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The Surf Also RisesHow macho movies get misread as homoerotic.

By Matt Feeney
Posted Wednesday, June 27, 2007, at 7:05 AM ET

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(Continued from page 1)

But if it's a loving examination of masculine status you want, it doesn't get mas macho than Point Break. Keanu Reeves plays hotshot FBI agent and ex-college football star Johnny Utah, who takes up surfing in order to investigate a string of theatrical bank robberies. He meets Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), a sort of dreamy New Age badass and the acknowledged alpha dude among a likable clutch of hard-core surfers, who might also be the bank robbers he's looking for. Their macho pas de deux starts with a beach football game, when, as far as anyone knows, Johnny is just some anonymous cat hanging around and learning to surf. At the end of one play, Johnny slams Bodhi into the white water, and the only person who doesn't get all up in Johnny's grill is Bodhi himself. He just stands up, shakes the wet hair from his eyes, and, with a delirious look of gratitude on his face, asks his overprotective friends, "Don't you know who this is?" (It's the most excellent Johnny Utah, my little droogs.) For a certain viewer, who has a weakness for the unironic pleasures of the heroic encounter, this is a delicious moment of recognition.

But sophisticated critics routinely dismiss this sort of quasi-heroic cinematic friendship as "homoerotic," and they do so with such offhand certainty that it's easy to miss how doltishly unimaginative this interpretation is. Indeed, claiming a macho film friendship is not-so-secretly gay has become its own kind of silly convention, a fake-subversive cliché. It is better—sounder both aesthetically and sociologically—to view the masculine pathos in films like Point Break in light of the tradition of heroically minded philosophy that runs from Aristotle to Nietzsche. If Point Break is homoerotic, in other words, then so is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed, the thing that connects Johnny and Bodhi is precisely the thing that Hegel says distinguishes the Master from the Slave: The master prefers death to a life without honor and beauty, a life of mere survival. (And, just to be clear, we're talking about Hegel's idealized view of slave-taking as a convention in ancient Greek warfare—soldier versus soldier. Not the modern trade in African slaves.)

The frisson of attraction that abides in the Johnny-Bodhi standoff is erotic, all right. But it isn't homosexual desire. It's narcissism, the delight of seeing one's rare magnificence in someone else. The fact that Johnny and Bodhi operate on different sides of the law only highlights their mutual identification. Johnny is drawn across that line not because he wants to have sex with Bodhi, but because he wants to be Bodhi—or, more accurately, because he is Bodhi. If this isn't obvious enough, Johnny's new girlfriend, Tyler (Lori Petty), who is also Bodhi's ex-girlfriend, says it repeatedly.

A good way of grasping how the claim of homoeroticism misfires sociologically comes from a more recent example: the Spartan blood bath 300. Critic after critic sneered that 300 was transparently homoerotic. Blogger Andrew Sullivan approvingly cited a (presumably gay) correspondent who wrote, "Everyone in the film is gay." Why? Because of those short shorts and all those exposed muscles. (The correspondent dug the movie because of the hot, sweaty men. Ergo, everyone dug the movie because of the hot, sweaty men. I hope the entanglement of this interpretation in a hermeneutic circle is obvious.)

Now, 300 has earned more than $200 million in America alone, from an overwhelmingly male audience. What more plausibly accounts for this? That 20 million closet cases snuck off to see an illicit fantasy about bare-chested men in Hellenic Speedos, or that young men from the vast heartland of this very conservative, Christian, pro-military country flocked to see an unabashedly heroic tale of Occidental, republican military glory? To believe the latter, all you have to accept is that, in imagining the sort of heroic figures they themselves would like to be, straight men would project onto them not just excellence but physical beauty. Shouldn't a guy be able to do such a thing without being called gay?

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Matt Feeney is a freelance writer in Oakland, Calif. He can be reached at mattfeen@hotmail.com.
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Remarks from the Fray

The author takes umbrage that the cinematic depiction of the male body and male friendship is labeled as homoerotic when he believes that instead it's an instance of narcissism. What a predicament for men (gay or heterosexual) to be in--friendship and the male body is either sexualized or a vehicle for egoism. That's a rather narrow worldview to project on manhood and similar in many ways to what the entertainment industry projects on womanhood. Not being male myself, I certainly hope that men don't take this out of the theaters and view friendships and their bodies as solely vehicles for self-interest and sexuality--that would strike me as incredibly myopic and sad.

--eiruduais

(To reply, click here.)

In a sense, the recognition of self and love of it would be, in fact, homo-love. Perhaps not erotic love or sexual love, but yes, a form of love. [...] There is something else going on in macho heroism brotherhood that isn't predominantly sexual, and as eros has been completely sexualized in certain circles of criticism, it would cause us to reject the notion that all macho heroism is homoerotic or homosexual. [...]

We don't have to get drawn into the distorted and convoluted arguments of critics who are trying to make everything Freud. There are more things out there, more important things out there, and many of them have little or nothing to do with sex, even as they may have lots to do with gender.

--BenK

(To reply, click here.)

After reading The Iliad, which has to be the spiritual predecessor to the action movie it seems entirely possible for a work of art to be both homoerotic and, like, totally awesome, man. [...] The reaction of Achilles to Patroclus' death, that otherworldly combination of grief and rage that transforms him into the demigod among men is so profound precisely because the loss is so acute.

Who cares if he was gay or not? The important part is his reaction. The ruthless killing machine that Achilles becomes upon hearing of Patroclus' death has been mirrored in many action movies. I remember reading the section when Achilles gets his new armor from Hephaestus and thinking This is the "Oh, its ON" Montage. The point of the moment is about the purity of Achilles' fury, and what it turns him into. That's the part of it that is awesome.

--Systemz

(To reply, click here.)

Straight men, unlike straight women, are not generally allowed to express their attraction to the male form or even their love of their male friends. Homoeroticism in cinema is an expression of the latent "homosexual" tendencies that exist amongst most, if not all, men. It is met with derision by critics not because they take it as a sign that all straight men are closet cases, but because of the clandestine way movie makers must appeal to these normal male feelings.

--coolya12001

(To reply, click here.)

The large lively object with the pulsing protuberant member which you are ignoring is the idea of the male gaze. Traditionally speaking, straight guys gaze at hotness, they don't worry about looking hot. Both grooming their own bodies for the purpose of another's aesthetic pleasure/sexual desire and appreciating the physical beauty of another man are coded as gay. To be a proper straight guy you're not supposed to notice other guys' hotness nor to effectively be able to beautify yourself. Because the straight guy is always the looker and never the look-y.

--Diablevert

(To reply, click here.)

The point of the discourse on Master and Slave, if I recall correctly, was to describe not just a static, "essentialist" relationship, but a dialectic the result of which lay in the Slave's overcoming and Aufhebung of his subordinate status, by means of the rational faculty. By studying the Master and learning from him, making him dependent on yourself, you not only liberate yourself but become a Master in your own right.

Feeney makes some good points; it's true: men can admire each other and not be gay. But I still can't help but wonder why Feeney has to conclude with the assumption that "gay" is an insult, a way to put another man down. Gay men can also be men of accomplishment - in any area of life. If Feeney wants to rehabilitate the idea of men sharing a narcissistic bond forged in mutual recognition of personal gloire, I would think being mistaken for gay would be something he'd strive for.

--MarkEHaag

(To reply, click here.)

The premise of the heroic tradition, going back to Homer, is that real life is lived among men, that meaningful activity is what men do, and that the only relationships that really matter are those between men based on mutual esteem. In the Iliad, women are a necessity to do the cooking, to scratch the old itch, and to bear the next generation of manchildren, but they're otherwise a distraction from what really matters. The only male-female relationship we'd consider mature in Homer is between Hektor and Andromache, and Hektor is an unwilling hero, compelled to fight in defense of his home for a cause he does not believe in.

Among the Hellenes the homoerotic blended seamlessly into the homosexual. In Christian societies, there is a constant tension to keep the one from toppling over into another. As in Victorian England, the more patriarchal the culture, the greater the risk, the fear and the temptation that David's love for Jonathan, "passing the love of women," will take that extra physical step. Sex and emotional intimacy should be closely intertwined. Confine the female sphere to "kinder, kuche and kirche," and you make that connection difficult if not impossible between men and women. Make male friendships the only meaningful ones, and you leave them lacking consummation.

--jack_cerf

(To reply, click here.)

(6/29)

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