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In his memoir Screening History, Gore Vidal describes his childhood desire to be a twin, which he remembers experiencing when he watched The Prince and the Pauper for the first time. The prince and the pauper were played by Billy and Bobby Mauch, identical twins who were the same age as Vidal, twelve: â?oI thought [they] were cute as a pair of bug's ears, and I wished I were either one of them, one of them, mind you. I certainly did not want to be two of me.â? Although an only child, Vidal was not a lonely one; rather, he was solitary, wanting no company at all other than books and movies, and his own imagination. Vidal notes that the star of the film was Errol Flynn, a swashbuckling actor at the height of his beauty, and that although Flynn â?ois charming as an ideal older brother,â? Vidal had completely forgotten that he was in the movie: â?oPlainly, I didn't want an older brother. I was fixated on the twins themselves. On the changing of clothes, and the reversal of rolesâ? (25).

Vidal goes on to comment that this desire to be a twin does not seem to him to be narcissistic in the vulgar sense: â?oAfter all, one is oneself; and the other other. It is the sort of likeness that makes for wholeness, and is not that search for likeness, that desire and pursuit of the wholeâ?"as Plato has Aristophanes remarkâ?"that is the basis of all love?â? (24). Elsewhere in his memoir, Vidal reveals that as a boy he had for a fleeting moment once been a newsreel personage, but what he really wanted to be was a movie star: â?ospecifically, I wanted to be Mickey Rooney, and to play Puck, as he had done in A Midsummer Night's Dream. â?¦ He was my role model, though he must have been all of fourteen when I was only ten.â?

Much in these recollections and in Vidal's assessment of their significance is relevant to the themes of this book. And in case the reader objects that Gore Vidal is a famously singular case and not emblematic of the norms of masculine identity formation against which I read the films discussed in the following pages, I hasten to point out that I might just as appropriately have

begun my investigation with the example of Chuck Norris, who watched John Wayne movies as a child and dreamed of becoming a screen hero such as Wayne.

Here we have the basic elements of what I call masculine interestâ?"a male interest in what it means to be male; an interest in masculinityâ?"accomplished through looking at another male, in an act of identification. Vidal's remarks reveal that among the reasons people watch movies is the opportunity the experience offers to observe and evaluate the possibilities of how to â?obeâ? masculine or feminine. But he also insists that one enters the movie theater as an already constituted ego (â?oAfter all, one is oneself; and the other otherâ?). Mickey Rooney/Puck may have been his â?orole model,â? and the Mauch twins were quite understandably objects of erotic identification, but Vidal's desire remains radically freeâ?"free to pursue the whole, wherever it may take him.

While there is something to be said for the cinema's powerfully reassuring ability to confirm or encode the viewer's sense of self, it must also be recognized that the conscious ego, which is formed mimetically (via models), can be the enemy of desire, which is formed unconsciously. One of my chief aims in writing this book is to put into play a number of analytical tools to help the reader experience Hollywood cinema not only as a means of developing the ego self-consciously or critically through a series of imaginary identifications or â?orole modelsâ?â?"if only to learn from the movies how to perform gendered identities that are at least not misogynist or homophobicâ?"but as a means of achieving what Tim Dean calls â?omaximum subjective and sexual freedom.â? To the extent that this is possible, we need to understand desire and sexuality both in terms of the unconscious and as a (self-) conscious play within the symbolicâ?"not, for example, in dominant culture's polarizing terms of gay or straight identities. Like the boy who wanted no company at all other than books and movies and his own imagination, I believe in the power and value of fantasy, in the productive sense in which the spectator constructs and is constituted by fantasy as the mise-en-scène of desire. By becoming active, cinematically literate viewers, we can better equip ourselves to create the conditions in which we might find happiness. If, like Vidal, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies, I might analyze and tap into that desire, for desire is the unconscious of all social productions and is behind every investment of time and interest and capital, and vice versa. I am motivated first by the radical insight of psychoanalysis, elaborated by Lacan, that desire springs from the relation between language and one's own body. As Dean puts it: One desires what he or she does not have, and the loss that initiates desire involves not gender (or the imaginary other) but something more fundamental, namely, the way language (what Lacan calls the symbolic Other) violates bodily integrity, thereby thwarting the sense of bodily wholeness conferred by the ego, one's sense of self. Although the capture of the human body by culture's symbolic networks functions differently for different subjects, in all cases that symbolic impact entails a disembodiment that no amount of theory or activism can restore. Yet it is also this disembodiment that creates desire.

This representation of desire as grounded in loss need not be viewed as tragic; rather, the contrary. As Dean implies, every subject's relation to the symbolic order is different, and that matrix of identification, desire, and the Law in which subjectivity is forged is an infinitely flexible structure. To participate actively in the dialectic of embodiment and disembodiment that creates desire is but a question of learning the languageâ?"and using it with imagination. What follows, then, are readings of some of those models for identification offered to us by the cinema which I hope will challenge the notion that sexualityâ?"and the â?omasculinityâ? which gives that sexuality a discursive identityâ?"is a regime involving notions of adaptation, maturity, and cure.

The title of this book was suggested by a reiterated phrase in Henning Bech's original and stimulating work about homosexuality and modernity, When Men Meet: â?othe interest between men in what men can do with one another.â? In a chapter titled â?oAbsent Homosexuality,â? Bech writes that â?obeing or wanting to be a man implies an interested relation from man to man. This male interest includes the pleasures of mirroring and comparing, as well as of companionship and apprenticeship. â?¦ The interest between men in what men can do with one another is a specification of thisâ? (44; emphasis in original). Although Bech quite rightly insists that male homosexual attraction is intimately and inextricably entwined with attraction to masculinity, he is at painsâ?"as I should beâ?"not to imply that â?othe social relations inherent in the wish to be a man and in the experience of being a man [are] at bottom â?~homosexual' relationsâ? (54â?"55). Indeed Bech is interested in the specificity of these relations, their unique and distinctive character: â?oBut the connections between wish, longing, body, male images, togetherness, sharing, security, excitement, equality and difference in relation to other men which are intrinsic to identification make it impossible to keep it apart from eroticismâ? (55). It is precisely this eroticism that is narrativized

as a problematic in each of the films I discuss, where the male-male eroticism as a symbolically fraught aspect of relations between men in our culture is given a generic articulation.

As â?osystems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that circulate between industry, text, and subject,â? cinematic genres offer the critic a uniquely accessible approach to a large and complicated object of study. And as Frank Krutnik observes, they function as â?ointertextual systems which assert a forceful pressure upon the channels and the limits of readabilityâ? which is also how ideology operates generally, to persuade the subject that in the matter of masculine identity formation, for example, there is some variety and choice, but there are also norms to be respected.

Genres, however, are never â?opure,â? a fact we seem to have become more conscious of since the collapse of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s. The idea of genre, and the paradoxes of genre-mixing, are central to the controlling thesis of this bookâ?"that masculinity itself is a genre formation. Gender, like genre, is a performative accomplishment. As Judith Butler puts it in Gender Trouble, â?othe various acts of gender create the idea of gender.â? Just as a film genre has no content until a number of genre films render it visible, gender, we may say, echoing Butler, is â?oan identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.â? And so it is that we recognize types of masculinity; but as soon as we come closer, to identify the type, we find a surprising degree of contradiction in our model of the genre of masculinity it supposedly represents. Gender, thus, as a regulatory, cultural fiction, is a norm that can never be fully internalized. In Butler's phrase: â?ogender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody.â?

This paradox notwithstanding, I have chosen the self-reflexive trope of men looking at men in some recognizably generic ways as a point of entry for my exploration of how males become masculine subjects and how that subjectivity is maintained, for it is the subversive potential of the eroticism intrinsic to identification (the homoerotic variations of which highlight the discursive rather than essential character of gender) that engages me in the first place.