The term "bromance" is so 13 years ago

I think of Filmspotting as generally being a pretty shrewd podcast in its attitudes and attempts to stay current. However, it's hosted by two old guys like me -- within two years of my age, in any case. They/we don't always get things right.

But I was still surprised to see them miss by as much as they did this past week.

In reviewing the new Martin McDonagh film The Banshees of Inisherin, which doesn't open here until Boxing Day, Adam and Josh selected a top five tie-in of "best movie bromances."

Is it 2009 all over again?

I say 2009 because that's when I wrote this post about I Love You, Man, which had just come out. The second paragraph of the post starts out with the words "The word 'bromance' has been thrown around so much lately that we're all pretty much sick of it." Even then, when this cutesy term was in its relative infancy, I was already over it. Though I did acknowledge that I Love You, Man was a perfect encapsulation of what they were going for with the term.

As a good sign of society's development and tendency to become more woke, I haven't heard the term "bromance" a lot in the past five to ten years. Teasing men about their level of affection for other men hardly seems like the right comedic target in a time of increasing awareness of the spectrum of sexuality and where any one person falls on it. What if this person you are calling part of a "bromance" is, actually, sexually attracted to the other person? Not so easy to make fun of then, right?

But even if the 2022 usage of the term wasn't tone deaf, they didn't get it right.

Some of the picks they went on to reveal were not too far off. For example, I liked Josh's inclusion of the leads from RRR, who do indeed meet and become quite taken with one another in the course of the narrative, and even have a great Bollywood dance during a moment of heightened mutual regard. 

But then there were the picks like the leads in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who as far as I recall have been partners for years. They do not meet within the course of the narrative, as do the characters in RRR and I Love You, Man. 

I suppose at this point I should define my terms a bit. To the extent that it means anything, the term "bromance" suggests newness, the sort of infatuation you have toward a person of either gender when you first meet them and just think they're really cool. It also implies a bit of a nervousness about potentially screwing it up.

To take the "b" off the front of the word, if you say "We had a romance," you are talking about a specific period of time that either collapsed or blossomed into something long-term. By the time it gets to long term, though, you don't call it a romance anymore. Lovely as she is, I don't say I have a "romance" with my wife. We had a romance in 2005, and then it blossomed into the marriage that it is today.

A "bromance" is not something that lasts a lifetime. My two best friends, whom I have known since the 1970s, are not people I have a "bromance" with. Those are lifelong friendships. "Bromance" cheapens what we have not only by teasing it and making us feel like we should be embarrassed about it, but by suggesting it's based on the same sort of infatuation as love at first sight. If it was indeed based on that sort of infatuation, it happened over 40 years ago and is ancient history at this point. 

So if Filmspotting really wanted to do a top five best male friendships in the movies, they should have just called it that -- but then they'd also have to know the sheer quantity of choices that would present them. "Bromance," even as a dated term, at least does the work of whittling down your field of contenders to only movies where the characters meet within the narrative and develop a fast, potentially vulnerable bond.

If they'd committed just one of these sins -- used the term but used it correctly, or not used the term but had a ridiculous number of resulting choices -- I probably wouldn't be writing this post. But both? Well, I couldn't stay quiet.

The timing, I must say, is also curious. Instead of tying it in with The Banshees of Inisherin, they could have tied it in with Bros, the lexicographical similarity to which could not have escaped them. But of course that wouldn't work because you wouldn't dare belittle an actual romance between two men by calling it a "bromance." The term is heteronormative in the extreme. 

If the faulty tie-in between Bros and the word "bromance" occurred to them at all, which I have to imagine it did, it should have also signalled that it was the wrong time to resurrect a term that never should have achieved such pop culture prominence in the first place. 

Opening night optimism for Bros, unfulfilled

I wanted to make sure I was in the opening night audience for Bros. It gave me the best chance of ensuring I'd have a review ready for Monday. Friday was already out since I had a delayed review for Barbarian going up from a pair of my other writers, and I don't post on ReelGood on weekends. 

Of course, the primary reason was that I wanted to support this movie. Desperately.

I didn't know, but likely assumed, that the movie has not done well in the U.S. Of course it hasn't. People are going out to the movies a lot less these days, and there's one particular sort of movie they consistently support in droves: a movie like Top Gun: Maverick. Bros does not stand much of a chance in this environment, even if it were a straight romantic comedy.

I suppose the thinking there might be more like "especially if it were a straight romantic comedy." Those have not been viable in years, and have basically been relegated to streaming. Being about two men, and all their super gay friends (really, this movie does not scrimp on the gay), might only help by at least giving it a novelty factor.

But then of course there is also the homophobia factor. And it's strong.

If my real-time googling of U.S. box office is actually yielding accurate results, the movies has made $11.6 million in the U.S. That's not terrible, probably, in this day and age, though at this time I am not going to compare it to all the other films that resemble it in some way that might bear itself out in the box office. But it's far less than the $22 million budget so I assume there is no way to view it as anything other than a flop. Which means a studio like Universal is far less likely to take a gamble on a project like this in the future.

Fortunately, I did not know all this when I walked into the Sun Theatre in Yarraville on Thursday night, Australian opening night, for the 9:20 showing. I went in on a cushion of optimism, buoyed by knowing that a friend of mine had liked it, though he had not yet gone into specifics. 

My optimism further increased when I saw that it had been put in the Grand, which, true to its name, is the largest of the screening rooms at the Sun. Given that no movie plays on more than one screen at the Sun, the fact that they had reserved their largest for the opening of the first gay romantic comedy from a major studio was a positive sign indeed.

And then I got into the actual theater.

I wasn't the only one there. No, there were about ten others, seated in groups of five around the back of the theater.

A theater which holds at least 150 people.

Is this just the era we live in? Is this homophobia? Is it just that opening night is not a real indicator of a movie's prospects, considering the people are more likely to go out on a Friday or Saturday night than a Thursday?

One thing I can tell you, though, is that my own personal optimism for the quality of the movie was fulfilled, and then some.

I've already written the review so I won't go into details here. If I remember I will link back to it once I post it on Monday. Or you can just go find the review itself, since it'll appear in my most recently reviewed movies on the right. Just know that I laughed a lot, and that I was impressed with Billy Eichner as a dramatic actor, in the relatively few scenes that required that of him. I already knew his talents as a comic, but this surprised me, as did his ability to sing. 

Also, it's super gay! I mean probably by some people's standards, they wouldn't think it was gay enough -- this is one of the film's thematic texts, what is gay enough and what is too gay. But for a mainstream movie, there were plenty of sex scenes, which were never graphic but certainly would have tested the limitations of what an audience weaned on heterosexual sex scenes thought they were ready for. And good on Universal for not telling them to keep things more chaste.

Really, though, I mean there were gay characters and trans characters and bi characters, and you didn't get the impression that any of them were tweaked in such a way as to fit better into the audience's perceived comfort zone. And by "the audience" I am of course talking about the straight audience, though it's difficult to tell how many of them actually came.

An $11.6 million box office could, in fact, be every single gay person near a major American city buying a ticket to Bros, with some of them seeing it twice. I hope at least a couple million of that can be attributed to straight ticket buyers.

It's probably not enough, though, which makes one wonder: How much longer will it be before a major Hollywood studio releases the second gay romantic comedy?