The Big Lebowski

 SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed!

As I have done in the past, this post derives from a Bryn Mawr Film Institute class on The Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998). It is a funny movie that deals with masculinity and politics in a story that is a variation on film noir and the Western.

  A tumbleweed blows across the screen at the beginning of the movie to the song “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.” We then see the city of Los Angeles, and California is as far west as you can go on the continental United States. But, LA is a far cry from what the Old West was. In a way the film is about the passage of time and what vanishes and what endures.

 

The main character is the Dude (a hilarious performance by Jeff Bridges). He is a stoner, a modern-day tumbleweed, just floating along, but surviving with little resistance against the forces around him. The Stranger (Sam Elliot), with a Texas drawl, narrates this story, which adds an anachronistic touch to the tale. A “dude” was originally the term for a “city slicker,” someone who dressed in a fancy manner and was out of his element on a ranch. So, the Dude would not fit in with cowboys. But he certainly doesn’t dress like a fashionable gentleman. He likes wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, and he’d rather be in bed or just hanging around his apartment relaxing, smoking a joint.  

 

His chill life is violently interrupted by a couple of goons from pornographer Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) who burst into his apartment and start banging things up, demanding that Jeffrey Lebowski (the Dude’s name) pay money that is owed by his wife, Bunny. Here is where the film noir aspect comes in. The Coens said that they wanted a comic variation on writer Raymond Chandler (movie titles like The Big Sleep and The Big Heat influence the title of this film). The Dude tries to explain that they have the wrong man because they think he is rich. These guys are not too bright because just looking at the Dude and where he lives would show he is not wealthy. The Dude demonstrates he is a witty guy even under duress, like a film noir detective. When one of the thugs keeps pushing his head into the toilet asking where is the money, the Dude says, “it’s down there somewhere, let me take another look.” When one of the thugs picks up a bowling ball and asks what it is, the Dude replies, “obviously you’re not a golfer.” When the Dude comes out with these occasional cool lines he mirrors the stylized dialogue of a Noir story. Before the henchmen realize the mistaken identity problem, one pees on the Dude’s Oriental rug. The Dude laments this action because, as is repeated in the story, the rug “really tied the room together.” Despite his foggy life, the Dude still wants to have focus where the strands of what’s happening are “tied … together.”

 

During the movie, we get some of the Dude’s backstory. He mentions that when he was in college, he “occupied” buildings. He was a protester against “the establishment,” someone associated with the 1960’s radical group Students for a Democratic Society, known as the SDS. He later wants to be represented by lawyers William Kunstler and Ron Kuby who defended radical leaders during that protest era. His activist ways eventually changed into his current go-with-the-flow lifestyle, possibly because his past ventures didn’t generate the change he hoped for.

 

He discovers who is the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), visits him, and asks for reimbursement for his rug since he is the innocent victim as a result of the borrowing excess of Bunny, the “trophy wife.” Dude can’t escape how the current political scene is dominated by Republicans. Lebowski’s servile aide, Brandt (Philip Seymour Hoffman), shows pictures of Lebowski’s connection to people like Nancy Reagan. Dude even repeats President George W. Bush’s statement on television that Saddam Hussein’s “aggression will not stand.” The Dude, however, is talking about his rug, and it is ironic that he is quoting a Republican leader. There is a framed mirror on Lebowski’s wall that has the tag of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, which turns out to be one’s own reflection. Probably Lebowski sees himself that way when he views his own face. Here we see the Dude looking at himself. It is a complicated image. Is the Dude a doppelganger of his rich self? Has he ironically become a member of the Republican collage? We also see a picture of Richard Nixon bowling in the Dude’s apartment. Has he come to identify with his old nemesis because the Dude has taken up bowling? Or, as The Stranger asks, is the Dude “the man for his place and time,” and currently represents the time of the film, the early 1990’s, and deserves to be on the cover of Time?

 

Lebowski is elderly and paralyzed in a wheelchair. Does his disabled status reflect the current dysfunctional state of the union? He states that the “bums” like the Dude “lost” the battle to subvert the status quo. But we find out later from his daughter, Maude (Julianne Moore), that her father’s wealth comes from her mother, and Maude manages the money. Lebowski lectures the Dude about how he is a self-made man, but he is the phony who is the “bum.” As one of our class’s instructors noted, Lebowski uses the word “achieve” a great deal. For this rich guy, achievement is measured in wealth, not what one does in life irrespective of accumulated funds. The Dude walks out and steals one of the rugs in the mansion as reimbursement for his loss, exercising his own version of ethics.

 

The Dude finds refuge from the world at the bowling alley with his friends Walter (John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi). As stated in the class, here is a place where these men can “achieve,” by bowling a good game and possibly winning a tournament. Interestingly, we never see the Dude bowl. Does that mean he can’t escape past failures? The Dude is not laid back when it comes to Walter, who infuriates him with his aggressive actions. The Coens said they saw these two acting like a turbulent married couple. Walter makes everything about his past as a soldier in Vietnam. He is a stickler for rules, which majorly contrasts with the easy-going Dude. It may be that the chaos of America’s failure in the Vietnam War causes Walter to overreact in post-war life as he can searches for order after chaos. For instance, Walter pulls out a gun to threaten a bowler who crosses the foul line but still wants his roll to count. The Dude sides with the bowler and wants to relax the rules. Walter also has converted to Judaism, and wants to comply with its religious dictates.

 

Lebowski hires the Dude to deliver a million dollars in ransom for the supposed kidnapping of wife Bunny. He says he thinks the culprits are the same guys who broke into the Dude's place, so the Dude can confirm they are the culprits. Despite his unfocused mind, the Dude channels the film noir private eye and concludes that there is something not right about what appears to be a crime. He knows Bunny needs money and he believes she is faking her own kidnapping to extract a ransom.

 Walter complicates the money drop by going along for the ride and substitutes his dirty underwear in a suitcase for the money bag. He wants to confront the crooks. The whole episode is like the Keystone Cops, ending with the Dude crashing his car which eventually gets stolen out of the bowling alley parking lot, with the money suitcase in it. Lebowski says he heard from the kidnappers that they didn’t receive the ransom, and Lebowski points the finger at the Dude, who is now in trouble with the kidnappers.

 

However, it is not Treehorn’s men who come to threaten the Dude, but a bunch of “nihilists,” including Karl Hungus (Peter Stomare), a porn star who worked with Bunny in adult films (his work name indicates his attribute for the job). These guys want the ransom money from the Dude. They drop a marmot in the Dude’s bathtub as they threaten to cut off his “Johnson.” One of the film’s main themes centers on threatened masculinity. There is the Bob Dylan song that talks about “the man in me.” After Bunny is kidnapped, Lebowski muses about what is the right thing a man should do. When the Dude has his dream sequence, he sees himself being pursued by these nihilists coming at him with castration-threatening enlarged scissors. A huge bowling ball comes at him, ready to squash him. The story uses the bowing pins and balls as symbols of male genitalia. Walter plays the role of the aggressive male, perhaps to compensate for his impotence in not being able to save his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. The Dude may also be suffering from testosterone failure in his inability to bring about change in society in his past. The loss of masculinity is also referred to by the passing of the cowboy era, including the fact that the fictional writer of the TV series Branded is in an iron lung when the Dude and Walter search for the missing money. Even the cab driver tells a story about a woman “bustin’ … agates.”

 

The ironically named character of Jesus (John Turturro), a fellow bowler, is a demonic figure who invades the sanctuary of achievement of these men whose masculinity is on the line. He has partially sheer socks and a painted baby fingernail, which depicts him as more traditionally effeminate than male (Bunny paints her toenails), which may suggest why he overcompensates with his overly machismo posturing. He licks his bowling ball which could be symbolic of a testicle. Walter tells the Dude that Jesus is a pederast, with a record of exposing himself to an eight-year-old child. There are several references to anal intercourse, including Jesus saying he'll take Walter's gun, stick it up his butt and pull the trigger. Our discussion noted that the Coens deflate Jesus’s character by making him look ridiculous in his exaggerated boasting. (As one of our instructors rightly noted, the comical allusions to homophobia probably wouldn’t make it into a film today as being politically incorrect).

 

Maude takes back the rug that the Dude stole from the Lebowski mansion, which he subsequently was allowed to keep. The Dude is on a search for an object, similar to the hunt for the Maltese Falcon. Maude invites the Dude to her artist’s studio where she tells him that the rug was a gift from her mother, so her father had no right to let the Dude have it. Maude says that those so obsessed just with sex do not love, and she puts Bunny is this category. So, there is a distinction drawn here between proving sexuality and the ability to show true emotion in the form of love. She shows the beginning of a porno film that has Bunny in it with Hungus. The film has Hungus as a cable guy visiting the scantily clad Bunny. The Dude delivers one of his funnier lines when Maude says one can imagine what happens next in the film, and the Dude says, “He fixes the cable?” It is here that Maude mentions her father’s lack of personal funds and that he embezzled a million dollars from a charity for children to get the ransom.

 

Treehorn wants his money. He drugs Dude when he doesn't get the right info from him, which gets the Dude in trouble with cops so Treehorn can toss the Dude’s place to look for the cash. In film noir movies the private eye usually gets knocked out. As one of our instructors noted, the Coens fill the blackouts with dreams. The Dude's dream here is like his carpet because it ties the story together. Many of the images already shown in the movie appear here. For example, there are the bowling pins and balls, and the outfit that Hungus wears in the porno (there are numerous other examples on IMDb). The Dude is more of a swaggering male here, dancing suggestively in a Busby Berkeley inspired erotic musical called Gutterballs. He drifts between the legs of the short-skirted dancers, looking upwards. However, there are then the scissors that undermine this macho wish-fulfillment.

The Dude deduces that Lebowski didn’t care what happened to Bunny, and actually wanted to get rid of her because of her gold-digger ways. So, the suitcase he gave them didn’t contain any money and Lebowski was keeping the cash for himself. The twisty noir aspect of the story continues when Bunny shows up drunk, crashing her car into the Lebowski fountain. (There are several car accidents in the film, suggesting how chaos upends order or calmness). She wasn’t kidnapped and was just on a holiday in Palm Springs which she didn’t tell anybody about. The nihilists just used her absence to try to extort money. The Dude confronts Lebowski, correctly concluding that the old man was setting the Dude up as the patsy for the missing money.

In a comical confrontation with the nihilists, Walter gets to do battle one more time and helps defeat the fake kidnappers. But, sadly the innocent Donny has a heart attack in the middle of the confrontation, and dies. There was a foreshadowing of this event, as IMDb points out, since he always threw strikes until just before his demise. There is a humorous burial as Walter allows Donny’s ashes, carried in a coffee can, to blow all over the Dude when Walter attempts to toss them into the ocean.

At the bowling alley, the Dude meets up with the Stranger, and issues his famous line about how, despite everything, “the Dude abides.” The Stranger, addressing the audience, says, “the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself down through the generations.” IMDb notes that the word “abides” in the script may come from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes, which reads: “One generation passes away, and another generation comes: but the Earth abides forever.” The Dude had sex with Maude, and the Stranger says that the Dude will become a father. Despite all the craziness in the world, life still goes on.

The next film is The Accidental Tourist.