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Questions of who or what guys are can first be addressed by asking where do guys turn up? For where they appear and how they perform in films produce spaces that uniquely focus guy issues of gender and male development. In terms of gender semantics, guys operate in intermediate spaces between boys and men, partaking of both while constrained by neither. Having shed their boyhood skins and survived adolescence, yet keeping their patriarchal predestinations on hold, guys promise (though rarely deliver) a reshuffling of adult gender roles framed by work, marriage, and civic duties as presided over by a guilt-inducing superego.
While guys are not gay, their libidos lack determinacy, and they often find their comfort zone in a homosocial matrix (Sedgwick, 1986). However, since the intense male bonding of Hollywood's buddy films involves defenses against various libidinal scenarios, as many studies have shown, I would situate guy films on a regressive/progressive developmental axis stemming from Winnicott's transitional sphere of playful experiencing as expanded and shaped by Hollywood's blend of creativity and commerce (Winnicott, 1958).
Spanning oedipal and preoedipal phases, these shared, no-fault zones of play not only temporarily validate viewers' illusions by minimizing consequences