Posted by Fanny Hell at ts16-64.dialup.bol.ucla.edu on September 02, 2001 at 14:05:54:
In Reply to: Ask your Brother. =) JK..... posted by Bruce The Shark on September 02, 2001 at 08:39:56:
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
The jokes don't bother me; my question was in the spirit of enquiry into the norms of contemporary American hetero masculinity--I really do want to understand.
I want to be optimistic, as you are, that likeable hetero male characters who are depicted as having fantasies about getting head from other males is a positive step that signals greater sexual openness and acceptance among young men. I want to hope this is true.
Based on the accounts of a young male friend, a "macho" football player, however, I think there continues to be a tense conspiracy of silence around this kind of sexuality among young hetero males, a silence that, if broken, can erupt into hostility and violence.
But back to the film. Smith uses these jokes to diffuse a taboo homoerotic sexual tension that permeates the male relationships in the movie. This tension arises from the intense homosocial bonding that Jay and Bob use to defend themselves against feminine attacks on their masculinity. The principal female characters in the film, parodies of the fantasmatically powerful "Charlie's Angels", continually belittle and manipulate Jay and Bob, literally "making monkeys" out of them through the diversionary orangutang rescue.
Abandoned by the contemptuous women, the boys bond with the orangutang, embracing and befriending their own animality. Their escape down the sewer reinforces this metaphorical descent into their "lower" natures. When Bob gets stuck in the sewer entrance, Smith evokes echoes of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit's hole because of his inability to control his physical appetites. Smith reverses the scene and its message by getting Bob stuck trying not to leave but to enter the underground realm of the body and its appetites. While the Pooh story seeks to restrain and discipline men's bodies and desires, Smith, in rewriting Milne, rejects this repression.