Opengender

There have been various accounts of the allegorical significances of nostalgic narratives in revisionist westerns for North American society during the 1970s which are not relevant to my present argument. What is most relevant to an analysis of representations of sex-gender in this cycle of films is the idea that the increasing popularity of buddy films in the 1970s and 1980s may have reflected more general male anxieties. The buddy movie represented an intensification of the (phallic) nostalgic mythologisation of the figure of the untrammelled western outlaw as anti-hero of the times (Wright, 1975; Films, 1983). The visual and narrative ordering of the buddy film marginalised women, or excluded them entirely. This exclusion of 'the feminine' was motivated by the need to deny the destabilising effects of feminism and to shore up the institution of homosociality itself.

[The buddy film] reconfirmed white male self-identity within radically shifting social and political frames; these men without women defined themselves in opposition to the (absented) other. (Fuchs, 1993: 196)

Mulvey's (1975) argument that the male buddy movie circumvented problems of verisimilitude produced in the classic relay of the male gaze through that of male protagonist onto the female was purely textual. For Mulvey, this form addressed a fundamental problem of the homosociality of the scopic relay itself:

The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to [...] freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation [...] (A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the "buddy movie," in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) (Mulvey, 1975: 62)

Mulvey's tangential remark did not develop the theme but, in terms of Neale's (1983) revision of her general argument, homoeroticism would inevitably be invoked by the scopic organisation of cinematic representations of the exclusively male bond. Thus "the exclusion of women compelled overt condemnation of implicit and even explicit homoeroticism" (Fuchs, 1993: 196).

Such homoeroticising effects may not only have been due to the absence or marginalisation of women in the buddy film and resultant disturbance in the relay. There may also be a feminising tendency in representation of the corporatising effect of male comradeship. That is, collectivity always tends towards feminisation precisely because it signifies invasion of individual boundaries, cancels differences between men, and effects a transgression of boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, "legitimate and illicit" (Fuchs, 1993: 194). In militaristic comradeship, this effect is enhanced because the presence of death and mutilation is also signified (Neale, 1983; Theweleit, 1989). Militaristic authority and the intense bonding process which incorporates and supersedes the individual male into a corporate military identity were identified as the homosocial processes most potently haunted by the spectre of homoeroticism (Waugh, 1977; Daly, 1978; Lewis, 1983; Theweleit, 1989). In such environments, the male bond is argued to develop fascistic undertones when a militaristic, violent, elite group is forged in a flight from "the feminine" (Waugh, 1977; Lewis, 1983; Theweleit 1989: 319-320).

The pervasive anxiety about homosexuality which haunts this era might, then, be seen as an effect of the defensive intensification of male homosociality in response to feminism. (It is important to emphasise here that it is not homosexual activity or identity which is under discussion, but phantasmic heterosexual male anxieties. Although Neale's (1983) analysis indicated that homoerotic subtexts in action genres may be subversively re-appropriated by gay men, this is obviously not their direct mode of address or preferred reading.) In his critique of An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Lewis (1983) linked the buddy-film not only with militaristic nationalism but explicitly with anti-feminism (13) and misogyny:

[D]iscipline shapes rather well-defined 'individuals' who are not only tenacious (in their ability to survive and succeed) but also quite willing to accept (paradoxically) that incredible sublimation of selfhood for the good of the male group [...] women here remain at the periphery of concerns and action [...] women become the real object(s) of his scorn and blame and externalised rage [...] Their very existence threatens the male group. (Lewis, 1983: 13)

Rosenthal's description of male bonding in buddy films also linked the homoerotic subtexts of buddy films to misogyny:

[R]elationships with women are always secondary, [...] the homoerotic tensions that structure these films tend toward an anti-social misogyny, which reduced love to a fascistic military solidarity. The outlaw code — the band of brothers living honestly outside of civil law can easily be transformed into the fascist band of brothers living above the law and enforcing it [...] the films are homophobic as well as misogynist. (Rosenthal, 1978: 1)

Rosenthal (1978) saw The Wild Bunch (1969) (in its corporatising representation of the male bond) as prototypical of the buddy movie, but most critics claimed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) as the archetype. This latter is, more typically, organised around a paired-bond between two men rather than a militaristic or quasi-militaristic group of men.

Wood (1986) did not think that the more typical 'paired' buddy films should be interpreted mainly as a reaction to feminism, however (230). If women carry the symbolic function of marriage and society in Western narratives, Wood saw the homoeroticism of the buddy movie as breaking through the repressive dominance of the heterosexual family.

[I]f women can be dispensed with so easily, a great deal else goes with them, including the central supports of and justification for the dominant ideology: marriage, family, home. (Wood, 1986: 227)

Such representations appealed to what Wood saw (somewhat optimistically) as the heterosexual male's "unconscious but immensely powerful need to validate love relationships between men" (Wood, 1986: 230). Of course, in terms of the model of male bonding being used by the other theorists of the buddy movie, this would still cite homosociality as the guarantor of heterosexual masculinity. Wood did, however, note the almost hysterical level of denial in these films. The homoerotic implications of such intimacy (and of the relay of the phallic gaze onto the male) are most usually displaced by projecting homosexuality outside the central male bond as the property of another, despised or comic, character.

The overt homosexual (invariably either clown or villain) has the function of a disclaimer — our boys are not like that. The presence of women in the films seems often to have the same function: they merely guarantee the heroes' heterosexuality. (Wood, 1986: 229)

The male buddy movie originally occurred most commonly in the western genre, which is associated with adolescent male thrills. It is now most common in the detective genre, which arguably took over the western's thematic and adolescent audience when the latter's popularity lapsed (Films, 1983). It would seem that the western's generic function of underpinning a mythos of society and nation, and thus of reflecting and controlling anxieties about race relations, also shifted to this new genre. The detective-buddy film also began to articulate white anxieties concerning shifting racial boundaries. Anxieties about race and sex-gender boundaries were frequently conflated.

The Lethal Weapon series (1987–1992) focused critical debate on a cycle of interracial buddy films in the 1980s. Whilst Guerrero (1993) saw it as one of the "least-worst" of the interracial buddy sub-genre (244-5), Modleski saw Lethal Weapon as "a heavily condensed mixture of racism, misogyny, homoeroticism, and heterosexual panic" (Modleski, 1991: 141). Jones (1993) saw Glover's "normally situated" Black character as "sanitised beyond recognition. Robbed of all traces of ethnicity or real sexuality . . ." (252-3). Fuchs (1993) and Tasker (1993) both also noted that the Lethal Weapon series displaced homosexual anxieties evoked by representation of the homosocial bond onto a racially defined boundary of 'otherness.'

The secrecy of masculine intimacy and vulnerability is sustained in these films by the 'marriage' of racial others, such that the transgressiveness of black-white difference displaces homosexual anxiety. (Fuchs (1993: 195)

The Lethal Weapon films manage to avoid any homoerotic inflections of the buddy pairing by reinscribing difference within the terms of race [...] Both men are further defined in the film [Lethal Weapon 2] against Leo Geetz (Joe Pesci), a witness they are assigned to protect. Leo's comic role functions to produce a figure who is both feminised and trivialised by his hysterical speech. (Tasker, 1993: 46-7)

Ames saw a revisionist imperialist agenda as more central. In his analysis of the interracial detective-buddy film, he related the significance of this new sub-genre to Fiedler's (1949) comments on the Western 'dark girl'/buddy and concluded:

This [American] archetypal relationship is manifested today most prominently in the black-white "buddy films," [...] Black and white protagonists are paired, not in a virgin wilderness, but in its metaphorical and corrupted contemporary counterpart, the urban jungle of violent crime [...] [in a mythic reversal] the white man is clearly the savage equipped for survival, while the black man has become a highly civilized figure who has lost touch with his savage masculinity [...] As in the traditional myth, a homoerotic or homosocial bond emerges, uniting black and white man against the civilized repressions represented by women and the law [...] [expressing] a powerful mythic longing to reverse or purge historical guilt. (Ames, 1992: 52-3)

Fuchs noted a similar sublimating effect in Heart Condition (1990):

[T]he plot device that transplants upscale lawyer Stone's heart to racist cop Mooney's chest [...] points out spiralling ideological and cultural tensions that structure the generic buddy film [...] First, the men's literally shared heart figures a masculine hegemony which appears to subsume such tensions, an all-male unit transcending race and class distinctions to produce stable self-identity. (Fuchs, 1993: 194)

As in the traditional Western, the possibility of substituting a female for the 'dark companion' was exploited in films as diverse as the genre spoof Streets of Fire (1984) and Lethal Weapon 3 (1992):

Lethal Weapon 3 actually proves the rule that these heroes cannot be allowed a central erotic relationship with a woman because it distracts from the primary love of the male companions [...] Lorna Cole is essentially [...] a female man. She is a permissible sexual companion for Riggs because she combines macho physical intensity with a female body - thus the eroticism latent in the scenes of the two male heroes can find acceptable expression [...] (Ames, 1992: 55)

The female protagonism of pro-feminist buddy-films such as Thelma and Louise might, then, be seen as effecting a similar mode of displacement — but in the replacement of both buddies by female protagonists, a subtextual homoeroticism is feminised (lesbianised).

The male buddy film, then, seemed implicated in an effort to re-establish and simultaneously conceal a threatened exclusionary white, male bond through a drastic denial of differences of both race and sex — often through the substitution of one set of signs for another. Simultaneously, in a fetishistic manoeuvre, the male spectator is able to deploy such differences to a denial of the homoeroticism of the male homosocial bond which he seeks to verify. This is possible through the inversion of the dominant tendency to hyper-virilisation of black masculinity on the one hand, and the 'inverted' virilisation of the white woman on the other. The two main 'buddy movie' forms (corporate or paired) show similar tendencies. Both evade the problematic of the cinematic representation of women. Both display a more general fear of the 'castrating' effect of closeness with women as well as a homophobic anxiety about the feminising effects of closeness with men. Both nevertheless evoke a homoerotic intensity to the male (or female) bond. Both are linked with revisionist agendas. However, whilst the former is usually overtly nationalistic and militaristic, and concerned with the maturing of the individual (his incorporation to dominant forms of masculinity) through suffering, the latter aligns itself with the phallic-nostalgic thrills of a fantasy wilderness — be it urban or 'natural.' Both forms have also developed pro-feminist analogues.