The Dude Testament

12. What makes a man? A pair of testicles.

Despite having been given the brush-off by the tycoon Lebowski, a few days later, the Dude is invited back to the mansion. It seems Bunny has been kidnapped, and the old man wants to hire the Dude to help rescue her. “Big” Lebowski even breaks down in tears as he describes his love for the bimbo and wrestles theatrically with the meaning of manhood. So then, his confidence was all a show and actually he’s an old softie? Accommodating to a fault (and seduced by the first easy money of his life), the Dude finds his good nature hijacked into helping out.

In this, perhaps the central exchange of the film, Lebowski posits to the Dude, “What makes a man…is it being prepared to do the right thing, no matter what the cost?” to which the Dude flippantly replies, “Sure, that and a pair of testicles.” In other words, he doesn’t recognize this arbitrary obsession with “manhood” that people still carry around with them in a day and age where physical prowess no longer confers an advantage against wild animals or marauding tribes. Perhaps it is this more than any of his other traits—an unencumbered, nontraditional attitude toward manhood—that so ironically marks him as the “man for his time and place.”

As may be appropriate in a film in which the main character’s moniker is “the Dude,” the meaning of manhood is approached from a variety of angles over the course of the story. The Dude, of course, came of age in a universally long-haired era when masculine ideals were questioned and feminism took root, though that skepticism didn’t last long. In fact, if nothing else, the gung-ho ’80s seemed to raise the macho modus operandi into a virtual man-ifesto. This scene asks us to re-examine the query by addressing a flaw in its construction: What makes a man? A pair of testicles. To maintain any relevance at all, the question should be “what makes a good man?” And of course, the answer is, the Dude. He is good, man. And thurrah.