most men, if they are honest, have experienced both kinds of environments and many in the middle where it is ambiguous https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1301329258682482691

movies like Clockwork Orange are a great example of the "ambiguity" part. You see what seems to be a typical if utterly sociopathic depiction of male bonding being built on hazing-esque behavior, but note that the moment that the underlings switch roles with gang leader

they take revenge and then victimize him, suggesting that maybe the droogs were not entirely happy with the parameters of the relationship and submitted to it only because of their cowardice and inability to stand up to him.

but prior to that, it is hard to tell. given that they are a street gang and we expect "healthy" gangs to behave in a certain way towards each other and such

Gomer Pyle is another sort of subversion of expectation, where military discipline pushes an already psychologically unstable recruit over the edge https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1301329968761319431

The most demonic depiction of male-male relationships is Straw Dogs, where the moment that the protagonist and his wife arrive in a rural village, the other men begin to covet his wife and start to aggressively test him

It's interesting that the same director (Peckinpah)'s masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, ends in a slaughter due to the characters' unwillingness to abandon a member of the group to the tender mercies of a Mexican warlord

Normally, this would be depicted as straightforwardly heroic ("leave no man behind") but here it becomes nihilistic because the imprisoned man had, earlier, murdered his girlfriend in cold blood for running off with the savage warlord. And in any event the cowboys have

no chance of victory. The encounter is just about killing as much people as possible. I mention a lot of mid Cold War films because I think they were part of a lacuna in which you could see male-male relationships depicted with some complexity

that has since mostly vanished from cinemas (with notable exceptions like Cronenberg's A History of Violence), in part because of the inherently volatile subject and the way in which it does not lend itself to cheap moralizing

this is part of what I mean by "complexity." all of these comments relate to things I've personally experienced or indirectly observed in others' experiences.

the "one joke about the hairline and suddenly enemies for life" part is real. It is very possible for a man to make an seemingly idle comment about another man and not know he has triggered some kind of blood vendetta