star persona and especially his literal physical presence provide a stabilizing constant linking these various performances of gender genre identity. This lack of stability is especially significant given how much each role visually highlights the physical, from the damaged and symbolically castrated masked figure of the Phantom to the CGIenhanced, gym-honed musculature of King Leonidas in 300 to the unkempt and undershaven Mike Chadway in The Ugly Truth. While the casting of The Ugly Truth clearly sought to draw on the hypermasculinized genre of masculinity that Butler inhabited in 300 to reinforce through star iconography the retro-macho attitude of Mike Chadway, the two movies visualize two very different kinds of bodies, bodies that themselves are caught in the instability of efforts to express an unambiguous genre of masculinity. In 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006), literally drawn from Frank Miller’s graphic novel about 300 Spartan soldiers facing off against the vast legions of the Persian army at the battle of Thermopylae, Butler displays the hypertrophied male body associated with both comic book superheroes and the bodybuilder physique that became a defining signifier of the action adventure hero beginning in the 1980s, from Sylvester Stallone’s later versions of both Rocky and Rambo to Arnold Schwarzenegger.27 Through its very exaggeration, this male body functioned as a signifier of homoerotic desire, creating a gender genre whose camp readings undermined its attempt to evoke an atavistic hypermasculine identity. Yet in The Ugly Truth, Butler’s body is now softer and puffier, in comparison both to his ostensible romantic rival Colin or the aerobically trim Abby. Indeed, while both Colin’s and Abby’s bodies are repeatedly put on voyeuristic display, likewise a defining characteristic of Butler’s role in 300, Mike remains modestly dressed throughout the movie save for the final scene of sexual consummation, where he remains discreetly covered by bed sheets. This mutability of Butler’s physical presence on-screen both undermines and in a backhanded way affirms Gabler’s reference to Butler as the “real personification” of the lout. As we saw, Gabler takes pains to differentiate the lout from “the old macho stereotype” using distinctly physical descriptors. To Gabler, the lout is specifically not “tough, muscular, steely,” and is perhaps best exemplified by bromance stars such as Jonah Hill or Seth Rogen (who have both recently remade their physical personas through dieting and exercise, in part resulting in a turn toward playing action heroes). Yet contemporary reviews of The Ugly Truth were quick to point out the marketing logic behind

16

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

the casting of Butler in the movie, one dependent on a physical screen identity as “tough, muscular, steely”: “And as long as he’s [director Robert Luketic] doing an R-rated comedy, shouldn’t he observe one of the genre’s cardinal rules and have someone go topless? If not Heigl, then Butler, whose magnificently bulked-up chest was one of the attractions of 300”;28 “Butler is still trailing fumes from his days as Leonidas in 300.”29 Owen Gleiberman similarly references Butler as the “gruffly bearded Scottish-born hunk.”30 In short, “tough, steely, muscular” exactly describes the screen persona Butler brought to his “real personification” of slacker loutishness in The Ugly Truth. Yet Gabler does have a point; while physically large, the character of Mike Chadway in the movie is in fact not “tough, steely, muscular,” in spite of what these other reviewers said. And if Butler is transformed from hunk to lout in The Ugly Truth, he personified a different gender genre altogether as the Phantom, where he functioned as a symbol of tortured masculinity in the style of Gothic kitsch, one that embodies some of the “tough, steely, muscular” physical presence of Leonidas as well as the sensitivity and vulnerability meant to leaven Mike Chadway’s loutishness in The Ugly Truth. In keeping with my point about the underlying generic confusion and miscommunication that best describes Butler’s career arc, however, the dominant critical impression he made at the time of The Phantom of the Opera’s release was, again, one of anonymity.31 As Altman reminds us, these moments of generic crisis provide fertile opportunity for investigating how genres operate, as “a more satisfactory understanding of genre may be built around generic miscommunication, for it is precisely in the apparent contradictions between differing genre practices that genre’s discursive investment becomes apparent.”32 Altman’s point about generic miscommunication echoes Judith Butler’s contention about gender miscommunication, that every individual performance of gender is a misperformance, an imperfect effort at replicating an ideological ideal. As Judith Halberstam argues in relation to the action hero, the greater the performative effort to insist on the immutability of gender, the greater the tendency to expose that performance as performance: “The action adventure hero should embody an extreme version of masculinity, but instead we find that excessive masculinity turns into a parody or exposure of the norm.”33 “Generic miscommunication,” to extend Altman’s evolutionary metaphor, can be taken as the cultural/ideological version of mutation, a word that carries both a sense of cultural dread and cultural vitality. The instability of the genres of masculinity inherent in Butler’s mutating physical presence in these three movies represents exactly such generic miscommunication/mutation and helps explain why a movie such as The Ugly Truth provoked not only critical dissatisfaction with its formal coherence as a movie but also concern over the health of romantic comedy as an entire genre. If Butler’s portrayal of the macho womanizer with a heart of gold is a clichéd syntactical element of the romcom, that cliché itself proves to be as equally an unstable genre of gender as the romantic comedy is a genre of

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

17

moviemaking, both in terms of the slippages in gender generic expression across the three performances by Butler himself and also historically in terms of a gender genre that would include characters played by stars ranging from Rock Hudson to Billy Crystal to Seth Rogen. If Dargis is right, and the “the old straight-boy-meets-straight-girl configuration” of the romantic comedy is extinct, then perhaps the genres of genders in that movie—the insistence on maintaining a hypersupervised construction of radical gender difference in an age of more fluid gender roles and identities—are, as Judge Walker opined, “an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” a time, Walker argues, that “has passed.” In their role as “regulatory schemes” attempting to preserve the fiction of a “single, unified social fabric,” genres, including genres of gender, exert a necessarily conservative force in relation to the idea of narrative coherence: we need to preserve specific genres of “man” and “woman” because particular narrative machineries or formulas demand them. It is no surprise, then, that those cinematic genres most dependent on gender-specific narratives, such as the musical (Phantom), the action adventure movie (300), and the romantic comedy (The Ugly Truth), are also seen as especially “conservative” in the sense of being resistant to generic change. As cultural narratives and genres change, however, tensions develop within particular narrative genres. As the genres of gender change, this evolution and instability appears in terms of a narrative crisis of obsolescence. I am referring here not only to how certain genres “adapt” to fit changing social situations but also to understanding genres as themselves components of the narratives that constitute those social situations. Neither the narrative inside a given movie nor the cultural narratives outside can provide a stable foundation one for the other; they dialectically operate as part of an overall process of generic redefinition.34 If anything, the narrative genres of cinema hold out the promise of ideological stability and reconciliation, a promise that becomes simultaneously more important and more tenuous as we become more meta-aware of narrative instability “in the real world.”35

GENRE OBSOLESCENCE, MINSTRELSY, AND PLAY In explaining how a text (e.g., a movie such as The Ugly Truth) could fail as an expression of a given narrative genre, Altman writes, “If the text fails to serve as a memorial both to a collective past and to a current collectivity, then it is not fulfilling a generic role.”36 But what if the coherence of that collective past—of the very idea of a single, coherent collective past—is now up for grabs? In relation to changing social conditions and ideologies, we have seen narrative genres become if not obsolete, then at least historical curiosities, their use by contemporary artists always self-conscious invocations of that past time. Many of the antecedents of cinema, such as vaudeville or minstrel shows, have long been abandoned as culturally irrelevant in the sense that

18

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

audiences no longer experience them without generic self-consciousness, are no longer able to see them as simply a naturalized part of the entertainment landscape. How might these previous examples of generic obsolescence apply to genders of genre? The example of minstrelsy provides the most relevant analogy in terms of genres of racial classification and the cultural/political argument over the morality and efficacy of maintaining racial categories. These categories, implicated as they are in networks of power and privilege, have proved resilient, but so have ever-advancing arguments that such categories are historical fictions and are neither inevitable features of all human societies nor stable genetic markers. In far narrower terms, the obsolescence of legal prohibitions against interracial marriage has become so much a part of the status quo that it is now deployed to argue that prohibitions against same-sex marriage should be equally obsolete de jure, even if cultural prejudices persist de facto. The idea of the obsolescence of certain genres of gender—or even the idea of gender roles themselves—allows us to relate the historical development of entertainment genres to the most significant central structuring difference within our larger cultural fictions of a unified social fabric: the binary opposition between male and female. But it is precisely this idea of the cultural and ideological centrality for genres of gender—as with the culturally and ideologically central function for systems of race—that is really in danger of obsolescence. For the crisis in gender is, of course, also a crisis in race, in ethnicity, in social class, in sexuality. Part of how genres of gender have operated within narrative genres such as the romcom or the action film has included reinforcing the cultural centrality and universality of binary gender identification. The title of Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s recent study, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre, precisely reflects this aspect of gender as genre.37 “Boy meets girl” is generic shorthand for the basic narrative formula of the romcom, but it also implicitly affirms the universal and therefore unproblematic nature of the terms boy and girl. Genre is thus doubly reinforced: both the overall genre of “romantic comedy” and the corresponding subgenres of gender, “boy” and “girl.” Titles of representative movies from this generic tradition likewise echo Jeffers McDonald’s canny formulation: When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989), Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949), and Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990). As she puts it, “The film titles themselves parade their romantic comedy status. . . . underlining this obvious fact by the title seems to indicate an anxiety within the genre itself.”38 In other words, genres of gender work within these genres to repress their status as genres, as variable, evolving narrative constructions. The analogy of minstrelsy connects us again with performance theory in understanding gender as a genre. It seems simple enough to point out that in every cinematic narrative text, actors “perform” gender. The classic critical assessment of these performances categorizes them along a scale running from the naturalistic to the mannered; in my terms, from the neorealist to

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

19

the parodic. In the end, both the naturalistic/mannered and the neorealist/ parodic scales rely on a certain assumed stability of the signified, a representational correspondence to realistic “presentations” of gender outside the cinematic text. Thus, on the one hand, Gerard Butler’s performance in the hypermediated, computer-generated text of 300 can be read as especially mannered and exaggerated in its evocation of comic book hero masculinity, while his turn as Mike Chadway in The Ugly Truth seems naturalistic in comparison. But the character arc of Mike Chadway hinges on supposedly opening a space between his enactment of the stereotype of the male chauvinist—his unkempt, slovenly appearance, his deliberate rudeness, a scene placing him in a Jell-O wrestling pit with two swimsuit models—and his “real” sensitivity and complexity, a space the existence of which the character at the same time denies, destabilizing the audience’s attempt to distinguish between performance and reality in understanding his character (one source of critical dissatisfaction with the movie on aesthetic/formalist grounds). The mirroring of reality in performance theory moves us in the opposite direction of M. H. Abram’s foundational formulation in The Mirror and the Lamp. The “fictive” text is not trying to mirror reality; if anything, reality is a mirror of our fictive texts. Or put more exactly, the performances of gender in a cinematic text—whether the cartoonish Leonidas or the stereotypical Mike Chadway—just as with the performances of race in the minstrel show, always maintain the subversive potential to remind us of the constructedness of these categories precisely through their recourse to exaggeration and parody. Both rely on the logic that the more exaggerated, the more stereotypical the performance, the more “typical” it is of the gender or race being so represented, a logic that of course ultimately undermines itself. As James Naremore points out in relation to comedy, “By its very nature, comedy undermines our involvement with the characters, barely maintaining a dramatic illusion. . . . Every comic actor is therefore something of a deconstructionist, calling attention to the way we manufacture our socialized selves.”39 Thus, in cinematic narratives, we can view gender performances as versions of gender minstrelsy, performances evoking codes and cues that are meant to register as always stereotypical constructions of gender and sexuality. These performances include not only the physical gestures and vocal inflections of the actors but almost every aspect of the mise-en-scéne, from wardrobe and makeup to set design and lighting. The genres of gender are one area where the physical size of the actors becomes of crucial signifying relevance, as do signifiers of class, ethnicity, and race. From this perspective, Dargis’s reference to the “old straight-boy-meets-straight-girl” narrative genre raises crucial questions about two gender genres—the “straight-boy” and the “straight-girl”—which may exist on the same sweeping level of conceptual abstraction as the differentiation of movies into comedies and dramas. At this level of abstraction, the cultural centrality of the boy/girl dichotomy depends for its continuing relevance on its very lack of specificity,

20

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

a lack that prevents these categories from being very helpful when it comes to the execution of a specific cinematic narrative.40 After all, movie production companies know that comedies are popular, but that generalization doesn’t get you very far in creating a specific instance of a comedy, leading only to the question that takes us further down the path of generic differentiation and therefore contingency and instability: “what kind?” From this perspective, it makes more sense to understand Gerard Butler’s performances across the three films mentioned as examples of gender minstrelsy rather than as instances of any kind of stable masculine star identity. In terms of the tension of the casting process, filmmakers look to draw on what they perceive as his star persona—the genre of “rugged male”—relying on the consistency of this gender genre type, just as studio marketing draws on audience familiarity and affection for the genre of the romcom. Yet the very conceptual abstractness of this type, as with all genres, whether of narrative form or of race and ethnicity, can only maintain this consistency if it remains purely conceptual, if it never has to be embodied in a particular role within a particular narrative text. As with any specific exemplar of a genre, the specific “male” character is defined as much by its divergences from generic consistency as its adherence to it. The crucial criterion is instead, as Judge Walker insisted, cultural usefulness; as Altman defines it, the ability of this instance of a gender genre to aid in “facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single, unified social fabric,” a benchmark that can only be qualitatively evaluated through the reception, critical, and interpretive histories of the text under consideration. The efficacy of gender genres in integrating diverse cultural strands into a unified whole also connects directly to the question of gender centrality, just as the performances in minstrel shows were connected to white supremacy, not simply to racial difference per se, a social construction that remains, for better or worse, a defining part of popular culture. The crisis in gender, as a result, is also a crisis in gender centrality, the breakdown of generic unity into various subgenres of gender working within a network of other demographic and identity genres. The obsolescence of men, in other words, doesn’t refer to their obliteration but instead their dizzying hybridization, what Halberstam refers to as “alternative masculinities.” Rather than ideologically central, gender can also function as culturally playful—a key implication of the general idea of gender as performance and of Judith Butler’s famous invocation of the potentially (although not inevitably) subversive gender play of drag: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.”41 By “gender play,” I do not mean a naïve sense of gender as performance based on the idea that constructions of gender—or genres of gender—are isomorphic, structural equals, no more than if I were to refer to ethnic or racial play. Central to the cinematic genre of gender that Gerard Butler performs in The Ugly Truth is precisely the idea of centrality—that “male” not only functions as the opposite of female but also defines a cultural, social,

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

21

and biological norm that affirms its narrative dominance and centrality. Indeed, the crisis in masculinity only makes sense if there is much more at stake than simply a role. It is not just the sense of “alternative” versions of masculinity becoming available for use in cinematic texts that fuels a crisis, it is the maintenance of a normative, central, and authoritative “mainstream” male identity that raises the cultural stakes.42 At play, in other words, is not only the definition but also the dominance of masculinity. This playfulness also means an end to the idea(l) of generic invisibility, to the naturalizing of genre away from generic self-consciousness. The persistence of generic meta-awareness is a definition of postmodernism, with the implication that such awareness represents a historical innovation. But if we follow Bertolt Brecht’s argument that such self-awareness is both politically progressive and a kind of mature return to our earliest forms of cultural play, then what we are experiencing may be less the “coffin” of genres than a return to the schoolyard. In “Two Essays on Unprofessional Acting,” Brecht posited that in becoming social actors, children first imitate form and rhetoric before they internalize ideological rationales: One easily forgets that human education proceeds along highly theatrical lines. In a quite theatrical manner the child is taught how to behave; logical arguments only come later. When such-and-such occurs, it is told (or sees), one must laugh. It joins in when there is laughter, without knowing why; if asked why it is laughing it is wholly confused. In the same way it joins in shedding tears, not only weeping because the grown-ups do so but also feeling genuine sorrow. This can be seen at funerals, whose meaning escapes children entirely. These are theatrical events which form the character. The human being copies gestures, miming, tones of voice. And weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping.43 Children at a funeral will begin crying because the adults around them are, without knowing necessarily why they are crying. Similarly, young children readily take to drag when exploring gender identities through dress-up play, seeing, for example, a dress not so much as something a woman wears but as something that makes you a “woman” if you wear it. A recent cinematic exemplar of Brecht’s point can be found in Will Gluck’s Easy A (2010), a high school romcom freely inspired by The Scarlet Letter (in the tradition of Clueless [1995], Amy Heckerling’s version of Jane Austen’s Emma set in Bel Air, and Gil Junger’s Taming of the Shrew update, 10 Things I Hate about You [1999]). The displacement of the romcom into a high school setting frees up possibilities for generic experimentation by obviating the need for the classic marriage resolution (as Alicia Silverstone’s character of Cher memorably explains over the establishing shot of a wedding ceremony at the end of Clueless, “As if. I’m only 16, and this is California, not Kentucky,” a line that always plays well in my Kentucky college classes).

22

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

Both the transitional status accorded adolescence and the ritualized conventions of high school culture foster an environment of genre performance and play, in terms of both narrative form and gender/sexual identity.44 In the spirit of a self-aware playing with the conventions of the romantic comedy, Easy A uses a framing device of the main character, Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone), creating a webcast explaining the events of her recent scandalous past—and hence self-consciously crafting the plot of the movie—to her high school classmates. On her webcast, Olive maintains a running commentary throughout the movie that allows her to foreground the pressures that high school genres of gender performance have on her own developing identity. At the same time, as the self-conscious shaper of the generic narrative, Olive draws attention to how the similar pressures of romcom genre expectations, involving both narrative and gender, create equal pressure on the movie’s plot development. The beginning of Olive’s internal narrative focuses on these externalized “regulatory schemes facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single, unified social fabric” with the story of how she became the subject of high school gossip after Marianne, the leader of the campus Christians, overhears a conversation between Olive and her best friend Rhiannon. Wanting to avoid an uncomfortable weekend with Rhiannon’s hippie parents, Olive invents a story about losing her virginity on a date with a nonexistent college boyfriend. Marianne quickly places Olive into the gender genre of the high school slut, a development the bright and witty Olive at first meets with amused exasperation. As the rumors spread, Olive is asked by her closeted gay friend Brandon (Dan Byrd) to pretend to have loud sex with him at a party in order to establish his heterosexuality. Soon Olive agrees to equally imaginary sexual encounters with other disaffected and marginalized boys on campus, kindnesses that only result in affirming her negative reputation. Olive decides to fight fire with fire by making herself into a contemporary Hester Prynne (her English class is reading The Scarlet Letter), complete with a provocative outfit emblazoned with a red A. A series of comic misadventures reveals the hypocrisy of her most self-righteous classmates as well as her guidance counselor, and in the end, Olive uses her webcast both to vindicate herself and start a relationship with a longtime crush. As with Clueless and 10 Things I Hate about You, Easy A uses the association with a canonical literary text to signify the cultural and therefore genre self-awareness of the filmmakers, at least to those viewers (including presumably a sizeable percentage of the professional critical community) who recognize the allusion. What is particularly significant about Easy A for the purposes of my argument is the narrative’s explicit focus on the performance of gender and sexuality: not only Olive’s playful performance of the “fallen woman” a la Hawthorne but also the central plot device of “proving” Brandon’s sexual identity through performance. The exemplary scene in this regard involves Olive and Brandon locked in bedroom at a high school party, an audience of their classmates pressed against the door debating the

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

23

meaning of the various sounds and exclamations that emanate from within. Inside, Olive directs Brandon in the faux performance of “straight” sex, her direction not based on any real personal experience but the influence of other cinematic and televisual performances, performances alluded to in the depiction of family movie night at Olive’s home and through her attending an avant-garde foreign movie. Crucially, these other subversive interventions into the gender genres of high school—and at the same time the narrative genre of the romantic comedy—in which Olive participates involve ostensibly “straight” boys, but boys whose gender security seems no greater than Brandon’s, suggesting that the binary between “gay” and “straight” is as equally unstable as that between “male” and “female.”45 Both the plots of Easy A and The Ugly Truth participate in the romcom narrative convention of the masquerade, explicitly in the case of Olive’s performance as Hester Prynne. In The Ugly Truth, the specific second-act masquerade of Mike coaching Abby to conceal her true personality during courtship mirrors the overall question of whether his macho bluster is itself a masquerade meant to conceal—and thereby protect—his own true identity. In Easy A, however, masquerade is not an alternative to reality; it is a synonym for gender performance and the inherently playful/unstable nature of the genres of gender (even Olive’s longtime crush and eventual beau—and it is significant how decentralized the “girl meets boy” story line is in the movie—is the school mascot, appearing in many scenes as either a devil or, after the complaints of the Christian students, a woodchuck). While The Ugly Truth founders on the inability to resolve the question of Abby and Mike’s true identities, resulting in the whirlwind plot resolution/ romantic reconciliation that mechanically accedes to romcom convention, Easy A resists the equally conventional imperative for the teen protagonist to “just be herself” and dispense with masquerade. The movie’s strength derives from its recognition that the adolescent narrative depends on its transitional nature, the conflict caused by the evolution and instability of identity. While the plot of Easy A may suggest a cycle of humiliation and insecurity that links Olive’s genre of gender performance with a character like Abby from The Ugly Truth, both Olive and Brandon display a sophisticated self-awareness and playfulness with the genres of gender and sexual identity very different from the defensiveness and (passive) aggressiveness of The Ugly Truth. Instead, the adolescent characters are trying on the gender and sexual genres of adulthood, and the adults in the movie represent a diverse range of these genres, from Olive’s cool (but radically insecure) male English teacher to her whimsically progressive parents, who themselves joke about their own sexual and gender identities. Olive’s family even includes an adopted African American brother, a device that could come off as a cloying attempt at political correctness. Instead, the family’s interactions playfully include awareness of the complex mix of identity genres involved, as the family jokes about the conventionality—and therefore malleability—of all family roles and relations.

24

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

The movie even makes an explicit connection between racial and gender minstrelsy as genre performance through Olive’s disparaging dismissal of the contemporary relevance of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (as opposed to the prescient gender politics of The Scarlet Letter) on the basis of the ludicrousness of the novel’s minstrel-like central narrative conceit: that large, adult black men regularly form intimate relationships with white teenage boys. In a neat reversal in the movie’s epilogue, one that moves further in confirming the inherent playfulness of all generic activity, the movie recasts Twain’s equally iconic classic as an (unintentional) pioneer not of racial but gay liberation (with echoes of Leslie Fiedler’s psychoanalytic reading of the text), when Brandon finally escapes the repression of their bourgeois Southern California suburb by running off with his older black lover. The movie depicts the tryst with the two men cuddling in a motel room, watching TV and laughing at the cinematic minstrelsy of Richard Thorpe’s 1939 adaptation of the Twain novel starring Mickey Rooney with Rex Ingram in the role of Jim.46 Recalling Altman’s words, “genres are regulatory schemes facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single, unified social fabric.” By viewing gender as genre, as systems of “regulatory schemes” rather than transcendent, transhistorical categories, we should not be surprised that the evolution of the contemporary romantic comedy should be as fraught as the larger social processes of the “integration of diverse factions into a single, unified social fabric” that include the genres of gender, processes that involve the political, aesthetic, and formal narrative question of whether a “single, unified social fabric” is even desirable to have. If movies like The Ugly Truth and Easy A seem oppositional in terms of their individual aesthetic success (as I and most movie critics believe they are), they represent neither the death knell nor the resurrection of the romantic comedy, that at once fragile and enduring genre. Instead, we can experience them as evidence of generic growing pains in an era when, if Judge Walker is right, the “time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage . . . has passed.” The generic meta-awareness, both in terms of narrative structure and gender performance, that both movies demand (if with more self-aware playfulness and less anxiety in Easy A), means an awareness of the conventionality and also multiplicity of the seemingly unified terms romantic comedy as well as the inherent minstrelsy of the gender/genre performances of “man” and “woman.” If boy meets girl now inevitably means “boy” “meets” “girl” in our cinematic experience, by compensation we can embrace a more playful understanding of genre and gender, one less concerned with centrality and stability and more open to transformation and possibility.

2

I Love You, Man Gender Genre Instability in the Bromance

In 2003, Celestino Deleyto suggested that the romantic comedy as a genre had reached a key moment in its evolutionary development: It is as if the new climate of social and sexual equality between men and women had rendered heterosexual desire less vital, as if the perfectly codified conventions that have been valid for so long had lost much of their meaning and become nothing more than picturesque museum pieces—to be admired but not believed. Disenchanted by this state of affairs the genre has started to explore other types of relationships between people and to consider their incorporation into their plots. . . . Friendships between men, between women, or between men and women have started to proliferate in the space of romantic comedy.1 Deleyto expresses both the views of those critics who, like New York Times critic Mahnola Dargis, worry that the romantic comedy is becoming “nothing more than picturesque museum pieces” and those who see this exhaustion of plots based upon the centrality and taken-for-grantedness of heterosexual desire as creating opportunities for generic experimentation, for seriously considering “other types of relationships between people” as the basis for romantic comedy. Of course, as with Dargis’s nostalgic reference to the “old straight-boymeets-straight-girl” formula for the romcom, “heterosexual desire” already assumes the existence and stability of the gender binary “men” and “women.” Extending the pragmatic logic of Judge Walker’s ruling on marriage equality, we could equally say that “heterosexual desire,” along with discriminatory gender laws, is an “artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.”2 Thus the exhaustion of one structure of genre formation—gender genres based on “distinct roles in society and in marriage,” leads to the potential exhaustion of a conventional structure of narrative genre formation—the romantic comedy. The obsolescence of a rigidly codified regime of “heterosexual desire” does not mean the end of desire, including desire predicated on performative genres of binary gender identity. It may be that it is not the vitality of desire

26

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

that is at stake but the specific policing mechanism of heterosexual desire, a mechanism that insists on the cultural centrality and stability of that desire. And it is the very oxymoronic instability of “stable desire” that has always fueled the narrative engine of the romantic comedy. As Frank Krutnik points out, “the term romantic has come to signify something of a revolt against the norms, against the cultural regimentation of desire, against marriage.”3 The marriage equality movement that Judge Walker’s ruling vindicated based its argument in part on the very displacement of heterosexual desire as fundamental to the social ritual—or genre of social performance—we call marriage. This displacement gains rhetorical traction both through the loss of vitality Deleyto describes and the historical contingency of the concept of heterosexual desire, dependent as it is on the binary construction of heterosexual and homosexual.4 As I suggested in the previous chapter, the metaphor of “straight” love that Dargis refers to is even more recent and unstable than the cultural genealogy of the decidedly clinical terms heterosexual and homosexual. In fact, the emergence of a self-conscious discussion of “heterosexual love” over the past 30 years is an indication of its exhaustion, an exhaustion that fuels the crisis in the romantic comedy to which both Deleyto and Dargis refer. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the rise of the bromance—ostensible romantic comedies centered on confused homosocial/homoerotic relationships between putatively “straight” male characters—as one example of this generic exploration of “other types of relationships” not defined by the conventional codes of the heteronormative romantic comedy, explorations driven by and responding to the “new climate of social and sexual equality between men and women,” one I have been arguing is predicated on the obsolescence of genres of “straight” masculinity. Following Rick Altman’s argument that we regard genres as “not just post facto categories” but instead as “part of the constant category-splitting/category creating dialectic that constitutes the history of types and terminology,” we can see the bromance as part of a dialectical process relating to the reconstruction of gender and sexual identities within the narrative framework of the Hollywood romantic comedy.5 The bromantic comedies centered around the work of Judd Apatow, especially his influential diptych The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) and Knocked Up (2007), as well as related films in the bromance movie cycle such as I Love You, Man (2009) and Superbad (2007), manifest this evolution in ways that, judging by their commercial success, closely resonate with contemporary moviegoers. While critics such as Richard Corliss and Joseph Aisenberg view these movies mainly as reactionary, regressive responses to this new climate, these films can also be understood as engaging self-consciously with both the “perfectly codified conventions” that define the narrative genre of the traditional romantic comedy and the conflicting genres of masculine performance connected to these conventions.6 In these movies, we find male characters confused and even frightened by what they experience as the destabilized genres of masculine gender

I Love You, Man

27

performance as well as the pathological nature of many of the more conventional versions of these codes. The Apatow-influenced bromance explores “other types of relationships” and other constructions of masculinity within the ostensibly heteronormative structure of the romantic comedy. By appearing to simultaneously challenge and reinforce traditional constructions of gender binarity and masculine centrality, the bromance as a narrative genre equally invokes both parody and realism, both broad comic exaggeration and appeals to realism and verisimilitude, a generic instability that registers in the confused and mixed critical reactions to these movies. In its confusion of parody and realism, the bromance enacts the generic growing pains that define both the mainstream and independent experiments in the contemporary romantic comedy that this work explores.

DESIRE IN THE ROMANTIC COMEDY A dominant critical narrative tracing the increasing destabilization of heterosexual desire in the romantic comedy begins with the emergence in the 1970s of a series of what Frank Krutnik has described as “nervous” romances, movies marked by radical experimentation in both form and theme that developed in dialectical tension with the emerging second-wave women’s movement. Woody Allen’s landmark Annie Hall (1977) represents the exemplary turning point in this trend, a narrative that abandons the culturally dominant goal of the stable, long-term heterosexual romance and substitutes instead a nostalgic longing and wistfulness for the beauty but impossibility of the traditional romantic comedy. The last shot in the movie signals this abandonment, with the camera focused on a busy New York city street after both lovers leave the frame walking in different directions, away from each other and away from the narrative closure that historically marked the genre. This abandonment led in 1979 to Brian Henderson’s famous prediction of the death of the romantic comedy, a prediction belied by the emergence (or better, resurgence) in the 1980s and 1990s of what are sometimes called “neotraditionalist” romantic comedies, movies that almost atavistically insist on the teleology of heterosexual romance and marriage in spite of the social evolution represented in a film like Annie Hall.7 As Tamar Jeffers McDonald argues in reference to Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998) (itself a remake of the “classical” romantic comedy The Shop around the Corner [Ernst Lubitsch, 1940]), “the current evolution of the romantic comedy has largely chosen to ignore the advances made by the genre in the 1970s, self-consciously reverting instead to more traditional textual strategies.”8 Rather than seeing the neotraditional turn as simply a last gasp for the genre, however, she echoes Deleyto in suggesting that “the genre itself is waiting for a new impetus which will renew its energies and lead it in more interesting directions.”9

28

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

The neotraditional turn likewise signaled a turn in the marketing and reception of the romantic comedy, as producers, critics, and the entertainment media began seeing these movies as primarily or even exclusively films for women, who may or may not drag reluctant men along with them. The emergence within the past 10 years of the bromance, or what Jeffers McDonald calls the “homme-com,” a version of the romantic comedy marketed toward men, however, underlines that this earlier marketing turn toward predominantly women viewers resulted not from any essential qualities of men that prevented them from connecting emotionally with romantic comedies, but rather from an ongoing crisis involving genres of masculinity within the genre.10 This increasingly gendered marketing of romantic comedies in the last two decades of the 20th century begged the critical question that drives this study: if (people coded as) men don’t need to be in the audience, why do they need to be in the story at all? That romantic comedies have long expressed anxieties over the genres of masculine performance is now a commonplace, from the gender inversions (to use Kathleen Rowe’s phrase) of the screwball comedy through the masquerades involving gender and sexuality in the Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex comedies to the pessimism of the nervous romances.11 For example, Claire Mortimer references Rowe in describing the emergence within more recent romantic comedies of the “‘melodramatized man’ who appropriates stereotypically feminine character traits, seeming to break with more traditional representations of men as emotionally repressed.”12 She then later incorporates the emerging subgenre of the bromance into this decades-old strain within the romantic comedy genre: The bromance is an ironic take on the romantic comedy, which can appeal to both genders at the box office, reaching out to the male audience that would regard the romantic comedy as a “chick flick.” These films work to reclaim masculinity for a generation that sees feminism as a historical movement and is familiar with conflicting representations of men in popular culture, ranging from the metrosexual icon of David Beckham to the macho posturings of many hip hop stars.13 The very examples Mortimer chooses of these “conflicting representations”—an international soccer star with a reputation for fastidious grooming and the “posturings” of pop musicians—underscore both the performative nature of gender and the evolution and experimentation of gender genres. These roles/representations/constructions of masculine identity can be read as ornamental and ceremonial rather than fundamental and intrinsic, mere symbols and icons of male identity that in the classic deconstructive sense seem supplementary, nonessential, almost quaint holdovers. They are signifiers of an empty patriarchal logic built on the centrality of masculine identity. Again, to return to the functionalist criteria of Judge Walker, do we really need metrosexual soccer stars and cartoonish macho

I Love You, Man

29

pop performers? Why do they remain part of our cultural logic? What useful purpose do they serve? It’s not surprising, then, that our most persistent genre dealing with courtship and marriage—the romantic comedy—registers these concerns in terms of its own narrative, cultural, and ideological structure. As Rowe reminds us in exploring the “persistence of films which posit the romantic couple as the source of all happiness and reinscribe women into traditional notions of femininity—long after the sexual changes of the sixties,” our culture’s “sexual mores often changed faster than do patterns of either gender or genre.”14 Or, I would add, the genres of gender. It is this fixation on the “patterns of either gender or genre”—the dissatisfaction with “perfectly codified conventions” of masculine identity—that we see in the contemporary bromance, most centrally in the films of Judd Apatow.

GENERIC AND GENDER SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BROMANCE Significantly, the question of the purpose and function of characters coded as male in the romantic comedy—the question of “why do we need men in these movies?”—represents an explicit concern among the male characters themselves within bromance narratives.15 These concerns express a metalevel of awareness within these films about the instability of the supposedly “perfectly codified” genre and gender conventions relating to the construction and even possible obsolescence of masculinity within the heteronormative romantic comedy. That is, although many bromances feature a version of the traditional “battle of the sexes,” this conflict operates less as an argument between women and men or a complaint of women against men than as an internal struggle of the male characters with their understanding of their identities and roles as men. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, Apatow’s Knocked Up can serve as a case study in this regard. The skeptical plot synopsis I provided highlights not only a central conflict facing the character of Ben Stone—what to do after finding out that his one-night stand with successful television personality Alison Scott has resulted in pregnancy—but also, especially when viewed from Alison’s perspective, a fundamental crisis in genre credulity and credibility for the narrative as a whole: why should Alison involve Ben at all in her decision-making process, let alone her life? As the movie progresses and both Alison and Ben engage in the process of rehabilitating Ben’s slacker persona, we see no signifiers reinforcing or even suggesting any strong desire between the two. Instead, their actions seem almost wholly motivated by generic expectations, both internal and external to the plot, from the proper way to construct a bourgeois career path to the presence of prescriptive guidebooks such as What to Expect When You’re Expecting, a title that can read as equally imperative as descriptive.

30

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

As I will explore further late in the chapter, Knocked Up also contrasts the relationship between Ben and Alison with that of Alison’s sister and brotherin-law, Debbie and Pete. As the kind of suburbanized middle-class couple to which both Ben and Alison and the genre logic of the narrative supposedly aspire, the mixture of hostility and entropy that characterizes Debbie and Pete’s marriage presents instead a decidedly ambivalent model for imitation. More specifically in terms of this study, even Pete’s apparently more responsible and goal-directed genre of contemporary straight masculinity cannot escape the fundamental question of male obsolescence that informs the contemporary romcom in general and the bromance in particular. Take, for example, the pivotal Las Vegas hotel room scene where Pete and Ben (played by bromance regulars Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen) have fled following key crises in both of their romantic relationships. The scene triggers our generic narrative expectation for an epiphanic moment of self-awareness on the parts of Ben and Pete that will lead to the ultimate resolution of these crises. Dealing with the aftereffects of a combination of peyote and a Cirque du Soleil performance, Pete expresses his amazement to Ben that his wife Debbie could possibly love him and want him around: BEN:

You think they’ll take us back?

PETE:

Yes, but I don’t know why. Do you ever wonder how somebody could even like you?

BEN:

All the time, man. Like every day. I wonder how even you can like me.

PETE:

She likes me. She loves me. The biggest problem in our marriage is she wants me around. She loves me so much that she wants me around all the time. That’s our biggest problem, and I can’t even accept that? Like that upsets me?

In a metanarrative sense, Pete and Ben question not only why anyone could value them as human beings, let alone romantic partners, but also their function within the movie itself, almost forestalling by consciously articulating the question that may be occurring to the audience: why would anyone desire these characters? Pete and Ben represent examples of Mortimer’s “conflicting representations of men,” and neither of the genres of masculine performance that they enact seems particularly functional or even desirable. In Seth Rogen’s Ben, a gender genre found throughout the bromance and often played by Rogen himself or the younger surrogate Jonah Hill, we find a version of what Neal Gabler described as “the lout”: the perpetual adolescent slacker, uninterested in and seemingly incapable of adult ambition or responsibility, whose main interests are pot and pornography. While the genre of the “melodramatized male” embodied by Pete appears more conventionally functional, maintaining roles as gainfully employed husband and father, he registers as depressed, emotionally distant, and almost paralyzed with a selfloathing related to his perceived lack of “masculine” assertiveness.

I Love You, Man

31

Rather than leading to a moment of clarity for Pete and Ben, this scene only deepens their confusion while heightening their—and by extension, the audience’s—meta-awareness about their roles in the narrative. Pete’s realization of his wife Debbie’s love for him triggers both further self-loathing and also an implicit negative judgment of Debbie: what is wrong with her that she would want to be married to me?16 Instead of a naturalizing reinforcement of the traditional gender genres of the romantic comedy, this scene foregrounds our awareness of the absurdity of these genres in relation to increasingly unstable constructions of masculine identity and purpose. In reading the bromance as largely reactionary, critics such as Corliss point to the substitution of the emotional relationships between these conflicted and confused men for the traditional heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman—the “vital” heterosexual desire that Deleyto references—as part of a trend to isolate and even banish women from romantic comedies through the combination of homosocial longing with homophobic panic: “In this all-guy world, girls are the mysterious Other. . . . But they are only the goal: get the girl because of the challenge. They are not only unknowable, they’re hardly worth knowing.”17 This is a valid line of analysis as far as it goes, but it discounts the self-loathing and gender confusion demonstrated in the previously described scene that accompanies this fear of women. Corliss is writing in specific reference to Superbad (discussed further subsequently), but both that movie and Knocked Up feature this connection between self-hatred, the destabilized gender genres of masculine performance within the romantic comedy, and the marginalization of female characters (the bromantic pair in Superbad assume their only chance of arousing the sexual interest of young women is by becoming “mistakes” that might result from a night of binge drinking). These observations are not meant to deny the androcentric and even misogynist cultural logics at play in these movies but to suggest another way of understanding their particular versions of objectification and gender panic in terms of the current moment: as part of a project of reconstructing the gender genres of the heterosexual romantic comedy male hero, a postpatriarchal hero who preserves the logic of heterosexual desire but who also questions the very subject position of masculinity itself within the romantic comedy. If Corliss is critical of the bromance, his skepticism stems in part from an uncertainty over whether to read these characters as parodic or heroic, as characters we are meant to laugh at or identify with. Their loutishness derives from parody and comic exaggeration, as in the drug trip sequence at the Cirque du Soleil performance or in Pete’s reverie about chairs and his attempt to put his entire fist in his mouth during the hotel room epiphany scene. The poignancy of the self-loathing they express in this scene, on the other hand, registers more with the neorealism of Annie Hall, working to enlist our sympathy and compassion for these characters. The radical destabilization of the genres of masculine performance, along with this instability over parody and realism, necessarily implies an equal

32

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

destabilization of the genres of female performance as well. Because the cultural (il)logic of patriarchy insists on the cultural centrality of the genres of masculine performance, the bromance unsurprisingly obsesses on the obsolescence of these genres. In some ways, the disappearance of women from these romantic comedies means the role of mysterious Other has been similarly destabilized and even introjected back into the genres of masculine performance themselves. It is not the externalized woman they fear, but the instability of their own fractured identities. More accurately, the fact that cinematic gender is solely constituted by genres of performance underscores the permeability and indeterminacy of gender identity, so that the Other may be manifested as much in styles of speech and intonation, facial expression, and bodily posture enacted by the “male” characters as by characters coded narratively as “female.”

MASCULINE ANXIETY AND THE REJECTION OF THE ALPHA MALE This questioning of the narrative functionality of the genres of masculine performance within contemporary genre cinema—the crisis of male obsolescence embodied in the question that is at once both ideological and formalist, “what use are men?”—depends for its cultural significance on a questioning of their supposedly necessary structural centrality. It is this lingering patriarchal insistence on masculine centrality that complicates the artistic challenge of constructing alternative and potentially more egalitarian genres of masculine performance, even as the time of any functional justification of that centrality has passed. Part of the traditional narrative conflict within the heteronormative romantic comedy—and, as the bromance suggests, part of its implicit subversive potential as well—relates directly to the need to form a romantic relationship that ultimately reaffirms, if only symbolically, the inherently unstable gender genres of masculine centrality, in particular those genres I group together under the larger generic umbrella of the “Alpha Male.” The traditional narrative logics of the pre-1970s romantic comedy may have represented “men and women willing to meet on a common ground and to engage all their faculties and capacities in sexual dialectic,” according to Brian Henderson, but they also functioned as containment strategies, strategies that facilitated a wide range of gender nonconformist behavior among women characters from the screwball comedy to the American bedroom farces of the early 1960s without seriously challenging the larger stability of the genres of masculine performance themselves, particularly as they were defined by the logic of masculinity centrality.18 Within the traditional romantic comedies that Brian Henderson referenced, no matter how subversive or androgynous a woman’s behavior in these movies might be (to cite an iconic example from the screwball tradition, Katherine Hepburn’s sexually aggressive Susan Vance in Bringing Up

I Love You, Man

33

Baby [Howard Hawks, 1939]), the inevitable containment of these transgressive energies within the confines of patriarchal marriage acted as both a cultural and narrative safeguard of ultimate patriarchal centrality. The “sexual dialectic” Henderson referred to resolved itself into the mythic unity of the stable marriage, and even if both filmmakers and audience members implicitly understood this unity as ultimately preposterous, the dominant gender and narrative genres governing the representation of romance in the movies made sure this understanding remained implicit. By the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, however, we can see social reality outstripping fictive representations, particularly in depictions of gender and sexuality. In 1964, Kisses for My President (Curtis Bernhardt) approached the idea of the first woman president of the United States by focusing on what is depicted as the inherently ludicrous idea of the “first man,” portrayed by Fred MacMurray, who suffers constant emasculation fulfilling the duties of hosting teas and other feminized activities before his presidential wife, played by Polly Bergen, steps down from office when she discovers she is pregnant. The fundamental logic at work here is not the incompetence of women at managerial positions but the fragility of male identity once clear occupational gender identities become androgynous. The notion of a woman as president remained so culturally anomalous that it largely disappeared from the cinematic and televisual imagination until the current century, in which television programs such as Battlestar Galactica and 24 revived the idea as a serious component of their narrative logics just barely before the 2008 campaign reordered the sense of dramatic plausibility for presidential candidates. It is exactly this implicit suspicion of the ability of patriarchal heteronormative marriage to successfully contain the energies generated by the sexual dialectic that has become increasingly explicit since the late 1960s. Marriage, of course, still operates as a crucial structuring device in contemporary romantic comedies, but a deep ambivalence marks its role as the object of women’s desire, an ambivalence that troubles the identification of romantic comedies as “chick flicks” within the highly stratified niche-marketing strategies of modern Hollywood. If the question of “what do women want” haunts the contemporary romantic comedy, the bromance asks the even more potentially disturbing question, “what do men (really) want?” The male characters within bromances constantly foreground this question, assuming that the answer must obviously be sex, as certain popular-culture constructions of Alpha masculinity keep insisting, with sex functioning as a surrogate for power and mastery. At the same time, they constantly question their own inability to access and perform this supposedly innate desire, a confusion expressed in the very title of Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This destabilizing of desire in the romantic comedy has complicated and confused Henderson’s binary ideal of the sexual dialectic, just as it equally challenges the binary dialectic of traditional genres of gender performance within these narratives.

34

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

In the Apatow school of bromances—both those he has written and directed and those he has produced and/or inspired, as in the case of Superbad and I Love You, Man—the genre of the dominant Alpha Male has been rigorously excised from the plot, a recognition of how traditional genres of masculine centrality, genres defined in terms of conventional male attractiveness, physical power, and social status, have themselves become a radically destabilizing force in even more apparently conventional romantic comedies, as exemplified by Gerard Butler’s almost cartoonishly overdetermined and simultaneously incoherent embodiments of a variety of Alpha Male performative genres. The devolution and potential extinction represented by how Hollywood has used (and misused) Butler forms a crucial counterpart to the evolution of what we might call “Beta” genres of masculine performance exemplified by bromance regulars such as Rudd, Seth Rogen, and Michael Cera (the hero of Superbad). The character of Mr. Big in Sex and the City (in both its television and cinema incarnations) foregrounded the degree to which the genre of the conventional Alpha Male character disrupts the emerging algebra of the postpatriarchal romantic comedy, as a core topic of conversation among the extended narrative’s four lead women (each of whom represents a genre of female performance in various stages of devolution/evolution) focused on whether a long-term relationship with such a throwback genre of masculine performance (echoed in the character of Don Draper from Mad Men as well as in the romantic conflicts between mature women and aging Alpha Males in Nancy Meyer’s popular twists on the neotraditionalist romantic comedies, Something’s Gotta Give [2003] and It’s Complicated [2009]) could ever be viable, however nostalgically attractive such a relationship might seem. Indeed, in discussing the first movie version of Sex and the City (2008), Claire Mortimer points out the almost vestigial role that Mr. Big plays: “the rather dull figure of Mr. Big is unconvincing and almost redundant in comparison to the compelling female characters.”19 This redundancy—echoed in the character’s ironic and even parodic nickname—reveals the Alpha Male as a mere placeholder in the movie, part of a generic narrative algebra that struggles to maintain relevance even as the women characters in Sex and the City register the same generic selfconsciousness we see at operation in the bromances.20 In the Apatow cycle of bromance movies, we see male characters wrestling with the personal inadequacy and social anachronism of the gender genre of the Alpha Male. In Janet McCabe’s words, these men are “struggling to express desire, to react differently even, beyond heteronormative cultural performances that praise particular models of male achievement and heterosexual masculinity, because [they are] speaking in and through a representation that has limited language to offer something different, to utter something new.”21 The bromance approaches the challenge of masculine obsolescence in the romantic comedy from the unlikely direction of the male buddy movie and derives conflicts over heterosexual bonding from what are seen as the more fundamental conflicts surrounding homosocial

I Love You, Man

35

bonding. With the exception of Superbad, a high school coming-of-age variation on American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) that ends with a shopping date at a mall, all of the movies under discussion here lead to marriage. From a conventional patriarchal perspective, women are indeed regarded by the male characters in these movies as mysterious Others, and the men endlessly, graphically, and, most important, anxiously discuss women’s sexuality and anatomy. Their efforts at sexual boasting and claims of sexual mastery, however, are subjected to endless ridicule, both from their other male friends and situationally from the plot situations in which they find themselves. In a key sense, male sexuality is the real mysterious Other for these characters, a source of inexplicable desire and humiliation and an aspect of identity that renders them almost useless as functioning members of society.22 In these movies, the male characters seem actively in flight from the genres of Alpha Male performance as a “a representation that has limited language to offer something different, to utter something new.” These “men” are not only romantically unattached and even alienated (again, as in the evocative title, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, itself an ironic definition of the genre of Beta Male performance linked to the fear of masculine obsolescence) but also socially unattached and isolated as well. Under- or unemployed, the state of perpetual adolescence associated with the emerging Ben/Seth Rogen gender genre derives not so much out of selfishness as aimlessness—specifically, the disappearance of clearly defined social roles that are necessarily encoded for masculinity. The title sequence from Knocked Up, which introduces us to the character of Ben, exemplifies this situation. As the music of the Wu-Tang Clan plays under the production company logos, signifying the exaggerated and parodic gender genres of hip-hop hypermasculinity that Mortimer referenced, the movie opens on a group of unkempt and unfit young men, apparently in their twenties (although their wardrobe has not appreciably changed since junior high school), engaged in adolescent horseplay around a half-filled, stagnating suburban swimming pool.23 The music provides the only sound track to a montage of what we take to be their typical daily activities—roughhousing, smoking dope, visiting theme parks—all played in slow motion as if they were exciting action sequences. The movie positions these young men as classic examples of arrested development (to allude to the postmodern television situation comedy that began the career of the melodramatized Beta man-child Michael Cera), and unless the viewer recognizes Seth Rogen as the star of the film from the credits, there is nothing in this opening sequence to label any of these characters as the potential hero of the story. Again, these characters are not just presented as ugly ducklings or diamonds in the rough; they are aggressively unattractive, personally dedicated to rejecting qualities that would render them as good candidates for any kind of stable long-term relationship, whether economic or romantic. As such, they function as extreme parodies of loutish, obsolescent masculinity. At the same time, the compensatory rhetorical move being made here is a

36

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

claim for radical honesty; that is, parody justified in terms of neorealism and verisimilitude. Within the larger genre of the romantic comedy, a genre by definition based on fantasy and wish fulfillment, and, in the case of Knocked Up, within a movie whose plot resolution exemplifies an almost ludicrously unlikely male fantasy, the bromance subgenre appeals to both men and women in the audience with the claim that male desire and insecurity will be exposed with ruthless candor. I emphasize the appeal to both men and women because the key to the marketing success of these movies stems from their ability to combine the box-office appeal of both chick flicks and buddy movies, to create a date movie with cross-gender appeal.24 This appeal to candor extends as well to the representation of the pathology implicit within the comic situation of these isolated male characters and in particular to the indeterminacy of the genres of masculine performance that they are supposed to embody. Early in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, for example, Seth Rogen’s character of Cal remarks to his other dysfunctional male coworkers that he seriously wonders whether the melodramatized title character of Andy, played by Steven Carell, might be a serial killer. The hyperbole behind this joke turns more serious at the crisis point of Andy’s relationship with Trish, played by Catherine Keener, when Trish learns that Andy’s odd behavior and reluctance to consummate their relationship stem not from psychosis but from his embarrassment over his sexual inexperience. Again, as with the similar turning-point scene from Knocked Up, the bromance self-consciously undermines the expected revelation that will resolve the central romantic conflict, as Trish tries to define the genre of masculine identity signified by Andy’s performance of gender: TRISH:

What are you, some kind of sex pervert, or are you a deviant or something?

ANDY:

No! I’m not a sexual deviant.

TRISH:

What is all this?

ANDY:

I haven’t even tried to have sex with you, so . . .

TRISH:

What are you trying to do? What are you buttering me up for?

ANDY:

Ah, c’mon.

(backing away):

TRISH

You aren’t going to try and kill me, are you?

ANDY:

Look, Trish.

TRISH:

You didn’t get a new carpet.

ANDY:

I’m not trying to kill you. I love you. I love you.

TRISH:

Oh, God! (runs away)

While Trish is eventually relieved to learn that Andy does not plan to kill her, we are meant to understand her initial fear here as real. And while the movie plays off the comic juxtaposition of Andy’s declaration, “I’m not

I Love You, Man

37

trying to kill you. I love you,” the real edge to the humor comes from how closely both Andy’s unfamiliarity with sex and his adolescent hobby of collecting action figures in their original packages fits the cinematic gender genre of the Oedipally damaged serial killer, the pathological horror movie variant of the Alpha Male (in a similar way, the television series Dexter fit a romantic comedy subplot into a serial killer story line). The character of Trish directly poses the question, “what do men—or at least Andy—want?” and the references to deviance and perversion only underscore the instability and insufficiency of culturally available answers and exemplify Andy’s “struggling to express desire, to react differently even.” This is an astonishing scene to find within a mass-market romantic comedy, acknowledging and even foregrounding the threat of sexual violence that usually remains scrupulously suppressed within the conventional patriarchal heterosexual romance. The bromance predecessor There’s Something about Mary (Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 1998) explicitly thematized this connection between the conventions of romantic seduction and sexual violence, as the main character Ted (played by Ben Stiller, himself a bromance forerunner discussed further in chapter 3) joins a group of stalkers pursuing the title character. He is likewise mistaken and even arrested at one point in the movie for a serial killer. This relentless focus on male pathology and the instability of genres of masculine performance recurs in all the movies I am discussing, as in the morning-after breakfast scene in Knocked Up where Ben reveals to a horrified Alison his aspiration to become a successful Internet pornographer, or in the repeated concerns about sexual “normalcy” that pervade the dialogue in Superbad. In all these cases, the underlying social and sexual inadequacies and anxieties of these characters become a strangely compensatory virtue in that they prevent the male characters from displaying the Alpha aggression or ambition to ever realize these obsessions, a point underlined by Andy’s almost ashamed admission that “I’m not trying to kill you.”

BROMANCES AND THE BIFURCATED MALE So what genres of masculine performance can take the place of the obsolete Alpha Male in the contemporary romcom? There have been several possibilities offered by scholars of the genre, including Deleyto’s that the lover may be replaced by the friend in certain romantic comedies, an idea he derives from a close reading of the neotraditionalist My Best Friend’s Wedding (P. J. Hogan, 1997). In many ways, though, the alternative of the gay best friend only defers the question of masculine identity and function within the romantic comedy without fundamentally challenging the “perfectly codified conventions” of the form and of constructions of masculinity. I would argue that we can see within the bromance the emergence of not a single replacement for the Alpha Male but the beginnings of a splintering of the idea(l) of a unified construction of masculinity itself toward, in

38

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

essence, a (at least) bifurcated genre of male performance, a bifurcation structurally connected to the narrative bifurcation between neorealism and parody. In the movies I am discussing, this bifurcated gender genre appears in two forms: The first, more potentially utopian model, features a single male character who embodies a radically destabilized gender and sexual identity. The second, more dystopian version, offers competing versions of post–Alpha Male identity that ultimately both founder within the confines of heteronormative marriage. The first and more utopian version of this model builds on the logic of the buddy movie to offer a literally bifurcated hero, two parts that go into making a single, whole main character. This is essentially the logic of I Love You, Man, a movie neither written, directed, nor produced by Apatow but which shares a genealogy with Apatow’s films through the director John Hamburg’s work on Apatow’s cult television series Undeclared and their mutual connection to the work of Ben Stiller. Rather than telling the story of how a (straight) couple gets together, I Love You, Man instead begins with a marriage proposal from the Beta metrosexual Peter (once again played by Paul Rudd—the repeated use of the name “Peter” in the bromance must represent at least a subliminal reference to the instability of masculine performance that defines these roles). His love interest Zooey (Rashida Jones) happily accepts, and the movie portrays the two as a “perfect” generic couple. In fact, the plot complication stems from their being too perfect in the sense of Peter’s being too melodramatized, too sensitive and nurturing, too in touch with his feminine side. Increasingly alarmed that Peter lacks close male friends, Zooey pushes him into an eventual bromance with Sydney (another Apatow and bromance regular, Jason Segel), who provides Peter with lessons in the genres of straight masculinity. As in Knocked Up, we are then presented with a range of these obsolete and postobsolete gender genres, from Peter’s gay brother Robbie (Andy Samberg), who is much more of a jock than Peter, to the boorish Alpha Male Barry (a physically imposing Jon Favreau), who inhabits the role of Gerard Butler–style lout. A la Corliss’s negative review of Superbad, many of the reviews, whether positive or negative, of I Love You, Man focused on this substitution of the bromance between Peter and Sydney for the more conventional heterosexual romance between Peter and Zooey. Potentially overlooked, however, is the central act of agency on Zooey’s part that impels the narrative logic of the movie: her desire to “fix” Peter, a standard plot complication of patriarchal romance in both movies and sitcoms, but with a twist. If the post 1970s romantic comedy often hinged on the need for consciousness-raising on the part of the conventional male hero and his need to develop a greater sensitivity to the needs of the woman he is seducing, I Love You, Man can be described as a consciousness-lowering movie. Zooey’s frustration lies in Peter’s status as a conflict-free male hero. Sensitive, polite, responsible, and gainfully employed, a utopian version of the melodramatized Beta Male, Peter’s character contains the seeds of a radical deconstruction of the gender

I Love You, Man

39

genres of romantic comedy beyond the substitution Deleyto describes in My Best Friend’s Wedding, in which Julia Roberts’s character cannot achieve a union of friendship and sexual fulfillment but instead loses her sexual love interest and remains platonically bonded to her gay male best friend. Instead, almost out of loyalty to maintaining the logic of heterosexual desire and the plot structure of the conventional patriarchal romantic comedy, a plot structure based on an inherent conflict between what are seen as the immutable differences between men and women, Zooey encourages Peter to seek out male companionship that will accentuate their gender differences. In his friendship/bromance with the androgynously named Sydney, Peter forms a kind of yin/yang dyad repeated in the adolescent buddies of Superbad and prefigured in the friendship between Ben and the identically named Pete (also played by Paul Rudd) in Knocked Up. As I have argued, the persistence of this dyad particularly within the Apatow cycle is reflected in the repetition of the casting, with Seth Rogen and Jason Segel repeatedly portraying slovenly ids to Rudd’s well-groomed but depressed superego. More technically in terms of psychoanalytic theory, Rogen and Segel’s characters depict versions of what Kathrina Glitre identifies in the screwball tradition as a positive “return of the repressed”—the pre-Oedipal energies of polymorphous sexuality. For the pre-Oedipal child, masculine and feminine do not exist; the opposition only comes with the Oedipal crisis and submission to the Law of the Father. The resurgence of pre-Oedipal energies and childlike play in screwball comedy work with gender role reversal, signaling a further breakdown in the binary hierarchy of masculine/feminine.25 In Lacanian terms, these characters resist incorporation into the Symbolic Order, a resistance marked in the bromantic preoccupation with phallic humor and the phallus itself, as in the character Seth’s childhood obsession with drawing anthropomorphized penises in Superbad, literally enacting an attraction to/shame over entering the Symbolic Order.26 If Rogen and Segel have specialized in the pre-Oedipal, Rudd’s career mirrors the crisis over the genre of Alpha Male performance in contemporary romantic comedy, especially in terms of how his characters also fall short of a postmirror phase incorporation into the Symbolic logic of the patriarchal romantic comedy narrative structure. Possessed of a boyish version of leading-man looks, Rudd first appeared in movies as the aspirational heterosexual love interest in Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995), even “rescuing” the character of Cher from a mugger. Since then, his roles often involve using sarcasm and irony to undermine his attractiveness, while playing both gay and straight characters within romantic comedies. The panic over the crisis in romantic comedy plotting that seems to impel I Love You, Man in part explains the obsession with gay sexuality and the mixture of homophobia and homophilia that runs throughout these movies

40

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

and that has given rise to the term bromance itself. The teen bromance Superbad is exemplary in this regard. A movie descended from another, even earlier ur-bromance, the adolescent sex farce Porky’s (Bob Clark, 1982), Superbad follows a long night where the two (bifurcated) heroes, the slovenly, id-like Seth and the melodramatized, androgynous Evan, played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera (and named after the screenwriters of the movie, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg), search for alcohol to bring to a party where their goal is to use intoxication as a means to initiate sexual relationships with the two young women they desire. The shaggy-dog narrative ends with them sleeping over at Evan’s house and confronting the real crisis driving the narrative: their impending separation after the summer when Evan goes away to college. The two characters, whose dialogue throughout the movie exemplifies anxiety over “what men want” through overdetermined protestations of heterosexual desire along with an obsessive fixation on penises (clinically so in Seth’s case), end the movie declaring their love for each other, an admission each makes with a sense of relief and that ironically allows them to successfully negotiate Deleyto-style friendshipbased relationships with the young women they had been pursuing: EVAN: SETH: EVAN: SETH:

I can’t believe you saved me. You saved me. I owe you so much. You carried my . . . I love you. I love you, man. I love you. I love you. I’m not even embarrassed to say it. Just, I love you. I’m not embarrassed. I love you.

The comedy in this scene in part derives from producing a homophobic anxiety in its male viewers over the two young characters engaged in emotional and physical, even playful, expressions of love and intimacy, but the scene also exemplifies what Jeffers McDonald identified as a feature of the chick flick neotraditional romantic comedy: the appeal not just for laughs but for tears as well (Romantic Comedy). Just as Zooey and her friends in I Love You, Man are depicted as viewing Pete’s budding friendship with Sydney as its own miniromantic comedy, Superbad likewise presents the bromance not just as a romcom for boys but as a homophilic romantic comedy for women. Rather than stabilizing their adolescent sexual anxiety, the sleeping bag scene suggests that the very instability of their sexual identities makes them in fact more amenable to heterosexual desire, more available and less frightening as “straight” sexual partners. Similarly, the conclusion of I Love You, Man likewise ends not with a more secure Alpha identity for Paul Rudd’s character of Peter—although he does develop more “dominant” gender performance styles, particularly in his business dealings—but with an ambiguous wedding scene featuring Peter at the altar flanked by both his “partners,” Zooey and Sydney, and expressing his love for both.

I Love You, Man

41

The ambiguity and ambivalence of the wedding scene in I Love You, Man points to the second, more dystopian example of the bifurcation of the Alpha Male genre of masculine performance in the bromance, one that highlights the difficulty of reconciling “other types of relationships between people” within the traditional teleology of marriage. If the nervous romance abandoned marriage as unworkable and the neotraditionalist romance offered an atavistic obsession with marriage (as in the neotraditionalist subgenre of the wedding picture), the bromance explores the question of whether there are new genres of masculine performance still unambiguously defined as masculine that might salvage the logic of heterosexual marriage or whether any genre of masculine performance that depends on the stability of this definition entails a structural insistence on structural and cultural centrality that inevitably links it to the logic of patriarchy, to “a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage.” We can see this tension embodied in the doppelganger marriages and genres of masculine performance of Knocked Up, a tension that exemplifies the generic instability between parody and neorealism in these movies. Within the wish-fulfillment fantasy/parody of the reclamation of Seth Rogen’s infantile Ben and his building of a relationship with Katherine Heigl’s successful career woman Alison, Apatow inserts a kind of compressed John Cassavetes film in the form of the strained marriage between Paul Rudd’s melodramatized Beta Male Pete and Leslie Mann’s Debbie (that Mann is also Apatow’s spouse lends extra cogency to this relationship, a cogency Apatow explores even further in his subsequent casting of Mann as a frustrated wife in Funny People). While (supposed) romance develops between Ben and Alison, Pete and Debbie experience the deterioration of their marriage as Pete begins to envy what he sees as Ben’s freedom and Debbie what she sees as the youth and sexual attractiveness of her younger sister Alison. More to the point, they both feel trapped not only by marriage but also by their adoption of atavistic genres of gender performance—the smothering stay-at-home mom and the bored, increasingly distant dad—drawn from the most conventional situation comedies. Whereas most of the arguments between characters in Knocked Up are leavened by parodic jokes and exaggeration, the conflicts between Pete and Debbie bring the movie to a halt, both thematically and also in terms of the plot momentum, as Ben and Alison become stand-ins for the audience, awkward witnesses to moments of potentially irreconcilable anger and resentment. In these scenes, the distinction collapses between parodic exaggerations of comic gender genre stereotypes (the control freak and the narcissist) and melodramatic investments in those very stereotypes. Pete and Debbie even manifest their own gender genre meta-awareness of this confusion, as part of the emotional power of this conflict derives from their sense of powerlessness to resist the generic pull of these stereotyped performances. Two scenes are exemplary in this regard. In the first, Debbie expresses her concern to Pete over her discovery that a convicted sex offender has moved into the neighborhood.

42

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

Instead of sharing her concern, Pete mocks in a passive aggressive way what he sees as Debbie’s overprotectiveness—“You’re so concerned with stuff, like don’t get them vaccinated, don’t let them eat fish, there’s mercury in the water. Jesus, how much Dateline NBC can you watch?”—which leads to her own complaint about Pete’s lack of engagement: “If I didn’t care about these things, you wouldn’t care about anything. Care more.” The scene begins as a comic interplay based on how these two characters have fallen into stereotyped gender roles, but the tone changes from banter to outright hostility as Debbie angrily hurls obscenities at an increasingly defensive Pete: “Because I want to rip your fucking head off because you’re so fucking stupid. This is scary. These are our children, you fucking dipshit.” Later, their marriage reaches a crisis point when Debbie discovers that Pete, instead of having an affair, has been lying to her in order to participate in a fantasy baseball league. Rather than the merry mix-up of traditional farce, this misunderstanding leads to a poignant expression of despair from Debbie over what seems to be the impossibility of their relationship, a despair rooted in Pete’s confused performance of a kind of post-Alpha genre of masculinity: “You just think because you don’t yell, you’re not mean. But this is mean.” The conclusion is tragic rather than comic: “You know what? I don’t want you at the house anymore. Okay?” In both scenes, Ben stands by as an awkward, uncomfortable witness, a surrogate for the equally uncomfortable viewing audience. Instead of progressing toward a dialectical resolution of their divergent genre performances of masculinity, as in I Love You, Man or Superbad, the bromantic connection between Ben and Pete comes to a dead halt. Pete and Debbie’s misery begins to function as the main impediment to Allison’s final commitment to a relationship with Ben, and although Pete and Debbie achieve a kind of rapprochement after the trip to Las Vegas alluded to previously, the conflict is never finally resolved. Ben and Alison finally bond over the birth of their baby, submerging Alison’s never explicitly resolved reservations about the example set by her sister and brother-in-law, but as an audience we are left with an uneasy sense of the long-term implications of their relationship.27 Toward the end of the movie, the narrative momentum of the plot tries to revive the dialectical resolution of the bifurcated male hero as Ben begins to adopt—impersonate might be an even more resonant word—the trappings of Pete’s more conventional gender performance of husband and father, landing a “real” job and moving into an adult apartment while Allison warms to the idea of having a father figure in her child’s life. During the birth scene, Ben even takes on aspects of the Alpha Male, demanding that the male obstetrician treat Allison with more care and sensitivity. The birth of the baby functions magically not so much to resolve the plot as to suggest that the further progress (if that’s the right word) of the relationships under examination are a kind of fait accompli. Caught up in the moment, Debbie even suggests a longing for another child, an idea that scares Pete but that also ominously points to the inefficacy of assuming that parenthood will

I Love You, Man

43

automatically create a lasting bond between the characters. Ultimately, the question posed by Pete in that Las Vegas hotel room—“How can Debbie like me?”—is never answered and haunts the movie’s conclusion as well as the utopian possibilities of the bifurcated male hero. Here we see the reverse of the more optimistic plot line of I Love You, Man. In that movie, the melodramatized Beta Male Peter begins by supposedly learning from the more traditionally Alpha Sydney, but each character turns out to be more fluid in their performances of masculinity than they at first seemed, with Peter displaying from the beginning an ambitious career orientation and Sydney comically spouting a clichéd version of therapy speak. The movie evades the question of the postmarriage prospects for their bromance in the grand tradition of the romantic comedy by ending with a heterosexual marriage. Knocked Up directly engages the question of the long-term viability of these alternate genres of masculine performance by juxtaposing the premarriage romance of Ben and Alison with the postromantic trials of Pete and Debbie, trials that underscore both the obsolescence within the logic of the romantic comedy of conventional genres of masculinity and the dubious viability of the various bromantic experimental alternatives of the bifurcated male pairs that define the subgenre. In this way, bromances contain a logic of generic self-consciousness and self-critique that belies readings of them as simply reactionary or regressive. The reconstruction of genres of masculine performance within the bromance remains not only a source of crisis but also a source of vitality and manifests a particular response to the potential narrative obsolescence of traditional genres of masculine performance. Again, the idea of the obsolescence of masculine identity may initially seem counterintuitive in reference to contemporary mainstream American cinema, where critics have rightly noted the virtual disappearance of women from central roles within key genres, including of course the bromantic comedy, but this obsession with male narrative function is itself a sign of anxiety over genres of male performance. The title I Love You, Man evokes how the bromance exemplifies both this obsession with and anxiety over the narrative viability of the genres of masculinity within the romantic comedy. The simultaneous critical ambivalence and marketing popularity of these movies locate them at the crossroads of efforts to “explore other types of relationships” between people within a “new climate of social and sexual equality”: the question of what role(s) constructions of masculinity will play within the contemporary romantic comedy.

3

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance Mumblecore, Neorealism, and Gender Play

At the same time as the bromance was developing, with its broad, hyperbolic representations of dysfunctional genres of masculine gender performance, a contrasting neorealist cinema movement arose that seemed its diametrical opposite: mumblecore. In fact, this pattern of neorealist reaction is nothing new in the history of American cinema. Warner Brothers created a distinct market identity in the 1930s with urban crime movies that stood out against the more lavish production values of MGM; the fatalistic worldview and small-time criminals of film noir, especially in its B-picture versions, served as a counterpoint to the glossy Hollywood musicals and adventure movies of the 1940s. More to the point of mumblecore, however, the formal, cultural, and ideological break represented by the “New Hollywood” of the 1960s and 1970s, from the studios’ reluctant embrace of a European-influenced auteurist cinema to the growth of underground and alternative moviemaking, created a pattern of oppositional reaction to the status quo of Hollywood production that still powerfully influences our narrative construction of how movies are made. The yin/yang dialectic of “mainstream” and “independent” remains a defining critical paradigm in approaching the complex social, aesthetic, and economic complex we subsume under the mythic term Hollywood, even as we regularly acknowledge that reality is far messier than these distinctions suggest. In classic fashion, then, mumblecore represents the latest neorealist, lo-fi challenge to the focus-group driven, schematically assembled, relentlessly imitative Hollywood norm of which the bromance is a prime example. Revisiting the romantic conflict at the heart of auteur theory, mumblecore champions the individual artist versus the corporation, the personal movie versus the commercial vehicle, indie versus Hollywood. Mumblecore appeared, as such neorealist revivals do, at a period of transitions shortly after the turn of the 21st century. The (mostly male) auteurs who had defined the indie renaissance of the early 1990s—Tarantino, Anderson, Russell, Lee, Fincher— seemed either stalled or had become establishment figures themselves.1 The term indie itself had long lost clarity as a reference to how certain movies were financed with the development of studio boutique production divisions. Most significant, the development of low-cost digital camera and editing software was approaching critical cultural mass in relation to the production

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

45

and distribution of complex visual narratives. Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha, which has emerged as the founding text of mumblecore, appeared in 2002, the same year that movies such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and especially George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones brought digital cameras into the Hollywood mainstream. Websites such as AtomFilms (now Atom.com) were already offering online outlets for alternative moviemakers, and in three years, YouTube would radically escalate the cultural power and influence of viral video. Funny Ha Ha was shot on 16 mm, and many of the filmmakers associated with mumblecore were among the last to attend film school when production pedagogy was still almost exclusively focused on, literally, film (or as we might say now, prevideo). In terms of plot construction, character development, and acting styles, mumblecore movies seem at first glance to embody a traditional indie ethos meant to, once again, challenge the artificiality and audience pandering of the formulaic genre movie in general and the bromance in particular. Mumblecore features understated, highly individuated, and psychologically complex characters instead of broadly drawn, interchangeable stereotypes. While the bromance relies on high-concept narrative structures that can be boiled down into titles that double as plot synopses (Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and that relentlessly follow a conventional three-act formula, mumblecore plots (such as they are) are open-ended and digressive, suspicious of neat resolutions or even the very idea of resolution. Bromance performances reflect the sketch and stand-up comedy backgrounds of their actors and creators (a subject I will return to later in the chapter), relying on identifiable hooks and mannerisms that marquee performers bring with them from movie to movie. Mumblecore actors, as the not completely affectionate name given to the movement implies, are marked more by a lack of affect and the avoidance of overt displays of emotion. Bromance is parody, the deliberate comic exaggeration of social performance styles, the ostensible formal opposite of neorealism, or the effort to duplicate the specificity of individual personality. But as we have already discussed, the very idea of oppositional reaction implies the ultimate kinship of these two approaches. Genre, whether in terms of narrative structure or gender performance, is inescapable. Neorealism signifies the particular versus the typical, but the category of the typical is unavoidable even if ultimately imaginary. A critical literature exists, for example, that describes the typical generic features of the indie film, and the name mumblecore itself implies a perceived common aesthetic and style every bit as definitive as those surrounding the bromance.2 When we press these supposed differences further, the distinction between mainstream and indie, parody and neorealism becomes ever blurrier. The subgenre of the bromances, for example, shows several points of intersection with the neorealist mumblecore movement in particular and indie films in general: • While the alternative/indie film designation has signified an aesthetic opposition to the idea of genre understood either as rote formula or

46

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy commercial standardization, one way of signaling this opposition (and, I would argue, really the only way, given the impossibility of completely escaping the generic economy in any signifying system) has been through genre experimentation and hybridization. Self-conscious genre hybridization became the defining feature of the 1990s indie renaissance, encompassing movies as otherwise varied as Pulp Fiction, Rushmore, and Boogie Nights. If we add There’s Something about Mary to that list, a romantic comedy that combined the high school comedy, stalker movie, and even the musical, we can see the bromance emerging out of the same experimental mix. However marketing driven (or simply marketing friendly), the admixture of the chick flick with the gross-out comedy that marks the bromance points to a narrative and gender generic self-consciousness every bit as intentional as the mumblecore movies I will examine subsequently. • The bromance has created its own class of auteurs, most notably Judd Apatow, as discussed in chapter 2, and like mumblecore there is a dense web of writers, actors, directors, and producers who circulate among the various movies that can plausibly be categorized as bromances and, in the case of Bridesmaids, the emerging variant of the “womance.” • The use of improvisational composition and acting techniques link the bromance and mumblecore to a long tradition of neorealist filmmaking, most specifically, as we will see later, the movies of John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, and Mike Leigh. • Finally, the larger theoretical point made by Rick Altman still holds: all specific examples of genres (and genres only materially exist as specific examples, just as a species only materially exists as individual organisms) are genre hybrids, mutations that are only seen as “mutations” after we have derived the abstract categories of species and genres that supposedly define the norm. This is not at all to say that the oppositions between indie and mainstream, neorealism and parody are meaningless or wrong, just that they are less absolute distinctions than cultural tendencies. Mumblecore does not produce movies that are the opposite of Hollywood movies but are in their own ways meditations and studies of Hollywood, just as a filmmaker like Jean-Luc Godard is as much a descendant of Hollywood as Steven Spielberg.

Most significant, this generic self-awareness that marks both the broadly parodic bromance and the neorealist mumblecore focuses as much on genres of gender as of narrative construction. This chapter continues to track the crisis over the obsolescence of masculine gender genres by exploring how the bromance and mumblecore, parody and neorealism ultimately collapse into one another as symptoms of the complex cultural, ideological, and finally generic system change referred to by Judge Walker. The resulting cultural/ generic mix is a new manifestation of Frank Krutnik’s “nervous romance” that I call the anxious romance.

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

47

I use the near synonyms of nervous and anxious both to signify the genetic linkage between the two concepts as well as to signal a critical space between the historical movies Krutnik discusses—movies nervously trying to preserve binary genres of gender even as the ground shifted beneath them— and the contemporary examples of movies anxiously negotiating postbinary genres of gender under discussion here. Across the range of the contemporary romcom, from glossy star vehicles to bromances to revisionist lo-fi indie movies, this gender genre instability exposes and exacerbates a similar narrative instability and anxiety between the concepts of neorealism and parody. Contemporary romcoms of all kinds—both mainstream and indie— oscillate between generic unconsciousness and self-consciousness, between wish-fulfillment narratives that try to disguise their generic machinery and self-conscious metanarratives that foreground that machinery, just as their genres of gender—especially masculine gender—swing between the reactionary and the progressive.

THE NERVOUS ROMANCE Frank Krutnik’s essential 1990 essay, “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes,” serves as both an incisive overview of the genre of the Hollywood romantic comedy over the 20th century and a persuasive argument concerning the contradictory progressive and regressive cultural forces at work in the movies of the 1970s and 1980s as typified in Manhattan, Starting Over, and, in an extended endnote, When Harry Met Sally. Identifying the “two polarities” that drive the romantic comedy in the apt phrase, “the cultural regimentation of desire,” Krutnik sees the movies of the 1970s and 1980s that follow Woody Allen’s Annie Hall as “nervous romances,” efforts to recuperate the romance in an era when that “cultural regimentation”—specifically, the codes and regulations linking heterosexual desire with legal marriage—had come undone. Responding in part to Brian Henderson’s 1978 article “Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough, or Impossible?” Krutnik counters Henderson’s pessimism to argue that the nervous romance “betrays an intense longing for the restitution of faith in the stability of the heterosexual couple as some kind of bulwark against the modern world.”3 Krutnik connects this romantic nostalgia to the generic self-awareness and experimentation that marked the nervous romance, movies that combine the “intense longing for the restitution of faith in the stability of the heterosexual couple” with the acknowledgement that the “romantic certainties of the past cannot be embraced innocently.”4 For all the narrative generic selfawareness expressed in the post–Annie Hall romantic comedy, however, this tenuously negotiated nostalgia still insisted on a more fundamental generic stability, the stability of genres of gender themselves. Henderson expressed the lost utopian vision of the romcom in terms of “men and women willing

48

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

to meet on a common ground and to engage all their faculties and capacities in sexual dialectic.”5 While Henderson explored what he saw at the time as the growing impossibility of achieving this willingness to “meet on common ground,” the terms/genres “men” and “women” remained implicitly self-evident. Writing just 12 years later, but a 12 years marked by the growing significance of queer theory and performative-based theories of gender (Krutnik writes in the same year that Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble appeared), Krutnik’s article returns to the questions of this fragile dialectic and the “difficulty of maintaining and overriding faith in The Couple,” but now with cracks opening in the foundational gender genre assumptions. Krutnik’s juxtaposition of the gender-variable reference term “The Couple” with the more historically specific “stability of the heterosexual couple” (emphasis mine) begins to imply that the gender self-awareness and instability defining the nervous romance extends to gender genre selfawareness and instability. He later redefines the “intense longing” driving the nervous romance as “a desire to slip back into a fantasied past of secure options and a less chaotic sexual menu.”6 The phrase “a fantasied past of secure options” both extends the concept of gender genre instability into the past through the contradictory tension of “secure options,” emphasis on “secure” (but how can “security” ever really coexist with “options”?) and into the future, emphasis, a la Judith Butler, on “options.” The “chaotic sexual menu” necessarily complicates Henderson’s invocation of the intrinsically binary (and intrinsically heterosexual) “dialectic.”7 “Why do women need men?”—a critical subtext of both Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Manhattan (and both movies rely on the idea of men as “teachers” of emerging independent women, a stopgap answer I will return to in the discussion of Greenberg subsequently)—morphs into the prior question of “what are ‘men’ and ‘women’ anyway?” What contemporary function does this distinction serve, or is it an atavistic holdover? In this respect, it is especially significant that Krutnik’s essay concludes with a final endnote on When Harry Met Sally, directed by Rob Reiner but, more crucially, written by Nora Ephron, who would become a major auteur in the 1990s neotraditional romcom revival/response to the nervous romance. Krutnik sees a progressive evolution in the movie, which avoids, he writes, “the twin obsessions with blighted male potency and disruptive female narcissism which so strongly mark the ‘nervous’ romances I have considered.”8 Instead, Krutnik argues that When Harry Met Sally, although firmly working within what has now become a tradition of “nervous” romance, differs from its forebears of the late 1970s in that it seeks an equalization of male and female experience (albeit one heavily biased towards the lifestyles of the prosperous urban bourgeoisie) and is concerned with a more generalized project of refinding in the modern world a secure and viable place for the kind of totalizing intimacy of the screwball era.9

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

49

This twin desire for both “an equalization of male and female experience” along with a “secure and viable” version of “totalizing intimacy” helps us make sense of the neotraditional romcoms of the 1990s in general and of Ephron’s movies—especially You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle—in particular. The “equalization of male and female experience”—a necessary ethic of the neotraditional romcom—combines a progressive foregrounding of women’s experience (an important contribution made by these movies in an era of increasing cinematic masculinization) with the “secure” reaction of reifying the idea of unified “male and female” experiences. The result is a deliberate forgetting of the emerging gender genre selfawareness implied in Krutnik’s 1990 essay in favor of a nostalgic invocation of the naturalized gender genres of what now became the classic romcoms (and Ephron’s movies were instrumental in positioning the source texts for her two key neotraditionalist romcoms—An Affair to Remember [Leo McCarey, 1957]/Sleepless in Seattle [1993] and The Shop around the Corner [Ernst Lubitsch, 1940]/You’ve Got Mail [1998]—as central to the canon of Hollywood romance; in this way, Ephron’s movies functioned as critical arguments about gender roles in film history). Of course, the desire to forget is its own version of self-awareness, and neotraditionalism (as with all “neo” gestures, including neorealism) constantly brackets tradition even as it invokes it, always comparing the past and the present, how things used to be with how they are now.

FROM THE NERVOUS ROMANCE TO THE ANXIOUS ROMANCE Both Henderson and Krutnik agreed that the romcoms of the 1970s and (in Krutnik’s essay) the 1980s represent a historical turning point and even rupture in the evolution of the narrative genre. When combined with an understanding of how this rupture in narrative genre equally reflects crises in gender genre—and specifically how male obsolescence has become the central problematic across the fractured landscape of the contemporary romcom—that rupture point becomes less a specific moment between two stabilized cultural arenas than a movement into a permanently destabilized landscape. The nervous romance can thus be extended to the concept of the anxious romance as definitive of the crisis of masculinity within the romcom. In the conflation/confluence of the mainstream bromance subgenre and the alternative neorealist mumblecore experiments, we can trace the contours of this constantly shifting landscape. In the rest of the chapter, I will look at two movies that suggest this continuum between mumblecore and bromance, a mixing of alternative and mainstream that points to the underlying anxieties over the obsolescence of genres of masculine centrality that inform both of them. Through close readings of two key mumblecore movies—Aaron Katz’s Dance Party, USA

50

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

(2006) and Lynn Shelton’s Humpday (2009)—I will explore how these movies deploy the signifiers of indie neorealism (handheld camera, improvisational acting, the use of the emotionally subdued and digressive dialogue that gave the movement its name) while simultaneously foregrounding the gender performativity and minstrelsy inherent in all cinematic narratives.

MUMBLECORE AND GENRE OBSOLESCENCE More a loose collective or even a state of mind than an actual aesthetic movement, mumblecore concerns itself with the mundane vacillations of postcollegiate existence. It can seem like these movies, which star nonprofessional actors and feature quasi-improvised dialogue, seldom deal with matters more pressing than whether to return a phone call. But what these films understand all too well is that the tentative drift of the in-between years masks quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight.10 The in-between years involve moments of transitions, evolution, fracture, experimentation, and anxiety. As with neorealist revivals in general, mumblecore marks a response to cultural and cinematic turning points. The nervous romances that Krutnik describes represent an earlier cinematic reaction to the changing production methods and cultural shifts begun in the 1960s and 1970s. Mumblecore represents both the latest evolutionary manifestation of that earlier response and an example of a new turning point connected to the emerging revolution in the production and distribution of narrative visual media in the digital age. If the nervous romance was driven by an “intense longing for the restitution of faith in the stability of the heterosexual couple,” the radical destabilizations wrought by the dislocations of the globalizing economy, the possibilities and perils of information technologies, and the progressive prospect of quantum transitions in our understanding of gender and sexuality make such a longing itself appear both quaint and, in its naturalization of the heterosexual couple, positively reactionary to the characters trying to make sense of their new “adult” lives in the world of mumblecore. In its handmade, do-it-yourself ethos, mumblecore is a kind of punk rock filmmaking, albeit one that features movies “set in mostly white, straight, middle-class worlds” and where, as the at once evocative and embarrassing name associated with these films emphasizes, the volume level is decidedly low key.11 Of course, as Dennis Lim’s previously given description of mumblecore correctly observes, these characters rarely talk about their situations in terms of such grand (or grandiose) abstractions. These “seismic shifts” are registered through the “mundane vacillations” of quotidian life, inviting and even demanding that the viewer supply the larger cultural significance, one reason that mumblecore—as is true of other neorealist movements—has

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

51

provoked such contrary critical reactions. But the phrase mundane relations itself reveals its own critical bias, the same bias that has long attached itself to mainstream narrative genres such as romantic comedy and melodrama, in that these relations are relations of love, gender, and sexuality, mundane certainly, but no less significant for that. Although ostensibly sharing in the neorealist reaction against genre, mumblecore can be equally understood as self-conscious genre experiments. Mumblecore movies are melodramas of postcollegiate anxiety, romantic comedies of postmillennial de/reconstructions of genders of genre. It is impossible to examine mumblecore’s relationship to earlier alternative neorealist film movements without an account of genders of genre. In 1999, on the eve of both the millennium and the emergence of mumblecore, the post–Riot Grrrl feminist dance band Le Tigre recorded a song called “What’s Your Take on Cassavetes?” Over a slow rock drudge, the song begins with a kind of spoken prologue: “We’ve talked about it in letters/And we’ve talked about it on the phone/But how you really feel about it/I don’t really know.” A minimalist dance beat kicks in, and all the band members begin chanting the song’s title, registering the complex relationship contemporary progressive artists have to avant-garde patriarchs like John Cassavetes. A pioneer of alternative filmmaking whose films can be read as either reinforcing or questioning gender genres of masculine centrality (or perhaps both at the same time), Cassevetes’s work prompts the backand-forth responses between band members Kathleen Hanna and Joanna Fateman: “Misogynist!” “Genius!” Neither embracing nor rejecting Cassavetes’s legacy, the song foregrounds both the gender politics of Hollywood and the issue of gender genre performance, concluding with the semirhetorical question, “Hey, where’s Gena?” a reference to Cassavetes’s wife and sometime star of his films, Gena Rowland. Mumblecore emerges in an alternative film culture that, following the third-generation feminist challenges to rigid definitions of gender performance and identity within popular music that marked early 1990s feminist punk rock (and from which Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna emerged as an important artist and activist), is more and more confronting the obsolescence of genres of male gender centrality. If the new wave of American filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s—along with the early 1990s indie film renaissance— (once again) reinforced a romantic ideal of the rebel male auteur, a new genealogy was emerging at the same time. While John Cassavetes and Gena Rowland’s son Nick became a director himself, so did their daughters Alexandra and Zoe, and all three represent a relative gender diversity of the 1990s indie movement. (Care should be taken not to take diversity to mean anything like equality, either ideologically or demographically.) Yet given the narrative and gender genre conservatism of traditional Hollywood, the presence of any gender diversity productively troubles the gender genre structure of the male temperamental maverick director. Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter Sofia, for example, is a generational sister of

52

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

both Zoe Cassavetes and the Kathleen Hanna who openly confronts the conflicted avant-garde legacy of nervous romance–era auteurs like Cassavetes père. Sofia Coppola’s work, beginning with The Virgin Suicides (1999), forms a crucial link between the 1990s indie movement and the emergence of the neorealist mumblecore movement. Along with her contemporary Miranda July and the 1980s pioneers Kathryn Bigelow and Amy Heckerling, their work represents an engagement with feminism that takes gender performance and gender politics for granted as a central dynamic in all cinematic narrative, not a special topic as in the more self-consciously thematized nervous romance–era movies such as Annie Hall; Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974); An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky, 1978); and, most significantly, Cassavetes’s own A Woman under the Influence (1974). This same assumption of not only the relevance but also the ongoing evolution of gender performance and politics carries through into mumblecore. On the one hand, like previous neorealist reactions to market-driven Hollywood genre formulas, mumblecore has centered around a group of largely male directors: most notably, Andrew Bujalski (whose Funny Ha Ha [2002] is regarded as the founding text of mumblecore and who has also directed Mutual Appreciation [2005] and Beeswax [2008]), Mark and Jay Duplass (The Puffy Chair [2005], Baghead [2008], Cyrus [2010], Jeff, Who Lives at Home [2011], The Do-Deca-Pentathlon [2012]), Aaron Katz (Dance Party, USA [2006], Quiet City [2007], Cold Weather [2010]), and the especially prolific Joe Swanberg (Kissing on the Mouth [2005], LOL [2006], Hannah Takes the Stairs [2007], Nights and Weekends [2008], Alexander the Last [2009], Silver Bullets [2011]). Yet compared to the nervous romance–era movies of the 1970s New Hollywood movement, mumblecore movies share the third-wave feminist assumption that gender evolution and, I am arguing, the growing obsolescence of conventional cinematic genres of masculine performance, are now part of the air we breathe, as mundane and quotidian as the question of “whether to return a phone call”; indeed, they are inextricable from it. All mumblecore movies feature various permutations of male and female relationships that represent a movement beyond the old binary heterosexual dialectic of platonic versus romantic. Neither do they evoke some kind of Hegelian or utopian synthesis, either. Instead, friendship, intimacy, sexuality, loneliness, and anxiety function as fields of energy that complicate (and thereby denaturalize) conventional genre understandings of gender performance and identity. Ironically, if there is anything naturalized in these movies, it is their postmoderness; we could even refer to these movies as postmodern neorealism, where “postness” functions as the defining existential condition of the characters: they are postgraduate, postpatriarchy, postnarrative, and postgender, not in the sense that they have transcended these categories, but that these categories only exist in a state of perpetual flux. In this, as I have been arguing, mumblecore reveals its kinship with the gender genre crises

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

53

in the more mainstream narrative genre movies to which they supposedly stand in opposition. From the beginning, mumblecore has acknowledged an awareness of the inescapability of generic economies, both of narrative and gender, an awareness that necessarily links their neorealist improvisational experimentation with the parodic improvisational experimentation of the more specifically market-driven bromances. The title of Andrew Bujalski’s foundational movie Funny Ha Ha references the generic category of “comedy” (and romantic comedy in particular) while expressing ambivalence—or, more to my point, anxiety—over whether the crises experienced by the main character Marnie (and as suggested previously, mumblecore movies are just as likely to focus on female as male protagonists) are comical or tragic, or whether these extremes are even available within our current state of narrative and gender generic uncertainty. The unstable duality connects Bujalski’s much smaller and quieter movie with the parallel plot lines of Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up that I discussed in chapter 2, where a broad gross-out comedy seems paired with a dark, even bitter exploration of the impossibility of traditional marriage. In its fundamental generic instability, including the taken-for-granted questioning of the gender and narrative genres of compulsory heterosexuality and their focus on the obsolescence of all genres of gender within the inescapable genres of narrative cinema, mumblecore may represent the avant-garde wing of the emerging anxious romance. But this wing exists along a continuum rather than on one side of a binary, and both movies under consideration here express how this anxiety over gender obsolescence results in the blurring of neorealism and parody that mark the anxious romance.

DANCE PARTY, USA: PERFORMING THE TEENAGER As I have argued, there is no escape from genre, either of narrative or gender. Any aesthetic commitment to an antigenre, antinarrative agenda betrays a concomitant obsession with genre. To be frustrated with genre is to be intensely interested in genre. Similarly, any aesthetic commitment to neorealism signifies both an allegiance to and skepticism of constructions of the real. And as cultural critics from Bertolt Brecht to Terry Eagleton have pointed out, realism represents the ultimate form of aesthetic illusion and ideological subterfuge, an argument against the idea of social reality as multiple and always in flux.12 Cinematic neorealism is a form of generic rhetoric that both invites the viewer to judge a movie on the basis of its correspondence to the world beyond the screen and mitigates against that judgment by persuading us that what we are seeing on-screen is the real truth we should use to understand that world. In this sense, any performative understanding of gender genres automatically challenges the representational stability of neorealism, and it is

54

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

just this metageneric awareness that informs the postmodern neorealism of mumblecore. Not unlike the French new wave, mumblecore has openly embraced populist cinematic genres, including those most resistant to conventional neorealism, including horror (the Duplass brothers’ Baghead, Swanberg’s Silver Bullets or his contribution to the horror omnibus V/H/S [2012]) and the musical (Damien Chazelle’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench [2009]).13 Aaron Katz’s recent mumblecore detective thriller Cold Weather (2010) marks his second overt reference to narrative genre. His first—as well as his first theatrical movie—was the ultralow-budget Dance Party, USA, a version of the coming-of-age teen high school movie that foregrounds gender performativity through an examination of the pathology/ obsolescence of the conventional genders of male centrality available to the protagonist Gus. As the actor Cole Pensiger performs Gus performing gender in ways informed by the cultural representations of gender genres that Dance Party, USA both critiques and participates in, an uncertain mix of neorealism and parody emerges that radically disorients the viewer’s overall genre orientation toward the movie. As with Funny Ha Ha, the title of the movie is deliberately ironic, almost too easily so, as viewers may suspect a campy parody/homage to the teen movie that could amount to little more than a lackluster imitation of John Waters. But Dance Party, USA owes more to previous neorealist takes on the coming-of-age story such as American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993). Katz’s original plan was to supplement the on-screen title with a 1960s girl group sound track, before the potentially prohibitive cost of the rights for these songs led him to turn to his now regular sound track composer Keegan DeWitt, further invoking the power of genre conventions, both narrative and gender, in ways that blur lines between cinematic and social narratives. Rather than parody, the title signifies a self-awareness of the inevitability of genre intertextuality, that however neorealist in style, all movies featuring the socially constructed type/genre of the “teenager” unavoidably reference the complex web of the teen movie genre. And while Dance Party, USA features the signifiers of low-budget neorealism—primarily handheld camera shots and naturalistic lighting—unlike other mumblecore films in the Cassavetes/Altman tradition, the movie largely sticks to a carefully written script begun when Katz was still a student at the North Carolina School for the Arts. The movie begins with a party—actually, the aftermath of a party, as the other main character of the movie Jessica (Anna Kavan) rouses herself from where she had fallen asleep on the floor amid the morning-after wreckage of a teen party in a large, suburban Victorian-style home in what we soon learn is Portland. This first scene, which follows Jessica as she silently makes her way through the house, peering into rooms littered with the cinematic signifiers of teenage wasteland—red plastic cups and sprawls of comatose young people—creates an atmosphere of quiet anomie and emotional disengagement that links the movie to earlier films such as Dazed and Confused

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

55

and even Larry Clark’s self-consciously shocking Kids (1995) but minus the loquaciousness and plot incident that mark the former and the deliberately provocative exposé style of the latter. Instead, Jessica and Gus in Dance Party, USA are better understood as characters in search of a genre, increasingly bored and dissatisfied with the performative genres they have been inhabiting but unaware of other options. The plot of the movie actually invokes the romantic comedy tradition of the teen movie (and of course the precedence of John Hughes is impossible to avoid in the contemporary teen movie, especially for a filmmaker born in 1981), as Jessica and Gus, high school acquaintances, meet up at yet another desultory party, this one set on the Fourth of July, although the presence of sparklers at the party and shots of exploding fireworks only underscore the lack of emotional intensity that the characters experience. They each express a kind of premature world weariness, as when Jessica remarks that she used to like the Fourth of July when she was a child, suggesting that the life stage of strong passions and clear feelings has forever passed. After talking at the party and in an anonymous parking lot that serves as a teen hangout (and the implication of teens being kept in storage seems intentional), they don’t meet face-to-face again until the final scene of the movie, where they run into each other at a downscale local amusement park and somewhat atavistically pose for pictures in a photo booth. The movie was originally conceived as a parallel study of both Jessica and Gus, one privileging Jessica’s experience, if any, but the pathology/obsolescence of masculine genders of genre comes to form the focal plot of the main narrative conflict. Jessica has heard from her friend Christie at the beginning of the movie (in a sequence that parallels the gender/sex-based discussion between Jessica and Christie with a similar interplay between Gus and his friend Bill, which will be discussed subsequently) that Gus treats women badly and is only interested in sexual conquest. When Jessica openly expresses her skepticism about him when they meet at the party, Gus responds with a monologue confession of date rape that serves as the emotional center of the movie and that breaks the narrative genre link to the conventional teen romcom, where such a transgression would spell the end of any romantic development. Yet Jessica does not flee in disgust from Gus; instead, they continue their conversation in the aforementioned parking lot before separating until the last scene in the movie. In the meantime, Gus makes an ambiguous attempt at contrition/restitution/satisfying his curiosity—the only thing that is clear is how unclear Gus himself seems about his motives—with an unannounced visit to his victim, who doesn’t seem to remember him or the incident. He tries to express his dissatisfaction with the direction of his life in general and his relation to women in particular to his uncomprehending friend Bill, then heads to the amusement park with him for the final irresolution of the movie. Yet even this brief summary runs the risk of overstating the level of emotional expressiveness in the movie. These are characters who quite literally

56

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

“don’t know how to act”; who seem disconnected both from the gender and narrative genres that are supposed to define their identities and actions. This version of the anxious “love story” reflects their confusion over the social function/purpose of “romance” as well as gender roles. Their mix of intense self-consciousness, emotional dislocation, and inarticulate wariness denaturalize the very idea of “desire” as the motivating energy in the romantic comedy. Contrary to the prevailing logic of the conventional teen sex farce, which is built on the assumption of an intrinsic, overwhelming (hetero)sexual desire, the characters in Dance Party, USA seem anything but “horny,” even or especially when they feel compelled to enact the protocols/ gender genre requirements of “horniness.” That is, these characters know they are supposed to be horny and make half-hearted attempts to perform accordingly, but they remain bad actors engaged in gender minstrelsy. The awkward sex scene at the Fourth of July party underscores the emptiness with which the characters perform their gender generic roles. Gus begins a desultory conversation with a young woman he is crammed next to on a sofa. After Gus makes the hollow suggestion that “I know how to make you feel better,” the shot immediately cuts to the pair upstairs in bed as Gus achieves what we understand to be a quick, mechanical climax. Climbing off his partner, the scene pictures the young woman in the bed at left, covering up and appearing completely unsatisfied, while Gus moves quickly into the room on the right (the wall a dividing line between the two parts of the scene) and hurriedly begins to put on his clothes. The participation of both characters in this act (and the metaphor of “act” is particularly appropriate) seems more a fulfillment of the generic demands of the narrative in which they find themselves—that is, a performance for us, the voyeuristic spectators—than an outward signifier of any interior desire for sexual fulfillment. According to the director’s commentary on the DVD version of the movie, Katz originally considered having the young woman begin masturbating after Gus abandons her to emphasize his sexual inadequacy. By not following through on this idea, the scene manages to avoid the naturalizing implication that a fundamental (and therefore outside the instability of gender performance) sexual desire motivates these characters. Instead, they remain as baffled by their own actions as the audience. In this, Dance Party, USA anticipates a teen bromance like Superbad, whose main characters only find relief through abandoning their own efforts at fulfilling the role/gender genre of the horny male teen. While Superbad toys with the potential pathologies of the masculine gender genres the characters inhabit, the movie’s broadly comic invocation of parody insulates the characters from straying irrevocably from the ultimately conventional moral order underlying the narrative’s subversive pretensions. In Dance Party, USA, on the other hand, the characters confront a starker existential crisis, looking to abandon pathological adolescent gender genres without a clear sense of alternatives. The opening sequence of Dance Party, USA features a self-conscious performance of pathological gender genres by Gus and Bill aboard a Portland

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

57

MAX train that likewise anticipates the bromance while also connecting to earlier examples of the slacker gender genres exemplified by Beavis and Butt-head, Bill and Ted (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure [Stephen Herek, 1989]), and Randal and Dante from Kevin Smith’s Clerks diptych (1994, 2006). Based on an overheard real-life example of adolescent sexual boasting that Katz experienced, this opening dialogue is deliberately and excessively graphic and misogynist, based on a combination of disgust and fascination with the body and female sexuality. By deliberate, I mean both the sense that Katz wants to shock his audience and prevent our easy identification with either Gus or Bill and that Bill and Gus themselves—through their ostentatious exaggeration and conspicuously raised voices—mean to shock their fellow commuters, using their auditors as mirrors to reflect back their own self-conscious gender performance. The reference to Brecht’s theory of the relation between rhetoric and ideology in chapter 1 is relevant here as well. Our own ability as viewers to negotiate the challenge of accepting Gus and Bill as potential protagonists—a challenge connected to our making sense of the signifiers of narrative genre that condition our reception and interpretation of any cinematic text—depends on the extent to which we can read their gender genre performance as an example of naïve characters who imitate the rhetoric of what they take to be the genre of the sexually dominant male without at all understanding the ideological rationale/ramifications informing that rhetoric. In Superbad, the excessive sexual and anatomically graphic boasting of the main characters is tempered both by their Beta Male gender genre as outsider nerds as well as their physical incarnation as androgynous/asexual/ childlike, whether in terms of Jonah Hill’s round features and baby-like physique or Michael Cera’s underdeveloped body and large, doe-like eyes. In Dance Party, USA, Gus and Bill try instead to enact Alpha genres of adolescent masculine centrality and authority, part of a “skater culture,” which weds/recuperates punk rebellion with jock authority. The ambivalent construction of skater culture—an effort to claim both authority and subversion—functions as a symptom of the growing instability and increasing obsolescence of the genres of Alpha Male performance. The lineage of skater culture stretches back to the postwar formation of the juvenile delinquent, combining aggression with sensitivity and androgyny in both Marlon Brando (The Wild One [Laslo Benedek, 1953]) and the iconic James Dean (Rebel without a Cause [Nicholas Ray, 1955]). And although both actors Cole Pensinger (Gus) and Ryan White (Bill) are older than the characters they portray, their facial features—especially their curly mops of hair and long eyelashes—suggest this androgynous dimension that belies their overdetermined misogynist bluster. The “mumble” that affirms the movie’s mumblecore status—the flat, affectless, and virtually monosyllabic dialogue of the characters—signals the radical generic instability and anxiety of Dance Party, USA. Signification of all kinds has become permanently undone for these characters, the

58

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

poststructuralist rupture of signifier and signified, of desire and act, a defining and taken-for-granted quality of contemporary gender instability. Verbal communication exists on an almost purely phatic level, where speech acts serve only to maintain social linkages among the characters divorced from any larger purpose or teleology. In fact, we can describe the main source of conflict in the movie as stemming from moments when the characters attempt to interrupt the phatic flow of interchangeable verbal gestures— “what’s up, dude?”—and engage in efforts at emotional exploration and even intimacy. The movie’s structure hinges on two main instances of the effort to create meaning and coherence out of emotional anomie and confusion: Gus’s confessional admission of date rape to Jessica and a later effort at selfexamination and emotional intimacy with his putative best friend Bill over the prospect of reaching the age of majority. Both examples invoke a convention central to the teen movie/romcom: the heart-to-heart confession that erases both social and emotional barriers and connects the central couple on the basis of a shared inner identity. That this emotional connection and generic convention works equally for both opposite and same-sex couples reveals the anxiety that has always accompanied constructions of the couple in romcoms, an anxiety that is the driving force of the bromance. In Dance Party, USA, both of these scenes exemplify the seemingly contradictory generic mash-up of parody and neorealism that defines what I am calling the anxious romance. In the first instance, Gus tries to verbalize his confusion and guilt over his actions at a previous party, where his initial rescuing of an unconscious young woman from being raped by another teen leads to Gus himself raping her, only to stop midact when he realizes that his victim has awakened enough to at least open her eyes and look at him, creating a moment of unbearable self-awareness of his social performance. As noted previously, Gus’s admission represents a radically ambiguous act of emotional intimacy, one coded both to attract and repulse Jessica. The genre convention of the heart-to-heart confession by a “bad boy” character is meant to soften the reaction of the female character by substituting a more appealing, emotionally sensitive interior for the disturbing signifiers of outwardly aggressive masculine behavior (Rebel without a Cause provides the generic template here, a model followed by the more contemporary The Breakfast Club [John Hughes, 1985]). In the case of Gus’s admission, the narrative genre convention meant to stabilize the centrality of the heterosexual couple is potentially undermined by the gender genre pathology of masculine performance. Gus himself is baffled by his own actions, as is Jessica and by extension the audience. We can equally read his participation in rape as either his giving in to a primal desire—suggesting a stable signified anchoring his performative signifiers of gender—or, conversely, his enacting of the performative signifiers demanded by the genres of gender he is trying to inhabit. Gus’s disturbing confession

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

59

recalls similar scenes in both the gross-out sex comedies and the bromances that evolved from them, as sexually inexperienced male characters who are attempting to enact the performance of “horniness” find themselves in situations where they reveal their inherent moral decency by refusing to take advantage of a drunk young woman. (Think of the characters of Larry from Animal House [John Landis, 1978] through Michael Cera’s Evan in Superbad). But Gus, of course, is neither sexually inexperienced nor a “harmless” Beta Male. And his actions reveal not an inherent decency—another reassuring signified that would stabilize the inherently unstable play of gender performance—but an even greater confusion over the relationships between desire and action, signified and signifier, an essential self versus the expectations of gender performance. His confusion is mirrored in the reaction of Jessica; reactions, really, because her shot/reverse shot close-ups are crucial to the viewer’s experience of the scene, a point echoed by the actor Anna Kavan, who admitted on the DVD commentary to her own difficulty with the question of why Jessica reacts (or doesn’t react) the way she does. We can even read her confusion in terms of the parodic/neorealist genre crisis occasioned by the scene. What generic expectations is this scene meant to trigger or undermine? Both Gus and Jessica recognize Gus’s confession as “out of character,” an anxious interruption of the phatic stream of social clichés that has constituted all the dialogue in the movie to that point, clichés that have provided what stability there is for these characters in their uncertain performances of gender.14 And in terms of the narrative genres of teen movie or the romcom, the scene destabilizes the registers of ironic distance and generic self-consciousness in the movie. The actions that Gus admits to require more than simple confession to achieve redemption in terms of positioning him as the misunderstood teen “hero” and love interest. In comparison, for example, consider the parallel examples of both The Breakfast Club, where the jock Andrew Clark admitting to the brutal sadomasochistic hazing of another student (itself a kind of disguised rape) is ameliorated both by his admission and his tearful response, the signifier again of his essential decency, and Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1988), which consistently signals its status as dark generic parody through the extremity of the actions committed by Christian Slater’s “J. D.” (multiple murders, the planned bombing incineration of the school) and by the multitude of metageneric signifiers. Dance Party, USA, on the other hand, destabilizes the poles between neorealism and parody evoked by these earlier movies. Gus’s confession scene to Jessica forms a structural parallel to another teen movie staple (and staple of the bromance as well), the male-bonding scene, as Gus again struggles to break the flow of phatic dialogue to engage his best friend Bill in a kind of consciousness-raising discussion of the direction of their lives in general and their attitudes toward gender and sexuality in particular. Fueled by the late morning consumption of cheap beer, the

60

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

scene continues the tension between neorealism and comic parody, as Gus’s tentative efforts at a “meta” discussion about gender genres conflict with Bill’s outrageous and confused responses. As Gus tries both to work out his own confusion over the performative demands of the gender genres of the teen Alpha Male and articulate this confusion to an equally confused and alarmed Bill, the phatic becomes thematic. Gus finally can only signal his consciousness-raising by saying that he is tired of “fucking with the shit” of the girls/young women he encounters, and specifically Jessica, who had been previously relegated to the category of “bitch” by Gus and Bill. The simultaneously phatic quality of the phrase, meant to reinforce their social bond as teen Alpha Males, and its radical ambiguity—“fucking with her shit” can reference activities ranging from rape to simple thoughtlessness—suggests that while Gus wants to escape the pathology and obsolescence of the gender genres he has been performing, he is equally unsure about his alternatives. As in the bromance, this male bonding/confusion over masculine obsolescence is connected with homophobia. When Gus raises the question of why they automatically consider certain activities as out of bounds for them, such as an interest in photography or certainly the sciences (a question presumably occasioned by Jessica’s earlier admission, post rape confession, that she might want to study entomology in college), Bill tries to cut off this disturbing line of thought by labeling such “Beta” Male proclivities as “fag shit.” Under the influence of their alcoholic buzz, Gus nevertheless pushes the subject, finally insisting that Bill hug him. Significantly, for a film project that began with Jessica as the central character, she remains a mysterious Other in the narrative, almost as much for the viewers as for Gus. The crisis over gender performativity instead gravitates toward the melodrama of Gus’s increasing if inarticulate dissatisfaction with the gender genres of masculine pathology and obsolescence. But after Gus’s ironic epiphany of not wanting to “fuck with [Jessica’s] shit,” the ending of the movie resists the narrative genre conventions of both the conventional romcom and the Annie Hall nervous romance. In fact, the movie ends with an ironic cliché—Gus and Jessica meet, seemingly by chance—at a downscale amusement park and impulsively decide to have their pictures taken in a photo booth. Usually, a photo booth sequence in the romantic comedy is a part of a montage of the burgeoning romance, and their awkward posing within the tight framing confines of the booth does end in a tentative kiss. Again, however, despite Gus’s earlier efforts at self-awareness, what meager dialogue there is in the scene returns to the phatic level. There is no further verbal processing of the major disruption in gender genre performance—Gus’s confession—and the state of their “relationship” remains as tentative as ever. That we as viewers wonder at the end of the movie about the future of the relationship between the two results from our own atavistic investment in the narrative genre of the heteronormative romantic comedy and begs the question central to the issue of masculine obsolescence: “what’s in this for

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

61

Jessica”? If the desire of Gus and Bill is overdetermined by the genres of masculine performance, the question of Jessica’s real desire is equally opaque but unconnected to the signifiers of aggression and dominance that mark male identity. Throughout the movie, we glean signifiers of Jessica’s loneliness: her estrangement from mother and a phone message left for her absent father (an earlier version of the movie apparently contained a scene between Jessica and her father, but Katz felt the scene wasn’t working. There are of course many reasons why this might be so, but among them is the possibility that such a scene risks layering the radical indeterminacy of the gender performance in the movie with an overtly and overly explanatory psychoanalytic framework related to Jessica’s desire for a father figure). At the end, though, we remain as uncertain about how Jessica interprets her experience as we were watching her wander silently through the morning-after wreckage of the teen (dance) party at the movie’s beginning.

HUMPDAY: A FEMINIST BROMANCE If Dance Party, USA ends on a note of uncertainty regarding gender genres, it also opens a space for generic experimentation as well. Gus and Jessica’s final meeting occurs in a literal play space—the shabby theme park—a site that evokes a self-conscious nostalgia for a teen past that we know was as artificial and flimsy as the semidecrepit amusement park in which they find themselves. The park is ultimately as obsolescent as the genres of gender that the characters fitfully inhabit, an obsolescence that also extends to the narrative genre of the teen romcom. The indie/mumblecore status of Dance Party, USA allows tolerance for the movie’s indeterminacy and lack of narrative closure. In Humpday, Lynn Shelton constructs a version of mumblecore that more directly tackles a high-concept version of the bromantic comedy, one equally motivated by an interest in exploring the gender genres of straight male identity and in estranging the overdetermined normalcy of those genres. In the indie/neorealist tradition, Dance Party, USA pushes back against conventional plotting from the beginning. The movie resists making Gus’s climactic date-rape confession into a classic second-act crisis; rather than engage in dramatic emotional confrontation and catharsis, the characters continue their aimless day-to-day wandering. Humpday, on the other hand, embraces a high-concept three-act plot structure more commonly associated with the mainstream bromance: two longtime but recently estranged “straight” male friends challenge themselves to win a local adult movie competition by making and starring in a gay porn movie. Yet Shelton also adheres to an alternative aesthetic of openness and improvisation. The actors improvise the gender performance of characters who themselves are confronting the performative dimension of their gender identities. The result is a feminist bromance: a subtle exploration of performativity in relation to genres of gender and sexual identity.

62

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

For Shelton, Humpday is the result of her ongoing interests in the construction of masculinity and sexuality: I’ve always been interested in the boundaries of sexual identity and how rigid or fluid those boundaries might be for different people. I thought taking two guys who were particularly invested in their “straightness,” and placing them (or getting them to place themselves) in a situation that would challenge their heterosexuality would make for some interesting dramatic tension and awesomely squeamish humor.15 The investment of male characters in their straightness is itself a defining leitmotif of the bromance, the characters’ homophobia an index of a simultaneous attraction toward the freedoms offered by the radical reconstructions of the gender genres of male centrality and a fear of the loss of social status and (an always illusory) definitional certainty over the meaning of masculinity. In fact, the most homophobic dimension of the bromance may be less the specific deployment of stereotypes or gay panic jokes than the way gay identity is just a means to an end, a convenient form of Otherness for straight men to use in adjusting to the changing performative landscape of heteronormativity. I would argue that the idea of gay identity serves just this role for the main characters of Ben and Andrew in Humpday. Homophobia becomes a register of the characters’ dependence on/resistance to the gender genres of straight masculine centrality, a conflict that they connect to their (almost) midlife crises about the degree to which they have abandoned their adolescent commitment to nonconformity and freedom.16 Shelton’s movie takes on these vicissitudes of straight masculinity—concerns central to both the mainstream bromance and indie mumblecore—to create the generic hybrid of a neorealist parody, a high-concept art movie. Shelton explicitly describes this generic hybridity as another motivating feature of her filmmaking: I don’t shy away from the challenge of having a sort of ridiculous premise on paper and figuring out how to get a grounded version of that—a really real, actually believable, emotionally truthful version of that scenario. . . . That balance just feels natural to me, to have these ridiculously horrible or dramatic or emotional things happening and at the same time there’s humor in it and humor that comes out of it.17 Her specific interest in the contours of masculine gender performance informs her previous movie, My Effortless Brilliance (2008), another improvised exploration of a wounded male friendship between two types—genres—of straight masculine identity, in this case involving a self-absorbed, physically soft novelist Eric (played by indie rocker Sean Nelson) who attempts to reconcile with his more rugged friend Dylan (Basil Harris), who now lives in an

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

63

isolated forest cabin. Much less high concept than Humpday, My Effortless Brilliance still relies on the “fish out of water” trope, as Eric squeamishly reacts to life in the woods. In fact, My Brilliant Romance is a purer kind of bromance, in that the entire movie revolves around the tentative restoration of emotional intimacy between Eric and Dylan, without a single femaleidentified cast member. Shelton’s connection to mumblecore is twofold, in part arising out of her friendship with mumblecore veteran Mark Duplass and stylistically through her reliance on improvisation. While largely scripted, Dance Party, USA produces the illusion of improvisation through the deliberately inarticulate, emotionally vague performances of the actors. The concept of the illusion of improvisation is crucial to the understanding of improvisation within mumblecore and relates directly to mumblecore’s postmodern engagement with the ideas of aesthetic authenticity in the longer indie tradition that the movement inherits from and reacts to. Dance Party, USA demonstrates the recognition within mumblecore that the rejection of traditional genres is better understood as an even more intense self-conscious engagement with genre, whether of narrative or of gender. Similarly, the movement away from traditional scripting in favor of improvisation within indie moviemaking has long signified the desire for greater authenticity and less artifice, an escape from the idea of acting as representation. But the rejection of artifice, of the idea of acting as mimicry, however highly skilled, equally signifies a foregrounding of artifice that finally admits its inescapability. The rejection of “artificial” acting styles is of course most famously associated in American stage and film with Method acting, and the Method revolution in the late 1940s and early 1950s represents the main genealogical branch from which the improvisational school of American mumblecore descends. In her Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance, however, Virginia Wright Wexman identifies a more specific improvisatory school that I see as having more direct relevance not only to mumblecore but also to the entire field of the bromance and the anxious romance, in fact, to much of the landscape of contemporary cinematic and televisual comedy: the Second City improvisational comedy troupe started by three University of Chicago graduates—Bernard Sahlins, Howard Alk, and Paul Sills—in the late 1950s. Wexman contrasts the Second City approach to improvisation—an approach based on the work of acting theorist Viola Spolin, the mother of founder Paul Sills—from the Method style on the basis of a greater attention to social performance rather than psychological introspection: “Where Method-oriented characters emerge from the depths of the actors’ psyches, Second City Characters are drawn from the actors’ understanding of social types. . . . Where a Method performance seeks emotional ‘truth,’ the Second City performance aims for acute social observation.”18 Wexman’s argument that, in effect, the Second City style favored an anthropological over a psychological approach (and founding member Bernard Sahlins is the brother of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins) toward

64

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

improvisation is in keeping both with the nature of comedy as a genre as well as a performative approach to genres of gender. The very distinction between “drama” and “comedy” as generic categories within the history of American movies can be understood as paralleling the distinction between psychology and anthropology/sociology, between the personal and the social, and ultimately between a search for interior truth and an acceptance of the instability and anxiety of the performative. The cultural capital accorded these two generic approaches mirrors this duality, as comedy remains suspect in terms of aesthetic and cultural importance, the signifier of tears taken to represent a more authentic example of spontaneous emotional reaction than laughter, just as sincerity registers as more trustworthy than irony. The idea of “acute social observation”—that successful improvisation involves the careful observation and representation of “social types”—or genres of social and especially genre performance—explains how the improvisational, indie style of both Dance Party, USA and Humpday precisely aligns with a focus on type and genre and undermines the opposition between the authentic and the artificial. It is also no coincidence either that Second City developed during the same era as the alternative “sick” comic tradition represented by Lenny Bruce, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, and others. This more observational, less joke-oriented style of stand-up not only relied on acute social observation but also registered acute cultural anxieties, including anxieties about gender and gender performance, anxieties that would lead directly to the later nervous romantic comedies of the late 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, Shelton has emphasized the important influence on her work of the great improvisational directors Robert Altman and Mike Leigh, directors known for their commitment to social observation. Altman in particular prefigures the mumblecore version of indie filmmaking through his history of self-consciously using improvisational techniques within traditional narrative genres, from the war movie (M*A*S*H [1970]) to the western (McCabe and Mrs. Miller [1971]) to film noir/crime thrillers (The Long Goodbye [1973]; Thieves Like Us and California Split [1974]), even the comic-strip adaptation (Popeye [1980]) and British drawing-room mystery (Gosford Park [2001]). The legacy of Second City remains one of the most influential on contemporary comedy through Saturday Night Live (a wholesale importation of Second City to network television) and the skit approach to what is now called comedian-based comedy. The entire subgenre of the bromance can be viewed as an extended Second City improvisational project,19 as can in fact most mainstream contemporary comedies, built as they are from extensive improvisational takes that use scripts more as plot outlines, the very technique Shelton draws from Leigh and Altman and that forms the basic structure of Humpday. In Humpday, Sheldon uses improvisation’s “acute social observation” of “social types”—social genres of gender performance—to link the highconcept parody of gender genres found in the bromance—in this case, the

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

65

homophobia informing the contemporary bourgeois masculine genres of the metrosexual and the hipster—to the indie social realism of mumblecore. Shelton’s interest in the intense self-consciousness of “straight” white men she refers to as “the low grade homophobia of the average, well-meaning straight guy”—enables the improv performances in Humpday to expose the potentially subversive potential of bromance parody. This potential derives precisely from the complex symbiosis of the gender performance of “the average, well-meaning straight guy” and “low grade homophobia,” the persistent reliance of even these liberal modes of masculine gender performance on the logic of masculine centrality and patriarchal power.20 It is this persistent reliance that impels the high-concept narrative genre logic of Humpday and that answers the questions that go without saying because of their taken-for-grantedness: why are these characters so “invested in their straightness”? Why does the prospect of something called “gay sex” register as categorically different than simply another form of sexual activity, as a terrifying and irreversible bright line in terms of gender/sexual/social identity? Humpday generates its anxious comedy through the irresolvable conflict that both Ben and Andrew face over whether their ability or inability to perform gay sex—and specifically, their insistence that this performance be understood (somehow) as straight men performing gay sex—affirms their performative gender identities as enlightened, “well-meaning” straight guys or so completely deconstructs the socially constructed categories of “masculine” and “feminine,” “straight” and “gay” as to expose their investment in the heteronormative. If the Second City style of improvisation relies on close observation of social gender performance, this process inevitably includes the day-to-day gender genre performance of the actors. The characters of Ben and Andrew in Humpday enact social types of masculine performance—a politically progressive city planner and a bohemian dilettante artist—not only central to the mumblecore tradition but which also includes the category of indie film actor, a connection/confusion that mumblecore embraces by constantly blurring the lines between director/writer/performer, between social observation and autobiographical confession. In Humpday, while Duplass and Justin Leonard are clearly creating the distinct fictive characters of Ben and Andrew through improvisation, the plot of an indie movie based on characters who themselves decide to create an improvised movie starring themselves (and again, much of the anxious laughter in the movie derives from the characters’ uncertainty over whether their movie is fiction or nonfiction) foregrounds the question of to what extent the actors are involved in a parody not only of social types but also of themselves as social types. The fact that Humpday was shot in chronological story sequence furthers this blurring of the performative, as the process by which the characters Ben and Andrew rebuild their friendship mirrors that of the actors Duplass and Leonard developing the characters and their relationship with each other. This overlap of social and artistic performance especially informs the

66

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

opening scene of the movie, where Andrew shows up in the middle of the night on the Seattle doorstep of his old college pal Ben and Ben’s wife Anna after not having seen each other in several years. The improvised scene of an awkward greeting between two men who were once emotionally intimate but have drifted apart by two actors who themselves had only just met results in a particularly elaborate and self-conscious performance of male friendship in front of multiple audiences: within the movie’s diegetic world, for both the characters themselves as well as for the character of Ben’s wife Anna; nondiegetically, for the viewing audience; and, in a narrative/generic space that strains distinctions between the extra- and metadiegetic, the improvisatory actors themselves, whose own performative choices hinge on the close observation of the on-the-spot choices made by the other actors, making each simultaneously audience and participant.21 This opening scene enacts an aspect of social behavior that likewise connects the everyday with the theatrical, suggests that the true value of improvisatory acting consists not in replacing a studied artificiality with spontaneous realism but just the opposite: the Brechtian revelation of the artifice of the everyday, that all social interaction is a form of improvisation based on our awareness of social roles and types, our awareness of genres of social performance. We can see this congruence most clearly in situations of social awkwardness or newness, such as the reunion of Andrew and Ben or the case of two actors learning each other’s improvisatory styles and patterns. The tendency in these cases is toward an exaggeration of gender genre performance, manifested on-screen in the “bro” style greetings of both Andrew/Leonard and Ben/Duplass. The scene emphasizes the extreme physicality of the greeting between the two men, a performance that the character of Anna (here acting as a surrogate for the viewing audience) responds to with facial expressions mixing curiosity, embarrassment, and even alarm, as the two old friends engage in ritualized, quasi-violent hugging and backslapping. The escalating level of their physical encounter signals both intimacy and aggression, a simultaneous effort to reestablish personal intimacy and masculine identity while also fighting for hierarchy and dominance. Their improvised performance quickly focuses on a comparison and manhandling (the term has an almost scientific precision in this case) of key physical signifiers of masculine potency and/or decline: the grasping of emergent middle-age bellies and Ben’s (too) forceful pulling on Andrew’s hipster beard. Within the diegesis of the story, both Ben and Andrew are confronted here with a crucial conflict of gender genres, caught as they are between two different performative identities, that of their past college selves and those which they currently inhabit—put more simply, between adolescent and adult identities. In terms of the narrative, this tension will be expressed as a conflict between whether Ben can best be understood as an evolved postpatriarchal metrosexual or a caricature of postyuppie conformity, and whether Andrew represents a bohemian hipster ideal or a version of the bromantic

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

67

perpetual adolescent. In terms of Humpday as a mumblecore bromance, this conflict deliberately draws on the real-life situation of the filmmakers and actors, who themselves struggle with defining the social roles of creative men and women in early 21st-century America. In this case, the characters of Ben and Andrew represent two gender genres of post-twenties middleclass masculine identity, neither of which is attractive but which nonetheless may be inevitable: Ben’s (post) corporate suburban clone or Andrew’s ineffectual dilettante. Both carry the whiff of social obsolescence. The two actors’ commentary on the disc version of Humpday directly addresses this crisis in masculine genre identity. The digital-age development of the commentary track itself has special relevance to an improvisatory experiment like Humpday, as actors ad-lib a metaperformative commentary about their own ad-libbed performances of masculine social types. Throughout the track, Duplass and Leonard enact the same type of aggressive joking/provocation we see in the characters of Ben and Andrew, wavering as the characters do between affecting an air of not taking anything too seriously and occasionally confessing to more earnest artistic intent. At one point, reacting to a scene where the character of Ben arrives at a party held at a kind of artist’s commune that Andrew has located, a scene that through Ben’s awkwardness underlines both for the audience and for Ben just how conventionally bourgeois he has become, Leonard reacts to Duplass’s mock complaint over how lame Ben looks by joking that Duplass’s impersonation of the an aging Dockers-wearing bro is no impersonation at all, that Duplass in fact has much in common with Ben, who is more conventional than he likes to think he is. Duplass responds, partly kidding and partly (or perhaps more than partly) in earnest, by instead identifying himself as a “girlie man” in spite of his physical appearance. It is of course his physical appearance that has enabled Duplass’s acting career, allowing him to portray the social type/gender genre of the aging bro, both in mumblecore projects like Humpday and Shelton’s more recent Your Sister’s Sister (2011) interested in a sympathetic exploration of this genre and in more mainstream projects like the cable television bromance The League. In the commentary, Duplass links his insistence on the identity of “girlie man” with his vocation as a creative artist (Duplass is also a musician as well as a director/writer/actor). The gender genre of “girlie man” obviously references the crisis in masculinity that is the subject of this study as well as Humpday, and it suggests both a running away from older types of masculine identity and an embrace of the feminine, however attenuated through the adjective girlie.22 In his joking rebuttal to Leonard’s teasing, Duplass’s reference to his “true” girlie man identity in fact further reinforces his identification with Ben, as Ben’s ambivalence over his own straight masculinity, his simultaneous attraction to/fear of the “girlie man” identity, defines the central conflict in Humpday. In its mumblecore take on the comic narrative genre of the bromance, Humpday reveals that the improvisatory and often adolescent male joking about gender and sexuality that characterizes these movies (and that

68

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

also serves as the main focus of their critical disparagement) signals both self-awareness and self-defensiveness about the instability and possible obsolescence of genres of masculine identity. Consider the following comic exchange between Ben and Andrew during one of their first bromantic heartto-heart talks, an intimate late-night conversation that follows Andrew’s tumultuous arrival and Anna’s returning to bed. Andrew expresses a mix of astonishment and envy, tinged with a layer of self-defensive condescension, over Ben’s achievement of a stable straight marriage. Ben jokes (somewhat boastfully, somewhat defensively) that it was all really no big deal: “Ah, it’s easy. You just go to a grocery store, you find someone with long hair that’s a girl, start kissing her, one thing leads to another. Then you buy her a ring, you get married, you buy a house.” The mix of self-awareness and self-delusion, of comic understatement and feigned naïveté, its radically unstable irony, marks Ben/Duplass’s improvised joke as the prototypical expression of the anxious romance. In its fixation on social convention and the outward signifiers of gender genres, the joke both derives from and exemplifies Wexman’s description of the Second City model of comic improvisation. In essence, Ben tells Andrew that to be a successful heterosexual you simply act like a successful heterosexual. The key moment of slippage in the joke, the give-away moment that reveals the anxiety-producing fissure between social behavior and the desire for inner truth, comes at the end of the phrase, “you find someone with long hair that’s a girl” (emphasis mine). This moment of anxiety, in which Ben and Andrew’s aspirations to postpatriarchal metrosexual sophistication still can’t dispel their desire for a stabilizing reference point within the generic play of gender and sexuality, points to the real question that gnaws at them and drives the comic tension behind Shelton’s high-concept bromantic mumblecore: “what are we really?” This question defines how the crisis of masculinity manifests itself in the bromance, and its equally definitive—and most controversial—expression is the homophobia that pervades these movies. This homophobia expresses itself as an insistence on straightness, an insistence that, of course, constantly undermines itself the more it is invoked. We saw previously in chapter 2 how this fear of/attraction to gay sexuality operates in what we might now call “traditional” bromances such as Superbad and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. In their efforts to appeal to a broad viewership, the mainstream bromance can be seen as trying to have it both ways (so to speak) in terms of how we understand their sexual politics: their jokes can simultaneously exploit masculine homophobia while their ironic self-awareness leaves open the defense that these movies are critical commentaries on homophobia as a response to the crisis in masculinity. In mumblecore variants such as Dance Party, USA, the markers of lowbudget indie filmmaking point to a more self-selecting niche viewership. Unlike the mainstream bromances, which follow a traditional Hollywood comic rhythm of maintaining a steady and predictable stream of jokes or comic incidents, Dance Party, USA deliberately mixes and obscures its specific genre

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

69

and features the long, contemplative takes of the art movie. In Humpday, Shelton experiments with splitting the difference, in creating a mainstream mumblecore. While not as relentless in its comic barrage as Superbad, Humpday nonetheless does maintain a consistent comic rhythm throughout, much in the pattern of the improvisatory skit. Significantly, however, Shelton did not specifically design Humpday as a generic comedy. Rather, Humpday’s generic status as a comedy arises out of the movie’s desire to seriously examine straight masculine anxiety. Unlike a movie that uses homophobia as a means to generate laughter, in Humpday Shelton says that (anxious) laughter is a by-product of Ben and Andrew’s homosexual panic: Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make Humpday a comedy. We played every scene straight. I mean, we were not unaware of the potential for laughter, but we really didn’t think about it on set. We were never playing for laughs nor looking for opportunities for jokes.23 In the same interview, Shelton explicitly voices her goal that the movie endorses neither homophobia nor misogyny: “It was also vitally important to me that this film not be a homophobic one, by the way.” Whether Shelton succeeds or not, whether the movie is or isn’t homophobic, is ultimately undecidable in any categorical sense. In fact, an essentialist approach to homophobia can forestall discussions of how homophobia operates as an oppressive social formation. Just as arguing over whether a person is or isn’t racist can be used as a smokescreen to distract attention from statements and actions that perpetuate racism (as in, “because I am not a racist, my campaign rhetoric can’t be racist”), trying to determine whether a complex semiological machine such as a movie is inherently homophobic can be less interesting (and even less antihomophobic) than considering how homophobia operates in the movie and how the movie operates in the larger cultural matrix. Both Ben and Andrew, for example, enact their own investment in needing to think of themselves as inherently nonhomophobic, commensurate with thinking of themselves as inherently straight (and inherently masculine). The more useful approach, as a result, and the one most relevant to this study, is to consider “homophobia” itself as a performative category, not an essence. In Humpday, I would argue, homophobia operates as a register of Ben and Andrew’s dependence on/resistance to the genres of masculine centrality, a struggle that mirrors their confusion over their conflicting desires between freedom and stability. The movie places both the fictional characters and the actors/improvisers in a series of increasingly fraught liminal situations that simultaneously challenge how the characters perform gender and by extension how the actors improvising these characters perform the performance of radical performative instability. As an audience, our own anxious laughter is triggered by this dizzying display of

70

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

postmodern self-referentiality, as in classic bromantic fashion the movie at once invites our sympathy with and mockery of these self-conscious and self-absorbed portraits of the crisis of masculine identities. The first of these liminal situations plays like a typical improv-club premise and creates conflict between Ben and Andrew based on two of the most clichéd gender genres of masculine centrality: the free spirit/phony versus the sellout/realist. In town for less than a day, Andrew has connected with the local bohemian community and invites Ben to a party at a sex positive artist’s commune (complete with a sign on the door reading “Dionysus”). When Ben arrives, Andrew begins to self-consciously perform his own supposed flexibility toward genres of gender and sexuality, ostentatiously displaying his comfort in an atmosphere in which acts of physical affection and romantic play easily cross lines of gender and sexuality. Andrew’s embrace of the freespirit role becomes amplified almost in exactly reverse proportion to Ben’s defensiveness and anxiety over the need to extricate Andrew in time for the domestic dinner being prepared by Anna. In this sequence, Ben increasingly tries to distance himself from his bourgeois yuppie identity, with the bearded, goatish Andrew playing the Dionysus figure, the spirit of dissolution and the erasure of boundaries and performative categories. Yet the staging of this sequence over and over again emphasizes the inescapability of the performative, as this tension between Ben and Andrew is enacted in front of an audience: the other partygoers, most of whom are literally performers, musicians, and artists. Shelton then moves the stage from the large audience of the entire party in the living room to a smaller grouping in one of the bedrooms centered on the bisexual couple of Monica and Lily. Shelton herself plays the role of Monica, who along with Lily “directs” the ensuing scene, where a stoned Ben and Andrew first propose the idea of entering a local homemade porno contest with the high concept of gay sex featuring “straight” men. The proposal arises out of a ritualized performance of masculine one-upmanship, as both Ben and Andrew try to convince multiple audiences—the bohemians Monica and Lily, the movie audience, and ultimately themselves and each other—that performing “gay” identity is at once no big deal and a sign of their daring and bravado. In fact, they claim their performance will transcend genre and occupy a utopian space “beyond gay.” The scene’s carnivalesque setting—the party, the outsider environment, their altered states of consciousness—leaves open how serious the characters are and raises the prospect not of genre transcendence but of gender and sexual minstrelsy. The more fundamental theoretical question of “how will they signify they are ‘really’ straight,” a question that explodes the distinction between the essential and the performative, is left unexamined for now but recurs in the crucial final scene. Lest we assume that the movie intends us to regard Andrew in the same way he regards (or wants to regard) himself, as the boundary-breaking free spirit, a later scene where he returns for a threesome with Monica and Lily, only to lose his nerve and flee when they want to introduce a penis-shaped

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

71

sex toy into their play, indicates the limits of Andrew’s performativity. More specifically, it underscores that the “free spirit” is equally a genre of masculine performance, one that depends as much on the centrality of masculine identity as Ben’s more conventional yuppie patriarch. In this case, Andrew’s performance of homophobic panic at the prospect of encountering the penis sex toy does more than just indicate that Andrew has as much sexual anxiety as Ben. In this scene, male obsolescence is made literal in terms of the replaceable phallus. Monica and Lily imply that while Andrew is a welcome addition to their sex play, he (and his real phallus, one he makes a half-hearted pitch for as superior to its latex copy) are by no means indispensable. I argue it is this idea of gender replaceability, of masculine roles as no longer foundational and necessary, which informs the performance of homophobia by both Ben and Andrew. Both Andrew and Ben fixate on their participation in “gay sex” as the ultimate performative rejection of their own homophobia. Homophobia becomes for them the most powerful signifier of their inability to reject the genres of conventional masculine centrality, an internalized fear that also complicates the entire question of sexual orientation and its relation to patriarchy and male obsolescence. In Humpday’s version of the bromantic staple scene of the late-night heart-to-heart between the two friends, Ben confesses to Andrew an experience of sexual attraction to another man in the lonely days of his freshman year in college (before Ben and Andrew became a bromantic pair). Ben appears puzzled, a little frightened, and fascinated by the implications of his experience, which was never physically consummated. He “knows” that one experience of homoerotic attraction doesn’t signify gay identity, but actually he doesn’t really know what it means. The scene almost stands as a dramatization of the cultural shift Foucault describes when, in the 19th century, sexual practice became synonymous with something called “sexual identity,” when particular behaviors and performances became signifiers of an essential orientation.24 Caught in this uncertainty about whether desire signifies an essential identity or consistently undermines the stability of any identity, Ben and Andrew ironically revert to the most atavistic, minstrel-like performances of masculine centrality in their efforts to show how much they have transcended social convention. As the movie builds to the narrative question of whether they will finally go through with straight/gay porno movie, Ben and Andrew repeatedly dare each other to commit to the project, challenging each other’s manhood precisely in terms of whether they have the courage to challenge their manhood. Their final agreement to go through with it follows the most comic and slapstick moment of macho buffoonery, as they trash talk their way through an inept display of one-on-one basketball. Clearly out of shape and comically unskilled, their emasculation as the result of their athletic incompetence leads to their face-saving (to each other) pledge to make the movie, to prove their masculine centrality by their ability to transcend that centrality.

72

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

The movie’s final scene, where Ben and Andrew meet in a motel room to record their movie on a home video recorder, compounds the meta-awareness of gender performativity in Humpday through an improv of an improv of an improv. The plan for Humpday left this final scene deliberately open ended; there was no predetermined resolution as to what the characters will or won’t do. Unlike the mainstream bromance, Humpday provides no final “screenwriter ex machina” to restabilize (or at least try to restabilize) the uncertainty over gender genre performativity raised by the movie through a clever plot device. As actors, Duplass and Leonard improvise how the two characters will improvise their porno movie, including improvising the answer to the question of whether these actors will make the movie at all. This is, of course, a metacinematic moment as well, as Humpday becomes a movie about making a movie. Anxious about how to begin, the two actors/ characters start with Ben recording a prologue to their movie, violating, as Duplass points out in the video commentary, a rule of conventional cinema narrative that warns again expository scenes that merely serve to recount the plot. In this case, however, the scene functions as more than exposition. It both allows the characters to think through what it is they think they are about to do and foregrounds for the Humpday audience the high theoretical concept behind the high comedic concept of the plot: what does it mean for a straight guy to have gay sex? As they reluctantly try to get started, both the actors and the characters engage in a kind of Second City–style acting workshop on the performativity of straight and gay identity; in particular, they finally explicitly engage the impossible question of how to perform straightness and gayness at the same time. If the earlier confession scene recalls Foucault, here Ben and Andrew/Duplass and Leonard echo Lacan, as the erection becomes their central phall(ogocentr)ic signifier of masculine identity, gay or straight. Both men automatically equate “gay sex” with anal penetration, acting as a simulacrum of “straight” sex, both depending on a phallic-centered signifier of masculine virility. Yet just as Ben earlier fretted over what his internal feelings of youthful homoerotic desire signified, both characters comically founder on the question of what the external signifier of the erection ultimately signifies. The irresolvability of their question is expressed through the absurdity of how they think through the logistics of anal intercourse, including their plan to have the penetrator arouse himself in the bathroom with fantasies of “straight” sex and then race into the bedroom to engage in “gay sex,” apparently before the “straightness” wears off. In this scene, the multiple resonances of performance—sexual, dramatic, social—collapse into one another, as the idea of fooling their own libidinal impulses through an imaginative performance that begins in their own psyches completely undermines any last vestige of a primal heterosexual masculine identity, just as the anthropological Second City approach to performance deconstructs the internal authenticity of Method acting. Ben and Andrew are left finally questioning what it is they are trying to prove

The Emergence of the Anxious Romance

73

to whom. Searching for an ending, the movie—specifically, the director/ actors/characters—settle on a final moment of gender genre performative self-reflexivity. As Ben and Andrew finally abandon their project—and potentially each other, along with their earlier fantasies of masculine identities that could both confirm and transcend the logic of male centrality—the movie faced a tragic or at least melancholy ending. Ben returns to Anna and a model of postpatriarchal bourgeois domesticity, leaving Andrew adrift, his pretensions to a bohemian, Alpha Male, artistic identity shattered. The movie threatens to end on these mutually despairing notes of resignation and disillusionment, a conclusion not only aesthetically disappointing but also ideologically regressive, suggesting no possible alternative to the atavistic gender genres that Ben and Andrew had been clinging to throughout the narrative. As with Dance Party, USA, Humpday has no specific utopian alternative to offer, but both the political orientations of these narratives—clearly informed by the extent to which feminist, gender, and queer theory and activism have become active cultural memes over the past 20 years—as well as the irrepressibly comic energies that keep surfacing in both movies demand final scenes that no matter how ambiguous leave open the possibilities for something new, something better. And in both cases, that possibility is signified by laughter. After Ben leaves (or retreats) from the motel room/set, we end the sequence with a reprise of the metacinematic—and metaperformative—scene with which it began. We watch Andrew watch the recording of their inept efforts at simultaneously talking themselves into and out of going through with their impossible project. It is another moment of extreme self-reflexivity, as the actor Leonard improvises the character of Andrew watching the improvised performativity of the actors Leonard and Duplass improvising the improvisation of the characters Andrew and Ben. Significantly, we do not watch what Andrew is watching (we only hear the dialogue); we instead focus on the reactions of Andrew/Leonard. As the scene progresses, the sheer absurdity of the high concept behind both movies (the gay/straight porno and Humpday itself) moves Andrew from melancholy into laughter. Given, however, that what we are watching here is not Leonard’s enactment of a scripted reaction but instead an improvised breakthrough, the scene stitches together the laughter of the character Andrew with the laughter of the actor Leonard laughing at his own enactment of Andrew, a reaction further echoed on the commentary track through the laughter of Duplass and Leonard. Rather than the characters’ fixation on erection and ejaculation as the performative signified of masculinity, laughter here functions as a radically destabilized version of the transcendental signified, a kind of involuntary physical orgasm that cannot be “faked” but that is also inherently polysemic and ambiguous. Neither the actors nor the characters can perform the genres of straight masculinity with a straight face. To make visible the performative, constructed, and therefore contingent dimension of the genres of masculine centrality is to make them risible. This inherent absurdity of

74

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

all social performance may explain why improv so strongly correlates with comedy. This is not to argue that the recognition of this absurdity ultimately dismisses the poignancy and legitimacy of the emotional pain and confusion enacted by the characters in Humpday. It is precisely this tension between the tragic and the absurd, between the cruel and the ridiculous, that defines the growing pains of genre in transition as well as the movie’s ambiguous status as a mainstream mumblecore movie. In the final chapter, I will focus on Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg (2010) as a case study of the contemporary romantic comedy/anxious romance. Neither bromance nor chick flick, a nervous romance without the fantasy wish fulfillment that informs Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally, Greenberg confronts both the fear and possibility of revising obsolete genres of masculine performance in an age when the need for distinct binary gender roles has passed.

4

Greenberg The Anxious Romance and the Future(s) of the Romantic Comedy

I really feel these characters are a lot like people in the world. . . . They’re only “difficult” compared to conventional movie characters. I don’t think they’re difficult compared to real human beings. I’m surprised how people react so strongly. Their argument is, “Who is like this?” But they don’t realize they’re using other movies as comparison rather than using their own parents or themselves. —Noah Baumbach1

If Humpday represented mumblecore’s embrace of and experimentation with genre cinema, deconstructing the binary distinction between “indie” and “mainstream” moviemaking from below, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg (2010) contributes to the same project from above. Featuring an A-list comic actor in Ben Stiller and a director who carries the “nominated for an Academy Award” imprimatur, Greenberg meets Humpday on the common ground of the boutique studio/distributor (Focus Features in the case of Greenberg; Magnolia Pictures in the case of Humpday). The emergence of the oxymoronic corporate/indie boutique studios in the 1990s, both through acquisition and financial metamorphosis (as in the case of Focus, which began as October Films, merged into USA Films as it passed through the corporate hands of Universal to Vivendi, and finally was acquired again by NBC Universal as Focus), serves as the economic base for understanding the process of dissolving/confusing/reorganizing narrative and gender genres over the past 40 years. In Greenberg, we see the emergence of mumblecore sensibilities into the mainstream romantic comedy at a moment when the definitions of “mainstream” and “romantic comedy” have never been more semiotically unstable. Or more specifically, at a moment of semiotic instability that parallels that early crisis in narrative and gender genres described by Krutnik as the rise of the “nervous romance.” Greenberg connects the nervous romance tradition to the contemporary crisis of the obsolescence of masculine centrality, featuring a narrative that shares with both the bromance and mumblecore not only the depiction of particular crises of masculine identity but also the cataloging of pathologies of inherited genres of masculinity. In Greenberg’s “Gen X meets Gen Y” revision of Annie Hall, the nervous romance takes

76

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

on the gender genre instability over masculine obsolescence to create an anxious romance for the age of masculine obsolescence, both an end and a new beginning to the romantic comedy for an age when the idea that, in the words of Judge Walker’s ruling in the Proposition 8 case, “genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. . . . has passed.”2 Several commentators have pointed out the structural similarities between Greenberg and Annie Hall.3 There is the demographic parallelism between Alvy Singer/Annie Hall (Woody Allen and Diane Keaton) and Roger Greenberg/Florence Marr (Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig): a middle-aged, neurotic, creative Jewish man becomes involved with a younger, neurotic, creative, WASP woman (9 years younger in Annie Hall; 18 years in Greenberg). In both cases, the performative expressions of their comparative neuroses are differentiated through cultural and gender stereotypes/genres: the men are angst ridden and doom obsessed; the women flighty and insecure, the relative youth, beauty, and “mainstream” ethnic identities of the women serving as kinds of fantasy ideals for the men. The parallels extend to the star personas of both Stiller and Gerwig. Stiller is the scion of Second City graduates Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, pioneers along with Woody Allen of the observational humor comedy trend in the 1960s that informs Annie Hall. The celebrated “prologue” to Annie Hall, in fact, where Allen/Singer addresses the audience directly as both stand-up comic and protagonist of the movie, registers this evolution in less than two minutes, as Alvy transitions from the classic Borscht-belt–style jokes that Allen began his career writing to the sharp observation of social types that marked both Allen’s later stand-up career as well as the improv school of the Second City. From the perspectives of both comic form and the evolution of gender genres, we can read the “nervousness” of the romance in Annie Hall in terms of the increasing instability of traditional types/genres of gender and ethnic identity and the crisis this instability causes for Alvy as both lover and social comedian. Throughout the movie, Alvy constantly resorts to “cultural stereotypes,” as his first wife Allison points out to him, and much of the initial humor of his relationship with Annie derives from the ludicrous contrast between his stereotypical working-class Jewish family and the equally stereotyped Midwestern bourgeois Halls. As the narrative progresses, however, these stable cultural markers begin to fade in significance, and by the end of the movie, we understand that these traditional “differences,” a staple of American ethnic-based comedy and melodrama since the early days of cinema, play no significant part in the eventual dissolution of the romantic relationship between Alvy and Annie. Ben Stiller represents a second generation of the Second City in terms of his career arc and in the evolution of the contemporary bromance. If Saturday Night Live (SNL) represents the mainstreaming of Second City–style improv to network television, then programs such as The Ben Stiller Show in the early 1990s continued this development in an even more postmodern key, as SNL itself became an object of self-referential parody. As SNL moved

Greenberg

77

from subversive experiment to career launching pad, the self-referentiality of programs like The Ben Stiller Show functioned as an essential, ironic safeguard against losing one’s satirical edge, a challenge for Stiller throughout his career, as he balances mainstream, big-budget, and big-paycheck performances in movies such as A Night at the Museum (Shawn Levy, 2006) with both improv-styled (although now equally mainstream) comedies such as Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001) and smaller, indie roles as in Greenberg. Greta Gerwig’s performance as Florence links Greenberg with both Annie Hall and with mumblecore, where she has emerged as the first “star” that mumblecore has produced. Although Diane Keaton had appeared in several films before Annie Hall—most notably The Godfather movies as well as Allen’s earlier comedies—her background was in 1960s alternative theater, a training ground that contrasted sharply with Allen’s development on nightclub stages, a contrast that plays out in their Annie Hall performances. Keaton’s more Method-influenced naturalism contrasts with Allen’s portrayal of Alvy as “always on,” always self-consciously maintaining a persona. In keeping with the emerging genre self-consciousness that marked the nervous romance, Annie Hall called comic attention to this contrast in styles/gender genre performances through the iconic rooftop scene in which subtitles indicated what Alvy and Annie were really thinking as they attempted to impress each other, one point being to remind us that Keaton’s naturalism is itself a performance, that naturalism is not necessarily more natural than Allen’s stand-up persona. Gerwig’s mumblecore training—really, a kind of antitraining—equally stands as a contrast not only to Stiller’s performance of Roger in Greenberg, but, as with all stars of “comedian comedies,” to the particular kind of comic improv style he carries with him from movie to movie, a style he must essentially play against when essaying a more serious, less cartoonish role such as Roger Greenberg. In keeping with mumblecore’s early neorealist DIY aesthetic, which militated against the highly differentiated division of labor traditional in movie production, Gerwig began by participating in the all-hands-on-deck casting strategy of her friend Joe Swanberg’s movies. Yet the mumblecore ethos of Brechtian amateurism also parallels the Second City improv tradition, as actors in these movies “play” themselves by portraying people “like” themselves: bohemian twentysomethings with artistic aspirations of varying degrees of vagueness (as in Humpday). As with Second City, mumblecore improv ultimately relies on the identification of social types, an identification that begins with recognition that our real identities are themselves constructed out of social types. Mumblecore neorealism is thus the neorealism of a post–Judith Butler age (and the characters in mumblecore are exactly the social types who would have encountered Butler in an undergraduate gender studies course), one based not on essential character traits but on the play of performative categories and genres of identity. It is the instability of the distinction between reality and representation, between the individual and social type, that Baumbach references in the epigraph

78

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

given previously. He is ostensibly responding to criticism that the characters in Greenberg seem absurdly eccentric and stylized, too self-consciously quirky to be real, a criticism also leveled against the 1990s generation of indie auteurs in whose lineage Baumbach stands, particularly Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, and Paul Thomas Anderson. Baumbach answers by turning this charge on its head, arguing that our sense of reality derives in fact from representation, from the genres of gender and identity we learn from movies and television: “But they don’t realize they’re using other movies as comparison rather than using their own parents or themselves.” In contrast, Baumbach justifies the “difficulty” of the characters in Greenberg on the basis of realism: “I really feel these characters are a lot like people in the world. . . . They’re only ‘difficult’ compared to conventional movie characters.” The idea of “conventional” movie characters connects exactly to the ideas of genres of gender, social types, and performative approaches to gender identity. The adjective conventional also implies the desire for standardization and consistency, the criterion of psychological unity that emerged as a hallmark of the 19th-century novel and has been subsequently instantiated in the canons of screenplay writing within the classical Hollywood style.4 My contention in this study is that the crisis of masculinity we see in contemporary cinema derives precisely from the way these movie conventions have become increasingly fractured, an evolutionary process that mirrors the “difficulty” of changing and confusing social roles for “real human beings.” The identity crises that mark the alienated hipsters of mumblecore now equally inform the generic crisis that results in the confusion over what constitutes a “conventional” romantic comedy in the first decades of the 21st century. Where a nervous romance such as Annie Hall expressed doubts about whether the monogamous heterosexual Couple could survive as the standard teleological goal for relationships between men and women, the anxious romance extends those doubts to the fundamental gender categories on which the idea(l) of The Couple is based. Unlike Annie Hall, which models the relationship between Alvie and Annie on a traditional and patriarchal teacher/student dynamic, with Alvie as an established and successful older man—an Alpha Male in terms of cultural capital—who acts as both lover and mentor to Annie, Greenberg features a “failed” Alpha Male in Roger Greenberg, someone whose early promise and talent has been squandered and who is as equally adrift as the postgraduate Florence. A member of an up-and-coming indie rock band in his college days some 20 years earlier, Roger short circuited the band’s opportunity to sign with a record label out of a combination of an inflated sense of artistic integrity and a miscalculation that better offers were on their way. When these other offers failed to materialize, the band disintegrated. While his former bandmate Eric (played by Mark Duplass) went on to material success in the entertainment industry, both Roger and his onetime best friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans)—with whom Roger reunites in Greenberg—fall apart, Ivan into substance abuse and Roger finally experiencing a nervous

Greenberg

79

breakdown. As a final hedge against complete cultural obsolescence, Roger fashions a kind of career out of his lifelong aptitude for carpentry. At the beginning of the movie, he has recently been released from a psychiatric hospital and has returned from New York to house- and dog-sit at his brother’s upscale home in Los Angeles. Rather than acting as any kind of mentor for Florence, Roger’s situation if anything seems more hopeless than hers. The movie opens with a sustained close-up taken from the passenger’s seat of Florence driving through the streets of Los Angeles listening to the classic rock of Steve Miller’s “Big Old Jet Airliner.” She is cobbling together a living through a series of odd jobs, including serving as a nanny/personal assistant for Roger’s older brother Phillip and his family. Like Annie Hall, she occasionally sings in local clubs, an avocation that might allow the former musician Roger an entrée to offer advice and help, but he seems so frozen in his neuroses and compulsions (he is an obsessive writer of complaint letters to corporations and political rants to the New York Times) that he struggles throughout the movie to register any empathy for the emotional needs of others. In fact, in his role as house sitter Roger functions as a kind of assistant to Florence, who clearly displays greater competence and organizational skills than he does. If the bromance gender genre of Beta Male represents one effort to redefine—and therefore stabilize—a new genre of cinematic male identity in response to the crisis of masculinity, the middle-aged Roger instead embodies that crisis. Like the younger characters of the bromance and mumblecore, Roger remains confused over what it means to be an adult man in contemporary society, but this confusion has now extended into early middle age. His confusion signifies as neither boyish nor cute. He is that rarest of characters in a Hollywood movie: the unlikeable hero. His recently acquired vocation as a carpenter carries an atavistic quality to it, a recourse to a nostalgic gender genre of working-class masculinity in a postindustrial economic environment that has been devastating to working-class communities. As viewers, we remain unsure as to how we are meant to respond to Roger as carpenter, whether as a display of actual competence meant to redeem his role as “leading man” or as yet another hopeless pipe dream along the lines of his failed music career, his pointless letter writing, or his doomed fantasy about rekindling his long dead relationship with his psychologically fragile ex-girlfriend Beth (coproducer and cowriter Jennifer Jason Leigh). While he clearly does display ability as a carpenter, he gains no social status from his skills among his former peers, a point underlined when Roger undertakes to build an upscale doghouse for Mahler, his brother’s dog. The doghouse appears in fact to demonstrate an impressive level of craftsmanship, but to Roger’s distracted brother calling in from abroad, it functions as no more than another example of Roger’s lack of focus. Similarly, when Ivan reveals to him (only as the result of Roger’s insistent questioning) that others criticize Roger for failing to make an effort in his life, he expresses a comically self-deluded bafflement that no one recognizes his doghouse project as precisely an example of making an effort.

80

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

If Greenberg is a comedy, it is a comedy of social embarrassment rather than jokes. One source of this social embarrassment could be understood as the relentless emasculation of Roger, but the psychoanalytic concept of emasculation really only makes sense in a patriarchal context built on maintaining male dominance and centrality. In short, Roger can only be effectively emasculated if he has first been masculinized. Instead, Roger seems completely acclimated to humiliation in a way foreign to a nervous romance character like Alvy Singer. In comparing Annie Hall with Dance Party, USA, Humpday, and Greenberg, it is striking how much more assured and taken for granted Alvy’s (hetero)sexual prowess is than the male-identified characters in these later anxious romances. If the nervous romance of Annie Hall presaged the contemporary crisis in masculinity, the anxious romance documents the aftermath. The first, disastrous sexual encounter between Roger and Florence in Greenberg serves as a case in point of how fractured the genres of masculine gender performance have become. Roger reflexively invites Florence out for a drink after a series of depressing encounters at a lavish barbecue held at the house of the far more conventionally successful Eric. There, his ex-girlfriend Beth remarks how “brave” it is for Roger to be doing “nothing” at “our age,” an unintentionally backhanded complement that Florence will echo later at one of the many crisis points in their “relationship,” such at it is. The concept of bravery will also return at the movie’s end in relation to the themes of contingency and chance that mark the anxious romance. The interactions between Florence and Roger have to this point been defined by a social awkwardness linked to their difference in age but equivalence in terms of occupational status. If Roger’s invitation seems prompted more by a desperate effort to assert masculine agency than by any conventional generic logic of romcom attraction, her acceptance is in keeping with the directionless mumblecore inertia that has defined her character so far. Because Roger lacks a driver’s license (a crucial signifier of cultural impotence in Los Angeles that also recalls Alvy Singer’s horror at the car culture of Los Angeles in Annie Hall), Florence must pick him up, immediately underlining Roger’s vestigial sense of agency and centrality. Stopping by her tiny apartment before setting off for a bar (and the “date” never gets that far), their meager, strained conversation is followed by Roger’s abrupt sexual advance, a move motivated by nothing in the conversation that has gone before and that Florence again acquiesces to out of her ingrained passivity. This sexual encounter stands as a generic nexus point for the nervous romance, gross-out bromantic comedy, and mumblecore neorealism. In classic Second City improv style, both Roger and Florence appear to be following a predetermined social script, a protocol for a first sexual encounter as habitual as asking to take a houseguest’s coat or offering him a drink. Roger begins kissing her as they share a bottle of Corona light (the only beverage in her refrigerator). She pauses to remove her coat, then Roger immediately begins to aggressively remove her top and bra, actions Florence

Greenberg

81

only responds to with an apology for her bra’s ugliness and lack of clasp (Roger complains that it’s like “an Ace bandage”). Abandoning the project once her breasts are exposed, Roger pushes her on the bed and quickly pulls down her tights and underwear, less suggesting passionate urgency than an impatient recognition that oral sex is the next item on the checklist. Rather than the montage of fetishizing close-ups that characterizes sex scenes in mainstream American cinema, Baumbach maintains a clinical medium shot from several feet behind Florence’s bed. We see Florence exposed, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling, her arms lying passively on the bed in a “hands up” pose, while Roger has his face buried between her legs in a ridiculous tableaux. The scene combines stasis and embarrassment, the lack of movement on the part of Roger and Florence allowing the viewer’s eyes to examine the mise-en-scène of Florence’s tiny Los Angeles apartment: the cheap beige carpeting, the dorm-room style decorating, posters and pashmina tacked to the walls, and the thrift-store bookcase. Florence makes a few ineffectual attempts to conjure her own arousal through deep breathing but becomes distracted by what she claims to be the sound of a train, although the audience hears nothing. Responding to Florence’s apologizing (yet again) that “I get kind of nerdy” as an explanation for her lack of sexual response, Roger simply says, “don’t worry about it,” repeating his earlier response to still another Florence apology for getting the hiccups after drinking a carbonated beverage. “Don’t worry about it” is the most ironic note Roger can strike in relation to the defining attributes of his character, as throughout the movie he counters his aimlessness and sense of impotence with a simmering neurotic rage at what he sees as the absurdity and shallowness of contemporary culture. An echo in many ways of the scene in Annie Hall signaling the fraying of the relationship between Annie and Alvy in which a double exposure of Annie leaves her body to watch the couples’ lovemaking, leading to an argument between Alvy and the ghost Annie over his desire to make love to the “whole” Annie, this initial sexual encounter between Florence and Roger forestalls any assumption of an initial passion/attraction between the two, an assumption crucial to the construction of gender in Annie Hall. In the earlier nervous romance, the flowering of heterosexual passion promised a respite— however transitory, and the point of Annie Hall is to affirm the inevitably transitory nature of love—from the neurotic self-consciousness that marks both characters. In the anxious romance Greenberg, there is no such respite, no appeal to any stable gender constructions that can provide even temporary affirmation of the naturalness of The Couple. Instead, Roger and Florence are leading their whole lives as Second City–style improvisation. This performative self-consciousness has come to define mumblecore neorealism, a neorealism built not on depth but surface metaphors. That characters are “shallow” in mumblecore is exactly the point. They have abandoned the last vestiges of the nervous romance’s faith in depth psychology and essential truths about the nature of heterosexual romance. Instead, these characters

82

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

struggle with adapting to increasingly obsolete genres of gender, genres built on a symbolic and increasingly hollow ideal of male centrality. In Greenberg, the crisis of male centrality forms the basis of the movie’s bromance subplot, the renewed relationship between Roger and Ivan. Male friendships in the romantic comedy have traditionally assumed two main forms: either the romantic rival or, more relevant to both the nervous romance and the bromance, the best friend/sidekick. These homosocial relationships trace their own history of the cinematic genres of masculine identity, from the sexually ambiguous characters performed by Gig Young and Tony Randall in the late 1950s/early 1960s sex comedies on the verge of second-wave feminism to the hipster swinger portrayed by Tony Roberts in both Annie Hall and Woody Allen’s earlier exploration of masculine identity, Play It Again, Sam (1972), to the Beta Male pairings that define the bromance. In the earlier incarnations leading up to the 1970s nervous romance, these sidekicks worked to buttress/redefine genres of Alpha masculinity, even and most especially in Annie Hall, where Allen still seeks to fashion a version of Alpha Male identity—the teacher/mentor version of patriarchy—that retains a sense of relevance and centrality for the male lead, even in a movie whose title focuses solely on Annie. As Frank Krutnik recognized, for all the self-conscious modernity of the nervous romance, their impetus is more headily nostalgic. They capitalize upon a desire to slip back into a fantasied past of secure options and a less chaotic sexual menu which can be regulated by and through heterosexual monogamy. Even while acknowledging the contemporary breakdown of marriage, these films manifest a yearning for rules, norms, and boundaries within which The Couple can come, and stay, together; within which both inter- and intrasubjective relations can be safely regulated.5 Krutnik positions the nervous romance in terms of the ideological context for the evolution of gender genres in 1970s Hollywood: the “breakdown of marriage,” with marriage understood as synonymous with “heterosexual monogamy.” What was experienced or at least translated as a crisis in the 1970s has become a long-standing trend by the early 21st century, with both marriage and divorce rates continuing to decline. Just as significant, “marriage” itself is in the process of divorce from “heterosexual monogamy,” the very development that resulted in Judge Walker’s court opinion on the obsolescence of segregated gender roles. All of these developments are at play in the bromance and mumblecore, as well as in their synthesis in the anxious romance exemplified by Greenberg. A little remarked on dimension of these contemporary anxious romances is just how little divorce plays a part in these narratives, especially in the backstories of the protagonists. These movies are not “comedies of remarriage,” part of an effort to establish a more fulfilling, erotically satisfying version

Greenberg

83

of heterosexual monogamy, an effort that the nervous romances defined by Krutnik still take part in, even if a movie like Annie Hall ultimately suspects that lifelong monogamy might be impossible.6 A first marriage for the characters of the contemporary nervous romance suggests a moment when those characters believed they understood their performative gender identities, even if they later become disillusioned about the social restrictions of these identities (as in the classic consciousness-raising plots of 1970s responses to the women’s movement such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, An Unmarried Woman, or even later broad social comedies such as 9 to 5 [Colin Higgins, 1980]). Pervading both the bromance and mumblecore and serving as a hallmark of the contemporary anxious romance is a radical uncertainty about gender genres from the very beginning, a sense of their performative contingency and thus arbitrariness that has defined these character’s lives from adolescence. In Greenberg, Roger and Ivan function neither as Alpha hero and Beta sidekick (as do Rock Hudson and Tony Randall in Pillow Talk) nor as aspiring Alpha and Alpha coach (as do Woody Allen and Tony Roberts in Annie Hall) but as two examples of “obsolete” males, each a failure at Alpha masculinity. Just as the twentysomething characters in contemporary mumblecore movies likely studied Judith Butler in college, these Generation-X exemplars of the midlife crisis have carried with them from an early age an ironic awareness of the camp dimensions of the performance of gender genres in movies like Pillow Talk and even Annie Hall. For someone like Roger, the multiple levels of subterfuge and impersonation involved in the closeted gay actor Rock Hudson’s performance of a “straight” character who enacts a “gay” masquerade represents less of a scandal or anomaly than business as usual for generic (and gender generically unstable) Hollywood cinema. Whether in the bromance, mumblecore, or the various combinations under scrutiny here, the ascension to adult masculinity always represents just another level of play acting, another version of the childhood game of “Let’s Pretend” only with (supposedly) higher stakes involved. A common refrain throughout these movies is a sense of the unreality, contingency, and arbitrariness pervading the entire enterprise of adult masculinity. Characters search for the right rules to follow, the correct performative cues for creating the social character types that are expected of them. In fact, if there is a single plot device that links all of these movies, it is the education in how to play a grown-up man. The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and I Love You, Man each feature characters who are given explicit instructions on how to be a grown-up. The aimless teens in Dance Party, USA feebly guess at the roles they are supposed to play next, while Ben and Andrew in Humpday move from reviewing how their college-day expectations of adulthood were playing out to directly engaging in the question of what it means to perform gay—and thus by inference straight—masculine identity. For Roger in Greenberg, the entrance into midlife brings with it a consciousness of what used to be called a generation gap between how his own age

84

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

group has struggled with adulthood and what this struggle means for Florence and her contemporaries. In what could stand as a tagline for the contemporary crisis in masculinity, Roger sums up the radical contingency of masculine gender performance in his dismissive—and defensive—description of Eric’s party: “The men dress like children;, the children dress like superheroes.” There is a cultural logic that runs through both the contemporary anxious romcom and the concurrent fixation on the superhero in action adventure movies, one captured by Roger’s aperçu: the reversion to childhood and imaginative playacting. For Roger (as for many cultural critics), this reversion suggests a willful infantilism, a morally indefensible shirking of grown-up responsibility. There is truth in this accusation, but willful infantilism is nothing new. Indeed, we can read the history of psychoanalytic theory as a century-long explication of the relationship between modernity and infantilism. But the easy joke attached to the hypocrisy of Roger making such a statement (throughout the movie he seesaws back and forth from acting as a curmudgeonly scold to painfully trying to establish hipster cred) points to a more useful and more potentially hopeful reading. If the reversion to childhood can be taken as a symptom of a mass moral failing, it can equally represent not only a completely understandable response to a period of cultural evolution and redefinition but also a constructive one as well. As I have argued, the critical reception of the bromance is defined by a radical ambivalence over whether the gender politics of these movies should be seen as progressive or regressive, as gestures toward postpatriarchal genres of masculine performance or as misogynistic and homophobic reactions against the decentralization and obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculine performance. This critical ambivalence is likewise echoed in arguments over whether the use of nudity and explicit representations of sexual activity in mumblecore should be seen as revolutionary or regressive. The intense debate over Lena Dunham’s recent HBO series Girls—like Greenberg an example of the mainstreaming of mumblecore—as demonstrating either the ultimate success or failure of third-wave feminism is a case in point. The critical reception of Greenberg betrays a similar uncertainty, over not only how to deal with the fraught question of the central character of Roger Greenberg’s likeability (or lack thereof) but also whether to identify the movie as a romantic comedy. The catchall genre of “indie” movie can be deployed to forestall further discussion of narrative genre specificity, but one of mumblecore’s recurring cultural strategies has been to challenge the idea of a “genre-less” movie by embracing popular genres with varying levels of ironic engagement, from horror to the musical to the teen movie and the high-concept comedy. In terms of Greenberg, the issue of its romcom status can be summed up in the question, “Is this a happy or depressing movie?” In his negative review of the movie, for example, David Edelstein offers that “the movie has the vague outlines of a formula romance (or screwball comedy) in which a prig learns to loosen up and care for someone else, but Baumbach scores points off his protagonist in a way that’s almost

Greenberg

85

pathological, like people who hate themselves so much that they have to be the first (and loudest) to point it out.”7 Mary Pols expressed a similar frustration with Greenberg: Yet the movie has the curious vagueness of intent that makes so many “meaningful” works of fiction not all that meaningful. I’d be happy to accept Greenberg as a portrait of the terrible insecurities and needs that bring the lovely person and the stinker together. But I doubt that Baumbach intended to make a dramatized version of Smart Women, Foolish Choices. It seems out of character, and the tone is not that of a cautionary tale. I worry that he sees Greenberg as a modern, ennui-filled love story and believes, like Florence, that Greenberg can be saved by the love of a good woman. Not a chance.8 The point, of course, is not to empirically determine whether in fact Greenberg is or isn’t a romantic comedy. A more significant dimension of both of these reactions is their mutual identification of—and impatience with—what both see as the “vagueness” of either its “formula” (Edelstein) or “intent” (Pols). Both critics express a need for the movie to definitively declare its generic status and purpose. Both offer similar possible formulas, each derived from earlier manifestations of the romcom: “a prig learns to loosen up and care for someone else” and “a portrait of the terrible insecurities and needs that bring the lovely person and the stinker together.” And the headlines for both reviews—whether supplied by the critics or by their editors—connect this desire for greater narrative generic certainty to a desire for gender genre certainty, as both the “prig” and the “stinker” refer to genres of masculinity: “Monsters, Inc.: Two Films, Vincere and Greenberg, Lay Bare the Emotional Destruction of Hideous Men”; “Greenberg: When the Nasty Guy Gets the Girl.” In her review on Salon.com, however, Stephanie Zacharek reframes this “vagueness” in terms of established narrative and gender genres as a sign of experimentation and openness: “Greenberg” is an unsettling but ultimately joyous little picture, a movie that’s as self-conscious as anything Baumbach has ever made, and yet far more open: It reaches out to the world instead of insisting on hugging its own pain, tight. There are points in “Greenberg” where Roger treats Florence with inexcusable cruelty; he’s cruel to her, in fact, right after he proffers that heartfelt mix-CD. But slowly, gradually, he’s getting the hang of not hurting people. “Greenberg” is all about that halting, forward movement. Maybe there’s no happy ending for Roger Greenberg, but there’s no going back, either, and that counts as progress.9 Zacharek’s take on Greenberg captures what I argue is the real question emerging from the crisis in genres of masculine identity: what represents

86

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

a “halting forward movement” when it comes to redefining genres of gender identity within the romantic comedy? The lack of a “happy ending” is inevitable; the very idea of a happy ending in the romcom depends on a narrative logic that itself depends on a “time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage.” Both of the possible formulas for Greenberg identified by Edelstein and Pols derive from a need to preserve at least some version of these distinct roles, a version that also, whether intentionally or not, also preserves the idea(l) of male centrality, a danger Pols acknowledges when she worries that Greenberg may be another example/fantasy of the pathological male being “saved by the love of a good woman.” For Zacharek, however, the joyfulness of Greenberg derives instead from how “it reaches out to the world instead of insisting on hugging its own pain, tight.” Zacharek’s insight suggests that Greenberg’s “halting forward movement” is not an effort to transcend genre altogether in the name of some greater essential truth, a la traditional neorealism. Instead, Greenberg brings with it the mumblecore recognition that genres cannot be transcended, only transformed, whether these genres are those of story or gender. The social satire of Greenberg is the social satire of Second City–style improv and its careful attention to social performance rather than the deep emotional truth of the Method. And as Zacharek further identifies, what emerges within Greenberg is a social ethic that ultimately trumps the traditional romcom concern with reconciling the potential anarchy of romantic love with the socially mandated insistence on the stability of the heterosexual couple: “getting the hang of not hurting people.” From this perspective, the most important question confronting the audience at the end of Greenberg is not whether Roger and Florence will work out as a couple, but whether Roger in particular will be able to abandon the social script of the failed Alpha Male and fashion an approach to gender performance based on the ethic of “not hurting people,” of moving beyond the circular trap expressed in the psychobabble cliché he learns from Florence: “hurt people hurt people.” In fact, the entire question of “The Couple” as a narrative generic goal in the contemporary romcom depends on the degree to which characters in these movies see the radical destabilization of gender genres as a “forward movement” full of progressive possibility instead of a crisis of masculinity. It is in this radically open-ended conclusion to Greenberg that the anxious romance most clearly signifies its distinction from the Annie Hall nervous romance that Krutnik definitively described. The end of Annie Hall leaves the cultural concept of The [Heterosexual] Couple intact, even as it radically questions its long-term efficacy, to the extent that it reaffirms the binary gender genres that have governed the evolution of the cinematic romantic comedy. The famous split-screen psychotherapy scene in Annie Hall exemplifies this reliance on gender binarity. On the left, Annie is seen sitting casually in a light, stylish office, talking with her offscreen female

Greenberg

87

therapist. On the right, Alvy lies on the classic leather couch in what is almost a parody of the psychiatrist’s office, all dark wood paneling with a patriarchal, bearded Freud figure listening/sitting in judgment in the background. In terms of exposition, the scene exposes the extent to which Annie and Alvy find themselves growing apart in their relationship; in terms of the jokes, the scene focuses on their different—and stereotypically gendercoded—interpretations of the same empirical situation: MALE ANALYST:

How often do you sleep together?

FEMALE ANALYST:

Do you have sex often?

ALVY:

Hardly ever, maybe three times a week.

ANNIE:

Constantly, I’d say three times a week.

The humor and even poignancy of this scene in particular and from much of the entire movie stems from this oscillation between an affirmation of the individuality and growing equality of the male and female leads of the traditional romcom and the reassurance that no matter how much gender relations may change, there will remain an essential disparity between the genders that ensures the durability of at least some form of The Couple. In his final endnote on Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (really, neotraditional romcom auteur Nora Ephron’s script for the movie), Krutnik recognizes that this Annie Hall revision represents “a more generalized project of refinding in the modern world a secure and viable place for the kind of totalizing intimacy of the screwball era.”10 This “totalizing intimacy” of the screwball comedy, of course, derived from the governing cultural insistence on gender binarity and masculine centrality, however much the anarchic energies of these classic movies tried to subvert this logic. In essence, then, the nervous romance is always looking backward, to an era where, in Brian Henderson’s terms, “men and women [were] willing to meet on a common ground and to engage all their faculties and capacities in sexual dialectic.”11 Krutnik describes the nervous romance as embodying “a yearning for rules, norms, and boundaries within which The Couple can come, and stay, together.”12 The most important of these “rules, norms, and boundaries” are those regulating gender performance and significance. The traditional Couple presupposes the (relative) stability of gender genres, which is why these genres become the focus of nervous humor, as in the Annie Hall therapist scene or throughout When Harry Met Sally, where the main character note defining Harry derives from his ongoing riff about (and stubborn insistence on) the essential differences between men and women. In the contemporary anxious romance, however, it is not divorce and the possible obsolescence of marriage that drives the central generic crisis, as in the nervous romances or the screwball comedies of remarriage. Again, the anxious romances I am describing remain surprisingly unconcerned and unpreoccupied with divorce. Instead, it is the increasing obsolescence of gender genres and the

88

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

attendant crisis surrounding the concomitant obsolescence of masculinity and masculine centrality that opens up new imaginative possibilities for the idea and ideal of The Couple, but the expanded possibilities equally mean the radical destabilization of existing genres of both narrative and gender. The transition from the generic experimentations and recuperations of the nervous romance to the almost schizophrenic generic status of the contemporary anxious romance registers as the move from an internal tension between the modes of comedy and melodrama that animate movies such as Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally to the greater tension, even contradiction, between neorealism and parody that link the bromance and the anxious romance. In spite of their comic wit and postmodern self-awareness, both Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally exhibit an essential conservatism when it comes to their melancholy over the lost utopia of the heterosexual couple (as in Annie Hall) or their insistence on ultimately resolving the cultural conflicts faced by Alvy and Annie, as in the final happy ending of When Harry Met Sally and the subsequent neotraditional romances of the 1990s. This stabilizing nostalgia for the ideal of The Couple helps explain why these earlier movies, whether the nervous or neotraditional romcom, were more easily assimilated into dominant critical opinion, as signified by such markers as yearly “10 Best” lists and Academy Award nominations, than the bromance or anxious romance. The tension between neorealism and parody haunts both the bromance and mumblecore, defining the generic experiments of movies such as Knocked Up and Super Bad as well as the indies Dance Party, USA and Humpday. The mainstream/indie synthesis represented by the anxious romance of Greenberg exemplifies this tension through the simultaneously mocking and sincere repetition of the therapeutic catch phrase “hurt people hurt people” referenced previously, a kind of contemporary manifestation of the psychotherapy scene from Annie Hall. In Allen’s earlier movie, psychotherapy, however much the source of mocking humor, is represented as a dominant social institution defining a stabilized, even stereotyped construction of the New York cultural bourgeoisie. In the Los Angeles of Greenberg, the middle-class characters are more isolated from each other, less a part of a well-defined milieu. Their relationships to and experiences with therapy are equally fragmented and isolated. For Roger, psychotherapy meant his separation from society as the result of his breakdown, not a badge of his membership in the intelligentsia. The phrase “hurt people hurt people” operates simultaneously as the endorsed theme of Greenberg and as a ridiculous example of how contemporary American culture confuses fatuous, tautological syllogisms for profundity. Audience members are asked to modulate uneasily between these two readings just as the characters do. Traditional understandings of both neorealism and parody depend on essentialist understandings of social reality that have come undone in the contemporary romantic comedy. To represent masculinity realistically or to subject it to parody each requires a social consensus about what masculinity

Greenberg

89

is or, crucially, what it is supposed to be. In the movies under discussion here, it is the lack of this social consensus that has been thematized, the obsolescence of these foundational abstractions, these dominant genres of gender. The characters in these movies continue to enact the gestures and rituals of these older genres of gender (the bromance typically featuring explicit instruction in “how to be a man,” as in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, and I Love You, Man; the men in mumblecore anxious romances openly expressing their ambivalence over these gender legacies), but they have lost faith in them. In fact, a loss of faith can be another way of describing the obsolescence of masculinity, resulting in a kind of gender existentialism. This loss of faith corresponds with the improv tradition of focusing on the details of empirical social performance rather than operating from internalized, psychologized social scripts. The movies under discussion here focus more on particularity than abstractions, resisting the genres of “male” and “female” that have underwritten the idea of The Couple. As Zacharek observes, a crucial ethical dimension results from this insistence on particularity and social performance, an emphasis on avoiding cruelty and the creation of more “hurt people.” The violence in older romantic comedies that could always be justified in the name of maintaining the sacred institution of the heterosexual comedy, from the physical and verbal assaults of the screwball comedies to the notorious rape conclusion of Pillow Talk, have instead become the mark of the ultimate pathology that results from maintaining obsolete genres of gender in the time when the idea that “genders [have] distinct roles in society and in marriage” have passed, as in the revelation in both There’s Something about Mary and The 40-Year-Old Virgin about the equivalency of the suitor and the stalker.13 As a result, more than romantic disappointment or frustration, it is a concern with hurt feelings that motivates these movies. Consider, for example, the use of the term love in the bromance and the anxious romance. The nervous romance participates in the older romcom tradition of seeing the declaration of love as the crucial speech act in establishing The Couple. Annie Hall is once again paradigmatic here. As the romcom negotiated the growing obsolescence of traditional gender genres in the 20th century, the notion of romantic love became increasingly reified as an almost innate biological affirmation of the rightness of The Couple, as in the physical cliché known as “foot popping,” where the female lead raises one foot off the ground midkiss as the external signifier of true love.14 In the world of gender performance of Annie Hall, both Alvy and Annie are too sophisticated, too knowing to indulge in this simplistic kind of biological determinism, as exemplified by the first-kiss scene, which Alvy proposes not as a momentous test of their ultimate compatibility but as a hedge against indigestion. Still, at the movie’s beginning, Alvy poses the question animating the narrative as figuring out what went wrong in the relationship in spite of their being in love. The crucial tipping point in the movie in regards to love, more in terms of the cultural evolution of the romcom than the plot of

90

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

Annie Hall, occurs when Annie questions Alvy, somewhat seriously, somewhat rhetorically, about his declaration of love, evoking both her desire to believe in and equal skepticism about the concept of love. Alvy acknowledges how shopworn the term has become by comically offering “lerve” as a replacement signifier less burdened by cultural baggage than “love.” In the contemporary bromance, as in the very title I Love You, Man, declarations of love are most significant for the establishment of the same-sex bromance couple, even if the movies also concern themselves with the creation of heterosexual couples as well. These bromantic declarations of love function as both parodies that evoke the gay subtext of the classic romcom tradition and as key signifiers of the male characters’ developing a kind of postpatriarchal sensibility. “I love you” may have become almost meaningless, a kind of rote ritual or insincere seduction strategy when it refers to the heterosexual Couple, but in terms of the bromantic couple, it instead makes explicit this welter of cultural confusion surrounding the obsolescence of masculinity. It points to the emergence of new genres of masculine identity that teeter uneasily on the borders between gay and straight, masculine and feminine, misogyny and feminism, and homophobia and sexual liberation. In an auteurist anxious romance such as Greenberg, the concept of love is simply too abstract, too loaded with cultural baggage, to function usefully as a register of personal intimacy. Characters use the term sparingly in the movie. Florence only uses the word once—in the form of the question “Could you love me?”—when discussing the state of her relationship with Roger. In the age of Facebook, where the digital interface has reopened questions of friendship and intimacy, they largely replace love with the ubiquitous social networking term like, as in Florence’s observation to Roger that “you like me more than you think you do.” Love remains reserved for those relationships—such as between parent and child or between siblings—where “love” functions as much as a cultural imperative (you are required to “love” your “official” family members) than as a personal choice. In fact, it is only in their relationship with the dog Mahler that Florence and Roger are able to express their clearest, least emotionally fraught expressions of love and intimacy. Crucially, these expressions of love and intimacy toward the nonverbal Mahler take the form of actions rather than words, of acts of kindness rather than the verbal performance of uncertain social roles and gender genres. In keeping with Judge Walker’s focus on the pragmatics of social interaction, on whether distinct gender roles continue to serve a useful purpose rather than on their essential truth value, the anxious romance of Greenberg resists a conclusion based on determining whether Roger and Florence really love each other and instead raises the question of what social purpose (romantic) love serves. From this view, love is not (solely) justified on the basis of emotional truth but is weighed against its ethical impact. This pragmatism—which is also an openness to experimentation, to the play of gender genres—likewise explains Greenberg’s greater interest in specific, empirical social competencies and job skills—particularly caregiving—as a counter to the obsolescence of

Greenberg

91

naturalized gender identities, especially the Alpha Male genre that so comically and pitifully cripples Roger’s emotional development. Greenberg explicitly foregrounds the question that I have been arguing drives the contemporary romantic comedy in the era of male obsolescence: “what does she see in him?” This question, always a part of the political unconscious of the American romantic comedy, reaches a crisis point in the contemporary romantic comedy. We can read a “coffin of romantic comedy” such as The Ugly Truth as in pathological denial of this crisis, the “awful truth” of the classic screwball comedies turning ugly as the dominant gender genres of male centrality continue to erode in the contemporary romcom. The subversive gender play of the classic screwball comedies contributed to this ideological erosion, but what was subversive then becomes reactionary now. In the bromance, mumblecore, and the anxious romance, “what does she see in him” becomes a narrative given and a question to which there may be no answer, or where the answer involves a radical reconsideration of what we mean by “she” and “him.” If the mainstream bromance falls back on a preadolescent boyishness as potentially redeeming characteristics for their emotionally immature heroes, Greenberg is relentless in denying the audience any such compensating personality features in Roger that we could use to achieve the closure of the romantic couple. There is no mothering Roger; his childishness expresses itself in an off-putting narcissism. What we do get, however, is much less amorphous than whether we find Roger lovable. The question of “what does she see in him” is answered like a job interview, with a discreet enumeration of specific skills and abilities. For two characters so incompetent at the performance of the classic gender genres of the romcom, both Roger and Florence display compensating competencies in other areas of their lives. Florence serves in the gendered role of the personal assistant and caregiver, entrusted by Roger’s brother with the responsibilities of both Mahler and Roger. That Florence excels at these roles could be seen as simply reifying the stereotype of the nurturing woman, just as Roger’s most convincing (and really only) performance of competency stems from his carpentry skills, a similarly reified and atavistic trait of traditional masculinity. It will be significant that the movie’s final scene features an exemplary if small demonstration of his carpentry prowess when he hangs a picture on Florence’s wall. “Like a professional,” Florence remarks. “I am a professional,” Roger asserts. “I mean I build things.” Roger’s qualification here is crucial; essential social categories such as the “professional” are as much in flux as genres of gender in Greenberg. Instead, Roger refocuses his claim on his actions rather than their status, on the walk rather than the talk. The central narrative conflict of an anxious romance like Greenberg stems from improvisation, not negotiation. Greenberg is not a battle of the sexes precisely because such a battle requires that we know what the sexes are and what it might mean to be a man or a woman. Over the course of the heterosexual romantic comedy, much of the moral energy

92

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

of the narrative is ultimately spent on maintaining the continued viability of distinct gender roles and masculine centrality. The result is that whatever violence or mayhem may occur along the way—the screwball comedy may set the paradigm, but think of the destruction of Katherine Hepburn’s career in Woman of the Year or again the concluding rape of Pillow Talk—as long as the narrative ends in marriage, all is forgiven, or at least tolerated. Reacting to this suspect moral equation, especially as the pathology of that equation was made even more explicit in feminist theory, the earlier nervous romance threatened to abandon the field of marriage. The neotraditional romcoms of the 1990s represented a continuing effort to refigure the equation of the classic romcom marriage plot. Yet as the neotraditional romance increasingly showed, the end—the necessity of heterosexual marriage—could no longer justify the means, with My Best Friend’s Wedding serving as a kind of logical dead end. Released just one year later than My Best Friend’s Wedding, There’s Something about Mary performs an ethical about-face, drawing comic energy out of exaggerating the violent pathology of the romantic comedy, a pathology derived from the increasing obsolescence of the gender genres of masculine centrality. Throughout the romantic comedies under discussion here, we see a common ethical through line, a pragmatic emphasis on ends over means that complements a focus on improvisation and experimentation, the working through of newer genres of gender expression on the basis of their ethical implications. This ethical imperative is exactly the point I take from Zacharek’s review. The goal of Greenberg—and it is a goal explicitly embraced by Roger—is learning how not to hurt people. But not hurting people has never been the goal of the traditional romantic comedy. The gender genres of the time of distinct gender roles offer no guidelines for Roger and Florence. They find themselves pretending and imitating social and gender roles—acting “like a professional”—but these imitations grow problematic. The crisis of imitation in Greenberg finally comes to a head during the second encounter/date between Roger and Florence at her apartment following their meeting Ivan for dinner at Musso and Frank’s restaurant. The theme of improvisation and experimentation runs throughout this scene, itself a do over of their first encounter. The fact that neither the characters nor the audience is able to neatly categorize just what it is Florence and Roger are doing—dating? “Seeing each other”?—works as both running joke and symptom of the obsolescence of the gender and relationship categories they inhabit. As mentioned before, Florence unintentionally echoes Beth’s earlier attempt at expressing admiration for the most generous reading of Roger’s midlife crisis: a courageous willingness to abandon outmoded social expectations: FLORENCE: ROGER:

“I’m impressed by you.” “In what way?”

Greenberg FLORENCE:

ROGER:

93

“I don’t know. I mean you seem really fine doing nothing. It’s like, you don’t feel that bullshit pressure to be a success. I mean by other people’s standards.” “I want to be doing nothing. I’m doing nothing deliberately.”

Florence follows this awkward exchange with an equally awkward sexual invitation to Roger, offered as a parody of conventional flirtation: “Mahler’s not at home. You could stay over. Wink, wink.” Only agreeing after much waffling back and forth, Roger then responds to Florence’s saying how much she liked meeting Ivan with an explanation not so much of their relationship but of the rhetoric of their relationship, an explanation grounded in the idea of ironic improvisation and impersonation as itself a new kind of genre of masculinity, a self-conscious parody of Alpha Male confidence: “Ivan and I call each other ‘man,’ but it’s meant as a joke. It’s the kind of thing we wouldn’t say. It’s our imitation of other people. It’s the kind of thing we wouldn’t say.” Roger’s statement, of course, begs the question, “what would they say?” The circularity of Roger’s logic—“we say the things we wouldn’t say”—perfectly evokes the impossibility of grounding the performative in the real, or of understanding gender as existing in any other essential form than as performative genres. Both Roger—and, he implies, Ivan as well—find themselves caught in the crisis of masculine obsolescence. He rejects the performative gender genre evoked by the use of “man,” a lineage of cool pose that traces itself back to the post–World War II white male appropriation (and stereotyping) of black jazz culture, as hopelessly clichéd and insincere, but he can find no alternative other than a regression into childhood (as in “The men dress like children; the children dress like superheroes”). He instead finds himself forced to make it up as he goes along, or worse, to engage in an endless cycle of mimicry and imitation. That this crisis is so acute for Roger can help explain his cruelly harsh reaction to Florence’s own story of gender genre mimicry and imitation, one she offers in solidarity with Roger’s explanation of his behavior with Ivan. She tells a long, shaggy-dog story of the night in a bar that she and a friend decided, “Let’s pretend to be these slutty girls who are looking to get picked up, even though we’re not.” After recounting how they maintained their masquerade long enough to be taken back to a man’s apartment where they engaged in a strip tease, Roger’s condemns the story as pointless and storms out of the apartment, leaving Florence hurt and stunned. It’s as if confronted by the possibility that anyone could imitate any role, that there is no essential core of identity to guide or, more importantly, justify behavior, Roger can only flee in anger and terror. Suddenly Roger’s obsessive-compulsive personality, his streak of self-righteousness, doesn’t signify a refreshing frankness and honesty on his part, an internal, Emersonian integrity of character that not only excuses but exalts his obnoxious

94

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

behavior, but simply habit, and a habit that often manifests itself in cruelty, even if unintentional. This point is more specifically articulated later in the movie, where Roger defensively invokes what he sees as his honesty and lack of pretense in response to Ivan’s telling him (only after much insistence from Roger) that people see Roger as unable to laugh at himself. If this second disastrous encounter in Florence’s apartment evokes the fear of imitation, the rest of the movie documents not Roger’s redemption, but his learning of the difference between imitation and improvisation, of abandoning the need for certainty and the acceptance of experimentation, through his final crisis with Ivan and a kind of apprenticeship in caregiving with Florence. It is this lack of definitive resolution that marks Greenberg’s mumblecore inheritance as well as the critical ambivalence over the generic status of Roger as a masculine romantic comedy lead: most specifically, the question of what does Florence see in Roger. The spatial dimension of the preposition involved in this romantic cliché—seeing in him—depends on the myth of interiority, on an essential psychological truth that transcends behavior, that these anxious romances frustrate. An alternative question—what does she see him do?—provides a performative alternative for viewing the subsequent developments (“progress” seems too definitive an assessment) between Roger and Florence, one crucially less dependent on the growth of Roger’s self-awareness and more on his actions. To put it in temporal terms, we can see how Roger’s actions precede his conscious understanding of his social and gender identity, just as Brecht posited that rhetoric precedes ideology. In terms of what he is able to articulate throughout the rest of the movie, Roger remains defensive and resistant to a radical revision of his self-image. Unable to bond through the conventional language and actions of romance and sex, Roger and Florence instead form a partnership centered on providing care for the suddenly ailing Mahler, a partnership in which Florence takes the lead as mentor, taking careful notes and annotating Mahler’s prescriptions for Roger. The dog, of course, represents a moment of high sentimentality in the movie, an innocent substitute child figure who, unlike all the other characters in the movie, cannot be expected to assume any moral responsibility for its situation. But given the darkness and unpredictability of Roger’s actions throughout the narrative, especially his penchants for self-righteous insult and hypocritical judgmentalism, what thread will this movie follow? Should we expect a redemption story or an even darker spiral into Roger’s narcissism, the potential death of Mahler signaling likewise the movie’s potential dedication to nihilism? In keeping with the movie’s incrementalism, Greenberg avoids these sweeping generic expectations, expectations that hinge on conventional, reified, and binary genres of gender. Instead, we focus on detail and gesture, the specifics of action, as part of an experimental process—one that I am arguing defines the anxious romance—of piecing together new genres of gender performance, new assemblages of actions. If Mahler’s ultimate outcome is a happy one, it

Greenberg

95

still does not signal a redemptive arc, certainly not if we equate redemption with the recuperation of an atavistic gender genre of masculine assertion and centrality (and as we have seen, this lure of recuperation runs through all of the movies under discussion here). Roger instead performs a series of discrete actions—small steps—that together begin to form a collection—a resumé, really—for the possibilities of new ways of acting in the world. These new ways do not represent a sudden break from the old ways; instead, we can think of them as a redirection of previous energies, a redirection not dependent on an equal growth in self-awareness. The emergence of this narrative space, between Roger’s actions and his self-understanding, creates the subsequent comic energy for Greenberg’s boldest and most subversive sequence, Roger’s efforts to help Florence through her abortion. In an almost deliberate rebuke of the most reactionary elements of Knocked Up and the indie teenage romcom Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007), where women characters quickly abandon the option of abortion, Greenberg does not treat Florence’s decision to terminate the pregnancy that resulted from the desultory sexual encounter we see at the beginning of the movie as a moment of high melodramatic import. Obviously, she cannot keep the baby; carrying it to term would represent an ultimate capitulation to hopelessness and fatalism. Instead, giving in to Roger’s pleas that he take her to the clinic, despite his lack of a driver’s license, Florence finds herself being awkwardly chauffeured by Ivan—a person she has met just once before—and Roger, a repeat of her needing to pick up Roger for their first “date.” Rather than melodrama, the scenes at the clinic instead offer more deadpan embarrassment focused on Roger’s well-meaning but inept attempts to provide sympathy and care on what he tells Florence is “your day.” Fighting against his impulses to flee a situation he finds uncomfortable and, more to the point, that reveals his antiAlpha ineptitude, Roger sends Florence off to her procedure with another only semi-ironic New Ageism, “you are of value,” to which Florence takes mild offense, opening a space between the idea of accepting help and needing help, telling Roger “I know that.” In the recovery room, knowing that Florence has had nothing to eat or drink since the night before, Roger greets her coming out of anesthesia with a hamburger, a joke that nicely illustrates the widening gap between Roger’s efforts to perform kinder actions and the continuing confusion that marks his self-awareness. These are small moments, to be sure, and they may or may not signal a qualitative change in Roger, but their smallness is exactly the point. Greenberg does not move toward redemption or epiphany, the unveiling of the real truth of Roger’s character, of his gender performance, of his destiny. Instead, we see a character who has found himself locked into certain cultural scripts of gender, age, and achievement—the Alpha Male as self-righteous, principled artist—who begins to learn how to abandon scripts in favor of improvisation, the play and contingency of evolving gender genres. For the anxious romance and its predecessors in the bromance and mumblecore,

96

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

this interest in the fluidity of gender performance does not signal an abdication from the ethics or politics of gender. It is striking how issues of sexual violence, rape, homophobia, and reproductive rights are foregrounded as topics in these movies, from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Knocked Up and Superbad to Dance Party, USA, Humpday, and Greenberg, even as our ideological reading of the treatment of these subjects remains conflicted. The ethical upshot of the abortion sequence is that actions ultimately matter more than feelings. More specifically, performance is empirical, while intentions remain hypothetical. Put in psychological terms, actions create identity, rather than identity defining—or justifying—actions. It is the same gap between the depth metaphors of the Method’s belief in psychological interiority, where surface performance suggests deep truth, and the Second City improvisational observation of manifest social behaviors. Cinema, seen from this perspective, is an art of surfaces, of screens. If the cinematic romantic comedy has always raised philosophical questions of what it means to be a real man or a real women, the screens where cinema exists only give us “reel” men and “reel” women. In watching Greenberg, we try to answer the question of whether Roger is “the right man” for Florence based on our experiences with the narrative and gender genres of the romcom. The narrative development of Greenberg, however, hinges less on the question of Roger’s essential character than on our appraisal of his actions toward her, an approach derived from and in answer to the obsolescence of masculinity. The real question is not whether Roger is the right man for her, but what use is he to her? As Roger struggles with his own sense of masculine identity in Greenberg, the movie also wrestles with questions of what purposes our prevailing genres of gender serve. What are the ethical consequences that result from particular performances of gender and masculinity? What have been the costs of maintaining a system of male centrality in defining these genders, and what other options do we have? These are the questions that provide our most useful inquiry into the gender crisis of the contemporary romcom, and they account for the wide and conflicting range of critical responses to the subgenres—the bromance, mumblecore, and the anxious romance—that I am examining here and to the instance of Greenberg in particular. By the time viewers move in the film from Roger’s taking stewardship of Mahler’s sudden illness to his painfully comic efforts at caregiving for Florence, we risk moments of real generic confusion resulting from our frustrated expectations of conventional gender and narrative performance, a frustration we share with Roger. This frustration culminates at the end of the party sequence in the final argument between Ivan and Roger, an argument that hinges on the acceptance of improvisation and contingency and a willingness to walk away from older narrative frames and genres of gender. Roger returns to his brother’s home, surprised and angry at Ivan’s revelation (made reluctantly only after Roger’s repeated insistence) that most people think of Roger as lacking self-awareness and an ability to laugh

Greenberg

97

at himself. Throughout Greenberg, Roger has taken what he sees as his ruthless honesty and sense of integrity as justifications for his often cruel behavior, a specific genre of Alpha masculinity. Now, his fragile self-image is radically shaken. At the same time, we have been watching Roger consciously changing his behavior and significantly taking on responsibility for the care of both Mahler and Florence, actions for which he has no ready social script or gender genre. Suddenly, Roger discovers that his brother’s home has been invaded by his twentysomething niece and her friends, who are throwing a huge party. Plunging into this social carnival, Roger lurches back and forth between pathetic envy and contemptuous condescension, acting out his obsession with the coolness (or lack thereof) of his own social performance and his anxiety over being typecast as a midlife loser. Arguing about taste in music, snorting coke in an effort to assert his world-weariness, Roger’s actions now seem not qualitatively different than they did at the start of the movie; certainly, his attitude is the same. As viewers, we grow increasingly concerned that Roger has reverted to form, that his self-obsession will blind him to the needs of the convalescing Mahler, who wanders through the party surrounded by potential hazards. At critical moments, however, Roger’s self-absorption apparently breaks enough to prevent a young woman from letting Mahler drink her beer or to remove contraband pizza from Mahler’s mouth. While his self-understanding remains stalemated, in other words, he does seem to have formed new habits of behavior. He acts as if he cares about the needs of others, even if the motives that, from a depth metaphor point of view, supposedly underlie that behavior remain opaque to him—and to the audience. As I argued previously, the traditional romantic comedy based on the gender genres of masculine centrality resolves its narrative crisis through a personal epiphany based on the increasingly reified idea(l) of romantic love. The nervous romance and the neotraditional romcoms centered their cultural work on the crisis occasioned by the growing inability of the declaration of love to resolve the equally growing obsolescence of traditional gender genres. As Frank Krutnik’s work makes clear, this stage in the development of the romcom remained haunted by a nostalgia for what increasingly came to be seen as the certainties of the past (and nostalgia is perhaps the most powerful link between the worldviews of Woody Allen and Nora Ephron). In the anxious romance Greenberg, Florence’s tentative question—“Do you think you could love me?”—only provokes bafflement on the part of Roger, and she quickly replaces love with like: “You like me so much more than you think you do.” Were Greenberg a traditional romcom or even a nervous romcom, the climactic personal crisis occasioned by the party would lead to just such an epiphany. As an anxious romance, the movie follows this conventional structure only to frustrate it in the form of the neorealist parody that emerges from mumblecore. In this case, the would-be epiphany occurs twice, first as a kind of tragedy and then as a kind of farce. Eager to flee a social situation that is only increasing his sense of personal panic over his disintegrating

98

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

self-identity, Roger contacts Ivan in an effort to revert to their more familiar, comfortable performance of ironic masculinity, a performance in which Roger has come to assume—at least in his mind—the lead Alpha role. In recovery from substance abuse, working as a computer consultant rather than a musician, Ivan at the beginning of the movie is temporarily separated from his wife and child. Throughout the movie, Roger applauds this separation as a chance for Ivan to escape what Roger sees as the prison of bourgeois domesticity and to reaffirm his status as Alpha Male bohemian (the same conflict underlying the bromance in Humpday). Roger’s reflexively judgmental and domineering attitude toward Ivan has marked their interactions throughout the movie, as has Ivan’s equally reflexive conflict avoidance. Again, as in Humpday as well as Dance Party, USA, two male characters find themselves acting out and against cultural scripts of obsolete Alpha Male centrality that offer only stasis and repetition. If an older romcom version of this conflict could be resolved through a modification that ultimately affirms, even if only symbolically, masculine centrality, in these romcoms of masculine obsolescence this conflict is never decisively resolved. Instead, male characters in these movies take actions that open possibilities but no certainties, actions that recognize the flux of gender redefinition. Gus’s embrace of Bill in Dance Party, USA and the final motel-room confrontation in Humpday each mark a turning point, but a radically open-ended turning point. Crucially, these moments both exemplify and thematize the idea and ideal of improvisation, of moving off script and away from the pantomiming of existing genres of masculine performance. In this climactic scene in Greenberg, Roger immediately condemns Ivan’s plan to reunite with his wife and family as capitulation to a script of bourgeois conformity (again, echoing both Humpday and Knocked Up). Instead, Roger urges Ivan to “stay free”: “It’s the harder, more painful decision to stay free, but that’s what adulthood is. I mean I could just stay with Florence because it’s easy, but I don’t want easy.” It is perfectly in keeping with Roger’s lack of insight throughout the movie that he turns Ivan’s problem into an illustration of his own reticence over the terms of his involvement with Florence, and he does so by invoking the twin terms of freedom and adulthood. In the anxious romance, freedom operates as a romantic delusion, the impossible alternative of abandoning all social scripts and genres altogether. In terms of ethics, this kind of false utopianism goes along with a retreat into a particularly atavistic masculine genre, the antisocial lone wolf, the brave truth teller role to which Roger has been clinging. At the same time, the question of adulthood and the prevalence of characters stuck in a permanent adolescence has emerged as the defining critical commonplace for the comedies of masculine obsolescence. For the first time in Greenberg, Ivan breaks with the script of his existing relationship with Roger by pointing out the cruelty and selfishness of Roger’s reaction. What Roger characterizes as Ivan’s falling back into the apparent safety of an even more outmoded social script, Ivan defines as

Greenberg

99

embracing improvisation and contingency, of recognizing that experience has shown him the futility—and obsolescence—of relying on these scripts: IVAN:

“You’ve been dating Florence for a month, I’ve been married for 10 years with a child. Don’t tell me about adulthood.”

ROGER:

“We’re not dating exactly.”

IVAN:

“That’s my point!”

Ivan’s response carries a dual resonance derived from the generic gender crisis informing the contemporary romcom. On the one hand, it can be read as a retrograde reaffirmation of the “time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” a way of saying “grow up” to Roger that means accepting an older status quo, an older genre of patriarchal masculinity, on the basis of its perceived stability and lack of ambiguity, no matter the trade-off in terms of Roger’s adolescent desire for freedom. This reading is certainly available in this scene, and in a fundamental sense it is a reading that is always available in any romantic comedy that claims status as a romantic comedy, no matter how revisionist or alternative. But the continuation of Ivan’s accusation turns into an explanation and plea for sympathy that opens another reading, one connected to the embrace of improvisation and uncertainty: “I don’t think you understand what it’s been like for me out here, how my, how the life I’d hoped for. It’s huge to finally embrace the life you never planned on.” Again, the idea of embracing “the life you never planned on” can reference the culturally conservative reading of Ivan’s settling for the older, hegemonic script of middle-class heterosexual marriage, but it also poses a crucial challenge to the generic structures, both gender and narrative, of the romcom. The idea and ideal of the romantic comedy is defined by the plan; indeed, plan can serve as a synonym for genre, a predetermined set of narrative outcomes that function as a kind of romantic destiny or fate, “facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single, unified social fabric,” in Rick Altman’s terms, one that serves as a “memorial both to a collective past and to a current collectivity.”15 In referring to the need to “embrace the life you never planned on,” however (and the metaphor of the embrace is telling here), Ivan does not justify his choice on the basis of romantic love, on his realization that the woman he married is his true love. In fact, we never see his wife or family in the movie at all. Instead, it is his acceptance of relinquishing the plan, of relinquishing the need for predetermined narrative closure, that Ivan seems to be talking about here. It is exactly narrative closure, especially in its classical Aristotelian sense, that improvisation most challenges and wrestles with, beginning with the pragmatic question of how to exit an improvised scene or skit. For the romantic comedy, the most teleological of cinematic narrative genres, the abandonment of the plan can mean the abandonment of the

100

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

genre itself, a prospect that leads to cultural panic, and it is panic that leads to what substitutes as an epiphany for Roger in response to Ivan, a defensive confession of his own terror at the prospect of endless improvisation and the abandonment of plans and scripts: “Of course I know what it’s like to live the life I never planned on. What the fuck do you think I’m doing now?” Throughout the movie, Roger has described his situation in the comic paradox of doing nothing intentionally, the nonaction that Florence sees as “brave,” and in the end bravery becomes the final touchstone of Greenberg. His relationship with Ivan over or at least in crisis, unable to either define his relationship with Florence or to embrace a spirit of collaborative improvisation, Roger instead impulsively decides to flee, an action that recalls the structures of classic romcoms where the resistant partner attempts one last effort to resist the plan before finally capitulating. Waking up the next morning with Mahler asleep on top of him, Roger wanders through the aftermath of the party (coincidentally paralleling the opening scene of Dance Party, USA) and encounters his niece and her friend who are planning to leave for Australia that morning. When they invite him to come along, Roger impulsively agrees, packs his bag, and jumps into the car with them. In keeping with a venerable romcom tradition, Roger attempts a final, futile pursuit of freedom, an impossible escape from genre. He even ironically registers his awareness that the impulsive flight from genre is itself a genre convention, asking his two companions, only semirhetorically, “Is this completely crazy? I mean, it’s what people do, right?” “It’s what people do” returns the movie to Baumbach’s epigraph: I really feel these characters are a lot like people in the world. . . . They’re only ‘difficult’ compared to conventional movie characters. I don’t think they’re difficult compared to real human beings. I’m surprised how people react so strongly. Their argument is, ‘Who is like this?’ But they don’t realize they’re using other movies as comparison rather than using their own parents or themselves. In effect, Roger himself foreshadows these later audience reactions, the ambiguity of “it’s what people do, right?” raising the further question of “what people”? Where are the registers we use to measure and evaluate performance, and what is the complex relationship between social and cinematic genres of gender performance? The aporia of Roger’s crisis—the hollowing out of every script, the obsolescence of every genre—is comically rendered through a visual joke at once poignant and absurd. Passing by a car dealership, Roger looks out the car window and we cut to a point-of-view shot of what he sees: a blow-up flailing man repeatedly inflating and deflating. My use of the generic descriptor “man” to describe the object is telling, of course, because the inflatable is marked by its very generic androgyny. The inflatable is a gender template, equally lacking race, ethnicity, class, or any other social marker.16 In this

Greenberg

101

final epiphany, the ridiculousness of his situation brings home to Roger that he is not chasing a higher, heroic gender genre but is instead pursuing a fragmented oblivion, an oblivion that both signifies the obsolescence of masculinity and by extension the obsolescence of the romcom. Of what use is Roger in Greenberg, the movie that bears his name? Of what use are men in this version of the romantic comedy? As Baumbach acknowledges in the epigraph, the movie openly risks viewer alienation by depicting the failure of genre without offering a definitive replacement and or the illusion of genre transcendence. The bromance thematizes the crisis in masculinity, ending in a comic ambiguity over the question of whether the romcom is doomed or not. In the mumblecore variations, the final calculation is more pragmatic, more concerned with the “halting, forward movement” of not hurting people that Zacharek points to and that echoes the similar pragmatism of Judge Walker’s affirmation of gay rights. Both the bromance and the mumblecore indie movies agree on the pathology of traditional genres of masculine centrality, even if the bromance finally insists on the happy ending. In the anxious romance Greenberg, Roger’s final epiphany crystallizes around the idea and ideal of bravery, but a dramatic revision of his loner Alpha Male understanding of bravery. Roger’s bravery was a rearguard action, a defensive performance of “bravery” manifesting itself in a selfabsorbed rudeness that justified itself on the basis of honesty. But as we have seen, that is not the bravery that others—especially Florence—recognize in him. For first Beth and then Florence, it is the bravery of improvisation, of “doing nothing,” that they admire, an admiration that at first rankles Roger, who is paralyzed and terrified by improvisation. In fact, his “honesty” can be read as a rejection of improvisation, a rejection culminating in his angry denunciation of Florence’s tale of gender genre improvisation. At the end of Greenberg, however, Roger’s “halting, forward movement” manifests itself in a simultaneous understanding of his cruelty and of Florence’s bravery as he himself “improvises” a phone message to her. That his “forward movement” is “halting” is evidenced by Roger’s use of voice mail, offering the two outs of not having to deliver the message in person and of erasing it before Florence hears it. The message begins with a recognition of bravery that is both personal and generational, applying both to Florence and to her historical moment: “You’re brave. Young people are brave.” Reflecting on the wasted potential of his own youth, Roger at the same time questions whether he has acquired any compensating wisdom as the result of his experiences: “When I was a kid I was a leader. . . . What happened to me? Where does experience go?” Earlier, during their bromantic breakup, Ivan had challenged Roger: “What could you possibly know about how the way the world works?” “The way the world works” is always at the heart of the question of genre and gender, the nexus between social reality and the representation of social reality. The crisis of masculine obsolescence in the contemporary romcom necessarily means a crisis of experience and

102

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

a valorization of improvising, of evolving new genres of gender on the fly. If the nervous romance registered a growing generic awareness in the romcom of the increasing obsolescence of the genres of masculine centrality, the contemporary anxious romance operates in the time of postobsolescence, a time of bravery and of the ethical imperative to rethink the cruelty of the traditional romance plot. “Hurt people hurt people,” Roger reprises in his rambling phone message, but this time the irony is gone, and the cliché becomes a confession: “I do. Hurt people. I think Ivan and I broke up. Oh, Florence. I really like you. Love Roger.” In keeping with how the mumblecore tradition of Greenberg and the anxious romance both embrace and deconstruct the narrative and gender genres of the romcom, the declaration of love is relegated to the level of phatic discourse, the level the characters of Dance Party, USA found themselves trapped within. In these romantic comedies past the time of “when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” the use of Second City–style improvisation, built on the keen study and imitation of gender performance (“the imitation of other people,” as Roger says), increasingly conflates the generic with the phatic. As Woody Allen acknowledged to comic effect in Annie Hall, the discourse of romantic love was coming increasingly to seem like going through the motions (or not going through any motion at all, as in the case of the movie’s most famous metaphor for the exhaustion of romance, a “dead shark”), repeating a script that was losing its relevance, “I love you” no more significant than an obligatory signature in a greeting card. If “love” has lost its immanence in the performative discourse of the contemporary romcom, its chain of signification inextricably embedded in the binary logic of traditional patriarchal genres of gender, Greenberg responds by lowering the bar for the utopian goal of the romcom. Not love but like, a word that carries with it less emotional intensity than love but also less mystification. “Like” connects the relationship between Roger and Florence with the relationship between Roger and Ivan (with whom he has perhaps “broken up”) and connects the romantic with ideas of friendship and kindness, shifting the idea of responsibility from the need to maintain the “time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage” to what we might call a more ecological register, the need to take care of one another across and between genres of gender performance (and, in the case of Mahler, even across lines of species). Greenberg ends with Florence and Roger returning to Florence’s apartment after her release from the clinic, she eager to hear the phone message he has said he has left. While Florence cycles through her messages to get to his, Roger joins the audience, as the movie alternates between close-ups of Florence lying on her bed listening to her phone and Roger watching her. Although a master shot would show them in intimate proximity, the shot/ reverse-shot sequence evokes both the space between them and their and our awareness that they continue to perform and improvise for each other. “OK.

Greenberg

103

This is you,” Florence announces, and the shot cuts to Roger, ever anxious but silent for once, bravely awaiting the life he can never plan on. As an audience, we are left as well without the consolations of genre fulfillment, neither of narrative nor of gender, as we must improvise ourselves how the plot will continue to develop. As an improvisatory genre emerging from the growing pains of the crisis over masculinity in the contemporary romcom, the anxious romance of Greenberg cannot provide the definitive consolation that Manohla Dargis searches for, the certainty that the romantic comedy will continue in anything like the “the old straight-boy-meets-straight-girl configuration.” Instead, the anxious romance, as with all the manifestations of the contemporary romantic comedy we have been looking at here, leaves us only with possibility, experimentation, and play, just as Judge Walker’s ruling on marriage equality only affirms the obsolescence of certain gender genres without defining what new generic forms and gender configurations will take their place. If the traditional romantic comedy up through and including the nervous romance and the neotraditional romcom is indeed an “artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” then that “tap-tap-tapping sound” we hear may indeed be the death knell of the genre, and as movie lovers we may remain trapped in the same nostalgic scripts and genres that Roger Greenberg struggles to escape. If instead, however, we can remain open in these growing pains to the gender and narrative genres we never planned on, then we may facing the end of neither men nor the romantic comedy, but the beginnings of something new.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Mahnola Dargis, “Girl Meets Ape, and Complications Ensue,” The New York Times, July 24, 2009, http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/movies/24ugly. html. 2. Judge Vaughn R. Walker, City and County of San Francisco v. Schwarzenegger, No. C 09–2292, United States District Court for the Northern District of California. August 4, 2010, https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cand/09cv2292/ files/09cv2292-ORDER.pdf. 3. And, in fact, his ruling was informed by the testimony of feminist and Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) scholars such as Nancy Cott and George Chauncey who served as plaintiff’s witnesses. 4. Judith Kegan Gardiner offers a more detailed description of this consensus in specific reference to the writers included in her essay collection on Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory (NY: Columbia UP, 2002): The authors represented here are skeptical about essentialist conceptions of gender and sexuality as fixed by God, nature, or immutable psychological or sociological laws. . . . They join poststructuralist suspicion of universal truths with queer and antiracist caution about the dangers of categorical exclusions and cultural imperialisms. They agree that the critique of essentialist categories is critically imperative, since the belief in traditional polarized genders as static, inevitable, universals precludes social change by insisting that change is impossible, deeply undesirable, or both. (12) 5. Maureen Dowd, Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (NY: Putnam Adult, 2005); Kathleen Parker, Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care (NY: Random House, 2008); Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (NY: Riverhead, 2012). 6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (NY: Routledge, 1990), 140, emphasis hers. 7. In Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), James Naremore provides the technical definition of the layers of performance that connect role to actor to star identity: First, there is the role: a character in the literary sense, a proper name attached to certain adjectives and predicates (or character ‘traits’) in a narrative. . . . Second, there is the actor, a person whose body and performing skills bring other important traits to the role. The actor is already a character in some sense, a ‘subject’ formed by various codes in the culture,

106

Notes whose stature, accent, physical abilities, and performing habits imply a range of meanings and influence the way she or he will be cast. Finally, there is star image, also a character, that begins as a product of the other two categories . . . but subsequently determines them. (158)

8. This essentialist/constructionist argument about genre obviously exists in other media as well, especially in literary studies. As several genre theorists have noted, the discussion of genre in literary studies has been complicated by the interplay between categorical genre designators such as the epic, lyric, short story, and novel and the kinds of thematic, narrative genres common to both literature and cinema: the western, the detective story, and so forth. A cognate complicating factor within cinema studies stems from the disparate criteria used to identify these genres, from setting (the western) to form (the musical) to effect (horror). 9. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1991), 70. 10. Ibid., 195. 11. Ibid., 174. 12. Butler, Gender Trouble, 140. 13. Ibid., 54, emphases his. 14. Ibid., 65. 15. Ibid., 98. 16. Ibid., 111. 17. Ibid., 188. 18. As contrasted with the generic meta-awareness that develops as a result of what we interpret as a deliberate strategy of the narrative text, as in most critical reactions to Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). Of course, whether the production of genre meta-awareness is an intended strategy by the filmmakers is a critical judgment call, but one that is crucial in determining our aesthetic appraisal of a given movie. 19. For a discussion of how Pillow Talk (and in particular the dizzyingly complex interweaving of Rock Hudson’s closeted performance of a closeted gay identity) “challenges the conventional system of gender and sexual identities—especially those that produce and are produced by celebrity— by underlining the dissonance between public and private performances of ‘self,’” see Cynthia J. Fuchs, “Split Screens: Framing and Passing in Pillow Talk,” in The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997), 230. 20. The most famous and famously premature expression of the death of the romantic comedy remains Brian Henderson’s 1978 “Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?” Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 11–23. 21. Linda Holmes, “Don’t Worry: The Romantic Comedy Is Not Dead at the Hands of Gerard Butler,” Monkey See, August 8, 2010, http://www.npr. org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/08/10/129105471/no-the-romantic-comedy-isnot-dead-it-s-just-not-as-easy-as-it-looks. Holmes bases her argument in the sensible point that any nostalgia for previous “golden ages” of the romantic comedy depends on cultural amnesia, specifically, the fact that the “junk degrades. The junk is forgotten.” 22. Neal Gabler, “Day of the Lout,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/13/entertainment/la-ca-louts-20110213. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. Gabler references this type of plot resolution as a “cop out,” signaling that “the lout turns out not entirely to be one.”

Notes

107

26. Baz Dreisinger analyzes the role of sexual identity in My Best Friend’s Wedding in “The Queen in Shining Armor: Safe Eroticism and the Gay Friend,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28, no. 1 (2000): 2–11. 27. The “bodybuilder” genre of male cinematic representation has its own long and complex history, from the silent screen persona of Francis X. Bushman emerging out of the physical health culture at the turn of the 20th century to the tradition of Olympic athletes (Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe) portraying Tarzan to the character of Hercules, a role played by actors ranging from Steve Reeves to Schwarzenegger himself. The 1980s, especially in the persona of Schwarzenegger, saw the mainstreaming of the bodybuilder gender genre from narrative genres primarily associated with the fantastic or mythological to ostensibly more realistic action movies, including police procedurals and spy movies. Moved from the jungle or the realm of Greek mythology to contemporary urban and suburban settings, the contrast between the physique of the action hero and the other male characters becomes more noticeable and even pathological. The prime example might be Schwarzenegger’s starring role in James Cameron’s True Lies (1994), where the audience is meant to accept his undercover CIA operative character plausibly posing as a mild-mannered suburban computer salesman. See also Chris Holmlund, Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (NY: Routledge, 2002). 28. Richard Corliss, “The Ugly Truth: Katherine Heigl Gets Mocked Up,” Time, July 24, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1912488,00.html. 29. Peter Rainer, “The Ugly Truth,” The Christian Science Monitor, July 24, 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2009/0724/p17s07almo.html. 30. Owen Gleiberman, “The Ugly Truth,” Entertainment Weekly, July 27, 2009, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20293046,00.html. 31. For example, see Stephanie Zacharek: “Butler is supposed to be menacingly sexy, but he reminds me of nothing so much as the bland, waxy Lotharios you used to see in bad perfume commercials of the ’70s.” “The Phantom of the Opera,” Salon, December 22, 2004, http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2004/12/22/phantom/. Owen Gleiberman agrees: “The Scottish actor Gerard Butler, by contrast, exudes little charisma beneath his mask.” “The Phantom of the Opera,” Entertainment Weekly, February 1, 2005, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1011985,00.html. 32. Altman, Film/Genre, 111. 33. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 4. 34. As Frank Krutnik put it in “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes,” The Velvet Light Trap 26 (Fall 1990): In general, one can see generic forms as a functional interface between the cinematic institution, audiences, and the wider realm of culture. Films never spring magically from their cultural context, but they represent instead much more complex activities of negotiation, addressing cultural transformations in a highly compromised and displaced manner. (57) Bakhtin’s dialogic analysis of narrative—particularly his view of the novel as a dynamic, heterogeneous mix of various social discourses and ideologies—is relevant here as well. 35. In this sense, critical commentary on movies, especially that which attains cultural currency and influence, is not simply commentary. The critical discussion of cinema, both in terms of reviewing and scholarly analysis, also

108

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Notes intervenes in and transforms our sense of cultural narratives, our very sense of history. From this angle, it is not a question of whether, for example, auteur theory correctly identified and described the significance of the role of the director; now that auteur theory exists and operates as part of the critical record, whether it is seen as currently relevant or critically outdated, auteurs now exist. Altman, Film/Genre, 188. Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (London: Wallflower P, 2007). Ibid., 90. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 114. In Halberstam’s explanation, In a way, gender’s very flexibility and seeming fluidity is precisely what allows dimorphic gender to hold sway. Because so few people actually match any given community standards for male or female, in other words, gender can be imprecise and therefore multiply relayed through a solidly binary system. At the same time, because the definitional boundaries of male and female are so elastic, there are very few people in any given public space who are completely unreadable in terms of their gender. (Female Masculinity, 20)

41. Butler, Gender Trouble, 137, emphasis hers. 42. I take the critique of how an “alternative/normal” binary in understanding representations of masculinity can reinforce as much as challenge the status quo from Sally Robinson, “Pedagogy of the Opaque: Teaching Masculinity Studies,” in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (NY: Columbia UP, 2002), 141–160. 43. Bertolt Brecht, “Two Essays on Unprofessional Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (NY: Hill and Wang, 1964), 152. 44. Using an adolescent female protagonist (even if the actors typically inhabiting such roles are past adolescence themselves) in a romantic comedy also avoids another recurrent area of gender instability and crisis within the genre: the paucity of romcoms featuring women past the age of 30. The ageist dimension of structural sexism surely remains the dominant factor fueling this crisis, but instability over the genres of gender coded as female related to social progress may also ironically play a part. If we look at the Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy romcoms of the 1940s or even the Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, we see Hepburn and Day portraying successful career women who function independently from men both economically and socially. These movies, however, still rely on the ideological centrality of the idea of compulsory marriage for all women to motivate their main romantic conflicts. This point is explicitly underscored in both Woman of the Year, where the mentor/role model to Hepburn’s character of Tess Harding counsels her against the loneliness and emptiness of the single life, and in Pillow Talk, where Doris Day’s character of Jan Morrow hears similar advice from her single, alcoholic housekeeper. In the contemporary romantic comedy, the inevitability of marriage has been radically destabilized to the point that an overwhelming desire for marriage above all else can make a successful, mature female protagonist seem pathological, a phenomenon made the central conflict in My Best Friend’s Wedding, where the efforts of Julia Robert’s character of Julianne Potter to win back her long-time male best friend from his younger fiancée leads her to behave, in the character’s words, like a “psychopath.” (Roberts made

Notes

109

the movie on the cusp of her thirtieth birthday, but the plot takes pains to establish her character’s age as “twenty eight.”) The episodic television series—most famously, perhaps, Sex and the City—where ultimate narrative closure can be repeatedly deferred until ratings and/or creative exhaustion set in, is better suited to deal with the complexities and instabilities—the generic growing pains—of the genres of female identity. 45. The movie’s screenwriter, Bert V. Royal, reports that he modeled the character of Brandon on himself. Easy A was Royal’s first screenplay; he originally came to attention for his gender-subversive play Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, a parody based on the comic strip Peanuts that premiered at the 2004 New York Fringe Festival. Dog Sees God draws comic energy from a queer reading of the genres of teen melodrama and romance that likewise inform the gender and narrative genre play of Easy A. Roger Moore, “Bert V. Royal Puts Witty Words in Emma Stone’s Mouth in Easy A,” Orlando Sentinel, October 4, 2010, http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/ entertainment_movies_blog/2010/10/bert-v-royal-puts-the-cool-words-inemma-stones-mouth-in-easy-a.html. 46. For Fiedler’s reading of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, see “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” The article is widely available, including in Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin, eds., Leslie Fiedler and American Culture (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999), 26–34. With this ending, Gluck and Royal also break with the tradition of the desexualized gay best friend associated with neotraditional romcoms such as My Best Friend’s Wedding. More than just serving as a foil/alter ego for the “straight girl” Olive, the validity of Brandon’s search for erotic and emotional intimacy is given weight along with Olive’s.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Celestino Deleyto, “Between Friends: Love and Friendship in Contemporary Hollywood Romantic Comedies,” Screen 44, no. 2 (2003): 181–182. 2. Judge Vaughn R. Walker, City and County of San Francisco v. Schwarzenegger, No. C 09–2292, United States District Court for the Northern District of California. August 4, 2010, https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cand/09cv2292/ files/09cv2292-ORDER.pdf, 113. 3. Frank Krutnik, “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes,” The Velvet Light Trap 26 (Fall 1990): 57. 4. By now, genealogies tracing the discursive development of the sociosexual categories of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” have become commonplaces of constructivist and performative approaches to gender and sexuality, but the foundational text, of course, remains Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (NY: Vintage, 1990). 5. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1991), 64–65. 6. Joseph Aisenberg, “Here Come the Bromides: Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy,” Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2009, http://www. brightlightsfilm.com/65/65bromance.php; Richard Corliss, “Superbad: A Fine Romance,” Time, August 17, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/ 0,8599,1653918,00.html. 7. Brian Henderson, “Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?” Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 11–23. For a definition and discussion

110

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

Notes of the neotraditional romantic comedy, see Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (London: Wallflower P, 2007). Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy, 4. Ibid., 17. Tamar Jeffers McDonald, “Homme-Com: Engendering Change in Contemporary Romantic Comedy,” in Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Stacy Abbott and Debbie Jermyn (NY: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 146–159. Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: U of Texas P, 1995), 193. Claire Mortimer, Romantic Comedy (London: Routledge, 2010), 49. Ibid., 135–136. Ibid., 130. This narrative crisis within the romantic comedy is part of what Yvonne Tasker (quoting Barbara Creed) refers to as “the ‘current crisis in master narratives.’” According to Tasker, this crisis stems not from an “inability to tell a good story, but in terms of the failings of the key terms around which stories are constructed, terms which include a coherent white male heterosexuality along with the rationality and binary structures it is often taken to propose”—see “Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, the Body, and the Voice in Contemporary Action Cinema,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993), 232. Pete’s confusion hearkens back to Alvy Singer’s quotation of Groucho Marx in Annie Hall diagnosing his own neurotic inability to maintain a stable relationship: “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.” In this way, the bromance represents a contemporary version of the nervous romance, a link I explore further in the next chapter in relation to the hybrid development of mumblecore and the bromance. Corliss, “Superbad.” Henderson, 19. Mortimer, Romantic Comedy, 39. Lena Dunham’s Girls, her HBO millennial generation follow-up to Sex and the City, extends this gender genre destabilization of the Alpha Male. A series about the experiences and gender genres available to young women in the current century, Girls also represents an exploration of postobsolescence masculinity in keeping with the neorealist independent movies I discuss in the next chapter. Both the characters of Mr. Big and Don Draper, as well as the actors who portray them (Chris Noth and Jon Hamm), feature facial structures—prominent foreheads and jaws—that function as retro signifiers of the genre of Alpha masculinity. Both are meant to register as “the way leading men used to look,” in the case of Mr. Big, anachronistically, and in Don Draper as the representation of an extinct species. Janet McCabe, “Lost in Transition: Problems of Modern (Heterosexual) Romance and the Catatonic Male Hero in the Post-Feminist Age,” in Falling in Love Again, ed. Abbott and Jermyn, 164, emphasis hers. Peter Lehman’s groundbreaking study, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of Male Identity (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2007), similarly analyzes how anxiety over male identity is connected to anxiety over representations of the male body. Obsessions with and fears of penis size, a staple of bromance humor, suggest the fragility and instability of phallic dominance, as well as the subversive potential of laughter to deconstruct the logic of phallic patriarchy: “The pervasive anxiety that underlies the entire spectrum of

Notes

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

111

imagining the male body is, then, not surprising. . . . Within this fear-riddled masculinity, the real or imagined sound of laughter rings persistently” (218). The element of parody in the genre performances of masculinity associated with hip-hop and rap is an understudied aspect of what is usually taken at face value as expressions of misogyny and machismo. That this parodic dimension is unstable and highly variable, even within the same performative context, is undeniable, but this only reinforces the cultural link with the equally unstable gender genres of the bromance. The cross-gender appeal of these movies represents a useful modification of Jeffers McDonald’s insightful discussion of the homme-com, or “romantic comedy for boys” (“Homme-Com”). The conventional thinking in Hollywood is that while male viewers are reluctant to attend “chick flicks,” female viewers are much more willing to accompany male viewers to “guy films.” In the case of the bromance, the idea is to appeal to both men and women. I Love You, Man even features a scene that models the ideal behavior envisioned for women in the audience, as the character of Zooey and her women friends gush like high school girls while listening in on her fiancé Peter’s phone conversation as he attempts to set up a “man date” with his newfound friend Sydney. Kathrina Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union 1934– 1965 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006), 56. Again, see Lehman, Running Scared. The lack of definitive resolution to Debbie and Pete’s marital crisis along with the narrative energy generated by this subplot are possible reasons why Apatow’s not quite sequel to Knocked Up—This Is 40—will center on Pete and Debbie.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Back Lot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (NY: Harper Perennial, 2006) both chronicles and reinforces the romantic ideal of the male 1990s auteur directors, a view indebted as well to Peter Biskind’s influential portrait of the 1970s Hollywood renaissance, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999). 2. See, for example, Emanuel Levy’s Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film (NY: NYUP, 2001). 3. Frank Krutnik, “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes,” The Velvet Light Trap 26 (Fall 1990): 63. 4. Ibid., 62. 5. Henderson, 19. 6. Krutnik, “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals,” 69. 7. Literary and cultural studies informed by information theory are exploring the transformative and creative potential of chaos; specifically, “the edge of chaos,” the place that defines, in Mark Taylor’s words, “the interplay between order and chaos at work in dissipative structures”—The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), 121. In her work on “posthumanism,” How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), N. Katherine Hayles argues that mutation is crucial because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve

112

Notes in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and intrinsic to information. (33) This bifurcation point defines the gender growing pains surrounding the obsolescence of genres of masculine centrality.

8. Krutnik, “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals,” 72. 9. Ibid., emphasis his. 10. Dennis Lim, “A Generation Finds Its Mumble,” New York Times, August 19, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19lim.html?pagewanted= 1&sq=A Generation Finds Its Mumble&st=cse&scp=1. 11. Ibid. Not surprisingly, most of the filmmakers associated with mumblecore dislike that name. Lim quotes Joe Swanberg: “‘It was an obnoxious name nobody liked and it was meant to be a joke. . . . But we haven’t been able to get rid of it.’” 12. “Realist literature tends to conceal the socially relative or constructed nature of language; it helps to confirm the prejudice that there is a form of ‘ordinary’ language which is somehow natural,” according to Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 117. 13. Of course, while the signification on classic Hollywood genres represented by movies such as Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de soufflé/Breathless (1960) or François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Piano Player (1960) operated as deliberately irreverent affronts to the proprieties of “respectable” mainstream French cinema, mumblecore’s genre experiments are more reactions against the antipopulist tendencies of the avant-garde, as these genres represent the domestic mainstream. 14. As I have suggested, mumblecore movies are especially sensitive to this use of phatic clichés as a substitute for generic stability, most significantly in Joe Swanberg’s LOL (2006), which specifically focuses on the (dis)connections of social media as a form of intimate communication. 15. “Lynn Shelton, Humpday: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Boundaries,” indieWIRE, January 14, 2009, http://www.indiewire.com/article/lynn_shelton_humpday_ masculinity_sexuality_and_boundaries/#. 16. The potential uncertainty among the viewers of Humpday over whether the heterocentrism of Ben and Andrew stems from the naïveté of the filmmakers or is instead the focus of the filmmaker’s critique helps explain the arguments among some of the movie’s early reviewers about the degree to which Shelton succeeds in her stated desire to avoid homophobia in Humpday. This ambivalence over whether the main characters are meant to be targets of our sympathy or parodic laughter defines the bromance as well. 17. Mark Olsen, “Indie Focus: Lynn Shelton Relates Your Sister’s Sister,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/04/ entertainment/la-ca-indie-focus-20110904. 18. Virginia Wright Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), 187. 19. Including the extensive use of Second City graduates such as Steve Carell. 20. Melissa Silverstein, “Interview with Lynn Shelton, Director of Humpday,” Huffington Post, July 8, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-silverstein/interview-with-lynn-shelt_b_227673.html. 21. The distinctions between the diegetic, extradiegetic, and metadiegetic levels of narrative reality most influentially derive from Gérard Genette’s work on literary fiction. Genette’s theoretical project calls specific attention to the rhetorical dimension of the process of creating fictive reality by examining the

Notes

113

relationship among a text’s various explicit and implicit narrative voices. In terms of improvisation, each actor becomes at once both character and narrator, again revealing the paradox that an acting style most associated with spontaneity and authenticity, with being in the moment, also demands a heightened degree of observation and self-consciousness, a meta-awareness of the relationship between awareness and social type. See Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), especially the chapter on “Voice,” 212–262. 22. The term girlie man itself derives from “Pumping Up with Hans & Franz,” a recurring sketch on the late 1980s/early 1990s incarnation of Saturday Night that satirized the cartoonish genre of Übermensch masculinity enacted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in his career as action movie star. The phrase subsequently entered the vernacular carrying with it a particularly postmodern ironic instability, simultaneously parodying and sharing in Schwarzenegger’s absurdly atavistic machismo, as when Schwarzenegger himself began using the phrase to mock the Democratic opponents of then vice president George H. W. Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign. The contrast between the physical and cultural identities of the carefully groomed and well-mannered patrician Bush and the oversized, boastful Schwarzenegger on the campaign trail further confused this irony. 23. Silverstein, “Interview with Lynn Shelton, Director of Humpday.” 24. “As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology”—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (NY: Vintage, 1990), 43.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. Anthony Kaufman, “Kicking and Screaming: Noah Baumbach Grows Up with ‘Greenberg,’” indieWIRE, March 18, 2010, http://www.indiewire.com/article/ kicking_and_screaming_noah_baumbach_grows_up_with_greenberg. 2. Judge Vaughn R. Walker, City and County of San Francisco v. Schwarzenegger, No. C 09–2292, United States District Court for the Northern District of California. August 4, 2010, https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cand/09cv2292/ files/09cv2292-ORDER.pdf. 3. See, for example, Jonathan Kiefer, “Why ‘Greenberg’ Is No ‘Annie Hall,’” The Faster Times, March 25, 2010, http://www.thefastertimes.com/film/2010/03/25/ greenberg-review/. 4. The definitive reference for the understanding of what is meant by “classical Hollywood style” remains David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema (NY: Columbia UP, 1985). 5. Frank Krutnik, “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes,” The Velvet Light Trap 26 (Fall 1990): 69. 6. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard Film Studies, 1981). 7. David Edelstein, “Monsters, Inc.: Two Films, Vincere and Greenberg, Lay Bare the Emotional Destruction of Hideous Men,” Time, March 19, 2010, http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/64952/. 8. Mary Pols, “Greenberg: When the Nasty Guy Gets the Girl,” Time, March 18, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1973431,00.html.

114

Notes

9. Stephanie Zacharek, “‘Greenberg’: Ben Stiller Is Cruel, Crazy—and Compelling,” Salon, March 18, 2010, http://www.salon.com/2010/03/18/greenberg/ singleton/. 10. Krutnik, “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals,” 72. 11. Brian Henderson, “Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough, or Impossible?” Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 19. 12. Krutnik, “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals,” 69. 13. I am indebted to the work of Rob Myers, an emerging film scholar in our graduate program, for the observation about the tradition of violence in the romantic comedy. 14. This cliché has been so readily identified and parodied throughout popular culture that it exists now only as parody (for an example, see the “Foot Popping” page on the website TV Tropes, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki. php/Main/FootPopping). 15. Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1991), 195, 205. 16. In this respect, the inflatable calls to mind the “Human Being” mascot featured on the American situation comedy Community, a parody of political correctness involving the desire of Greendale Community College to create a school symbol so inclusive that it also eschews any recognizable demographic signifiers whatsoever, the results being not unlike a walking inflatable flailing “man.”

Bibliography

Abbott, Stacy, and Debbie Jermyn, eds. Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema. NY: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Aisenberg, Joseph. “Here Come the Bromides: Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy.” Bright Lights Film Journal. August 2009. http://www.brightlightsfilm. com/65/65bromance.php. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1991. Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. NY: Columbia UP, 1985. Brecht, Bertolt. “Two Essays on Unprofessional Acting.” In Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett, 148–152. NY: Hill and Wang, 1964. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. NY: Routledge, 1990. Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard Film Studies, 1981. Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark, eds. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993. Corliss, Richard. “Superbad: A Fine Romance.” Time. August 17, 2007. http://www. time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1653918,00.html. ———. “The Ugly Truth: Katherine Heigl Gets Mocked Up.” Time. July 24, 2009. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1912488,00.html. Dargis, Mahnola. “Girl Meets Ape, and Complications Ensue.” New York Times. July 24, 2009. http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/movies/24ugly.html. Deleyto, Celestino. “Between Friends: Love and Friendship in Contemporary Hollywood Romantic Comedies.” Screen 44, no. 2 (2003): 167–182. Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide. NY: Putnam Adult, 2005. Dreisinger, Baz. “The Queen in Shining Armor: Safe Eroticism and the Gay Friend.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28, no. 1 (2000): 2–11. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Edelstein, David. “Monsters, Inc.: Two Films, Vincere and Greenberg, Lay Bare the Emotional Destruction of Hideous Men.” Time. March 19, 2010. http://nymag. com/movies/reviews/64952/. Fiedler, Leslie. “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” In Leslie Fiedler and American Culture, ed. Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin, 26–34. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999.

116

Bibliography

“Foot Popping.” TV Tropes. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FootPopping. Foreman, Joel, ed. The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. NY: Vintage, 1990. Fuchs, Cynthia J. “Split Screens: Framing and Passing in Pillow Talk.” In The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman, 224–251. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. Gabler, Neal. “Day of the Lout.” Los Angeles Times. February 13, 2011. http:// articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/13/entertainment/la-ca-louts-20110213. Gardiner, Judith Kegan, ed. Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory. NY: Columbia UP, 2002. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Gleiberman, Owen. “The Phantom of the Opera.” Entertainment Weekly. February 1, 2005. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1011985,00.html. ———. “The Ugly Truth.” Entertainment Weekly. July 27, 2009. http://www.ew.com/ ew/article/0,,20293046,00.html. Glitre, Kathrina. Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union 1934–1965. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006. Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower P, 2007. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP 1998. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Henderson, Brian. “Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough, or Impossible?” Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 11–23. Holmes, Linda. “Don’t Worry: The Romantic Comedy Is Not Dead at the Hands of Gerard Butler.” Monkey See. August 8, 2010. http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/ 2010/08/10/129105471/no-the-romantic-comedy-is-not-dead-it-s-just-not-aseasy-as-it-looks. Holmlund, Chris. Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies. NY: Routledge, 2002. Jeffers McDonald, Tamar. “Homme-Com: Engendering Change in Contemporary Romantic Comedy.” In Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Stacy Abbott and Debbie Jermyn, 146–159. NY: I. B. Tauris, 2009. ———. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower P, 2007. Jeffords, Susan. “Can Masculinity Be Terminated?” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 245–262. NY: Routledge, 1993. ———. Hard Bodies: Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. Kaufman, Anthony. “Kicking and Screaming: Noah Baumbach Grows Up with ‘Greenberg.’” indieWIRE. March 18, 2010. http://www.indiewire.com/article/ kicking_and_screaming_noah_baumbach_grows_up_with_greenberg. Kiefer, Jonathan. “Why ‘Greenberg’ Is No ‘Annie Hall.’” The Faster Times. March 25, 2010. http://www.thefastertimes.com/film/2010/03/25/greenberg-review. Krutnik, Frank. “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes.” The Velvet Light Trap 26 (Fall 1990): 57–72. Lehman, Peter, ed. Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. NY: Routledge, 1991. ———. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of Male Identity. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2007.

Bibliography

117

Levy, Emanuel. Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film. NY: NYUP, 2001. Lim, Dennis. “A Generation Finds Its Mumble.” New York Times. August 19 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19lim.html?pagewanted = 1&sq = A Generation Finds Its Mumble&st = cse&scp = 1. “Lynn Shelton, Humpday: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Boundaries.” indieWIRE. January 14, 2009. http://www.indiewire.com/article/lynn_shelton_humpday_ masculinity_sexuality_and_boundaries/#. McCabe, Janet. “Lost in Transition: Problems of Modern (Heterosexual) Romance and the Catatonic Male Hero in the Post-Feminist Age.” In Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn, 160–175. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Moore, Roger. “Bert V. Royal Puts Witty Words in Emma Stone’s Mouth in Easy A.” Orlando Sentinel. October 4, 2010. http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_ movies_blog/2010/10/bert-v-royal-puts-the-cool-words-in-emma-stones-mouth-ineasy-a.html. Mortimer, Claire. Romantic Comedy. London: Routledge, 2010. Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle.” Screen 24, no. 6 (November–December 1983): 2–17. Olsen, Mark. “Indie Focus: Lynn Shelton Relates Your Sister’s Sister.” Los Angeles Times. September 4, 2011. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/04/entertainment/ la-ca-indie-focus-20110904. Parker, Kathleen. Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care. NY: Random House, 2008. Penley, Constance, and Sharon Willis, eds. Male Trouble. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Pols, Mary. “Greenberg: When the Nasty Guy Gets the Girl.” Time. March 18, 2010. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1973431,00.html. Potter, Cherry. I Love You But . . . : Romance, Comedy and the Movies. London: Methuen, 2002. Rainer, Peter. “The Ugly Truth.” Christian Science Monitor. July 24, 2009. http:// www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2009/0724/p17s07-almo.html. Robinson, Sally. “Pedagogy of the Opaque: Teaching Masculinity Studies.” In Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner, 141–160. NY: Columbia UP, 2002. Rosin, Hanna. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. NY: Riverhead, 2012. Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. Shumway, David. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis. NY: NYUP, 2003. Silverstein, Melissa. “Interview with Lynn Shelton, Director of Humpday.” Huffington Post. July 8, 2009. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-silverstein/ interview-with-lynn-shelt_b_227673.html. Tasker, Yvonne. “Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, the Body, and the Voice in Contemporary Action Cinema.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 230– 244. London: Routledge, 1993. Taylor, Mark. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Walker, Judge Vaughn R. City and County of San Francisco v. Schwarzenegger, No. C 09–2292. United States District Court for the Northern District of California. August 4, 2010. https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cand/09cv2292/files/09cv2292-ORDER.pdf.

118

Bibliography

Waxman, Sharon. Rebels on the Back Lot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System. NY: Harper Perennial 2006. Wexman, Virginia Wright. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Zacharek, Stephanie. “‘Greenberg’: Ben Stiller Is Cruel, Crazy—and Compelling.” Salon. March 18, 2010. http://www.salon.com/2010/03/18/greenberg/singleton/. ———. “The Phantom of the Opera.” Salon. December 22, 2004. http://www.salon. com/entertainment/movies/review/2004/12/22/phantom/.

Index

abortion 95–6 À bout de soufflé/Breathless 112 Abrams, M. H. 19; see also Mirror and the Lamp, The action adventure as genre 13, 15–17, 84 Adam’s Rib 18 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (novel) 24, 109 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (movie) 24 Aisenberg, Joseph 26, 109, 115 Alexander the Last 52 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 52, 83 Alk, Howard 63; see also Second City Allen, Woody 5, 47, 64, 76, 82–3, 97, 102, 106 Alpha male 32–43, 57, 60, 73, 78, 82–3, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97–8, 101, 110 Altman, Rick 3, 8–11, 16–17, 20, 24, 26, 46, 99, 106–9, 114, 115 Altman, Robert 46, 54, 64 American Graffiti 35, 54 An Affair to Remember 49 Anderson, Paul Thomas 44, 78 Anderson, Wes 78 Animal House 59 Annie Hall 5, 27, 31, 47–8, 52, 60, 74–83, 86–90, 102, 106, 110, 113, 116 anxious romance 4–6, 44–7, 49, 53, 58, 63, 68, 74–6, 78, 80–3, 86–91, 94–8, 101–3 Apatow, Judd 1, 4, 26–7, 29, 33–4, 38–9, 41, 46, 53, 111 Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide 7, 105, 115; see also Dowd, Maureen AtomFilms (Atom.com) 45 Austen, Jane 21

Baghead 52, 54 Bakhtin, Mikhail 107 Battlestar Galactica 33 Baumbach, Noah 6, 74–5, 77–8, 81, 84–5, 100–1, 113, 116 Beavis and Butt-head 57 Beckham, David 28 Beeswax 52 Benedek, Laslo 57; see also Wild One, The Ben Stiller Show, The 76–7 Bergen, Polly 33 Bergerac, Cyrano de 14 Bernhardt, Curtis 33; see also Kisses for My President Beta male 34–43, 57, 59–60, 79, 82–3 bifurcated male 37–43 Bigelow, Kathryn 52 “Big Old Jet Airliner” 79 Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure 57 Biskind, Peter 111, 115 body builder, gender genre of 107 Boogie Nights 46 Bordwell, David 113, 115 Bounty Hunter, The 13 Brando, Marlon 57 Breakfast Club, The 58–9 Brecht, Bertolt 21, 53, 57, 66, 77, 94, 108, 115 Bridesmaids 46 Bringing Up Baby 12, 32–3 bromance 4–6, 15, 25–34, 36–41, 43–7, 49, 53, 56–65, 67–8, 72, 74–6, 79, 82–4, 88–91, 95–6, 98, 101, 109–2, 115; homophobia in 39–40, 60, 62, 65, 68–9 Bruce, Lenny 64 Bujalski, Andrew 45, 52–3

120

Index

Bush, George H. W. 113 Bushman, Francis X. 107 Butler, Gerard 4–5, 8, 11–17, 19–20, 34, 38, 106–7, 116 Butler, Judith 3, 7, 10, 16, 20, 48, 77, 83, 105–6, 108 Byrd, Dan 22 Byron, Lord 13

Dexter 37 Do-Deca-Pentathlon, The 52 Dowd, Maureen 7, 105, 115; see also Are Men Necessary? Dreisinger, Baz 107, 115 Dunham, Lena 84, 110; see also Girls Duplass, Mark (actor) 63–74, 78 Duplass, Mark and Jay (directors) 52, 54

California Split 64 Cameron, James 107; see also True Lies Carell, Steven 36, 112 Cassavetes, Alexandra 51 Cassavetes, John 5, 41, 46, 51–2, 54 Cassavetes, Nick 51 Cassavetes, Zoe 51–2 Cavell, Stanley 113, 115 Cera, Michael 34–5, 40, 57, 59 Chauncey, George 105 Chazelle, Damien 54; see also Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench chick flick 28, 33, 36, 40, 46, 74, 111 Cirque du Soleil 30–1 Clark, Bob 40; see also Porky’s Clark, Larry 55; see also Kids Clerks 57 Clueless 21–2, 39 Cold Weather 52, 54 comedies of remarriage 83, 87, 113, 115 Community 114 Coppola, Francis Ford 51–2 Coppola, Sofia 51–2; see also Virgin Suicides, The Corliss, Richard 16, 26, 31, 38, 107, 109–10, 115 Cott, Nancy 105 Crabbe, Buster 107 Creed, Barbara 110 Crystal, Billy 17 Cukor, George 18; see also Adam’s Rib Cyrus 52

Eagleton, Terry 53, 112, 115 Easy A 4, 6, 21–4, 109, 117 Edelstein, David 84–6, 113, 115 Emma 21 End of Men: And the Rise of Women, The 7, 105, 117; see also Rosin, Hanna Ephron, Nora 27, 48–9, 87, 97

Dance Party, USA 5, 49, 52–61, 63–4, 68, 73, 80, 83, 88, 96, 98, 100, 102 Dargis, Mahnola 1–4, 11–12, 15, 17, 19, 25–6, 103, 105, 115 Darwin, Charles 8 Day, Doris 14, 28, 108 Dazed and Confused 54 Dean, James 57 Deleyto, Celestino 25–7, 31, 37, 39–40, 109, 115 DeWitt, Keegan 54

Farrelly, Peter and Bobby 37; see also There’s Something about Mary Fateman, Joanna 51 Favreau, Jon 38 Fiedler, Leslie 24, 109, 115 Fincher, David 44 Focus Features 75 foot popping (as signifier of love) 89, 114, 116 40-Year-Old Virgin, The 4, 26, 33, 35–6, 45, 68, 83, 89, 96 Foucault, Michel 71–2, 109, 113, 116–17 Fuchs, Cynthia J. 106, 116 Funny Ha Ha 45, 52–4 Funny People 41 Gabler, Neal 13–16, 30, 106, 116 Gardiner, Judith Kegan 105, 108, 116 gender: inversion 28; minstrelsy 4–5, 17–20, 24, 50, 56, 70; performance-based theories of 3–8, 10–11, 14–20, 22–4, 26–8, 30; performance and performativity 3, 5–6, 7, 10–11, 19, 22–4, 33, 40–2, 44–5, 50–2, 54, 56–7, 59–62, 64–5, 71–3, 80, 84, 86–7, 89, 94–6, 100, 102; play 5, 20, 44, 91; theory of 3, 8 gender genres: crisis in 7, 11–12, 16–18, 20, 28, 39, 43, 60, 67, 70, 75–6, 78, 82, 85, 99–100, 108; defined 4, 8–24 Genette, Gérard 112, 116 genre: credulity 1, 2, 11, 29; evolution, relation to 8–9; generic growing

Index pains 3, 11, 14, 24, 27, 74, 103, 109, 112; hybridity 8, 46, 62, 110; meta-awareness 11, 21, 24, 31, 41, 72, 106; rhetoric and 8, 10–11, 21, 26, 35, 53, 57, 93–4; species, relation to 9; structuralism, relation to 9–10; theory of 2, 3, 8–11, 17; see also langue/parole Gerwig, Greta 76–7 Girls 84, 110 Gleiberman, Owen 16, 107, 116 Glitre, Katherine 39, 111, 116 Gluck, Will 4, 21, 109; see also Easy A Godard, Jean-Luc 46, 112 Godfather movies 77 Gondry, Michel 106 Gordon, Michael 12; see also Pillow Talk Gosford Park 64 Grant, Cary 12 Greenberg 6, 48, 74, 75–103, 113–18 gross-out comedy 2, 46, 53, 59, 80 Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench 54 Halberstam, Judith 3, 16, 20, 107–8, 116 Hamburg, John 4, 38; see also I Love You, Man Hamm, Jon 110 Hanna, Kathleen 51–2 Hannah Takes the Stairs 52 Harris, Basil 62 Hawks, Howard 12, 33; see also Bringing Up Baby Hawthorne, Nathaniel 21–2, 24 Hayles, N. Katherine 111, 116 Heathers 59 Heckerling, Amy 21, 39, 52; see also Clueless Heigl, Katherine 2, 14, 16, 41, 107, 115 Henderson, Brian 27, 32–3, 47–9, 87, 106, 109–11, 114, 116 Hepburn, Katherine 32, 92, 108 Herek, Stephen 57; see also Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure heteronormativity 5–6, 26–7, 29, 32–4, 38, 60, 62, 65 heterosexual desire 25–7, 31, 39–40, 47, 55–6 Higgins, Colin 83; see also 9 to 5 Hill, Jonah 15, 30, 40, 57 hipster, gender genre of 65–6, 78, 82, 84 Hogan, P. J. 14, 37; see also My Best Friend’s Wedding

121

Holmes, Linda 13, 106, 116 Holmlund, Chris 107, 116 homme-com 28, 110–11, 116 homophobia 5, 31, 39–40, 60, 62, 65, 68–9, 71, 84, 90, 96, 112 Hudson, Rock 13–14, 17, 28, 83, 106, 108 Hughes, John 55, 58 Humpday 5, 50, 61–75, 77, 80, 83, 88, 96, 98, 112–13, 117 Ifans, Rhys 78 I Love You, Man 4, 25–7, 34, 38–43, 83, 89–90, 111 IMDb (Internet Movie Database) 1 improvisation 5, 65, 72, 74, 77, 91–6, 98–102, 113; Second City school of 63–5, 68, 72, 76–7, 80–1, 86, 89, 96, 102; see also Second City independent (indie) film 3, 5, 27, 44–5, 51, 64–5, 68, 110–11, 117 information theory 111 Ingram, Rex 24 It’s Complicated 34 Jeff, Who Lives at Home 52 Jeffers McDonald, Tamar 18, 27–8, 40, 108, 110–11, 116 Jones, Rashida 38 July, Miranda 52 Junger, Gil 21; see also 10 Things I Hate About You Juno 95 Katz, Aaron 5, 52, 54, 56–7, 61; see also Dance Party, USA Kaufman, Anthony 113, 116 Kavan, Anna 54, 59 Keaton, Diane 76–7 Keener, Catherine 36 Kids 55 Kiefer, Jonathan 113, 116 Kisses for My President 33 Kissing on the Mouth 52 Knocked Up 1–4, 26, 29–31, 35–9, 41, 43, 45, 53, 83, 88, 95–6, 98, 111 Krutnik, Frank 5, 26–7, 47–50, 75, 82–3, 86–7, 107, 109, 111–14, 116; see also nervous romance Lacan, Jacques 9, 39, 72 Landis, John 59; see also Animal House langue/parole 9–10 League, The 67

122

Index

Lee, Ang 44 Lehmann, Michael 59; see also Heathers Lehmann, Peter 110 Leigh, Jennifer Jason 79 Leigh, Mike 46, 64 Leonard, Justin 65–7, 72–3 Le Tigre 51 Levy, Emanuel 111, 117 Levy, Shawn A 77; see also Night at the Museum, A Lim, Dennis 50, 112, 117 Linklater, Richard 54; see also Dazed and Confused LOL 52, 112 Long Goodbye, The 64 lout, gender genre of 13, 15–16, 30–1, 35, 38 Lubitsch, Ernst 27, 49; see also Shop around the Corner, The Lucas, George 35, 45, 54 Luketic, Robert 1, 16; see also Ugly Truth, The MacMurray, Fred 33 Mad Men 34 Magnolia Pictures 75 Manhattan 47–8 Mann, Leslie 41 Marshall, Garry 18; see also Pretty Woman Marshall Sahlins 63 Marx, Groucho 110 masculinity: Alpha Male 32–43, 57, 60, 73, 78, 82–3, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97–8, 101, 110; Beta Male 34–43, 57, 59–60, 79, 82–3; bifurcated male 37–43; crisis in 21, 28, 32, 46, 49, 67–8, 70, 78–80, 82, 84–6, 88, 93, 101; cultural centrality of 4–5, 18–21, 24–8, 32–4, 41, 49, 51, 54, 57–8, 62, 65, 69–71, 73, 75, 80, 82, 86–8, 91–2, 95–8, 101–2, 108, 112; genres of 13, 14; obsolescence 32, 46, 75, 88, 93, 101, 103; radical destabilization of 4, 14, 27, 31, 50, 86, 88; straightness and 62, 65, 68, 72 M*A*S*H 64 Mazursky, Paul 52; see also Unmarried Woman, An McCabe, Janet 34, 110, 117 McCabe and Mrs. Miller 64

McCarey, Leo 49; see also An Affair to Remember Meara, Anne 76 melodramatized male 28, 30, 35–6, 38, 40–1, 43 metageneric awareness 2, 54 Method style of acting 63, 72, 77, 86, 96 metrosexual, gender genre of 15, 28, 38, 65–6, 68 Meyer, Nancy 34 MGM 44 Miller, Frank 15; see also 300 Miller, Steve 79; see also “Big Old Jet Airliner” Mirror and the Lamp, The 19 misogyny 2, 5, 13, 31, 51, 57, 69, 84, 90, 111 Mortimer, Claire 28, 30, 34–5, 110, 117 Mottola, Greg 4; see also Superbad mumblecore 5–6, 44–6, 49–54, 57, 61–6, 67–9, 74–5, 77–84, 86, 88–9, 91, 94–7, 101–2, 110, 112; digital technology and 50 musical as genre 13, 17, 44, 46, 54, 84, 106 Mutual Appreciation 52 My Best Friend’s Wedding 14, 37, 39, 92, 107–9 My Effortless Brilliance 62–3 Myers, Rob 114 Naremore, James 19, 105, 108, 117 NBC Universal 75 Nelson, Sean 62 neorealism 3–5, 31, 36, 38, 41, 44–7, 49–50, 52–4, 58–60, 77, 80–1, 86, 88; postmodernism and 52, 54, 63 nervous romance 5, 41, 46–50, 52, 60, 74–5, 77–8, 80–2, 86–9, 92, 97, 102–3, 107, 109–11, 113, 116 Newhart, Bob 64 New Hollywood 44, 52 New York Times 1, 25, 79 Nichols and May 64 Night at the Museum, A 77 Nights and Weekends 52 9 to 5 83 North Carolina School for the Arts 54 Noth, Chris 110 October Films 75 Olsen, Mark 112, 117 Origin of Species 8

Index Parker, Kathleen 7, 105, 117; see also Save the Males parody 3–6, 11, 13, 16, 19, 27, 31, 36, 38, 41, 45–7, 53–4, 56, 58–60, 62, 64–5, 76, 87–8, 93, 97, 109, 111, 113, 114 Pensiger, Cole 54–61 performativity 5–6, 50, 54, 60–1, 71–3 Phantom of the Opera 13, 15–17, 107, 116, 118 phatic discourse 58–60, 102, 112 Pillow Talk 12–13, 83, 89, 92, 106, 108, 116 Play It Again, Sam 82 Pols, Mary 85–6, 113, 117 Popeye 64 Porky’s 40 pragmatism 90, 101 Pretty Woman 18 Proposition 8 6, 76; see also Walker, Judge Vaughn R. Prynne, Hester 22–3; see also Scarlet Letter, The Puffy Chair, The 52 Pulp Fiction 46 queer theory 7, 48, 73, 109 Quiet City 52 Rainer, Peter 16, 107, 117 Rambo Randall, Tony 14, 82–3 Ray, Nicholas 57; see also Rebel without a Cause Rebel without a Cause 57–8 Reeves, Steve 107 Reiner, Rob 18, 48, 87; see also When Harry Met Sally Reitman, Jason 95; see also Juno Riot Grrrl 51 Roberts, Julia 39, 108 Roberts, Tony 82–3 Robinson, Sally 108, 117 Rocky 15 Rogen, Seth 2, 15, 17, 30, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 107 romantic comedy: The Couple in 48, 78, 81–2, 86–9; crisis in 1, 3–4, 11, 26, 29, 39, 43, 59, 75, 87, 91, 96–7, 100, 108, 110; neotraditionalist 27–8, 34, 37, 40–1, 48–9, 87–8, 92, 97, 103, 109–10 Rooney, Mickey 24

123

Rosin, Hanna 7, 105, 117; see also End of Men, The Rowe, Katherine 28–9, 110, 117 Rowland, Gena 51 Royal, Bert V. 109, 117; see also Easy A Rudd, Paul 30, 34, 38–41 Rushmore 46 Russell, David O. 44, 78 Sahlins, Bernard 63; see also Second City Samberg, Andy 38 Saturday Night Live (SNL) 64, 76 Saussure, Ferdinand de 9 Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care 7, 105, 117; see also Parker, Kathleen Scarlet Letter, The 21–2, 24 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 15, 105, 107, 109, 113, 117 Scorsese, Martin 52; see also Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore Second City 63–5, 68, 72, 76–7, 80–1, 86, 96, 102, 112; see also improvisation Segel, Jason 38–9 Sex and the City (movie) 34 Sex and the City (television show) 34, 109–10 Shakespeare, William 21 Shelton, Lynn 5, 61–2, 64, 69–70, 112–13, 117 Shop around the Corner, The 27, 49 sick comics 64 Sills, Paul 63; see also Second City Silver Bullets 52, 54 Silverstein, Melissa 112–13, 117 Silverstone, Alicia 21 skater culture 57 slacker, gender genre of 16, 29–30, 57 Slater, Christian 59 Sleepless in Seattle 49 Smith, Kevin 57; see also Clerks Snyder, Zack 15; see also 300 Something’s Gotta Give 34 Spielberg, Steven 46 Spolin, Viola 63; see also Second City Staiger, Janet 113, 115 Stallone, Sylvester 15 star persona 4, 8, 13, 15, 20, 76 Starting Over 47 Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones 45 Stevens, George 12; see also Woman of the Year

124

Index

Stiller, Ben 37–8, 75–7, 114, 118 Stiller, Jerry 76 Stone, Emma 22, 109, 117 Superbad 4, 26, 31, 34–5, 37–40, 42, 56–7, 59, 69, 89, 96, 109–10, 115 Swanberg, Joe 52, 54, 77, 112 Symbolic Order 9, 39 Taming of the Shrew, The 21 Tarantino, Quentin 44 Tarzan 107 Tasker, Yvonne 110, 117 Taylor, Mark 111, 117 Tennant, Andy 13; see also Bounty Hunter, The 10 Things I Hate About You 21–2 There’s Something about Mary 37, 46, 89, 92 Thieves Like Us 64 This is 40 111 Thompson, Kristin 113, 115 Thorpe, Richard 24; see also Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The 300 13, 15–17, 19 Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Piano Player 112 Tracy, Spencer 12, 108 True Lies 107 Truffaut, François 112; see also Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Piano Player Twain, Mark 24 24 33 Ugly Truth, The 1, 2, 4–5, 11–17, 19, 20, 23–4, 91, 107, 115 Undeclared 38

Unmarried Woman, An 52, 83 USA Films 75 V/H/S 54 Virgin Suicides, The 52 Vivendi 75 Walker, Judge Vaughn R. 6–7, 12, 17, 20, 24–6, 28, 46, 76, 82, 90, 101, 103, 105, 109, 113, 117 Warner Brothers 44 Waters, John 54 Waxman, Sharon 111, 118 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 13; see also Phantom of the Opera Weissmuller, Johnny 107 western (as genre) 8, 64, 106 Wexman, Virginia Wright 63, 68, 112, 118 What to Expect When You’re Expecting 29 When Harry Met Sally 18, 47–8, 74, 87–8 White, Ryan 57–61 Wild One, The 57 Winter, Eric 15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 9 womance 46 Woman of the Year 12, 92, 108 Woman under the Influence, A 52 Wu-Tang Clan 35 Young, Gig 14, 82 Your Sister’s Sister 67, 112, 117 YouTube 45 You’ve Got Mail 27, 49 Zacharek, Stephanie 85–6, 89, 92, 101, 107, 114, 118 Zoolander 77