Logjammin and Gutterballs

I started to read this essay last week and my initial response was damn, I wish I had found this before I wrote my paper. My paper, on masculinity in The Big Lebowski, would have greatly benefited from all of the insight that Dennis Allen provided in Logjammin' and Gutterballs. Though the essay was quite confusing and did not make sense to me at times, I thought that it was very interesting how he used so many different angles to look at masculinity in the movie. (If only I had thought of that a week ago...) Allen shows that masculinity is a major theme throughout the movie, and found motifs in places I would not have even thought to look for them. He dissected the movie and essentially found some sort of manly inference in every scene. There are characters, events and symbols that allude to the idea of masculinity being a failure. I touched on this in my essay however Allen goes much deeper into it with the phallic symbols, motif of castration and the question of why this movie attracts so many male viewers. I agree with him as far as the film being a "buddy movie", one that a bunch of guys get together to watch, but I still think it is a little funny that there are so many blows to the manliness of the characters. Overall it was an interesting essay that, had I read it before my essay, I could've gained some serious understanding of the roles of masculinity in the movie. Let's just hope my paper was already graded before last Thursday's class....