Bros Wallows in Hollywood Narcissism

As Hollywood displays its ongoing artistic bankruptcy, we see the people responsible for this glut of unoriginality for what they really are morally and politically. That was the case last week with Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and now with Judd Apatow’s production of the Billy Eichner project Bros. The latest in Apatow’s series of vulgar introductory films (Knocked Up for Seth Rogan, Trainwreck for Amy Schumer, The King of Staten Island for Pete Davidson), Bros defends stunt-provocateur Eichner’s singularly hideous personality.

Bros sells the only thing Eichner’s got to offer: his political identity as a white gay male. It has been the media’s excuse for tolerating his unapologetic boorishness as shtick. You may never have heard of Eichner, one of those minor cable-TV aberrations (shows such as Billy on the Street, in which he accosted passersby) who was marketed into Hollywood acceptance as a “comedian.” In the gratingly unfunny Bros, Eichner plays Bobby Leiber, a podcaster — which explains how an obnoxious blowhard makes a living, a podcaster being tantamount to a cultural influencer.

Bobby gets an employment upgrade to curate an LGBTQ museum, which sets him up for another social gain: a romantic partner to certify his status. Goofy, smug, and insecure Bobby meets Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), a smiley, straight-appearing stereotype chosen for the film’s pretense of redefining all masculinity.

Through the title “Bros,” Hollywood — already a distinct political enclave — markets a protected social group. The film’s proper title could have been cultish –“Girls,” “Queens,” “Ladies,” even “Guys” — except that Apatow and director Nicholas Stoller (co-writing with Eichner) presume to instruct the public on its outmoded ideas of manhood. They want credit for being neither homophobic nor heteronormative (although the lamest jokes ridicule the latter). Witless Hollywood needs to flaunt its progressivism.

In those terms, Bros looks like a landmark, but not for its content (despite reviewers dutifully repeating the film’s dishonest sales pitch that it’s Hollywood’s first openly gay rom-com). Fact is, Bros is notable only for its surrounding context, a cultural low-water mark.

At a time when the only American who cannot offer a definition of a male homosexual is probably the disingenuous Ketanji Brown Jackson, Apatow, Stoller, and Eichner deal in the deliberate confusion of today’s sexual-equity circus — which derived from Hollywood liberalism as much as from the old Human Rights Campaign, now warped into the leading trans-activism organization.

The context in which Bros is released as a major studio project is the trans sexualization now threatening children, gender roles, social privilege, and political preference. In this light, Bros presents a fairly mild version of Eichner’s street harangues. The scene of Bobby leaving Aaron to a sexual threesome is like a safe, pre-monkeypox, Disney-certified orgy. The erotic tension in the Jackass movies is more daring.

Context being everything, Bros matches the announcement by the producer of the James Bond series: “Bond is evolving as men are evolving.” But the attempt to normalize Eichner by imitating the rom-com formula is what makes Bros bogus. Apatow and Stoller can’t domesticate their unruly pet, but they also lack the honesty to admit that Eichner’s insufferable bachelorhood actually exemplifies his own unevolved sense of entitlement — typical Hollywood narcissism.

More context: The rom-com premise of treating gay males like Norah Ephron clichés narrows gay life to the Buttigieg, Obergefell standard. In the same year that Terence Davies’s Benediction boldly revealed the heartache behind gay male sexual self-sufficiency, Bros proffers trivializing comedy. This insults those gay filmmakers outside Hollywood, from Bruce La Bruce to Patrik-Ian Polk to James Sweeney, who struggled to honestly express their wit and acknowledge our common sexuality.

Bros pretends to satirize Bobby’s fear of commitment, but the contempt Eichner showed to his on-the-street video victims has not been transformed into charm. Eichner bluffs his way through rom-com skits, unlike real actors Richard Burton and Rex Harrison putting themselves on the line in Staircase, the remarkably empathetic 1969 comedy revealing the depths of an aged gay couple’s unsettled needs and desires.

The hateful museum-board-meeting scene mocking homosexual privilege (Bisexuals vs. Lesbians) is a disgraceful update of those Gay 101 lessons that writer Paul Rudnick provided in Jeffrey and In & Out. And nothing in Bros compares to that moment in James Sweeney’s brilliant Straight Up when Rory (Katie Findlay) observed: “I have a theory that Millennials overshare because we’re the most godless generation, so that’s why we confess everything on social media. It’s sort of our way to cling to some kind of permanence.”

Apatow and Stoller can’t make a star of resentful, hang-dog Eichner. The real goal is to substantiate their industry’s agenda regarding sex, identity, and social position. (“Gay men are my jam,” boasts a moronic straight-girl character, one among the film’s celebrity-endorsement cameos by Debra Messing, Kristen Chenoweth, and Harvey Fierstein.) Stoller shows no interest in sensuality as broached in Straight Up or that Julián Hernández makes vivid in his romantic new short Dos entre muchos (Two Among Many). The fake rom-com of Bros makes light of gay male sensibility. It’s crude and dislikable.