English 101

Logjammin and Gutterballs: Masculinities in The Big Lebowski

To be honest, I’ll admit that I’m a bit embarrassed by the topic of this paper—masculinity in The Big Lebowski—simply because it is so obviously thematized, so omnipresently there in the film. It’s embedded in the film’s generic allusions--most notably film noir but also the western—those stories of heroic masculinity, which the film, of course, proceeds to rewrite and undo. It plays directly across the surface of the text: for example when the Big Lebowski, asking the Dude to help him find Bunny, wonders rhetorically “What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski? Is it being prepared to do the right thing whatever the cost?” (To which the Dude replies, “That and a pair of testicles.”) And if, following the Dude, we want to reduce the definition of masculinity to a more biological level, then we can ponder the campy celebration of the phallic in the Dude’s Gutterballs dream sequence, which may very well be the definitive statement of the link between bowling and sex.

This obvious attention to the topic of masculinity is underscored by the film’s thematization of threats to the masculine, by a certain castration anxiety that recurs obsessively throughout the movie, evident, for example, in Maude Lebowski’s discussion with the Dude, conducted in front of a painting of a giant pair of scissors, about the uneasiness some men feel when confronted by the word “vagina,” or in the Nihilists’ insistence that, if the Dude does not give them the money, then they will “come back and cut off [his] Johnson,” a threat that is rendered visually at the end of the Dude’s dream sequence. All of which is not to mention the continual representation of an adjacent masculine anxiety, an anxiety about masculinity, that appears in a slightly different register. As we learn from Walter as he’s destroying what he thinks is little Larry Sellers’s Corvette, you do not fuck a stranger up the ass, which doesn’t prevent the threat of precisely this action from being retailed by both the Nihilists and Jesus Quintana. In this context, I’ll just mention in passing the host of effeminate characters who haunt the margins of the film, from Marty, the manager of the Dude’s apartment complex, to Knox Harrington, Maude’s video artist friend. In other words, although it’s never presented directly, the film is shadowed by the spectre of homosexuality, which seems to function here as the image of the ultimate catastrophe: a masculinity that is so completely failed that it collapses into femininity.