The Big Lebowski: The Pardoner’s Tale of How the Bums Lost the Cold War
The Big Lebowski: The Pardoner’s Tale of
How the Bums Lost the Cold War
updated on August 18, 2023
The Big Lebowski (1998): directors
and writers: Ethan and Joel Coen
cast: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, David Huddleston, Tara Reid
Introduction
There are many obvious
comments one could write on the irony of the American-led neoliberal system
falling apart a quarter century after Mikhail Gorbachev announced the
dissolution of the Soviet Union. Donald Trump may be an American version of
Boris Yeltsin, who assaulted his own parliament with tanks less than two years
after coming to power. We may soon be seeing Trump too, either literally or
figuratively, firing heavy artillery at Congress and other American
institutions. Yet rather than editorialize further on this point, I examine
this historical moment through the Coen brothers film, The Big Lebowski,
a superficially unserious film that proved to be one of the most incisive
political commentaries in the past twenty years.
Synopsis (spoiler alert)
Setting: Los Angeles,
September 1990.
There are two Jeffrey
Lebowskis in this story. The older one (David Huddleston) is a wealthy
“self-made” businessman and philanthropist. The younger one is an aging peacenik
who has fallen on hard times. Henceforth, to avoid confusion, the older one
will be referred to as “Lebowski” and the younger one by his nickname “The
Dude.”
Due to a war injury
inflicted by a “Chinaman” in Korea, Lebowski is confined to a wheelchair. He
has a young trophy wife, Bunny, whose behavior has become problematic because
she owes money to a businessman who deals in pornography and other shady
enterprises.
The businessman sends
two of his minions to rough up Lebowski and threaten graver punishments if he
doesn’t settle his wife’s debts. However, the thugs go to the home of a
different Jeffrey Lebowski, The Dude (Jeff Bridges). They assault and threaten
him, and urinate on his prized carpet, then the thugs leave after realizing
that the humble surroundings mean that they have the wrong guy. It may have
been no accident that they were sent there, and they may have been working for
Lebowski rather than the pornographer.
When The Dude meets with
his friends at their weekly bowling game, they discuss the incident. He is
outraged that a “Chinaman” peed on his precious carpet during the home
invasion. Curiously, the former hippy uses a derogatory racist term that his
namesake—the other politically conservative Republican Lebowski—will use in an
upcoming scene. The two Lebowskis live in each other’s Jungian shadows. In this
opening act of the story, The Dude is becoming something that his younger self
would have disavowed. He is going to go to war over his ruined rug. Lewbowski,
on the other hand, is losing his grip on the truth he covers with his vanity:
he is not a self-made success and he is more of a bum than he would like to
admit.
Walter, a traumatized,
volatile Vietnam War veteran, convinces his friend, The Dude, to stand up to
this “unchecked aggression.” He is borrowing a term used by President Bush at
the time to describe the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a month earlier. He must go
to the other Lebowski and demand justice. A tale of hubris, absurdity, and woe
ensues.
The Dude gets a meeting
with Lebowski, but Lebowski denies any moral obligation to compensate The Dude.
The Dude knows he has a rather tenuous claim that no court would recognize. The
elder Lebowski is responsible for his wife’s debts, but not for the thugs who
assaulted The Dude and pissed on his rug. Lebowski quickly sizes up The Dude as
an unemployed bum, so he goes on to berate him with moral authority, because he
doesn’t live with the mentality of a victim. He prides himself on being a
wealthy, self-made philanthropist who succeeded in spite of the physical
handicap inflicted on him during his military service. His parting shot is a
comment on the entire history of late 20th century American life—the triumph of
the Reagan era, the defeat of the counter-culture, the fall of the communist
bloc, and the rise of the new world order based on American supremacy: “Your
revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. The bums will
always lose.” On the way out of the house, The Dude tells Mr. Lebowski’s
assistant, “The old man told me to take any rug in the house,” and he walks out
with a replacement for his damaged carpet.
In a surprising twist,
The Dude is soon called by Lebowski because his wife has been kidnapped, and he
wants The Dude’s help in solving the case. He says he believes that the thugs
who beat up The Dude might be the kidnappers. The Dude could help identify them
and link them to Bunny’s creditors, if he drops off the ransom. We never learn
whether Lebowski targeted The Dude from the beginning, arranged the home
invasion to set him up as a fall guy, or whether he thought of this fake
kidnapping plot as events occurred. Perhaps the writers wanted to suggest that
The Dude was like Lee Harvey Oswald—a patsy who was chosen for his role several
steps back in a layered plot.
Walter rides along for
the ransom drop-off, and argues that they should keep the ransom money and drop
off a “ringer”—an empty briefcase stuffed with underwear. He is certain that
Bunny kidnapped herself and is conspiring with her abductors. He assures The
Dude that no harm will come from this deception. After they drop-off the
ringer, the briefcase given to them by Lebowski, which they believe contains
the ransom money, is left in The Dude’s car while they go bowling. When they
return, they discover that the car has been stolen.
After many confusing turns, with “a lotta
ins, a lotta outs,” as The Dude describes the case, he gets closer to
Lebowski’s daughter, Maude (Julianne Moore), an avant-garde artist.
She reclaims the carpet he took because it was of sentimental value to her. ,
Maude gets the rug back by a punch on The Dude’s jaw delivered by a muscular
male assistant. The Dude never feels the need to retaliate against this
aggression. She apologizes later and he forgives.
The Dude learns from Maude that her father
has paid the ransom by taking funds from the charity she manages with him. She
wants The Dude to recover the ransom money and offers him a ten percent reward.
Then finally, The Dude realizes something that Maude has not. Lebowski never
put the ransom money in the briefcase. The missing briefcase in his stolen car
is also a “ringer.” He understands that Lebowski saw the ransom demand as a way
to transfer a million dollars from the charity to himself, and blame the loss
of the money on The Dude—a loser who no one will care about. Lebowski may have
hired Bunny and her friends to fake the kidnapping, promising to give them a
share of the ransom money. Another possibility is that the abduction was real,
and Lebowski took advantage of the event to embezzle funds from the charity.
Despite having seen a severed toe (taken, we learn later, from one of the
abductors) as evidence that Bunny had been kidnapped, Lebowski feels certain
that the kidnappers have no captive to hold for ransom, and no intention to
harm her. Therefore, he keeps the money for himself, quite sure that no harm
will come to Bunny. Or perhaps he doesn’t care if Bunny dies.
The audience does not know with certainty if
Bunny by herself, or Bunny and her friends, conspired with Lebowski. This is
left as a mystery. However, the kidnappers mistakenly believe that there is
lost ransom money to recover, which indicates that Bunny knew something they
did not. They don’t realize that Lebowski never handed any cash over to The
Dude. If Lebowski ever thought it was a real kidnapping, he doesn’t seem to
care if The Dude or Bunny gets hurt. His only objective was to get the one
million dollars then tell his daughter that The Dude stole or lost it.
Near the end of the film, we see Bunny
driving alone and returning to Lebowski’s home. It seems that she was in Las
Vegas, far away from the alleged kidnappers. This scene suggests that
everything may have happened without her knowledge, or, more likely, that she
conspired with Lebowski against her nihilist friends. She had the motive of
needing to pay off her debts. Her best strategy was to stay loyal to her
husband, use him to pay off her debts, and use and deceive everyone else. If
someone must lose a toe, so be it.
The Dude confronts Lebowski in the final act
of the story, telling him that he finally understood the entire plot. Lebowski
confirms it but says, “So what?” There is nothing The Dude can do about it. He
is just a bum who no one cares about. The bum loses just like the bums lost the
Cold War and the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
The Dude finds out that
Lebowski is a fraud in more ways than this. Maude tells him that his wealth
came from his wife, and that it exists at present only because of the careful
management of the family fortune by the mother and daughter. Lebowski is no
more than a vain man who wanted to have a trophy wife and be seen as a great
patriot and philanthropist.
As the story comes to
its conclusion, Maude seduces The Dude because she has been in search of the
ideal sperm donor for the child she intends to raise without a man. It helps,
she says, that he is someone she won’t have to see socially later on. She
chooses him also because she finds qualities in The Dude that suit her tastes.
He is intelligent and capable of enjoying healthy relations with a woman, but
he is not suffering from the widespread anhedonia and misogyny that she finds
all around her in the wasteland of L.A. The story wraps up with the narrator, a
mysterious cowboy observer of the tale, telling us there is “a little Lebowski
on the way.”
_____
When The Big
Lebowski had its first run in the cinema in 1998, it was, like many
classics, not immediately recognized as such. People left the theater mildly
amused but shrugging off its weirdness. It took time and deeper reflection,
upon repeated viewings on DVD, for audiences to appreciate everything that was
packed into it that elevated it to its classic and cult status, as attested to
by the annual Lebowski Fest since 2002.
The film is a mix of
several genres: Western, crime, noir, surrealist, buddy film, holy quest,
comedy, and subversive socio-political commentary. At first glance it appears
to be just a comedy about fools mixed up in a kidnapping caper. Yet for reasons
that became apparent upon later contemplation, the writers set the story in
September 1990, a month after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and a year before the
declared end of the Soviet Union. President George H. W. Bush, Saddam Hussein,
the Gulf War, and the Vietnam War all play important roles in the story.
The Historical Context
After launching
political and economic reforms, and achieving momentous agreements with the
United States to reduce both nuclear and conventional weapons, Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev made his famous speech at the United Nations in 1988. He
announced the end of Cold War hostilities and the possibility of a new peaceful
and balanced world order. The assembled international audience reacted with
stunned applause, but the US government soon came to take this as a cue to
establish uni-polar American supremacy.
In the summer of 1990,
shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait, president George H. W. Bush was also making
frequent mention of a new world order, but he remained vague about whether he
agreed with Gorbachev’s vision of a lasting balanced order. Six months later,
the historic overwhelming display of American military strength was made in the
Iraqi desert. From then until September 2015, when Russia entered the conflict
in Syria, at the invitation of the Syrian government, the United States made a
long series of unopposed, unilateral interventions. These interventions were
sometimes executed under the flag of NATO or a “coalition of the willing.” The
US launched these wars and regime change operations without any need to worry
about opposition from a rival superpower or the international community. When
the use of military force was inconvenient, sanctions and other punitive
actions were employed, without any concern for international law.
Lebowski Studies
Subversive Carnivalesque
Humor
One analysis of The
Big Lebowski’s political themes by Paul Martin and Valerie Renegar states
that it is a highly subversive film. They argue that the film:
... explores the ability of carnivalesque rhetorical strategies to
challenge hegemonic social hierarchies and the social order in general. Working
through grotesque realism, the inversion of hierarchies, structural and
grammatical experimentation, and other tropes, the carnivalesque encourages
audiences to achieve a critical distance through laughter and realize the
constructed nature of the social world.
They say the genre helps
audiences “reflect on, and ultimately reject, their fears of power, law and the
sacred.” The story features “multiple dismembered body parts, an outwardly
wealthy and successful character who turns out to be neither,” and an
“intentionally confused plot interrupted by dream sequences” to achieve its
effect on the viewer.[1]
In their book The Big Lebowski, J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters note the film specifically “subverts traditional notions of masculinity” with a morality tale about what happens when male ego is challenged.[2] The film examines what happens when one decides it is time to “draw a line in the sand” or say an “unchecked aggression will not stand.”
Contemporary observers
believe that it was the second president Bush, the son, who was prodded by
Oedipal doubts to overcome his father’s reluctance to go to war, but the story
of the two president Bushes is really one of doubling down on masculine
insecurity and the readiness to make war. Bush Sr. was mocked during the
election campaign of 1988 for being a wimp, for being the boring type who is
“every woman’s first husband,” and this insecurity lay behind his decision to
draw a “line in the sand” and announce that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was a
transgression that “will not stand.”[3]
The film refers to the way Bush succumbed to the threat to his masculinity, and connects it to the same problem faced by The Dude. In the opening scene, he is shown, pathetically, buying a quart of cream with a post-dated check. Behind the cashier, as he writes the check, a small television plays news footage from August 1990, right after Iraq invaded Kuwait, of President Bush saying “this aggression will not stand.” On the check we see the date: September 11, 1991—exactly one year after Bush gave his “toward a new world order” speech to Congress. The filmmakers couldn’t have known, but of course, this became an uncanny premonition of the infamous day ten years later when Bush Jr. launched the endless “war against terror.” In the next scene, The Dude’s landlord asks him for the rent check because “tomorrow’s the 10th,” and thus this scene delivers for the careful observer the joke that in addition to not having enough cash for a quart of cream, he had to buy it fraudulently with a check post-dated one day and one year into the future.
But is it really 1990? The writers created confusion about what year it actually was. In the opening, the narrator says imprecisely “it took place in the early 90s, just about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis.” Careful analysis reveals that it is September 1990, not 1991 as written on the check, which would explain why video footage of President Bush speaking in August 1990 is on the television behind the cashier. If it is 1990, then The Dude is committing a petty fraud by post-dating his check not just one day but one year in the future, hoping the clerk doesn’t notice. This puts him on the same moral level as the other Lebowski, with the only difference being that between sixty-nine cents and a million dollars. The Coen brothers are known for making their protagonists suffer immensely as soon as they make an unethical choice, no matter how small the indiscretion is.
Near the end of the
story, Walter is heard mumbling about the upcoming invasion and the difference
between desert and jungle warfare, so the writers left a well-hidden but clear
indication that The Dude is going to battle for his rug concurrently with the
president’s 1990 declaration that “this aggression will not stand.”
|
The
Big Lebowski is set in September 1990,
not September 1991 as suggested by the check that The Dude writes in the
opening scene. Operation Desert Shield, the buildup of troops, lasted from
August 2, 1990 to January 17, 1991. In the film, Walter talks in the future
tense about the upcoming combat phase, Operation Desert Storm, which lasted
from January 17, 1991 to February 28, 1991: Walter:
“Sure, you’ll see some tank battles. Fighting in desert is very
different from fighting in jungle. Nam was a foot soldier’s war,
whereas this thing should, you know, be a piece of cake. I
mean, I had an M16, Jacko, not an Abrams fucking tank.... Whereas, what
we have here... Fig-eaters wearing towels on their heads, trying to find
reverse on a Soviet tank.” |
By the time of the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was able to win by focusing on the message that it was “the economy, stupid,” so the post-dated check is a way of referencing America’s accumulated debt, the post-dated checks Presidents Reagan and Bush had written to “win the Cold War” and display American military supremacy to the post-Soviet world. War is money. Money is debt. War is debt.
Nonetheless, the story
does much more than just condemn the US leadership. More importantly, it shows
how the entire country, including pacifists like The Dude, went along for the
ride. The liberal and pacifist extremes of opposition were pulled into the
whirlwind. What was left of the counterculture of the 1960s was too weak, or
else it capitulated like the story’s protagonist, from a haze of
self-indulgence and retreat, drinking White Russians (!!),
smoking pot and bowling. It is an additional philosophical question to ask
whether The Dude’s apathy puts him on a path toward the nihilism of the gang of
cretins attempting to extort the ransom. Roused from his disengagement from the
world to face an aggression, The Dude reluctantly takes up the challenge, and
of course it ends in tragedy. Donny, symbol of the passive populace, dies in
the crossfire, and compensation for the urine-soaked carpet is never obtained.
Late in the story it is
revealed that The Dude was one of the drafters of The
Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of the
1960s radical student movement. He adds that it was the original one, “not the
compromised second draft.” He also mentions that he was part of the Seattle
Seven, a line which ties the character to the creators’ actual inspiration for
the story, Jeff Dowd, who was a member of the Seattle Seven who later worked in
Hollywood and befriended the Coen brothers.[4]
In spite of his past
commitment to pacifism, The Dude is urged on by his Vietnam veteran friend and
drawn into conflict to right an aggression against his prized possession. It is
just a rug, but The Dude is fiercely attached to it because it is a fetishized
object tied to his drug and alcohol dependency. He lies on it while stoned and
takes the “magic carpet rides” that the Coen brothers depict as dream
sequences.
In making his claim for
justice to his namesake and adversary, he even inadvertently uses the
president’s statement to Saddam. “This will not stand,” he utters lamely,
simply because it was a meme of the time, a line on everyone’s lips. He
restates it in counterculture argot by meekly adding “man” to the phrase with a
telling embarrassment and hesitation. “This will not stand... man.” This is a
demonstration of how propaganda works through repetition, entering the
collective consciousness until individuals can repeat its phrases like actors
who have learned a script. There are other instances in the film that show how
the characters have unwittingly become conveyors of propaganda terms as they
reuse them for their own purposes. They
talk about a “line in the sand” that can’t be crossed, and by the end The Dude
ends up repeating to Lebowski, “Where’s the fucking money, Lebowski?” —exactly
what his tormentors had said to him in the first act of the story.
The Dude doesn’t only succumb to the challenge
to answer the aggression (while later facing a threat of castration from the
nihilists and another of getting “fucked” by a bowling league rival). He also
gets pulled into Walter’s scheme to keep all the ransom money rather than to
merely settle for the $20,000 handling fee. They conclude that they might as
well keep it if they are sure that the whole thing is a scam and the trophy
wife kidnapped herself. After this, Maude offers him ten percent if he can
recover the ransom, which they believe has gone missing in The Dude’s stolen
car. Yet even after this offer, he attempts to play both sides by trying to
collect the $20,000 in advance from Lebowski. Like the characters in
Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale who set out to meet the grim reaper
and kill him, Walter and The Dude forget their original purpose and are
overtaken by greed.
The Dude, Walter and Donny
The Dude (Jeff Bridges),
Walter (John Goodman), Donny (Steve Buscemi)
Many fans of the film
have debated the meanings of the trio of bowlers that includes The Dude (Jeff
Bridges), trigger-happy Vietnam veteran Walter (John Goodman), and the passive
Donny (Steve Buscemi). A common reading of this trio is that The Dude and
Walter represent two opposing political wings of American life: liberal
“pacifism” (self-perceived and self-deceived on this point) and reactionary
militarism. Donny represents the ignored and uncomprehending masses who must
simply be spectators in the political theater of these polarized elites. Thus,
it is the war party (Walter) who continually berates Donny to “shut the fuck
up” and stay out of the political and strategic discussions of how to respond to
the aggression and the kidnapping. The Dude is the same, but just not so harsh
about it. He too hardly seems to acknowledge Donny’s presence. Donny never
interacts with any characters besides Walter and The Dude, which led to
speculation that he is a figment of their imagination throughout the film.
The odd-couple pairing
of The Dude and Walter says many things about the uneasy coexistence of
political opposites within America. If anything good has come out of their
ill-advised quest for justice, it is in the hint that Walter’s traumatized soul
has healed just a little. In the final moments The Dude explodes in anger and
finally gets Walter to face the truth that nothing in this misadventure has had
anything to do with his traumatic experiences in Vietnam.
A curious aspect of
Walter’s biography is that he converted to Judaism when he married his wife,
but she has divorced him. He now sticks with his adopted faith and looks after
his ex-wife’s dog while she goes on vacation with her new husband. As Walter represents
American militarism, the Coen brothers may have wanted to imply something here
about the United States’ relationship with Israel. Julian Assange provided some
perspective, as the American government and media were making frenzied
allegations in December 2016 that Russia interfered with its domestic politics:
... there is, however, another country that has interfered in U.S.
elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has
corrupted America’s legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that
corruption to initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted
unnecessary and unwinnable wars and has stolen American technology and military
secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media to spread its own propaganda
provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all that and more
through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby that oddly is
not subject to the accountability afforded by the Foreign Agents Registration
Act (FARA) of 1938, even though it manifestly works on behalf of a foreign
government. That country is, of course, Israel.[5]
Holy Quest
In a work of collected
essays on The Big Lebowski,[6]
Andrew Rabin writes that The Big Lebowski is a version of the
quest for the Holy Grail, with Los Angeles presented as the Medieval wasteland:
As bowlers, Lebowski’s grail knights seek to master a game which
idealizes repetitive, cyclical movement in a confined, constructed and utterly
controllable environment... Bowling offers them an escape into a predictable
world isolated from the chaotic nihilism of late-20th-century culture.[7]
Their quest forces them
to leave these confines and contend with the wider world where they find
deception, avarice, violence, duplicity, and manipulation—everything the
counter-culture opposed in the 1960s. For The Dude there was no escape in
bowling, White Russians (Kahlua, vodka, and cream), marijuana and refusal to
accept “gainful employment.” We are all captives of our era.
Victory for Matriarchy
The most ambiguous
question left by the story is what to make of Maude’s seduction of The Dude.
She obviously represents the establishment of a matriarchal order in which
women may wisely rule with the cooperation of a new kind of “successful” man—a
selected breed of evolved dudes who will help women lead in a new peaceful era.
She reveals that her father is merely a front for the family fortune.
The inversion of sex
roles is portrayed comically in the dream sequence in which The Dude dances and
shakes his ass before Maude’s female gaze. But the film leaves open the
question of whether Maude is a benign force. She made restrained but
unnecessary use of violence on a few occasions, which makes her less of a pacifist
than her chosen man. She could be a power-hungry usurper, conqueror of a breed
of men who have become lost boys condemned to living in perpetual adolescence.
They have no parental responsibilities, and seem to be needed only for
friendship, occasional heavy lifting, and sperm donation.
In several ways we see
Maude’s contradictory attitude toward The Dude. She likes him somewhat but does
not respect him. She has chosen him as the biological father of the child she
wants to raise alone, but she disrespects him in several ways. She tells him
straight to his face that he was chosen because she wants the father to be
someone who has no interest in being a father and someone she won’t have to see
socially. Many men would feel insulted by this, but The Dude abides.
Furthermore, she steals back the rug by using violence against him instead of
asking nicely for it. She uses him to recover the ransom money, with no regard
for the fact that this might put his life in danger. She arrogantly assumes
that she knows what has really happened in the kidnapping caper, but it is The
Dude who is first to figure out that Lebowski never put the ransom money in the
suitcase. She comes into his home without permission with a plan to seduce him,
and wears his robe. This is an act which he takes note of even while he is
distracted by the sight of her naked body being offered to him. She loves art
and would probably like to have a child with some artistic talent. She shows
some interest in him when he tells her that he used to be in the music
business. However, when he says that he was just a roadie, her face shows
disappointment. In every way she expresses no interest in him as a person and
shows no respect for his dignity. She has reversed the traditional roles of men
and women, but she has only usurped male power and turned it into female power.
She has not created an equal relationship or solidarity among women. She has
continued, above all, to act as a member of the ruling class. There could never
be any sisterly solidarity between Maude and her step-mother, Bunny.
Conclusion
The Coen brothers don’t
seem interested in commenting on their films or making sequels, but The
Big Lebowski is one that screams out for follow-up during this time
when America is reaping the whirlwind of what it started in 1990. The question
about Maude’s true nature and the potential of matriarchy could be answered by
showing us how The Little Lebowski has turned out a quarter century later. It
would be good to know how the progeny of Maude and The Dude (and grandchild of
the other Lebowski), at the age of thirty, would face this historic turning
point when the Democratic-Republican one-party order, along with its propaganda
machinery, is crumbling, just as surely as the Soviet order disappeared under
Gorbachev.
But perhaps the sequel
is not necessary because The Big Lebowski is the story of the
period around 2020 as much as it is the story of 1990-91. The capitulation of
the American people is represented by the defeat of “the bums” and The Dude’s
long absence from the struggle. When he is finally roused to action, he goes to
war not to defend life, family, or community, but to restore his pride and
obtain compensation for an offense against a mere possession that he could
easily replace. He was “a man for his time and place,” as the narrator states
in the opening. Perhaps the creators of the story dropped their biggest
symbolic hint of this apathetic capitulation by making the “White Russian” the
Dude’s favorite beverage. For anyone who missed the allusion in the film, the
White Russians were the Western capitalist-supported resistance to the
Bolshevik Revolution during the civil war of 1917-22. The Big Lebowski is
said to have caused a revival in the popularity of the drink.
Some analysts of The
Big Lebowski have made the argument that The Dude exemplifies Albert
Camus’ philosophy of how to live with dignity while abiding “the Absurd” of the
human condition. According to professor of philosophy, David Simpson, the
Absurd expresses a fundamental disharmony, a tragic incompatibility, in our
existence.[8]
Camus argues that the Absurd is the product of a confrontation between our
human desire for order, meaning, and purpose in life and the blank, indifferent
“silence of the universe.” Camus wrote, “The absurd is not in man nor in the
world but in their presence together…” Contrary to popular conceptions, the
Absurd does not mean simply that modern life is fraught with paradoxes,
incongruities, and intellectual confusion. The Absurd arises from the human
demand for clarity and transcendence in a cosmos that offers nothing of the
kind. We live in a world that is indifferent to our sufferings and our
protests.
In Camus’ view there are
three possible philosophical responses to this predicament. Two of these he
dismisses as evasions, and the other he puts forward as a proper solution. The
first choice is physical suicide. The second choice, philosophical suicide, is
the belief in a world of solace and meaning beyond our absurd, earthly
existence. Camus rejects this as evasive and fraudulent. The third and only
authentic and valid solution is simply to accept absurdity, or better yet to
embrace it, and carry on. Since the Absurd in his view is an unavoidable,
indeed defining, characteristic of the human condition, the only proper
response to it is full, courageous acceptance. Life, he says, can “be lived all
the better if it has no meaning.”
This third alternative
is to act in conscious revolt. Camus argues that such an act of revolt is far
more than just an individual gesture or an act of solitary complaint. For the
rebel there is a “common good more important than his own destiny” and there
are “rights more important than himself.” He acts “in the name of certain
values which are still indeterminate, but which he feels are common to himself
and to all men” (The Rebel pages15-16). True revolt, then, is not
just for the self, but also for solidarity and compassion for others. Camus
concludes that revolt is thus constrained. If it necessarily involves a
recognition of human community and a common human dignity, it cannot, without
betraying its own true character, treat others as if they were lacking in that
dignity or not a part of that community.
The Dude fulfills the
description of a person who has accepted the Absurd without indulging in the
evasions of physical or philosophical suicide. He accepts everything and rolls
with it, like the tumbleweed that rolls through the film’s opening shot. He’s The
Dude. He’s very cool, for sure. However, he did not always live up to the
standard of acting for the common good, or treating others as if they had
dignity. He’s a long way from being the rebel activist he was in the 1960s. He
is constantly self-medicated and withdrawn from society. He has taken refuge in
the narrow, artificial world governed by the rules of bowling, and abandoned
the larger political struggle. In spite of his good health and intelligence, he
has no job, and no money, apparently. (But the writers never explain why he is
not homeless.) He steals a quart of cream, fails to pay his rent on time, puts
others at risk in a struggle to retrieve a mere possession, and goes along with
deceptive schemes to grab some of the ransom money for himself.
It says something interesting about American culture in the 21st century that The Dude became a heroic figure, and that the film gained its cult status, only after the war on terror began in 2001. In 1998, Americans were in a rare period when their government was not involved in any major military operations (that they knew of), and this may be why the film had little impact at the time of its release. No one could relate to the life of an aging Vietnam war protester. No one seemed to “get it” until it came out a few years later on DVD and people started to see something in it after the second, third and fourth viewing. Thus, audiences began to appreciate the film as their anxiety and opposition mounted over the war on terror and the military invasions of Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003). Yet this was not a story of a hero revolting against war. Americans made a hero out of a character who was, like them, someone who had given up the fight and responded to the times with a shrug and “Fuck it. Let’s go bowling.” A true anti-war movement, if it ever was to appear, was left to the generation of the “little Lebowski” on the way.
A note on The
Pardoner’s Tale
Pardoner: A medieval
preacher delegated to raise money for religious works by soliciting offerings
and granting indulgences.
The Pardoner’s Tale is one of The Canterbury Tales by
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Pardoner initiates his Prologue—briefly accounting his
methods of conning people—and then proceeds to tell a moral tale. Setting out
to kill Death, three young men encounter an Old Man who says that they will
find him under a nearby tree. When they arrive, they discover a hoard of
treasure and decide to stay with it overnight to carry it away the following
morning. It goes without saying that they find Death but do not kill him. None
of them survives the night. The tale is concerned with what the Pardoner says
is his theme: Radix malorum est cupiditas (Greed is the root
of all evil).
Other essays in Lebowski
Studies in: Edward P. Comentale
and Aaron Jaffe, The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, editors (Indiana
University Press, 2009)
Metonymic Hats and
Metaphoric Tumbleweeds: Noir Literary Aesthetics in Miller’s Crossing and The
Big Lebowski
Found Document: The Stranger’s
Commentary and a Note on His Method
A Once and Future
Dude: The Big Lebowski as Medieval Grail-Quest
The Big Lebowski and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing
Historicism
“I’ll Keep Rolling
Along”: Some Notes on Singing Cowboys and Bowling Alleys in The Big
Lebowski
The Really Big Sleep:
Jeffrey Lebowski as the Second Coming of Rip Van Winkle
The Dude and the New
Left
No Literal Connection:
Mass Commodification, U.S. Militarism, and the Oil Industry in The Big
Lebowski
Dudespeak: Or, How to
Bowl like a Pornstar
Lebowski and the Ends of
Postmodern American Comedy
Lebowski Icons: The Rug,
The Iron Lung, The Tiki Bar, and Busby Berkeley
Logjammin’ and
Gutterballs: Masculinities in The Big Lebowski
Holding Out Hope for the
Creedence: Music and the Search for the Real Thing in The Big Lebowski
Professor Dude: An
Inquiry into the Appeal of His Dudeness for Contemporary College Students
What Condition the
Postmodern Condition Is In: Collecting Culture in The Big Lebowski
On the White Russians
Size Matters
“Fuck It, Let’s Go
Bowling”: The Cultural Connotations of Bowling in The Big Lebowski
Abiding (as) Animal:
Marmot, Pomeranian, Whale
Enduring and Abiding
The Goofy and the
Profound: A Non-Academic’s Perspective on the Lebowski Achievement
Notes
[1]
Paul “Pablo” Martin and Valerie R. Renegar, “‘The Man for His
Time’ The Big Lebowski as Carnivalesque Social
Critique,” Communication Studies, 57 (September 2007):
299-313.
[2]
J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters, The Big Lebowski (BFI
Publishing, 2007).
[3] Curt Suplee, “Sorry George, but the Image Needs
Work,” Washington Post, July 10, 1988.
[4] Colin Patrick, “The Dude, the Port Huron Statement and the Seattle Seven,” Mentalfloss, January 10, 2011. http://mentalfloss.com/article/26831/dude-port-huron-statement-and-seattle-seven.
[5] “Assange: Forget Russia, The Real Threat to America comes from Israel and the Israel Lobby,” Embassy of the State of Palestine. https://www.palestine.cz/en/newsd-assangeforget-russiathe-real-threat-to-america-comes-from-israel-and-the-israel-lobby. Accessed
August 18, 2023.
[6]
Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, The Year’s Work in Lebowski
Studies, editors. (Indiana University Press, 2009).
[7]
Andrew Rabin, “A Once and Future Dude: The Big Lebowski as
Medieval Grail-Quest,” in Comentale and Jaffe. Some of the sources listed here
(Martin, Renegar, Tyree, Walters, Rabin) were found in an article by Tom Jacobs
entitled “Scholars
and The Big Lebowski: Deconstructing The Dude,” Pacific Standard Magazine, July 11, 2011. https://psmag.com/scholars-and-the-big-lebowski-deconstructing-the-dude-38d135affa3b#.dr5oe9wgm.
[8]
David Simpson, “Albert Camus (1913-1960),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This brief
description of Camus’ philosophy in this section was derived from Simpson’s
article. https://www.iep.utm.edu/camus/#SSH5cii.
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