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Bros, BFFs, and the New Romantic Foil: Homosocial Relationships in the Emerging-Adult Film

A critical element of understanding genre film production is the relationship among genres, culture, and society. Early film genre theory from authors such as Edward Buscombe and Andrew Tudor explicate the relationship between genres and the audience in terms of the audience’s ability to group generic conventions into different categories and, more importantly, for the audience to maintain a certain set of expectations when seeing a film within a certain genre. Moreover, genre theorists such as Steve Neale and Leger Grindon investigate genre cycles and articulate that sociohistorical and cultural factors and events can influence both the production and box-office success of a set of films (Neale 2000, 211; Grindon 2012, 44). To the present day, this relationship between the film text, the industry, and the audience has been a fundamental way for critics and scholars to understand and interpret genres. Following this important context, I wish to place the recent box-office success of bromance films in dialogue with current discourses of emerging adulthood that have developed in the fields of sociology and psychology. In 2000, sociologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett coined the term emerging adulthood to describe young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty years who live in industrialized societies and are struggling to come to terms with their transition into adulthood. He states that one’s twenties are the time when people receive education and training for the jobs that will last the rest of their adult work lives and when they explore different possibilities in love, work, education, and worldviews. Further, he notices changes in demographic shifts in America in which the median age of marriage, the age of first childbirth, and the number of Americans obtaining higher education have dramatically increased since the mid-twentieth century. As a result, Arnett offers the theory of this new life stage, focused on individuals between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, which is “theoretically and empirically distinct from” adolescence. Arnett summarizes: “Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when little about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course” (2000, 469).While the sociocultural trends of emerging adulthood—finding a satisfying career, entering into a meaningful relationship, and residing independently—can be found across a number of contemporary media texts, many of them are based in a world of homosociality in which the bond between same-sex friends is equally or even more important than the connection between heterosexual partners. These include