BroMance and Pineapple Express

First, the Helm TPB is currently at the printer! Whoo Hoo!

Second, I saw Pineapple Express last night on DVD and it makes me think that the Helm is a BroMance.

Instead of watching the DVD, I really probably should have been doing something more obviously constructive with my time, like paying my bills or sleeping, but instead I chose to enjoy myself. Ah, enjoying myself, the bane of my existence.

So, anyway, pretty funny movie. It was not really what I was expecting. I had heard it was funny and that it had Seth Rogen in it and that it was in some way about drugs, but that was all I knew. All of those things were true, but they didn't really prepare me for the experience, probably because the movie was so odd.

Without giving anything away, I will say that I really enjoyed the collision between realism and absurdity and the way the film seemed completely okay with the conflict between them and didn't seem to have any need to reconcile it.

Beyond that, the movie got me thinking about BroMance as a sub genre of stories.

The key factors that seem to me to identify the BroMance story are that it's about a relationship between two guys (a relationship which can't exactly be described as a "buddy" relationship but is extremely close) and the bulk of the female characters primarily serve as speed bumps and obstacles to the central male relationship.

Now, to be clear, I'm not talking about a romantic or sexual relationship between guys. There's a different name for that kind of Broke-Back-Mountain sort of film and it's not BroMance. But I am talking about a level of relationship that is deeper and odder than your standard Lethal-Weapon kind of buddy film. BroMances tend to be comedies, probably because it is difficult in our society to deal with intense and interesting relationships between guys. The relationships in BroMances tend to be filled with as much tension as camaraderie and are even sometimes more negative or fractious than they are positive. There is frequently a lot of fighting and physical abuse of the main characters--as if they are manifesting their emotional lumps externally.

Anyhow, I'd say that Pineapple Express qualifies as a BroMance, and it got me thinking that the Helm is a weird sort of BroMance between Mathew and the Helm. They bicker and fight, Mathew gets the daylights beat out of him, there are comic overtones. I hadn't really intended that when I started writing, but I'm happy with it now that I'm done. And, at the end of the day, that's what's really important here--that I'm happy with it, because everything is always about me, how I feel about things and the strange sort of BroMance I have with myself.