“Please Baby, take me Back”: Homo-social Bonds in the Contemporary British Biopic

Abstract

Using textual analysis, this article offers a comparison between the homo-social bonds represented in "The Damned United" and those in "The King’s Speech". The article traces a pattern in which a powerful and dominant male suffers a professional crisis which is only overcome through the support of an intimate male friendship that is fixed as heterosexual though marginalised female figures. In both films, the central characters are rehabilitated into success only after a humbling and emotional acceptance of their need for support that positions them within the terms of ‘new man-ism’. However, because this is couched through homo-social couplings, rather than the heterosexual, the films mark the hybridisation of machismo and ‘new man-ism’ that were previously seen as alternative masculinities.