Cory Massimino

Review: The Big Lebowski (1998)

October 4, 2020 by Cory

★★★★★

What is the “The Big Lebowski” about? The obvious answers are bowling, smoking weed, and cursing (“fuck” is said 292 times!). But those are really just things that *happen*. What’s it *about*? What is the plot of this movie? I’ve seen it at least a dozen times and I couldn’t tell you. It doesn’t really have one. And not in a totally surrealist way like “Mirror” or “Daisies,” but in the sense of operating according to what Roger Ebert called “hallucinatory logic.” Where those movies jettison narrative altogether in favor of a succession of vignettes and abstract sequences of images, “The Big Lebowski” surely *professes* to be about plot.

After all, it’s a mystery driven by the sudden disappearance of a young woman named Bunny; an eclectic pastiche of Raymond Chandler Depression-Era crime novels, 40s film noir, Golden Age Westerns, zany stoner comedies, 90s L.A. city life, the occasional dream sequence that does engage in surrealism, and that unique enigmatic eccentricity the Coens imbibe all their dark comedies with. But “The Big Lebowski” has something no other Coens movie has: an unspoken aura of ephemerality; a romantic nostalgia for the not-so-distant past; a sober (heh) appreciation for any peaceful respite from the absurdity and chaos of life.

And that’s ultimately what “The Big Lebowski” is about. Life. Like life, “The Big Lebowski” *suggests* plot and *promises* plot where this in fact none. Bunny was never kidnapped. There was never any money. No one was ever going to cut off the Dude’s johnson. There is only a series of loosely related experiences that we muddle our way through and only in foresight and hindsight conceive of as *stories*. This overarching theme about life’s very lack of themes is realized in the very first image: a long take of a tumbleweed drifting through the desert and city — also a visual nod to this movie’s post-western vibe (not to mention the narrator’s “cowboy” aesthetic and almost fatherly attitude toward the protagonist).

This whole existentialist attitude culminates in the truly random, senseless, and meaningless death of Donny in the midst of the chaotic fight with the nihilists. The Coens go out of their way to construct a sequence where our protagonists are actually at risk and then one of them dies for reasons utterly and totally unrelated to the scene or even the plot of the film. This is the ultimate test for our characters. The Coens reach the heights of dark comedy in the subsequent scenes in which Walter can’t help but bargain for his best friend’s urn and then pervert his memorial into another war-inspired rant.

But our characters achieve a small victory in the face of the ultimate absurdity when they simply hug. At their very lowest, Walter and the Dude share a rare moment of intimacy, vulnerability, and peace. This is the real climax of the film, not the culmination of the plot (which Donny’s death had nothing to do with), but the culmination of our character’s emotional journeys; the ultimate mutual concession on the part of individuals with incompatible world views.

The thrust of “The Big Lebowski” is driven less by any coherent mystery and more by this oddball relationship between a Walter and the Dude. The narrative itself depends on their relationship, and their difference in world views, in an important way. While Jackie Treehorn’s goons pissing on the Dude’s rug is the inciting incident, the Dude was willing to just let it slide before he tells Walter who then convinces him to pursue restitution from the Big Lebowski. That is really the decision that initiates the whole sequence of events.

Walter is a Vietnam vet who can only find meaning and purpose by situating all — and I mean all — his experiences in the context of the war. He doesn’t understand any way to respond to the chaotic absurdity of the world except with violence. He mocks pacifism. He pulls a gun on a bowling competitor. He destroys an expensive car on a mere hunch. He attacks the Big Lebowski when he thinks he’s faking his disability. He forewarns that his enemies are “entering a world of pain.”

Walter justifies all his violent, emotional outbursts by reference to either his time in Vietnam or the absoluteness of certain “rules” — whether they be the rules of bowling, laws protecting property rights, or Jewish traditions (arguably the most rules-based religion). This is why Walter considers nihilism worse than Nazism, because while the latter still has rules the former rejects them entirely.

There is a deep irony in the fact that so much of “The Big Lebowski” depicts the Dude (the exemplar of being cool headed) freaking out over the latest random development in the mystery while Walter (the exemplar of being hard edged) consistently implores the Dude to calm down, step back, not assume the worst, and exhibit some skepticism at the whole convoluted story — which we know in hindsight was completely justified! Walter “am I wrong?” Sobchack was right that Bunny was never kidnapped, that the toe wasn’t hers, and that the nihilists wouldn’t cut off the Dude’s johnson.

However, Walter later ends up being wrong about the expensive car belonging to Larry and then ends up being wildly wrong about the Big Lebowski faking his disability. I think these mistakes eat at Walter’s hard outer shell a bit, which helps him later admit he ruined Donny’s memorial and actually open up to the Dude in the face of loss and grief. Yet Walter doesn’t totally jettison his stubbornness of course. No one changes just like that. He has an outburst when Donny’s urn is too expensive and yells “just because we’re bereaved doesn’t make us saps!” If Walter’s philosophy is good for anything, I suspect that line just about sums it up — sometimes the unfairness of life demands a kind of headstrong persistence.

On the surface, it might seem like Walter’s laidback foil in the Dude is a nihilist. This is why the Coens constantly contrast the Dude not only with Walter but with the nihilists, whom we are constantly reminded “care about nothing.” The Dude does not “care about nothing.” He cares about a lot of things. He cares about bowling. And pot. And white russians. And his friends. And his landlord’s performance art. And Bunny’s life. And his johnson. And the superiority of Credence over The Eagles. And, of course, his rug.

All these differing philosophies are hilariously illustrated in the fight with the nihilists in which Walter refuses to give them a penny of his own money and then bites one of their ears off, while the Dude desperately tries to pay them off with his $4 and avoids any physical contact otherwise. But the nihilists don’t care about the “rules” that Walter so highly values. They don’t even care about the rules of conventional story structure — they try to hold Bunny for ransom even after the Dude (and the audience) has seen she’s alive and well. They don’t even really care about what they profess to believe, appealing to abstract “fairness” when trying to get the ransom.

It is in this sense that nihilism is counter-intuitively “exhausting,” as the Dude sarcastically puts it. It’s actually exhausting to not care *about anything at all*. Like so many characters in “The Big Lebowski” and in the Coens’ filmography in general, the nihilists succumb to “caring about something” in the form of pursuing money. Their motivations ultimately turn, not on “meaninglessness” (whatever that would mean), but on simple greed. Perhaps no one is really a nihilist in practice.

The Dude is certainly not a nihilist. The Dude is indomitable. The Dude is obstinate. The Dude is stoic. The Dude abides. And that, too, is exhausting. That’s why the Dude loses his cool every other scene; every time he’s dragged back into the incomprehensible conflicts and feuds between different LA parties and interests. It’s really hard to abide. To find a golden mean between Walter’s aggressive belligerence and the nihilists’ callous apathy. But the Dude has the superpower of finding that balance, a superpower which he exercises on behalf of all us “sinners” according to the Stranger. That’s why he always gets his cool back.

This is not the detachment of nihilism, but the equanimity of wisdom. The Dude is ironically the most sober of all the characters in “The Big Lebowski.” He always gets himself back to that composed tranquil state that inspired an entire religion known as Dudeism. This is a philosophy of serenity and peace of mind for the secular, modern, and all-too-absurd age.

There’s a reason the Dude’s rare ability to abide is so aspirational to so many people. To abide is to avoid both the inflexibility of Walter’s deontology and the over-flexibility of the nihilists’ nihilism. To abide is to “roll,” not in the literal sense of bowling, but in the metaphorical sense of going with the flow and continuing one’s forward momentum in the face of both life’s “strikes and gutters.”

As is expected with the Coens, the world they’ve constructed here is thoroughly lived in and rich. It’s not just the Dude, Walter, and the nihilists. The other characters in “The Big Lebowski” all have their own distinct world views too. Both women exhibit ownership over their bodies and sexualities, Bunny in a hedonistic “devil may care” way and Maude in an explicitly ideological, feminist way.

Bunny grew up on a farm, placing her closer to the world we would associate with the Stranger, but she is far from the innocent damsel of conventional westerns. Instead, she uses the sexual freedom of post-60s America to achieve enough financial stability to indulge her spontaneity. She offers to sell sex to the Dude and she clearly takes advantage of both the nihilists and the Big Lebowski to make money.

Maude’s feminist stance is embodied in her “vaginal” art, but despite her artistic talents she’s ironically cold and logical. Maude is the least emotional, and in some sense most “Dude-like,” of anyone in the movie. Perhaps that’s why she ends up engaging in coitus with the Dude and mothering the Little Lebowski. She even pops up in one of his drug-induced hallucinations, dawning a masculine viking outfit and learning to bowl. And while she is the only party to actually be honest with the Dude (the clarity we *are* given mostly comes from Maude’s calculated exposition), she also manipulates him in her unrelated scheme to get pregnant without an involved father. She has found a way to take ownership of motherhood itself without actually relying on a man.

Maude’s father the Big Lebowski has his own conception of the good life and specifically of masculinity — he repeatedly asks the Dude what “makes a man.” Whereas Walter’s masculinity is realized in violence and aggression, the masculinity of his fellow veteran the Big Lebowski is realized in a wishful outward persona he constructs so people view him as a hard-working, self-made millionaire and philanthropist.

The Coens show the Big Lebowski’s 80s-era Reaganite American Dream philosophy to be empty and contrast it with the Dude’s 60s-era New Left counterculture philosophy, which they further contrast with Walter’s man-as-soldier philosophy, the nihilists’ man-as-nothing philosophy, and the Stranger’s man-as-cowboy philosophy. If “The Big Lebowski” affirms any conception of masculinity, it’s the Dude’s. His is a masculinity which values peace, friendship, leisure, harmony, and, above all, being comfortable with oneself.

By the end of the movie, it turns out the Big Lebowski is the real bum. His philosophy is revealed to be a mere cover for his “vanity,” as his daughter puts it. He, too, is motivated by simple greed but, perhaps more accurately, the *appearance* of wealth, of ambition, of self-reliance, of virtue, of goodness. Where the Big Lebowski is ultimately a slave to others and their perceptions of him, the Dude is a fully self-assured man whose self-esteem and integrity comes from within.

The Dude doesn’t care what other people think of him. The Dude doesn’t care what the Big Lebowski thinks of him anymore than he cares what the cashier he pays with a 69 cent check thinks of him or what the cop who fiddles with his bowling pin weed pipe thinks of him. In this way, “The Big Lebowski” formulates a totally new conception of self-reliance, one that values not the means to external praise but the internal attitudes that make life worth living.

The way the Lebowskis foil each other is the central irony at the heart of the film’s title. The Coens poetically subvert the traditional function of movie titles and name the movie after not only a supporting character but an antagonist. I think the Coens did this to subtly convey the movie’s theme that while the Big Lebowski has achieved external praise, and will consequently be more famous and later remembered by history, the Dude has achieved internal fulfillment, and will consequently be more lonely and later be forgotten by history. The title relegates the Dude to a supporting role even in his own “story”!

The Stranger tells us the Dude was in “the right place at the right time.” In that sense the Dude is the hero. But we know that even though no one is remembered “across the sands of time” some will receive more recognition and acknowledgement than others before they’re forgotten. The title just reflects that sad fact.

The dynamic between the Lebowskis underlies not only the irony of the title but the irony in the movie’s inciting incident. By naming the movie “The Big Lebowski,” the Coens trick the audience into thinking the protagonist would be the Big Lebowski in a way that mirrors Treehorn’s goons mistaking the actual protagonist for the Big Lebowski in the opening scene.

From the get-go the Big Lebowski totally despises the Dude. His stated reason has to do with their culture clash, calling the Dude lazy for being unemployed, etc. But I suspect the deeper reason he had so much contempt for the Dude, so much so that he went on to pawn his crime off on him, is because he was personally offended by the fact that the Dude was mistaken for him. There’s no greater affront to someone who gets their self-worth solely from others than to be confused for “someone the square community wouldn’t give a shit about,” as the Dude so aptly describes in his cathartic confrontation with the Big Lebowski.

The Coens’ characters are not “realistic” in the sense of being like normal people in the ordinary world, but they are “realistic” in the sense of feeling like genuinely unique individuals who keep on existing even when the camera’s not there. Almost all the character introductions, from the Dude, to the Big Lebowski, to Bunny, to Maude, to the Stranger, to Jackie Treehorn are immediately memorable and often contain more imaginative and interesting characterization than some characters get in entire movies.

Where some directors seem to create plot first and then characters with which to service that plot — *cough* Christopher Nolan *cough* — the Coens seem to create their characters first and then the plot with which to service those characters. That’s why their movies can impact people on such a subtly emotional level and why they can be returned to again and again. It’s such a joy to come back to and inhabit these stylized worlds which operate according to their own weird internal logics. To go bowling with Walter. To light one up with the Dude.

“The Big Lebowski” is deceptively complex, rich, and thoughtful. In the guise of a rabidly profane, incomprehensible dark comedy that confounded viewers on the heels of “Fargo,” the Coens made one of the most intensely philosophical movies of all time, exploring timeless questions around the nature of morality and the good life. The plot’s incomprehensibility mirrors life’s incomprehensibility, the ultimate alignment of viewer with protagonist.

The desperate yearning for answers and clarity shared by viewer and protagonist makes “The Big Lebowski” an emotionally unique experience that deeply resonates with anyone who’s been confused by the vastness and indifference of the universe. In its whimsical, chaotic, and even frustrating tone and structure, it encourages the viewer to aspire for the Dude’s Sisyphean resilience in the face of the absurd.

And while I sometimes fail in realizing that aspiration, I always try to abide by it.

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