The (Un)bearable Weight of Gendered Genre: Richard Linklater’s Post- Boyhood Masculinities

While masculine identities have been explored recurrently in Linklater’s films, these have come center stage since the release of Boyhood (2014), followed immediately by Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) and Last Flag Flying (2017). While Boyhood has been widely treated as avant-garde and received rapturous praise, the subsequent two films fall squarely into mainstream genre modes and have been afforded a more mixed reception. These divergent reactions tend to collect around accusations of bland nostalgia – in contradistinction to the purported raw authenticity of Boyhood’s perspective – and the related issue of the apparent unapologetic masculinism of the later films. This chapter attempts to unpick the blind spots behind and provide a counterargument to such critiques.