'Innerspace': a spectacular voyage to the heart of identity.(1987 American motion picture)

In a 1974 newspaper article entitled, "When Boy Meets Boy, What's a Girl to Do?" film critic Kathleen Carroll wondered, "Why, all of a sudden, does Hollywood seem so intensely interested in exploring man-to-man relationships? Not that movies haven't done it before. We have had Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable in Boomtown, Sydney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, and many more, but never so many movies on the subject at one time." Citing Papillon, The Sting, Scarecrow, and Bang the Drum Slowly, among others, Carroll observed that, "Hollywood seems to be leaning towards the idea, first espoused by the ancient Greeks, that a friendship between two obviously virile males is the most desirable of all human relationships, and that it can be a far more fulfilling experience than the love relationship between a man and a woman" (Carroll 1974, 7).(1) Then, in a casually homophobic remark intended to be approving, Carroll told her readers that "Men are learning what it means to care about another man, not in the homosexual sense (for none of the movies we are talking about have even the faintest suggestion of homosexuality), but in a very real sense."

Carroll's phrasing betrays a shallow understanding of homosocial desire(2) (it is simply not true, for example, that the films she mentions haven't "the faintest suggestion of homosexuality"), but her glib observations signal a shift in popular perceptions of how the affective element in male homosocial relationships might be acceptably represented in mainstream cinema. If anything has changed since 1974, it is the presumptuous certainty that allowed Carroll, writing in the spirit of heterosexual entitlement that characterizes the mainstream press, to use the phrase, "in a very real sense" (as opposed to "the homosexual sense" , and assume her readers would know what she meant. Indeed, only two years later, writing in The Villaqe Voice, Andrew Sarris declared that, "Above all, there is now a disturbing confusion about `normality' where once there seemed to be blissful certitude. Or was there?" (Sarris 1976, 16). He went on to observe that, "What is most fascinating about most movies is their virtually infinite capacity for reinterpretation. We think that we see everything at the time, but we never do."

A genre that has come in for complex rethinking is the buddy film, not because we can look back at old buddy films and reinterpret them as love stories between men, but because the genre itself is undergoing a crisis of self-consciousness.(3) Some recent developments in the evolution of the genre have been monitored by a number of critics. For example, Vincent Canby in 1979 sounded a defensive alarm in a New York Times article bearing the title, "Male-bonding? Now Wait a Minute!" He argued that "It's men who are being condescended to and patronized by moviemakers, most of whom, it should be emphasized, are men. Brothers, it's brothers not sisters who are shattering our egos, making us uncertain about our identities and persuading us to question something called `male-bonding,' which used to be known simply as friendship. Male bonding? Even the jargon is pejorative" (Canby 1979, 17).

In 1982, Molly Haskell noted irritably that, "Just when we thought the buddy-buddy film was finished--no more Paul Newman and Robert Redford riding off into the sunset--male bonding resurfaces in a new form. The latest twist is fathers and sons or, to use the currently fashionable term, `male parenting.' Kramer vs. Kramer. Ordinary People. Carbon Copy. Paternity. On Golden Pond. The upcoming Missing. They all show busy or repressed fathers learning to love their offspring, usually male. The man-to-manness of the bond certifies the virility of the new parenting" (Haskell 1982, C2).

Walter Goodman put in a good word for "boys' movies" in a 1987 New York Times article entitled, "Prankster Pals: the Appeal Never Ages." The pull-quote echoed his title: "From Gunga Din to Stakeout, buddies involved in good-natured mischief have proved an irresistible mix" (Goodman 1987, H19).

In 1988, Haskell identified another variation of the buddy film in a magazine article entitled, "The Odder Couples: Is Being a Misfit the New Precondition for Male Friendship?" Haskell obligingly pointed out that "Male bonding is nothing new in the movies: Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. loved each other more than any woman in Little Caesar (1931), and Paul Newman and Robert Redford were boys together in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. But men onscreen usually have shied away from displays of emotion that some of them associate with wimpishness. Taking their cue from women, men are starting to open up to one another, and going public in confessional forums like the "About Men" column in The New York Times Magazine. Recent movies like Dominick &Eugene, Patti Rocks, and the classic Birdy reflect this new glasnost, but the tortured fraternal relationships in these films suggest that conditions still have to be very special for men to express their feelings of love for one another" (Haskell 1988, 66).

Robin Wood takes the view that within their social context, seventies buddy movies are "more interesting than is generally recognized." He writes in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan that "the basic motivating premise of the seventies' buddy movie is not the presence of the male relationship but the absence of home" (Wood 1986, 227). He identifies Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, and Midnight Rider (all released in 1969) as the three films that effectively launched the cycle, and he makes a case for the later films, "of which Thunderbolt and Lightfoot [1974], Scarecrow [1973], and California Split [1974] are the most distinguished and idiosyncratic," as being variations on the principles established in 1969.