Last week, two movies opened. Their intentions were, on one level, remarkably similar: both of them were intended to be about homophobia, or, more specifically, about the weird blend of fear and fascination and prejudice many straight people express when faced with the thought of two men having sex.
The first movie, Bruno, opened internationally, had a massive promotional campaign, and stars the straight comedian Sasha Baron Cohen playing a hugely exaggerated, hugely offensive gay stereotype: its method of exposing homophobia was to have this comedian wander around and act in an offensively stereotypical manner in the hopes of making people visibly uncomfortable. (The critical reaction so far seems to show that while Bruno did his intended job, and got some rises out of the yokels, what makes many people really uncomfortable is the idea of a straight man playing a hugely offensive gay stereotype.)
The second, Humpday, opened in just two cinemas in the United States. Its aims were smaller, and simpler, and smarter: it's a comedy about two straight men, who have known each other for many years, and how they try to close the rift in their friendship (one is married, and quickly growing up; the other couldn't grow up if he tried) by having sex with each other. They intend for the sex to be filmed; they intend for it to be exhibited at a local "art porn" festival; it's not entirely certain – to us, or to them – what else they intend for it to be. Whatever it is, they want it to happen; whatever it is, they're scared.
The first thing I have to tell you about Humpday is that it is, simply, an amazing movie: beautifully acted, beautifully directed, deeply hilarious, and smart, with an emotional punch that I could not have seen coming, and which would be wrecked by giving away too many details.
What I can say is that Humpday is a movie about sex. It shows sex between people of different genders and sex between people of the same gender; it shows cold, disturbing hate-sex, and fun, let's-have-an-adventure hook-ups, and the comfortable, friendly make-outs that can only happen between people who have been making out for years. It winds up, however, being simply a movie about intimacy, and love, and how sex relates to those things, if it does at all. It seems to get at the real, lived experience of relationships – how they feel, what they mean, how people speak to each other and what they expect of each other – in a way that very few movies can: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I think, was the last movie that nailed these feelings down with such frightening accuracy. And Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind didn't touch on the divide between what straight men expect of lesbians in bed and what they feel when they are in bed with an actual lesbian couple, one of whom has a strap-on.
Humpday has been receiving a lot of press despite its extremely limited release, lots and lots of which contains the term "bromance" - a term that, as I understand it, has been all but patented by boy-man-obsessed auteur Judd Apatow. The film is weirdly Apatovian in its set-up: there's the domestic man, on the road to maturity, who feels castrated by the bonds of a functional relationship with another human being. ("If I want to do something, I can do it," he says, over and over, defensively; it sounds more like a lie every time he says it). There's the wild, free-spirited boy-man, ready to give him a new primary relationship – one that can save him from the harsh labour of being a decent husband. Then, there's the wife, who has no idea why her husband is running away from her, who is basically just trying the best she can, and who is slowly losing her mind. (In a distinctly un-Apatovian touch, even she gets a fair shake: "You talk about having more than one side," she says to her husband, "like I'm just some cardboard cutout who stands in the kitchen." Then she says something that changes their relationship, and our understanding of her, entirely.)
Yet, let's be honest with each other, here: the "bromance" genre has always been defined, not only by sexism (the men seem to love each other primarily because they aren't women: women, in these movies, are awful), but by homophobia. This decade has been many things, but I may always remember it as That Time When Men Decided They Had Feelings. (The 1990s were also included in this Time, but the Feelings seemed to be oddly entangled with Robert Bly workshops, in a way that I don't care to think about.) The bromance genre allows for those feelings – for bonding, and even love, between men – but it makes that love safe for mass consumption by infusing it with a deep distrust of women and lots of gay jokes. It's okay, Apatow movies tell their intended audience of straight men: you can love your bros, and think that they're the most important people in the world, and still think that Coldplay is for faggots.
Humpday is not that kind of story. The questions it asks are at once simple and disarming: if you love your bro, why don't you sleep with him? What does it mean if you don't sleep with him, or if you do? Would it even make any difference? They're hard questions to answer – by the time the movie ends, even the two men in question don't seem to know – but they challenge both the bromance genre and most of our widely held beliefs about friendship, sex, sexuality and what it means to be a man.
They're beliefs that need challenging. This decade will also always be the decade in which Prop 8 passed in California – the decade in which, after witnessing the election of the first president of colour, and feeling, maybe for the first time in our lives, a real belief in the American promise of democracy and equality, Americans woke up to find that a state with a substantial gay population (a state that had San Francisco in it, for God's sake!) had voted to revoke the right of gay people to marry. It passed by the slimmest of margins. Yet it passed. And the massive protests which followed woke us up, again, to the fact that in this democratic country of ours, a substantial number of citizens have been denied basic civil rights due solely to how they have sex, or who they love.
"Bromance" isn't cutting it. Accepting that men have feelings for each other, and declaring that this is perfectly wonderful as long as they don't have sex, is reprehensible. "Bromance" means nothing if we don't also admit the value of actual romance between bros.
What happens between Ben and Andrew, the main characters isn't exactly that: they're freaked out, squeamish, putting their own fears of gayness on display even as they determinedly push past them. In one of many funny scenes, they try to "warm up" by hugging each other while stripped down to their underwear. "It's like we met at a pool party," Mark says. It's the way they stay in the hug, the way you can see them processing it with their eyes and hands – something they've done many times before, that now means something different – that makes it brilliant. As Bruno smugly plays to both sides – assuaging the need of certain straight people to feel "tolerant," while also pandering to people who just enjoy laughing at those swishy, effeminate, flamboyant, slutty gays – Humpday, by presenting two men determined to cross the boundary between bromance and romance, shows just how thin and ultimately insignificant that line is.
A lot has been made of the fact that the director of Humpday, Lynn Shelton, is a woman. (She also appears in the film, as one half of the lesbian couple that encourages Ben and Andrew to make their art porn.) The New York Times, in a recent profile, called her "just another dude". The Times reviewer, Stephen Holden, marvelled at the thought of a movie about men "conceived by an empathetic woman with no apparent ax to grind." People find it strange, apparently, that a woman can be insightful about men.
Still, as I am a woman, and also a bit of an axe-wielder, I thought it only fair to see the movie in the company of a man – if only so that I could test his perceptions against my own, and see if I'd missed anything.
Afterward, I asked him how accurate the movie was at depicting male relationships. In what might be a statement about straight men in general, or straight men in the year 2009, or just about the fact that I know the right straight men, he said that it felt pretty real throughout. Yet the guys, he said, seemed a little too freaked-out about the sex.
