"Lang subtly analyzes the manner in which movies generally attempt to offer a normative account of sexuality while insightfully stressing the rich potential that some offer for opposing this effort to marginalize alternative sexualities. The argument is timely and important." -- Peter Lehman, Arizona State University " Masculine Interests is a queer road movie through seventy years of Hollywood constructions of maleness. This long awaited book on a quirky canon of guy movies from Tarzan the Ape Man to Being John Malkovich challenges, convinces, and breaks through. Robert Lang marshals theorists from Freud to Judith Butler for the task, lucidly and with an intense personal investment, without betraying the pleasure, thegrain and the truth of what's on the screen." -- Thomas Waugh, author of Hard to Imagine

Until Masculine Interests not much had been written about men "as men" in the cinema. Now Robert Lang considers how Hollywood articulates the eroticism that is intrinsic to identification between men. He considers masculinity in social and psychoanalytic terms, maintaining that a major function of the movies is to define different types of masculinity, and to either valorize or criticize these forms. Focusing on several films -- primarily The Lion King, The Most Dangerous Game, The Outlaw, Kiss Me Deadly, Midnight Cowboy, Innerspace, My Own Private Idaho, the Batman series, and Jerry Maguire -- Lang questions the way in which American culture distinguishes between homosexual and nonhomosexual forms of male bonding. In arguing for a much more complex recognition of the homosocial continuum, he contends that queer sexuality is far more present in American cinema than is usually acknowledged.