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

Maude (Julianne Moore) in her studio sizing up The Dude


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.


Tara Reed as the reckless Bunny, 
driving back to L.A. with all ten toes.


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.

[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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