In the opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel The Big Sleep, the seminal private eye Phillip Marlowe is introduced for the first time:
“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
In the opening minutes of The Coen Brothers’ 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski, the seminal stoner The Dude (Jeff Bridges) is introduced pretty much the same way. Los Angeles in the early nineties. Sundown. The Dude enters the picture, wandering a supermarket in flip flops, a bathrobe, and shades. He’s buying $0.75 Half & Half with a check.
As unlikely it may be, The Dude is a distant descendent of Marlowe, just like all private eyes and brother shamuses of the ensuing decades. In William F. Nolan’s essay “Marlowe’s Mean Streets,” he describes them as “men of honor who followed a strict code of personal morality, who couldn't be bluffed or bought off, who could stand up under a police grilling, and who knew how to take a punch and deliver one… Too much booze, too many cigarettes…” Now, The Dude doesn’t stand up to all of these,1 but instead serves as a modernization. Just replace the cigarettes with jays and service in WWII with occupying various administration buildings.
The Dude, real name Jeffrey Lebowski, is a pleasant burnout who lives to simply bowl with his teammates Walter and Donny (John Goodman and Steve Buscemi respectively). He was a political activist, a roadie for Metallica, and seems perfectly content spending his days at the alley.2 That is until two heavyweights mistake him for the other Jeff Lebowski, the millionaire, and pee on The Dude’s rug. What follows is a labyrinthian plot involving the disabled millionaire, his cynical and estranged daughter, a young woman in debt, and a known pornographer: characters all modernized and reinterpreted from The Big Sleep as well.
The Stranger (Sam Elliot) describes The Dude as the man for his time and place, but this seems far from the truth. The Dude is a cultural leftover from the sixties. Not a time traveler, as he seems badly bruised by the defeats of the counterculture in the seventies and corporatization of the eighties, but a piece of wreckage in the choppy seas of the early nineties. Similarly out of place is Elliot Gould’s interpretation of Phillip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s 1973 adaption of The Long Goodbye. Another Chandler adaptation, Gould’s portrayal of Marlowe is a wise-cracking private eye in a sharply lined suit. However, in contrast to the far-out world of seventies California, he’s a major pain in the ass. Altman and screenwriter Leigh Bracket even referred to him as Rip Van Marlowe, as it seemed like he fell asleep in the fifties and woke up in the free-lovin’ world.
Walter, The Dude’s best friend, is another victim of nostalgia. A bellowing Vietnam veteran, he can only relate to the modern world through comparisons of combat in the jungles or the Jewish experience.3 On the flip side, pornography mogul Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara4) is a cat who’s adapted to this new reality. Still dressed in half-foot lapels and hosting swinger parties, he explains to The Dude that he too has had to give up part of his soul to ride “the wave of the future”, by dropping his artistic standards in home video porn. The Stranger himself, an omnipotent Cowboy who digs The Dude’s style, is perplexed by the world around him.5 So what’s kept The Dude afloat all these years? To answer, we should look to the tenets of Dudeism (the government recognized religion spun off from The Big Lebowski) which read: The idea is this: Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man.
The Big Lebowski has a twisting legacy, as any cult classic should. It’s a comedy, a blank check project, a financial and critical flop, a cult reclamation project, a stoner staple, a poster on freshman dorm walls, a religion, and so much more. The Coen Brothers themselves seem characteristically indifferent about the whole thing, not offering much in recognition to the lively cult status it now holds. Perhaps this is because of how poorly received the film was when it was released in 1998. After the Oscar-winning screenplay of Fargo, this comedic riff of a Chandler noir left audiences puzzled. The Guardian’s review stated it was “a bunch of ideas shoveled into a bag and allowed to spill out at random.” Yet, isn’t that convoluted and nonsensical plot a lynchpin of noir?
In screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s essay “From The Big Sleep to The Long Goodbye,” she describes her time working on both films more than two decades apart. While writing The Big Sleep, she explains, “I did witness the historic occasion upon which everybody began asking everybody else who killed Owen Taylor, and nobody knew. A wire was sent asking Chandler, and he sent one back saying, ‘I don’t know.’ And really, who cared?”
Who cares indeed? The mystery of a film noir should only reveal itself at the bitter end, if even that. The Big Lebowski works to disorient the audience from the true plot in a way that embraces both it’s sixties psychedelia and the office-drone insanity of the early nineties. The nineties proved to be their own cultural movement, subbing out a dialogue of revolution for useless technobabble and economic jargon. Dialogue is routinely copied from character to character in The Big Lebowski, until it becomes meaningless. A prime example comes from the opening as The Dude watches President George H.W. Bush declare on TV, “This aggression will not stand. This aggression against Kuwait.” Later, as he implores Jeffrey Lebowski (the millionaire) to replace his peed-upon rug, he repeats, “This aggression will not stand, man.” Even more so, his conversations with Walter and Donny at the bowling alley are mostly them shouting, “What the fuck are you talking about?” again and again.
This meaninglessness and confusion that permeated the decade wasn’t just on the Coen Brothers’ minds. Brian Raftery relays this theme in his book Best. Movie. Year. Ever. “Once inside [the office], employees often found themselves trapped within sprawling bureaucracies, their lives dictated by pointless busy work as their tiny cubicles slowly began to feel like prisons…it was an epiphany that would propel other 1999 films such as Fight Club, The Matrix, and American Beauty”.
This epiphany of the stagnation and lack of autonomy in America radicalizes the heroes of those films, but actually informs the villains of The Big Lebowski: The Nihilists. Three German goofballs with a penchant for castration and water mammals. The Dude himself never lets the malaise of the mainstream and low economic standing –
Ah hell. I’m rambling.
The Dude just takes er’ easy.
The Big Lebowski is available to rent via Amazon, iTunes, and most other streaming platforms.
Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert.
The Dude is often bluffed and is always ready to accept money.
Hollywood Star Lanes, the LA bowling alley used in the film, is as close to heaven as I can imagine at this point. As shown in the dreamy opening credits, people from all walks of life are unified on these lanes for the hope of a strike. The neon stars twinkling above them. The oat-sodas cracking open alongside the wire baskets of bar pretzels. Paradise.
“Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax... YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I'M LIVIN' IN THE FUCKIN' PAST!”
Ben Gazzara essentially plays the same character from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, just aged twelve years later. Keep an eye out for that essay coming soon.
The Western twang of the entire film is also another oddity. Perhaps The Stranger, adorned in spurs and a ten-gallon hat, represents the masculine hero of another age, even before the private eye.