Challenging Onscreen Masculinity: The Lehman/Luhr Test for Men

Toward the end of yesterday’s post “True Grit, Mattie’s Fate, and Testing Onscreen Women,” I created a test akin to The Bechdel Test, seven questions that consider and challenge some of the common ways female characters are represented onscreen. In brief, if the film under question (True Grit, in my case) can respond positively to the seven queries (e.g.,. Do the female characters function as more than mothers/wives or whores? Do they avoid being saved by a man?), then it is most likely breaking stereotypes and deviating significantly from Hollywood’s traditional patterns of representing women.

My quiz, which I dubbed The Lehman/Luhr Test for Women, derives from a chapter in Peter Lehman’s and William Luhr’s book, Thinking about Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying. The chapter also features a section on onscreen representations of men/masculinity. To this end, I’ve created The Lehman/Luhr Test for Men. The rules remain the same: if a film (or television show or other popular moving image) responds positively to the following seven questions, then it is most likely challenging conventional onscreen representations of men.

1. Does the film feature male characters?
2. Are the male characters predominately passive in the narrative? In sex scenes?
3. Do they function as something more than a masculine spectacle (e.g., Rambo, John Wayne’s characters) or its collapse (e.g., Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon)?
4. If the male characters are scarred or maimed above the waist, do they come across as weak or damaged? (Usually, male scars to the face, arms, chest, etc. function to empower men, i.e., they have been tested and are tougher for it.)
5. If the male character is wounded below the waist, specifically in the legs, is he virile, strong, powerful, and firmly in control? (Generally, wounds to the male legs suggest a loss of sexual power and weakness; this is because in our culture masculinity is defined in terms of activity, mobility, e.g., Rear Window, The Lady from Shanghai, Forrest Gump.)
6. Is the male body displayed in a sexual way? Fetishized? Objectified?
7. If so, is the male character’s nudity (or partial nudity) devoid of any form of punishment or torture? (Theoretically, the heterosexual male spectator, for whom most films are created, should not ogle other male bodies as they might derive pleasure from those images; therefore, to avoid any homosexual/unnatural tendencies and “set right” the character/viewer relationship, the onscreen male is often physically punished.)

So according to The Lehman/Luhr Test for Men, how do your favorite films and male characters stack up? Are they challenging societal and Hollywood stereotypes?

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