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Abstract: In the double-protagonist film, a genre that has emerged in the past two decades, two male protagonists, each played by a film star, vie for narrative dominance. American manhood is depicted as fundamentally split, a split that can be understood as conflict between a narcissistic and a masochistic mode of masculine identity.
In Hollywood films from Bush to Bush - the late 1980s to the present - an unnamed genre exists. To give this new genre a name, I will call it the double- protagonist film. In the double-protagonist film, the central conflict is a com- plex negotiation for power between two protagonists, each played by a star, both of whom lay legitimate claim to narrative dominance (Figure 1). While it's possible to have two female characters in the double-protagonist roles, they are most often filled by males, and, given the focus of this essay on Hollywood mascu- linity, my term "double-protagonists" will refer to male characters. Bush-to-Bush Hollywood films suggest diat manhood's center cannot hold, that manhood is split, diat the warring elements of manhood spill out beyond the individual subjectivity of the star-protagonist, and that the burden of male representation must be carried by two stars rather than one. This masculine split can be understood as a division or conflict between a narcissistic and a masochistic mode of masculine identity. The most obvious precursor to the double-protagonist film genre is the buddy film genre. Though related to the buddy film, the double-protagonist film differs from it in several key respects. The other antecedents of the double-protagonist film are the western, the noir, the Hitchcockian psychosexual thriller, and its imitators of the 1970s and the 1980s. The overlaps between the new double-protagonist film and these otiier, influencing genres as well as their differences will be considered in this essay, which will conclude with a close reading of Paul Schrader's Auto Focus (2002), an exemplary double-protagonist film.
The double-protagonist film bears an interesting relationship to Hollywood history. A dyadic pairing of male stars does not occur in most Classic Hollywood films that are star driven. Some film genres, however, specifically depended upon the double-star film, such as the "road" movies of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and, most notably, westerns, which often placed...