The centrepiece in the Coens’ crime-filled gallery of Midwest/Western-comic-noir- Americana features a White Russian-sipping ex-hippie bowler who enjoys a nice joint now and again (and again) in the presumed privacy of his own bathtub. Throughout The Big Lebowski (1998), the Dude (Jeff Bridges) more or less abides . . . as does his film, living on and on in cult-classic status, from quote-along midnight screenings and fan-filled conventions to re-releases on disc and being subjected to academic study. But this ever-cool slacker movie is (whisper it) actually quite political, with our Hamlet-esque, well, “I won’t say a hee-ro . . . a man” realizing something’s rotten in the state of California and surrounded by models of not-so-good-citizen behaviour.

Before we go too deep—or, as the Dude says to pornographer-mogul Jackie Treehorn, “Yeah, well, right man, there are many facets to this, uh, you know”—let’s point out The Big Lebowski is more anarchic and pluralistic than it may seem. A ’60s acid-flashback on ’90s melting-pot America, its story stews up a succulent mix of genres, outlandish characters, and verbal and visual jokes (including misidentifications, misunderstandings, mis-trickery, and mis-posturing). A Western-style framework voiceover-narration by a mustachioed Stranger (Sam Elliott) and two Freudian dream-like, Busby Berkeley-style musical sequences tumbleweed through a slacker-mystery meets L.A. neon-noir. Parodying and paying homage to The Big Sleep (1946)—a noir with a plot so complicated that the director, screenwriters (one of whom was William Faulkner), and novelist Raymond Chandler himself didn’t know who killed one of the characters (the Sternwoods’ chauffeur)—the anti-establishment Dude’s byzantine investigation for the rich man whose surname he shares proves to be a hoax. It’s a hoax meant to cover up the only (political) crime committed—by the seemingly wealthy Lebowski—which is self-absorbingly capitalist: embezzlement.

But it’s the welcome-back, chummy, apparently non-political vibe—we’re happy to be idling away, just hanging out with the Dude and even his pals, high-strung Walter (John Goodman) and out-of-it Donny (Steve Buscemi)—that’s the big heart of The Big Lebowski’s irresistible charm. Rarely has such a smartly written film (Shakespeare, Herzl, the Talmud, and Lennoin—Vladimir Ilyich, not John—are quoted or misquoted) cared less to please. The Coens’ coarse (one of its famous lines: “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!”; “fuck” and its variations are apparently uttered 260 times) but erudite script (a thug says, “Ever thus to deadbeats, Lebowski,” then pees on his rug) wears its intellect like the Dude samples a carton of half-and-half off the dairy rack before paying for it with a $0.69 check—without an ounce of pretense or self-regard.

That opening scene shows the Dude’s no consumer. This past-his-expiry-date radical’s not buying in but shrugging off: drinking a supermarket item before purchasing it, which he only does by writing a post-dated cheque for

a measly amount (he’s also behind on his rent). After being mistaken for that other Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston) by thugs who wreak havoc with the Dude’s minimalist interior-decorating (after all, “that rug really tied the room together”), the Dude only gets on the case after he’s cajoled and harangued by his bowling buddy, Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak, the most florid petri-sample of a kooky, antagonistic political culture.

Walter’s the right-wing, loudmouthed, oppositional American citizen, talking about “drawing a line in the sand” and spouting xenophobia, from “that camel-fucker in Iraq,” Saddam Hussein, to a “Kraut”. Ever on-edge, he goes off about Jeffrey’s trophy-wife Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid), tapping a vein of misogyny likely popped in response to his ex-wife, whose show dog he takes care of and whose Judaism he still follows—or, as the Dude puts it, “your sick Cynthia thing”. (Both the hulking, right-wing veterans here, Walter and the “Big Lebowski”, try to stridently mask, often with vitriol and misogyny, their deep male insecurities and remaining in thrall to their ex-wives—the rich Lebowski’s money is all from his late first wife’s estate, from which his daughter Maude doles out “a reasonable allowance” to him.) Walter’s near-hysterical military-imperial attitudes—he’s eager to enforce

his “rules” by pulling a gun in the lanes—and distorted nostalgia for Vietnam only reveal late 1990 to be a moment when Uncle Sam’s acting the overgrown bully-boy, trying to regain some of his tough-guy self by steamrolling Hussein’s Iraq in the First Gulf War. Might-is-right Walter’s gun-brandishing epitomizes that conflict, with the U.S. suddenly turning its weapons on Iraq to ostensibly enforce the “rules” of international law. But neither Lebowski (Jewish) nor Sobchak (Polish) are “all-American” WASPs. And while one’s checking out or tripping out, the other’s trying too (blow)hard to defend and declare his red-white-and-blue-ness. (Super-patriot Walter was largely based on John Milius, a right-wing aficionado of guns and the military who co-wrote Apocalypse Now, coining “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” and Clear and Present Danger; he also co-wrote and directed the small-town-kids-fight-Commies ’80s movie Red Dawn.) Exasperated by Walter’s half-cocked rants, the Dude rejects Walter’s headstrong, bullying approach: “You fuckin’ asshole! Everything’s a fuckin’ travesty with you, man.” But, along the way, Walter’s inciting of his peacenik friend can addle the Dude’s politics—the left-ish beach bum even parrots President Bush (from an August 5 press conference on TV in the supermarket) when he tells the big-shot Lebowski, “This aggression will not stand, man.”

That other Lebowski (based on Welles’ Charles Foster Kane) is the more respectable right-wing citizen of the era—the Reaganite/Bush Republican;

this white man’s house is so large it has a “west wing”. He hates “bums” as much as Walter hates “amateurs”; obsessed with achievement, this self-important big-guy has his aptly-named lackey Brandt (Philip Seymour Hoffman) show off his trophies (and a picture of him with Nancy Reagan) to the visiting Dude, but he ends up exposed by his left-wing “bum” alter ego—whose mere same-name existence and laidback attitude irritate him—as a hollow, not-so-grand ol’ boy of the GOP. He’s no Big Lebowski but a Big Lie, having married a child-bride out of vanity, hoped for her death, stolen from charity, and tried to dupe a Dude whom he hopes is a dope. The ex-hippie calls this buzzkill a “human paraquat”—the pesticide the U.S. got Mexico to spray on its marijuana in the late ’70s.

Back in that otherworld of the lanes, bowling on, between the Dude on the left and Walter on the right, is Donny (family name Kerabatsos), not so much middle-of-the-road as a few steps behind, lagging but still tagging along. (The Dude can be a Donny-like P.I., stumbling in the dark even as he declares that “new shit has come to light”). Amid all these caricatures and extremes, Donny’s an everyday Johnny ignored, a Citizen Nobody. This usually neglected or told-to-“shut up!” guy gets his own moment when his ball hits nine pins but the tenth wobbles, staying up. Donny looks at it,

disconcerted. Soon after, he, unlike the pin, falls, dying of a heart attack in the trio’s fight with nihilists.

Both those nihilists and the film’s creative-types—feminist installation-artist Maude Lebowski; her video-artist pal Knox Harrington; the Dude’s landlord, Marty, who does interpretive dance—reflect the post-Nixon decades of political disillusionment and disengagement, in America and beyond, where political citizenship or activism becomes confused with and/or replaced by membership in or allegiance to niche-subcultures. And so there’s Maude and Knox’s fake European art-world intellectualism, the Playboy-ish Bunny’s sex-doll act, and even the German techno-music avant-garde (Uli and his nihilist buddies were in the Kraftwerk-like band Autobahn—one of their albums, Nagelbett [Nail Bed], is in Knox’s record

collection). All are selfish in their pursuits: Maude dupes the Dude into inseminating her, Knox is schmoozing up the art-world ladder, the Minnesota-raised Bunny seems to want the SoCal high life, and the nihilists are bent on their fake-kidnap scheme to get the ransom from Bunny’s husband.

While the Dude’s unconcerned with money—he only seems nudged by Walter’s fervour, and perhaps his own mild bemusement, to look into Bunny’s husband—this portrait of mad-manhood, from the Dude as “private dick” to his worries about Uli and his gang cutting off his “Johnson”, sees citizenship’s cost come with sexual transgression. The antichrist-like Jesus Quintana (John Turturro), a cocky, pantsuit-wearing arch-nemesis on the lanes, is—so Walter says—“a sex offender” who exposed himself to a child and then, post-release, had to go door-to-door in his neighbourhood to tell people of his conviction. (Yet Walter parrots Jesus’ all-the-more disturbing phrase, “I’m gonna fuck you in the ass,” when trying to scare a boy into confessing he stole the Dude’s car.) At large in his community, Jesus is a social pariah . . . but on the narrow lanes of his fetishized subculture (he lasciviously flicks his tongue at his ball’s holes before throwing), he can still swagger and strut.

The steepest price—albeit accidental—that’s paid for the Dude’s sleuthing is Donny’s life, lost in the parking lot of the alley, beneath its neon stars. On a bluff overlooking the Pacific, Walter’s rambling eulogy includes references to soldiers lost in ’Nam and melodramatically closes with Horatio’s tribute to the fallen Hamlet: “Good night, sweet prince” (Act 5, Scene 2, l. 312). Yet

it’s the Dude who’s the mostly at-ease Hamlet here, a non-anxious, happily indecisive, much less active riff on the Great Dane, not self-questioning or questing much but remaining, ultimately, true to his own droll stroll against the mainstream tide.

With his counter-culture claims—penning the first draft of the Port Huron Statement; being one of the Seattle Seven—the Dude’s politics seem faded, consigned to the photo-album pages of a rebellious past, two musty decades old. (Calling the Malibu police chief a “fuckin’ fascist” after he hit him with his coffee mug seems more of a throwback than a conscientious stand.) But in the present of this film—even though, in a marginalized L.A. (Venice Beach, the Valley, Pasadena), the Dude’s repeatedly used, attacked (including by ferret), pissed on (vicariously, via his rug and increasingly damaged car), and is never the typical “big man” of the title—he abides . . . as the one man, in a polarized America full of poseurs, who’s most comfortable with who he is. This slacker-sleuth takes the piss out of not just Hollywood’s noir detective but its action hero, using humour itself to be anti-establishment. Again and again, he lights up his sarcasm (to the thug beholding his bowling ball: “Obviously, you’re not a golfer”), his irony (a poster of Nixon bowling), and his quick retorts (to the thug dunking him in his toilet as he demands the money: “It’s down there somewhere—let me take another look”). Over and over, this chilled-out dude won’t take anything too seriously or let the man get him down. With its toking, strike-rolling, ambling P.I. closing the case his own easygoing way, The Big Lebowski is casually rebellious in its deflation of the myth of the movie hero, that ego-dick-tical, block-busting, big-screen substitute for the real-world citizen.

Works Cited

Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola. United Artists, 1979.

The Big Lebowski. Directed by Joel Coen. Written by Ethan and Joel Coen. Gramercy, 1998.

The Big Sleep. Directed by Howard Hawks, Warner Bros., 1946.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. c. 1600. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford UP, 1995, pp. 653-690.

The author, a professor of film studies, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All film stills are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.