Magic Rug Ride: ‘The Big Lebowski’ (1998)
Why do some films sink while others soar into the stratosphere, sky-high, where they remain as living monuments? It’s a good question, but a much better question is: Why do some films do both? I think I can be of some help in the matter, at least as it pertains to The Big Lebowski.
First off, it was marketed wrong. One of the primary trailers that Working Title Films first ran had nothing on its soundtrack but “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” (an admittedly wonderful song by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition) playing over a collage of moments from the film that do little to convey its greatest asset: the idiosyncrasies of the characters, whose attributes in the movie are conveyed mostly through the spoken word.
Then, of course, there were the critics. Some of the harshest were out of England, and can therefore be forgiven for finding Lebowski about as funny as I, for instance, find Monty Python. But what of the Americans? Most of them rolled directly into the gutter on their first try, and years later would do much better with a second ball.
The movie found its audience eventually, as great movies tend to do, but then it did something altogether more grandiose. It became a literal religion — the Church of the Latter-Day Dude, or Dudeism — and the subject of scholarly research that transcended even academia’s absurd standards. Two species of African spider have names derived from the film. There are Big Lebowski-themed bars around the world. There is an annual Lebowski Fest of ever-expanding popularity. I could go on, but I won’t.
Suffice to say, Lebowski has become the kind of cultural phenomenon that can never be achieved deliberately — the kind that strikes precisely the right spot at precisely the right angle, with an idiosyncrasy that cannot be contrived or calculated. And what is that spot? What is that angle? Reductionists will tell you, simply, that it makes being a slacker seem cool. Although there’s a lot of truth in this, it doesn’t come anywhere near a suitable explanation, and misses one crucial point.
It’s about the personal passions — about the importance of one’s own passions in leading a meaningful life, and about how our interests define us in an otherwise meaningless world. That’s the simplest way of articulating what the movie so eloquently demonstrates. It tells the story of a group of recreational bowlers whose lives are disrupted when a cabal of nihilists mistake the Dude — given name: Jeffrey Lebowski — for a different Jeffrey Lebowski, the so-called Big Lebowski, a wealthy man living in the same general area of Los Angeles.
It all starts when some thugs invade the Dude’s home, assault him, threaten him, break some stuff, and then piss on his living-room carpet. (“Hey, man, not on the rug.”) After all this, the thugs look around and realize they’ve got the wrong place — this guy’s not even rich. They leave the Dude’s place, but the Dude, for all the things he can abide, can’t abide his rug’s ruination. Cleaning it, apparently, having never occurred to him, he decides to get a new one by tracking down this rich guy whose name is also Jeffrey Lebowski.
Thus our journey begins.
The Big Lebowski was heavily inspired by the novels of Raymond Chandler, particularly The Big Sleep (1939), whose precise plot Chandler himself confessed to having never understood. The Coens had a lot of fun devising a plot that was by design as incomprehensible as that of Chandler’s similarly titled first novel. They wanted, said Joel, “to have a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant” — a plot that, as the Dude puts it at one point, has a “lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous.” As the Dude (correctly) explains elsewhere in the movie, “There are a lot of facets to this, a lot of interested parties.”
Which brings us to another Chandler influence on Lebowski, one that comes secondhand via Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973). “[T]hat’s the most important antecedent to this movie,” Ethan said,
because it tends to update Raymond Chandler in a much more direct way than this. But also the Elliot Gould character [Phillip Marlowe in Goodbye] is purposefully anti-Marlowe. Of the current time and yet not, wandering around L.A. in a suit. In Lebowski, all the characters were supposed to be throwbacks to or identified by experiences they had in another era. The Dude is obviously a classic sixties burnout case, but Goodman’s character [Walter Sobchak] too identifies himself as a Vietnam vet. Julianne Moore is that kind of Fluxus artist who’s kind of passe now. So they’re all meant to be anachronistic in a way.
And like Marlowe in Chandler’s books and their adaptations — The Long Goodbye not excluded — the Dude’s quest to solve a mystery delivers him into the realms of various social strata and subcultures. It’s these interactions — these comical culture-clashes — that account for so much of the film’s humor.
At one point the Dude ends up in Malibu, at the mansion of big-shot porno producer Jackie Treehorn, who during their talk drugs the Dude’s white Russian, thereby knocking him unconscious. Before he does so, however, many funny things occur between the two men, most of them in the form of spoken dialogue. But my favorite moment is pure action. Treehorn goes to answer the phone, writes something on a notepad, tears off the top page. When he momentarily leaves the room, the Dude rushes over to the phone and lightly brushes a pencil over the indentations left on the page beneath, hoping to reveal the message Teehorn just took. What he finds is that Treehorn didn’t even take a message, just idly made a rough sketch of a man with an erect penis. (It almost looks like a tree with a horn, come to think of it.)
When the Dude awakens in police custody and is reprimanded for bothering “Mr. Treehorn” (“a pillar of this community”), his pockets’ contents are inventoried — and there again is the dick drawing. The whole sequence is so bizarre and well-timed and unexpected, it far transcends its otherwise simple juvenility. It also hangs nicely on one of the movie’s major throughlines: the Dude as a misunderstood man blamed for others’ neurotic behavior.
When the Coen Brothers first approached Bridges with the script and asked him to play the Dude, he was compelled to ask them, “Did you know me in high school?” (Listen to him in interviews now, and you have to ask yourself why Bridges sounds more like the Dude than the Dude himself does.) Some of the clothes he wears in the film were his own, and some of those he wears still. The T-shirts, for instance, were curated from Bridges’ closet by costume designer Mary Zophres. And the jellies — those PVC-plastic flip-flops he wears throughout — are something he wears to this day.
Nevertheless, “Bridges understood that he had limited control over his performance,” as journalist Alex Belth writes in his wonderful memoir of having been an assistant on the film. “[Bridges’] job was to give the Boys [the Coen Brothers] as many options as possible. You could see his intelligence at work. It was like watching a great athlete. He was physical and intuitive, not brainy.”
Critic Janet Maslin was among the earliest to appreciate just how resoundingly right Bridges was for the Dude, observing in her review for the New York Times, “Mr. Bridges finds a role so right for him that he seems never to have been anywhere else. Watch this performance to see shambling executed with nonchalant grace and a seemingly out-to-lunch character played with fine comic flair.”
This “shambling executed with nonchalant grace” is best exemplified in two particular moments. First, there’s that opening scene: the Dude in the supermarket sampling, in-store, the half & half he’ll use for his white Russians, then sauntering over to the counter where he’ll write a postdated check for (yes) September 11. (We know it’s postdated because the next day his landlord reminds him that tomorrow in the 10th.) As if the nonchalant insolence could not get any more comic, the amount he writes it for just had to be 69 cents, didn’t it?
The other moment in which Bridges best captures that shambling, nonchalant grace is when he saunters away from a shouting Jeffrey Lebowski (the other Jeffrey Lebowski), down the mansion hallway as his executive assistant Brandt (a pre-fame Philip Seymour Hoffman) asks him how the meeting went. “Okay,” the Dude assures him less-than-truthfully. “The old man told me to take any rug in the house.”
It’s a hell of a rug, we can all agree, and the Dude is the kind of guy content to lie on it all day, drifting in and and out of sleep, making vaguely meditative motions with his hands while he smiles blissfully listening to a four-year-old bowling tournament on his Walkman (“Venice Beach League Playoffs 1987”).
This carpet seems to really tie the room together — at least as effectively as the old one did — but so does the photo of Richard Nixon bowling in the White House basement lanes he’d had installed in ’69. (Hah hah. Sixty-nine. Get it?) It’s only appropriate that, in a movie about how it’s our interests and passions that define and unite us (the guys on the bowling league seem to have nothing in common but the sport itself), the Dude would gaze fondly at the picture of a man who otherwise stands for everything the Dude lives to avoid: ambition, aggression, greed, resentment, sexual conservatism, and, yes, years-old tapes that bring anguish instead of bliss.
It’s someone else who tells the Dude’s story, in voiceover, and it’s this voiceover that gives the movie much of its texture. The voiceover is spoken by Sam Elliott — who, at the time the Coen Brothers approached him, was trying to phase out of the whole cowboy thing which had until then defined his career (and which, because of this movie, defines his career still). He plays a character called the Stranger, a regular at the bowling alley but not, apparently, himself a bowler. He’s something of a witness to the events but not himself a participant.
He shares a lot of the Dude’s values — particularly his easygoing, non-intrusive manner — but obviously not all of them. He considers the Dude lazy (hardly an unfair assessment) and wonders why he uses “so many cuss words.” The Stranger also doesn’t drink or do drugs, ordering a sarsaparilla (cowboy for “root beer”) whenever he bellies up to the bar. He’s an impartial fella with an appreciation for eccentrics, which makes him the perfect person to narrate this story teeming with eccentrics.
There’s Walter Sobchak, a bowling teammate of the Dude’s and apparently his best friend, as well as someone with whom he has virtually nothing in common. Walter’s a militant Vietnam vet, overbearing and prone to anger, modeled partly on the filmmaker John Milius. He has the indefensible tendency to yell at their mild-mannered friend and teammate Donny (Steve Buscemi) for being a little clueless during conversation.
John Turturro steals his two all-too-brief scenes as the Jesus — Jesus Quintana, pronounced Jee-zuss, as in the Biblical guy — a vulgar, flamboyant sex offender with a hilarious repertoire of pre- and post-roll moves: suggestively polishing his ball with great vigor, licking the ball, salsa-dancing in celebration of his strikes (“Fucking Quintana — that creep can roll, man.” — W. Sobchak).
(Funnily enough, three years earlier, in Spike Lee’s Clockers, Turturro stands by and listens as his detective partner, played by Harvey Keitel, says to a witness they’re questioning — who insists on being called Jee-zuss — that he feels much more comfortable calling him Hay-zoos.)
Promoting the movie in 1998, Ethan Coen told an interviewer that, even among Lebowski’s “congregation of misfits,” the Jesus is “undoubtedly the strangest.” The role as originally written was much less conspicuous, but Turturro seized hold of it and made it into something spectacular. “We were thinking on set,” said Ethan, “how that character could have his own TV series. It’s a pity how you only see him for three minutes.”
At the time of this writing, 22 years after Lebowski’s release, the character has just received his own movie, called The Jesus Rolls. And although it’s a pretty stagnant movie with a go-nowhere script, the character of the Jesus is — no surprise — compelling enough to keep you engaged and amused for the duration.
The music that plays in Lebowski behind the Jesus as he goes through his pattern of moves in slow-motion is a Latinized version of the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” The Dude — who elsewhere vehemently declares his hatred of the Eagles — looks on in disgust. We can presume that this Latinized Eagles tune is what plays in his head as the Jesus rolls.
The Dude’s hatred of the Eagles is an oft-talked-about aspect of the movie, and an unfortunate one. Not only did the Eagles make some of the greatest music of the ‘70s — which, as the Stranger might say, would put it high in the runnin’ for greatest of all time — but their sensibility seems to align perfectly with the Dude’s. One of their greatest songs, after all, is called “Take It Easy” — a phrase the Dude repeats throughout the movie (and not just the Dude, either, but the movie’s other conscience, the Stranger).
When the Coens were trying to purchase the rights to an inferior song by an inferior band — the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” (as performed by Townes Van Zandt) — Allen Klein (the crooked show-biz operative who years before had done more than anyone else to alienate the four Beatles from one another) was going to charge the Coens the full Rolling Stones rate for the rights, $150,000 back then. T-Bone Burnett, who was putting together the soundtrack, asked Klein to first watch a cut of the movie with him. “It got to the part where the Dude says, ‘I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man!’” Burnett later remembered with fondness and pride. “Klein stands up and says, ‘That’s it, you can have the song!’ That was beautiful.”
It’s not beautiful. Since so many seem reluctant to say it, I’ll just go ahead and say it myself: The Dude’s dislike of the Eagles is very un-Dude — an irreconcilable aspect of the movie.
Either way, the Dude really does know how to take it easy — it’s not just some shit he says. He’s found a way of life that suits and satisfies himself and disturbs no one else. Then, due to mistaken identity, other peoples’ greed and resentments and neuroses and, yes, nihilism infect that life. From there, the infection grows.
Even the Dude’s initial decision to confront the other, wealthy Jeffrey Lebowski — setting in motion all the misfortune to follow — is instigated by Walter, who advises him that “we’re talkin’ about unchecked aggression here” and that “there is no reason, no fucking reason, why his wife should go out and owe money and they pee on your rug. Am I wrong?,” before angrily reminding the Dude of his own words: “That rug really tied the room together, did it not!?”
When the Dude goes to the Lebowski mansion to get another rug, he’s subjected to a scolding by the older man from behind his well-appointed desk, safe within his well-appointed office and home — all of it unearned, we later learn. He remarks upon the Dude’s laziness, his shabby clothing, his employment status (non-existent). “My advice to you,” he says, capping off the tirade, “is to do what your parents did: Get a job, sir! The bums will always lose! You hear me, Lebowski?”
As the Dude leaves the residence with the new rug he’s decided to take for himself, perfectly satisfied, he’s involuntarily drawn further into the world of Bunny, wife of Lebowski and another instigator of all this mess (she’s the one who owes the money the thugs came looking for at the Dude’s pad). She asks him, in a flirtatious way, to blow on her toenail polish. Now, I don’t know whether the Coens — confirmed Kubrickites — mean for us to think of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) or not. Watch that movie again, though — namely the scene where Humbert first meets Lo — and you’ll hear ’50s teen pop coming from tinny radio speakers, while a (very) young woman in outlandish sunglasses flirts with the unsuspecting gentleman in her midst. All of this is exactly what we hear and see now.
Of course, at no point in Lebowski does the Dude fall for Bunny, the way Humbert falls for Lolita. In fact, his response to Bunny’s request/offer is to look down on the swimming pool below, where a man is passed out on a rubber raft, Jack Daniel’s bottle floating nearby, and ask, “Are you sure he won’t mind?”
“Dieter doesn’t care about anything — he’s a nihilist.”
“Oh, that must be exhausting.”
It’s funny because it’s not true — and then it’s funny because you realize it is true. It must be exhausting to not care about anything. Our initial inclination is to believe otherwise — to believe that it would be a great unburdening, going through life not caring about anything, when in reality — as this movie will proceed to show us — it’s precisely the things we care about that give the world meaning — that make its weight bearable. Nihilists have the same basic responsibilities we all do; they just lack the values and enthusiasms that make those responsibilities endurable. So yes, it must be exhausting.
It’s easy to misinterpret the Dude’s own manner for exhausted, but the Dude’s not exhausted; he just knows that some things are worth caring about and others aren’t. This sort of existentialism is often mistaken for nihilism, which is why it’s so nifty that the Dude’s been reading Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, perhaps the most important work of existentialism extant, and one that’s frequently mischaracterized as nihilistic.
The Dude spends much of the movie being berated and lectured by people who care about all the wrong things, things that do nothing to advance society or promote happiness. (Many of us can relate.) But the most telling such instance — the most thematically significant — is that creepy scene wherein the Dude is ushered in by Brandt to see the putative Big Lebowski, the one everyone calls the Big Lebowski, in his den in the dark, “stari[ng],” as the script has it, “hauntedly into a fire, listening to Lohengrin.”
“It’s funny,” Lebowski says, not at all laughing. “I can look back on a life of achievement, on challenges met, competitors bested, obstacles overcome. I’ve accomplished more than most men, and without the use of my legs.” And then, out of nowhere: “What…what makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?”
“Dude,” the Dude corrects him, picking a cannabis seed out of his teeth.
“Huh?” says Lebowski, confused.
The Dude answers the initial question (sort of): “Um, I…I don’t know, sir.”
“Is it being prepared to do the right thing? Whatever the cost. Isn’t that what makes a man?”
“Um, sure — that and a pair of testicles.”
When people comment on this movie, they often like to point out that the Big Lebowski of the title is not, in fact, the Dude, but the other Jeffrey Lebowski, since he’s the only one referred to in the film precisely that way. But the Dude’s quip here — about “that and a pair of testicles” — is more than just a great line; it also slyly opens another possibility for just who is referred to in the movie’s title.
You see, the Dude has sex with Jeffrey Lebowski’s daughter Maude (a fascinating character, about whom not nearly enough has been said in this essay). An empowered, independent woman, it was Maude who tracked down the Dude — or had her goons do it — and who did the seducing. She has a grievance with her father, from whom she’s estranged, and she tells the Dude all about how Lebowski’s not nearly the self-made philanthropist he poses as; rather, his fortune belongs to his wife (Maude’s mother) and he subsidized the ransom payment for Bunny (who staged her own kidnapping) with funds from his Urban Achievers foundation. (She also asks him to help retrieve the money.)
In other words, this Jeffrey Lebowski who’s supposedly the Big Lebowski of the film’s title is hardly even real, let alone Big. What’s more, as the Stranger informs us on the way out, “there’s a Little Lebowski on the way,” fruit of Maude’s frolic with the Dude — who all along has demonstrated the courage to be true to himself. That’s one of the other things that makes a man, you know? That and a set of testicles, which Jeffrey Lebowski also lacks and the Dude does not. So when the Stranger tells us in the end about the impending arrival of a Little Lebowski, courtesy of the Dude and Maude, who do you think is really referred to in the movie’s title?
