Innerspace: A Spectacular Voyage to the Heart of Identity

In a 1974 newspaper article entitled, “When Boy Meets Boy, What's a Girl to Do?” film critic Kathleen Carroll wondered, “Why, all of a sudden, does Hollywood seem so intensely interested in exploring man-to-man relationships? Not that movies haven't done it before. We have had Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable in Boomtown, Sydney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, and many more, but never so many movies on the subject at one time.” Citing Papillon, The Sting, Scarecrow, and Bang the Drum Slowly, among others, Carroll observed that, “Hollywood seems to be leaning towards the idea, first espoused by the ancient Greeks, that a friendship between two obviously virile males is the most desirable of all human relationships, and that it can be a far more fulfilling experience than the love relationship between a man and a woman” (Carroll 1974, 7).1 Then, in a casually homophobic remark intended to be approving, Carroll told her readers that “Men are learning what it means to care about another man, not in the homosexual sense (for none of the movies we are talking about have even the faintest suggestion of homosexuality), but in a very real sense.”

Carroll's phrasing betrays a shallow understanding of homosocial desire2 (it is simply not true, for example, that the films she mentions haven't “the faintest suggestion of homosexuality”), but her glib observations signal a shift in popular perceptions of how the affective element in male homosocial relationships might be acceptably represented in mainstream cinema. If anything has changed since 1974, it is the presumptuous certainty that allowed Carroll, writing in the spirit of heterosexual entitlement that characterizes the mainstream press, to use the phrase, “in a very real sense” (as opposed to “the homosexual sense”), and assume her readers would know what she meant. Indeed, only two years later, writing in The