Lads' Films

Abstract

There is a congested field of proposed genre labels applied to films that center on an objectified masculinity, comprising “lad flicks,” “homme‐coms,” “bromances,” “chuck flicks,” and “romantic sex comedies.” These experience varying levels of popular and critical uptake with bromance arguably the most prominent. However, these labels are not interchangeable and present different emphases in their look at screen masculinities. “Lad flicks” are a subgenre, aimed at male audiences, that explore masculinity as a troubled cultural category often as a source of humor. Narratives are typically “about” masculinity insofar as its definition is explored through the protagonist(s) and their ongoing struggles to fulfill it. David Hansen‐Miller and Rosalind Gill propose the phrase to emphasize the ambivalent negotiation of lad culture or “laddism” within these texts. Lad flicks are not necessarily “rom‐coms” whereas Tamar Jeffers McDonald's “homme‐coms” remain anchored to these conventions, albeit reconfigured for male viewers with “gross out” bodily humor and explicit, sometimes slapstick, sex scenes. Benjamin A. Brabon's “chuck flicks” focus on so‐called male singletons that find themselves adrift courtesy of late capitalism and the financial burden of hegemonic masculinity. These constructions bear an inverse relation with their economically liberated yet romantically unfulfilled female counterpart. Lauren Jade Thompson meanwhile proposes “romantic sex comedy” as a crucially ungendered umbrella term that, unlike these increasingly niche gendered partitions of genre, does not reify the continuing feminization of the macro “rom‐com” genre.