"His wife goes out and owes money all over town,
and they pee on my rug?"
20 years since its release, The Big Lebowski
has shaped pop culture in a way
no one could have predicted.
“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like, uh,
your opinion, man.”
It’s inspired theme parties, fan clubs, cosplay,
a signature drink, an annual festival,
a religion based on the Dude’s philosophy,
and the Day of the Dude
celebrated every March 6th,
the day the film came out.
By now The Big Lebowski is more than a movie --
it’s a lifestyle.
"Far out."
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So why exactly did the Dudeist lifestyle become
so instantly and enduringly iconic?
“I'm the Dude.
So that's what you call me.
That, or his Dudeness.
Or Duder.
Or, you know, El Duderino,
if you're not into the whole brevity thing.”
What’s so appealing about The Big Lebowski
is what Roger Ebert describes as the film’s “attitude.”
And of course, the film’s attitude is a reflection
of the dude’s attitude.
"Take it easy, Dude."
"Oh yeah."
"I know that you will."
The Dude is embodied in the opening image:
that tumbleweed, rolling along,
carried by the wind across L.A.
This is someone who goes with the flow.
But like the tumbleweed the Dude is pulled
by a tumultuous world into over-the-top adventures.
So the suggestion is that if we stop pushing
and forcing movement in our lives --
and instead let ourselves be moved by
the flow of things --
we might actually experience more.
Of course, the Dude doesn’t want
big, crazy experiences.
All he wants is peace and stability.
And throughout the film as he gets more and more
mixed up with these crazy plots,
the Dude is fighting to maintain
his relaxed composure.
“Earlier today, I was really feeling shitty, man.
Really down in the dumps.
You can't be worried about that shit.
Life goes on, man."
His true goal is less to solve the kidnapping mystery
than to keep his cool and not let
all of this get to him.
Thus the spiritual question of the movie is --
How does the Dude keep being the Dude,
when so much drama around him is threatening
to destroy his inner tranquility?
One of the movie’s most famous lines --
“The Dude abides.”
is an homage to The Night of the Hunter.
“Lord save little children.
The wind blows and the rains are cold.
Yet they abide.”
With that mysterious phrase “The Dude abides”
the Coens are imbuing him with this
sacred spirit of the child,
who perseveres in spite of whatever comes.
And then the Dude is compared to Christ.
“It’s good knowing he’s out there.
The Dude.
Takin' her easy for all us sinners.”
So the righteous thing the Dude is doing
is “takin’ it easy,”
and our sin that he’s redeeming
is the way we constantly do everything
but take it easy.
“Just take it easy, man.”
“You know, that’s your answer for everything, Dude.”
Taking it easy in a world that’s
constantly trying to ruffle you
is a significant, and, paradoxically,
difficult thing to do.
The Dude represents a passive life,
disengaged from the chaos.
He's not married with a family
and doesn't seem to seek a partner.
"Do you see a wedding ring on my finger?
Does this place look like I’m [bleep] married?"
He doesn’t work or seek a job.
"My papers, business papers."
“And what do you do sir?”
“I’m unemployed.”
He’s not fixated on proving any macho, aggressive
standard of masculinity.
"They're calling the cops, man,
put the piece away."
"Mark it zero!"
His world thinks these things make him a loser.
“He looks like a fucking loser.”
“Hey, at least I’m housebroken.”
But the Dude’s detachment from the crazy,
wound-up world and its whirlwind of toxic emotions
feels spiritual,
reminiscent of Buddhist or Taoist philosophy.
The dude doesn’t seek excitement or greatness --
just balance and equanimity.
“How things been going?”
“You know, strikes and gutters,
ups and downs.”
At the beginning of the film we’re told
“Sometimes there's a man who, well,
he's the man for his time and place.
He fits right in there --
and that's the Dude.”
He embodies that “slacker” type
that came into being in the 90s.
Of course, the Dude is also an aging hippie
from the 60s --
“I spent most of my time occupying
various administration buildings,
smoking a lot of thai-stick,
breaking into the ROTC, bowling...”
and perhaps the “slacker” is
the 90s’ answer to the question,
what happened to those idealistic dreamers
of the 60s --
if they didn’t go on to just “get a job”
and get with the program over time?
“My advice to you is to do
what your parents did --
get a job, sir!”
But as we watch the film,
the initial statement
"his the man for his time and place"
starts to sound curious,
because the Dude doesn’t really seem to fit in
with his time and place at all --
and ultimately he’s more the inverse
of the “man of the times”
we might imagine from the 90s.
He’s a pacifist at the time of the Gulf War.
"These guys, you know, they're like me,
they're pacifists."
He’s completely unambitious, anti-achievement,
at the start of a decade that was about to see
a huge commercial boom.
The narration says he’s “the man for his time”
because maybe his time needed more people, like him,
to think differently from the norm of the era.
There’s also something timeless and mythical
about the Dude’s story --
as if this spiritual tumbleweed is
an essential antidote to mankind’s
crazed forward motion in any era.
And at the end we hear
“I happen to know that there’s
a little Lebowski on the way...”
so we can take comfort that there will be
more Dudes in the future,
needed in times to come.
Moments from this film are so iconic
because they’re specific, original,
neatly presented,
and made of surprising, incongruous
combinations --
thus they stick in our minds.
Like when we first meet the Dude
and he’s paying for a 69 cent carton of milk
with a check.
Or the Dude’s White Russian milk mustaches.
And the choice of drink itself --
the constant drinking here is a play
on the whisky-drinking noir hero,
"I got a bottle of pretty good rye in my pocket.
I'd a lot rather get wet in here."
but the specific choice of the White Russian
is a decidedly un-masculine yet delicious drink
that really embodies the Dude himself.
There's the repetition of Bob Dylan’s
“The Man in Me,” the Dude’s song --
and how it’s paired with flying dreams
and a POV shot of a bowling ball --
so this unexpected combination embodies
the Dude’s holy place of sorts.
The way he tries to transcend.
There’s Bunny’s car, driven straight into the fountain,
with its license plate that says “Lapin” --
french for rabbit.
And of course, her green nail polish --
we’re introduced to Bunny painting her toenails.
Then we see that green nail polish
on the bloody amputated toe --
and what was an idiosyncratic detail
becomes brilliantly efficient storytelling --
we immediately summon that first image of Bunny
and understand the meaning of this toe instantly.
Then we get the incredibly memorable shot
revealing Bunny’s ten intact toes --
a huge turning point in the story
communicated through this simple efficiency.
And later, we get our explanation
when we see the nihilist’s bandaged foot,
missing a toe.
The specific, efficient storytelling
through these four instances of toes
adds such character that even decades
after seeing the movie,
we still remember that green nail polish.
And that bloody toe with its perfect green polish
embodies how the film understands
that incongruous combinations are memorable.
The characters, likewise, are contradictory mixes
of qualities we don’t generally associate
with each other.
An angry Vietnam veteran who’s very vocal
about his conversion to Judaism.
“I don’t roll on Shabbos!”
A moody femme fatale who’s also
a feminist artist partially based on
Yoko Ono and artist Carolee Schneemann.
“My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal,
which bothers some men.
The word itself makes some men uncomfortable.
Vagina.”
Even the Dude is incongruous --
he seems like the most relaxed guy ever --
“Quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County.”
but he gets bent out of shape
when his life is disrupted
in a relatively insignificant way.
“Yeah, man, it really tied the room together.”
And he just won’t let it go.
“really...tied the room together”
The Dude’s caring too much about small things
gets him into this whole mess.
“I could be sitting here with just pee stains
on my rug.”
"Yeah."
"But no, man, I gotta -- you know."
"[Bleep]-ing Germans."
But his “takin' it easy” lifestyle
isn’t the same as not caring about anything.
“He doesn’t care about anything,
he’s a nihilist.”
“Oh, that must be exhausting.”
His hard-won peace comes from focusing on things
he can control.
He depends on his routine --
wearing sunglasses inside, bowling,
drinking White Russians, taking a bath,
smoking a joint and listening to Bob.
His sacred place is the bowling alley,
where everything is the same from game to game.
“This is not Nam, this is bowling.
There are rules.”
The loving, slow-motion shots of the bowling
emphasize the reverence these characters have
for their game.
It’s their temple;
this is their meditation.
"[Bleep] the tournament.
[Bleep] you, Walter."
"[Bleep] the tournament?
[Gasp]
Okay, Dude, I can see you don't
want to be cheered up here."
So repetitions within the film add to
the memorability, humor and storytelling efficiency --
but they also thematically illustrate
how the characters derive happiness
from repetition in their lives.
And the film reveals to us that
one way of building a happy lifestyle
is committing to our own repetitions --
filling our days with what gives us joy,
finding our own favorite activity and drink,
and enjoying them as ritual.
And of course, if we don’t want the trouble
of finding our own routine,
the Dude’s is a pretty easy one to emulate --
so that’s another reason it’s become a lifestyle.
In 1998, The Big Lebowski helped create
a whole new subgenre --
one which Slate has dubbed the slacker noir.
The sub-genre is the marriage of film noir
and the stoner comedy.
You could also call it stoner noir.
It’s got many traditional film noir elements --
a dark, cynical outlook,
the femme fatale,
"Blow on them."
"You just put your lips together
and blow."
smoking, here it's joints instead of cigarettes,
and a deadpan protagonist who gets
horrendously beaten up and abused
over the course of the story.
The Big Lebowski is partly based on
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
The film stays true to the episodic nature
of Chandler-esque magazine pulp fiction.
It feels like it’s made up of isolated sequences
that don't have that much to do with each other,
and it values the individual scene over the plot.
Joel Coen has said that, like Chandler’s work,
The Big Lebowski has
“a hopelessly complex plot
that’s ultimately unimportant.”
We also associate noir with its
stylized, distinctive patterns of speech.
“You know, you're the second guy I've met today
that seems to think a Gat in the hand
means the world by the tail”.
Lebowski likewise creates its own style of dialogue,
so memorable that it’s one of the most quotable films
of the last two decades.
For instance:
“Hey, nice marmot.”
“Nobody [bleep] with the Jesus.”
“Obviously you’re not a golfer.”
“Shut the [bleep] up Donnie.”
"The parlance of our time."
"In the parlance of our time."
“Mr. Treehorn treats objects like women, man.”
“I will not abide another toe.”
But as Slate pointed out,
there’s a notable difference between
the film noir and the slacker hoir:
here the protagonist is not a PI
trying to solve the mystery.
He’s a hapless slacker who’s attempting to
separate himself from the mystery.
The Dude’s only objective is to get reparations
for his rug,
but this simple goal sucks him deeper and deeper
into a mess that he can only exit
by solving the mystery.
“This is a complicated case, Maude.
Lotta ins.
Lotta outs.
Lotta what-have-yous.”
And the comedy comes from
watching the Dude bumble through this case
and try to figure it out through
unconventional means.
"Is this your homework, Larry?"
So Lebowski’s new genre embodied what
the Dudeist lifestyle represents to people:
a certain cool vibe, an acceptance of the futility
of much of life,
combined with an embrace of the laid-back stoner attitude
and a serene approach to life.
The Dude might be a god on earth,
or he might be a loser --
this is really in the eye of the beholder.
His world certainly views the Dude as a bum.
Both the Jeffrey Lebowski and daughter use the Dude
because they see him as worthless, not a threat,
as nothing.
"You think, oh, here's a loser, you know,
a deadbeat, somebody the square community
won't give a shit about."
"Well, aren't ya?"
The “Big Lebowski” of the title isn’t the dude,
it’s the other Lebowski.
The Dude constantly reminds people he’s not Lebowski.
“Nobody calls me Lebowski, you got the wrong guy.
I’m the Dude, man.”
"I am not Mr. Lebowski.
You're Mr. Lebowski.
I'm the Dude."
"Mr. Lebowski."
"Dude."
He doesn't want to be a “Big Lebowski” --
a big, rich man, making a big name for himself.
The Dude rejects the Big Lebowski’s image of success.
He rejects that key word “achieving.”
"There are the little Lebowski urban achievers."
The central divide in the film is really
between these two men
with the same given name.
"The bums will always lose!
You hear me, Lebowski?"
And while the Big Lebowski seems to
have everything at the start,
he turns out to be a fraud.
“A million bucks from [bleep]-ing needy
little urban achievers.
You are scum, man”.
And we end up feeling it’s the Dude
who’s really rich in his life.
The embrace of the Dude’s abiding lifestyle
over the years
has shown that people wanted to challenge
our society’s assumptions
that achievement, machismo and a big name
are the measures of a man.
There might be some value to cutting back
leading a simpler, humbler,
more spiritual existence.
And maybe the world would be a better place
if we were all a little more relaxed like the Dude,
instead of trying so hard to be Big Lebowskis.
"What do you do for recreation?"
"You know, the usual.
Bowl, drive around,
The occasional acid flashback."
It's Debra.
And Susannah.
You're watching ScreenPrism.
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