Reader's Request Week: The Big Lebowski

1 year ago

Reader’s Request Week: The Big Lebowski

WHAT MAKES A MAN

by Karina Wolf

Maybe because I’ve only ever been a tourist, I accept the Coen brothers’ version of Los Angeles as plausible. The odd genesis of the city seems to uphold the filmmakers’ vision. Because it houses fame, notoriety and extraordinary wealth, the city also shelters deadbeats, pornographers, trophy wives and avant-garde heiresses. In the California panorama that is The Big Lebowski – across class and subcultures, politics, philosophy and aesthetics – no one escapes the Coen brothers’ acid vision.

The Coens wrote the script, as they often do, while working on another project, stopping 40 pages in and returning to the screenplay after completing Barton Fink. The plot begins with the carpet-pissers. After a rambling introduction by The Stranger, we find the Dude (Jeff Bridges) jumped by slow-thinking, weak-bladdered thugs, who mistake him for a different Lebowski, attempt to extort a large sum of money and urinate on his floor covering. Later, with his bowling buddies, the Dude cooks up a plan. He will find his wealthy doppelganger and demand a replacement rug. What ensues: a missing wife, a ransom plot, a crack on the jaw, a brandished firearm, a bowling pederast, a severed toe (with nail polish), an amphibious rodent, some poorly scattered cremains.

What’s surprising about The Big Lebowski is that it’s rooted in the real. The Coen brothers based some of the characters on dropouts they encountered while shooting Blood Simple. Others are amalgams of observation: the art of Maude Lebowski, for example, is based on the work of Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneeman, while Maude’s accent strives for a Hepburn’s Yankee dipthongs. The brothers’ comprehensive attention fashions a film that is a pastiche of words and views and sounds from life and culture of the thirties through the seventies. Within Lebowski, the Coens produce a loveably lewd rendition of Busby Berkeley on a bowling lane, a byzantine plot modeled on Chandler’s The Big Sleep, a softcore version of Beach Blanket bingo, and a curated playlist of period music and oddball covers.

The Coens are joyful artists. Their patter might add up to something, but it also exists for the pleasure of the play. I have no doubt that they created Lebowski because it’s exactly the film they’d want to watch. They retain the bemusement, disdain, playfulness, and lust of teenagers. What else might you expect from filmmakers whose first foray was a Super 8 short called Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go?

For a while I only had friends born in December. This was an unintentional clustering. Jung might call it synchronicity. My best friend is born on the same day as Jeff Bridges, December 4^th. Much as I’m embarrassed to follow the dictates of magical thinking, I read up on star signs. I like to think the Dude (and my friend, too) embodies some of the best of Sagittariusness – the humor, the philosophizing, the overindulgence, the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, up for anything good nature of the December native.

And the more I watch Jeff Bridges, the more I suspect he resembles the Dude. This overlap doesn’t undermine his impressive lassitude on the screen. If American acting is based on letting it happen – less is more – then Bridges is a master. Moreover, as the Dude, his performance allows no room for vanity. Instead, we find a man who brought his own wardrobe to set: jelly shoes and hairclips and sunglasses plucked from the toilet and worn without a cursory rinse. Bridges might be more determinedly artistic than the character (the actor is also a lifelong photographer), but he’s as breezy as you’d expect a West Coaster and Hollywood child to be. And perhaps also as cagey — there’d be no Door in the Floor, no Oscar for Crazy Heart, perhaps not even an Iron Man villain without the lighthearted range conveyed through Jeffrey Lebowski.

What genre is The Big Lebowski? The film echoes other American movies — Western, Californian, pulpy crime noir. But the Coens’ films don’t quite fit categories; they’re rarely straight-faced enough to be noir, nor adequately lowbrow to be comic. When I watched A Serious Man — not entirely an enjoyable film, but possibly a therapeutic one — I finally understood their ongoing project. In that film, each scene is an elaboration of the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment about interpretation and arriving at consistent history. This experiment, I realized, is at the heart the Coens’ stories: a Beckettian reach for an orderly world.

Lebowski has much less regard for establishing certitude or the nature of anything. (Look up ‘Shaggy Dog’ in the dictionary, and you’ll find the Dude’s mug, sporting shades and a goatee tinged with White Russian.) Plot and resolution are largely unimportant. However, the Dude is presented as a man of his time, in an age when puffed up American rhetoric and military action had little fall out beyond the linguistic crimes of George Bush Senior. The Dude’s irony is ideological stance; he’s a stoner Winnie the Pooh. His mutability reflects Zen mastery. “My thinking has gotten way too rigid,” the Dude says as he has a breakthrough in his concentric investigations.

Above all, The Big Lebowski is a collection of inspired performances and punchlines. It lauds bowling, toking and coitus, and gently ribs technopop, nihilism, and feminist (or vaginal) art. But a series of festivals and academic papers have resulted from the film. Is Lebowski a religion? An ode to the Neocon? Many of the movie’s most memorable lines are uttered by John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak, a pistol and Pomeranian wielding Jewish convert army veteran. His priorities are: bowling, the first Amendment, Shabbas and his ex-wife’s show dog. Though extreme, Walter detects, mostly accurately and most often, the motivations and dangers in their way. Apparently only the chaos of ’Nam prepares you for life, or at least for life in the world of the Coen brothers.