I met a Film Bro – here’s what I learned

Last sum­mer a man I’d once met to talk about a script he had writ­ten invit­ed me to go for cof­fee. I decid­ed to throw cau­tion to the wind; the slim chance I might get a script edi­tor cred­it on a fea­ture film just about out­weighed the stranger-dan­ger aspect of the sit­u­a­tion, and that I was vol­un­tar­i­ly going to lis­ten to a man talk about him­self for an unspec­i­fied amount of time.

His meet­ing place of choice was not a con­ven­tion­al cof­fee shop, but a co-work­ing space (where we were the only cus­tomers) that resem­bled someone’s front room: a mish­mash of chairs and tables that meant while he sat in a regal arm­chair I was hunch over on a fold­ing gar­den chair. He offered me a cere­al bar retrieved from the depths of his satchel. I declined.

My descrip­tion of this sce­nario would be unfair if it weren’t for the con­ver­sa­tion that ensued for the next two hours. As for the (albeit very vague) pur­pose of the meet­ing, we dis­cussed some of my pro­posed changes: some­thing I didn’t feel nec­es­sary was the gra­tu­itous descrip­tions of the imag­ined women in the script. My con­cerns over repeat­ed use of terms like ​“tits” and ​“arse” were quashed when he assert­ed that it was fine ​“because it’s set in the ​’90s”.

The top­ic of my own work and inter­ests even­tu­al­ly rolled around. When I men­tioned the films of Joan­na Hogg, they were dis­missed as ​“pre­ten­tious”. I put on my coat and stared long­ing­ly at the door after we talked about I, Tonya. I had enjoyed the film and even read the script, but all its mer­its were erad­i­cat­ed by his asser­tion that it was ​“deriv­a­tive”. For our extend­ed stint in the glo­ri­fied fur­ni­ture yard, I paid £7.

Aside from this story’s val­ue to a sec­ondary school inter­net safe­ty class, you might be won­der­ing why any of this is rel­e­vant. Well, this man is a Film Bro, and as much as the expe­ri­ence made for a good anec­dote to tell my friends, his behav­iour reflects the misog­y­ny that per­vades the world of male film appre­ci­a­tors. I want to take you through how the Film Bro was con­ceived, what exact­ly one is, and how the stereo­type is changing.

To under­stand the his­to­ry of the Film Bro, you have to under­stand the ety­mo­log­i­cal ori­gin of the word ​‘bro’. In the mid 20^th cen­tu­ry bro was pop­u­larised among the Black com­mu­ni­ty as a slang abbre­vi­a­tion for broth­er. By the 1970s the word was no longer asso­ci­at­ed with just famil­ial con­no­ta­tions, being used to refer to any male friend.

There’s a glar­ing con­trast between this def­i­n­i­tion and the mod­ern-day, over­whelm­ing­ly white, mean­ing of bro. As with so many oth­er aspects of Black cul­ture, bro was sub­ject to appro­pri­a­tion. Sur­pris­ing­ly, the 1992 film Enci­no Man was a sig­nif­i­cant junc­tion in this process. Kather­ine Con­nor Mar­tin of the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary points out how the script describes the white char­ac­ters as hav­ing ​“been bros since gram­mar school”.

By the late ​’90s, bro had shift­ed from being a sig­ni­fi­er of friend­ship between men to rep­re­sent­ing a kind of frat­ty mas­culin­i­ty among guys who like to par­ty. At this point, I like to imag­ine that Chad stopped mid-beer chug, got his dudes togeth­er and told them that bro effec­tive­ly lends itself to com­pound­ing. Terms like bro­mance and bro­hemi­an entered the cul­tur­al lex­i­con and, some­where in the nev­er-end­ing process of cre­at­ing bro­isms, the Film Bro was born.

But an ety­mo­log­i­cal analy­sis of the term doesn’t real­ly tell you what a Film Bro is. Urban Dic­tio­nary defines a Film Bro as some­one who ​“views them­selves as a huge film nerd” despite hav­ing a ​“most­ly sur­face-lev­el knowl­edge of movies”. This is the def­i­n­i­tion that informs most people’s under­stand­ing of the term and I have cer­tain­ly met peo­ple who fit this descrip­tion. How­ev­er, I’ve come to realise that ​‘Film Bro’ is not a fixed idea; it’s a sprawl­ing web that con­tains at least three major subtypes.

The first is the ​“sur­face-lev­el” Film Bro. This is the quin­tes­sen­tial Film Bro, epit­o­mis­ing the term as it first emerged in main­stream media back in 2017. It’s the film slo­gan t‑shirt wear­ing guy I met on the first day of my film degree who thinks the Father, the Son and the Holy Spir­it are Christo­pher Nolan, David Finch­er and Quentin Taran­ti­no; he’s respon­si­ble for the hoards of film-cen­tric Insta­gram accounts that regur­gi­tate the same films from IMDb’s Top 250. I think of this sub­type as the gate­way drug of Film Bro cul­ture, from which some­one might grad­u­ate to one of two lev­els of full-blown Film Bro-dom.

The sec­ond is the ​“turtle­neck-and-Tarkovsky” type. He’s the pre­ten­tious one, smok­ing a cig­a­rette at a house par­ty while cor­ner­ing a girl with unso­licit­ed view­ing rec­om­men­da­tions. This Film Bro has gained noto­ri­ety by mak­ing appear­ances on the dat­ing scene, immor­talised by the Insta­gram account @beam_me_up_softboi.

The third sub­type, occu­py­ing the dark­est cor­ners of bro cul­ture, is the ​“cause-for-con­cern” Film Bro. He idolis­es the prob­lem­at­ic male pro­tag­o­nists of Amer­i­can Psy­cho, Fight Club and A Clock­work Orange. He’s prob­a­bly part­ly respon­si­ble for the onslaught of think pieces about the per­ceived dan­gers of Jok­er and con­tem­po­rary anx­i­eties con­cern­ing on-screen vio­lence in general.

For the most part, all three Film Bro sub­types sub­scribe to the same estab­lished film canon: the films are crit­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful, they fuel crit­i­cal dis­cus­sion and they often have a pen­chant for nar­ra­tives that either objec­ti­fy or sub­ju­gate women. What tru­ly uni­fies the three types of Film Bro is how these val­ues are expressed: through the gate­keep­ing of what is essen­tial­ly main­stream cin­e­ma. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard remarks like ​“you prob­a­bly haven’t heard of it” or ​“you wouldn’t get it”. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly harm­ful because gate­keep­ing and insid­i­ous misog­y­ny help to uphold a patri­ar­chal film industry.

In 2020 Jack Loney wrote an arti­cle for Lithi­um Mag­a­zine enti­tled ​‘How Crit­ics Cre­at­ed the Film Bro’. He argues that Hol­ly­wood, specif­i­cal­ly male direc­tors, are stuck in a cycle of mak­ing films that cater ​“almost exclu­sive­ly to men like [them]”. Because crit­i­cal cir­cles are also ​“over­flow­ing with men’”, the film will receive both com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal suc­cess and be placed with­in the ​“Good-Movie canon”. The male view­ers’ opin­ions, which are often misog­y­nis­tic, are then ​“val­i­dat­ed through the nar­ra­tive of [their] favourite film” and its pos­i­tive crit­i­cal recep­tion. Loney cites the 2020 Acad­e­my Awards as a per­fect exam­ple of this ​“cir­cuit”; Jok­er, with its con­tro­ver­sial depic­tion of male vio­lence, received 11 nominations.

There are, of course, oth­er forces qui­et­ly work­ing away to reassert these patri­ar­chal val­ues. For exam­ple, there’s the ​“Frat Pack”, the nick­name giv­en to a group of male com­e­dy actors (Ben Stiller, Owen Wil­son, Will Fer­rell, Steve Car­rell, among oth­ers). As the name sug­gests, they’re a film­mak­ing fra­ter­ni­ty who held a monop­oly over main­stream com­e­dy for the best part of a decade. The only female-led com­e­dy film to rival their suc­cess, at least com­mer­cial­ly speak­ing, was 2011’s Brides­maids. These male col­lec­tives are impen­e­tra­ble and, con­scious­ly or oth­er­wise, they pre­vent a greater diver­si­ty of cre­ators from enter­ing the mainstream.

In a since-delet­ed arti­cle titled ​‘The Cult of Paul Schrad­er’, a writer for Facets mag­a­zine point­ed out that until fair­ly recent­ly male-cen­tric nar­ra­tives were also laud­ed as ​“bet­ter” films than those with female leads and sto­ries. Not only is there a dire rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women behind the scenes, but audi­ences have long been con­di­tioned to regard female-cen­tric films as less­er forms of art. Despite their faults, it’s sad that films with female leads like Twi­light and The Fault in Our Stars, both of which were mar­ket­ed to teenage girls, have become the sub­ject of intense mock­ery with­in film culture.

So while I can poke fun at Film Bros, for me to lay into them would be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. The Film Bro didn’t invent him­self, the indus­try did. If we want them to go away, we need to look for answers high­er up.

And this might just hap­pen; the industry’s sta­tus quo is shift­ing. In addi­tion to #MeToo, this generation’s Frat Pack, Team Apa­tow (Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Jon­ah Hill, et al), has been shak­en by alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al mis­con­duct against James Fran­co. Rather than enabling this behav­iour and allow­ing pat­terns of tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty to be repeat­ed, Rogen has said he has no inten­tion of work­ing with Fran­co again. Even the sor­did alle­ga­tions against Armie Ham­mer, the ulti­mate Prep­py Bro, have revealed that bro cul­ture is more than a meme-ready joke; it breeds a very real threat to women.

We are also see­ing a trend towards increased diver­si­ty both on- and off-screen. Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site, a film deeply inter­con­nect­ed with Kore­an cul­ture, wasn’t made for Film Bros; its suc­cess is so impor­tant because both nei­ther its inher­ent val­ues nor its wide­spread crit­i­cal acclaim were dic­tat­ed by white, cis­gen­der men.

Like­wise, female-led films are no longer rel­e­gat­ed to the realm of rom-coms and fam­i­ly dra­mas; Chloé Zhao’s Nomad­land, an inti­mate por­tray­al of female sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, won the 2021 Acad­e­my Award for Best Pic­ture. Even the most change-averse awards bod­ies are pledg­ing to diver­si­fy, dis­rupt­ing the typ­i­cal pat­terns of only male-ori­ent­ed films receiv­ing award recog­ni­tion. As a result, Film Bros no longer have a monop­oly of knowl­edge over the themes explored in main­stream cinema.

My advice? While we wait for the patri­archy to crum­ble, next time a Film Bro tries to talk about Fight Club, just walk away.