Fuck it Dude, let’s go bowling

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, ten-year career check-up, and Fargo.

The authors the Coens cite as influences more than anyone else are the three titans of noir/crime/detective fiction, James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. During press for Blood Simple the brothers professed a particular love for Cain. Joel told one interviewer, “We’ve always thought that up at the Low Library at Columbia University, where the names are chiseled up there above the columns in stone—Aristotle, Herodotus, Virgil—that the fourth one should be Cain.” Blood Simple, insofar as it’s a film about two people blowing up their lives due to catastrophic horniness, is a Cain story through and through. Two films later they riffed on Hammett with Miller’s Crossing, which is quite in line with a work like Red Harvest, concerning as it does a corrupt city where no one is redeemable. The Coens have been very explicit about this; Joel told Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret at Positif, “Miller’s Crossing was certainly born from our desire to tell a story the Hammett way.”

That left Chandler as the last of the three unimitated. You know what article you’re reading—enter The Big Lebowski. Again, the Coens are refreshingly not coy about acknowledging the influence. “We wanted to do a Chandler kind of story,” Joel told Doug Stone in 1998, “how it moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery. As well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.” Adds Ethan, “And there was something attractive about having the main character not be a private eye, but just some pothead intuitively figuring out the ins and outs of an elaborate intrigue. And then there’s Walter, whose instincts are always wrong.”

I don’t want to belabor this point too much, since Lebowski stands on its own as so funny and so great, but some of the characters are such direct lifts or clever modifications they bear noting. The first is the title character himself, the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), by which I mean not Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), but the rich husband of Bunny (Tara Reid) who employs The Dude in resolving (or not?) her kidnapping. Confined to a wheelchair, he is a direct analogue to General Sternwood in The Big Sleep (Charles Waldron in the Howard Hawks adaptation), who employs Marlowe to deal with a blackmail situation involving his younger daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers). Here’s how Joel interprets this character to Positif:

Here again, that has been inspired by Chandler. You find him in The Big Sleep, and also in The High Window. He’s a recurrent character, the domineering, all-powerful figure who becomes a catalyst. Chandler’s novels cut across all the social classes of Los Angeles, and this character is at the top of the ladder. He represents Money. He appears in Chinatown, he’s contributed to the town’s construction. He symbolizes an old order, which, in the end, you discover is all a sham.

Sternwood has two daughters, the elegant older sister Vivian (Lauren Bacall) and the wild-child source of trouble Carmen. Ethan points out how they have lifted these types and their dynamic with the protagonist, saying, “We had, as so often in his novels, a mature and sophisticated woman, Maude, played by Julianne Moore, and a licentious and depraved girl, Bunny, played by Tara Reid. The main character is often involved in a romantic subplot with the first type of woman.” For a visual point of comparison, let’s look at how Hawks introduces his flirtatious girl in The Big Sleep (this is the opening scene FYI):

Martha Vickers… Hello. Now consider how the Coens have updated and twisted this moment in Lebowski:

All credit to Reid for that delivery, but wow, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s pained laughing grimace is truly one of the funniest things ever put on film.

Last but not least, we must consider The Dude’s resemblance to Marlowe. One way to understand Lebowski is as a Marlowe story where his role is played by the most un-Marlowe-like character possible. Whereas Marlowe is a private eye by trade, Jeffrey has the role of detective thrust upon him and is wildly unprepared to unravel a mystery. Marlowe is something of an ascetic—constantly rebuffing the women throwing themselves at him and working long hours on cases that don’t pay. The Dude is, of course, a slacker extraordinaire who tokes up as the Big Lebowski delivers his key exposition laying out his task in rescuing Bunny from her kidnappers.

Looking below the surface though, I see a number of qualities that unite the two. I’ve already quoted Ethan as saying that they liked the way The Dude works through the case intuitively rather than logically, but I question how far that really is from how Marlowe works. Putting aside a whole thing I need to write about detective fiction and the fundamentally magical and uncanny nature of generating ideas, I think of a moment in Farewell, My Lovely where Marlowe, in the midst of working two unrelated cases, walks to the elevator and is suddenly struck by an idea and runs back to the office to make a call. We’re not told what the idea was for quite a while but it turns out to be a gut instinct that the two cases are connected and how to prove it.

In addition to their cutting wits and love of a stiff drink, what truly unites Marlowe and The Dude is their mutual inability to walk away from a situation. Marlowe is often hired for jobs that his employers want to keep contained—just pay off Carmen’s blackmailer, don’t look into her gambling debts or what became of Vivian’s missing husband. But once Marlowe gets his teeth into a case he can’t let go until every loose end is tied up. And he can’t resist putting himself in these situations in the first place. I think of a moment at the very beginning of Farewell, My Lovely where Marlowe watches a hulking colossus of a man—“Moose” Malloy—walk into a building and then bodily throw another man out into the street. Marlowe stares at the double doors, thinking. “It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.”

As I rewatch these movies I’m at pains to notice how the Coens construct their plots and keep the action moving forward. Lebowksi relies so much on the way The Dude just keeps showing up. Long past the point where any normal person would cut their losses and walk away from the whole situation, The Dude keeps his appointments. Maude, whom he has never met, leaves him a voicemail asking him to come by to talk and we just cut to him arriving at her studio—no hesitation, no justification, he just does it. It’s a pretty clever and subtle bit of storytelling sleight-of-hand that also envelops the audience in the reefer haze that clouds the entire film. The action carries along so effortlessly and dreamily that one can occasionally sort of jolt awake, so to speak, asking how they arrived at the present moment and finding they are unable to trace a path backward to the last stable point in the story. It’s an ingenious mimicking of the disoriented way The Dude stumbles through his investigation without ever quite knowing where he’s come from or where he’s going.

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It wouldn’t be in the spirit of the film to run through and explicate its plot. The movie can’t keep track of it itself. In interviews for Miller’s Crossing the Coens disavowed any meaning in the film beyond the unfolding of its plot. With Lebowski they have gone even farther. Now the plot itself, though hopelessly convoluted, is ultimately irrelevant. It’s just scaffolding for a bunch of funny scenes and oddball characters. Yet they see even the characterization as basically irrelevant as well. When Gary Susman of the Boston Phoenix asked them why Walter (John Goodman) is an observant Jewish convert in addition to a hot-headed Vietnam veteran, Ethan replied, “What’s the point of any of the characterization? It’s a peg to hang a few gags on him.” Similarly, Ethan said of John Turturro’s character Jesus Quintana, “Originally he was just like a good bowler, the nemesis bowler, but we thought, make him a Hispanic pederast, it’ll give John something to get his teeth into.”

Note that both Bunny’s introduction and The Jesus’ work the same way, where they establish a new character in a memorable way, then deliver a bunch of exposition—in the first case by introducing Uli (Peter Stormare) and mentioning he’s a nihilist, in the second the details of the money and the handoff—then return to the new character for another gag to close the scene. Works every time.

Similarly again, they disavow any real significance of the centrality of bowling to the film. If character traits are just pegs for gags, setting is just fodder for interesting visuals. Joel: “We liked the design aspects of bowling. The sort of retro aspects of it seemed like the right fit for the characters. One of the people this is loosely based on was in an amateur softball league in LA that really took up a lot of his time. We changed that to bowling because bowling seemed more compelling from a visual point of view. It’s the only thing that calls itself a sport where you can smoke and drink beer.”

But in the hands of the right interviewers, the Coens finally start to show a willingness to interpret their own work. In particular I think it’s interesting what Joel told Positif about the relationship their characters have to their historical moment:

The action itself takes place at the beginning of the nineties, but all the characters refer to the culture of thirty years ago, they are its aftermath and mirror. Jeff Bridges is an aging hippie, John Goodman is defined by his Vietnam experience, while Maude has for her blueprints the sixties New York Fluxus artists like Yoko Ono before she met John Lennon, or Carol Schneeman, who literally threw herself into her projects for physical support. Maude owes her a lot! Ben Gazzara also echoes people like Hugh Hefner from that period. The difference from Boogie Nights, which represents the seventies, or Velvet Goldmine, on rock starts like David Bowie in that same period, is that The Big Lebowski doesn’t really take place in the past. It’s a contemporary movie about what’s become of people who were formed and defined by that earlier period.

I guess that makes Lebowski the only not-annoying movie about the Baby Boomer Experience. Wow!

The guys at Positif also were able to get a better answer about the bowling alley. Ethan said, “The movie was conceived as pivoting around the relationship between The Dude and Walter. The idea sprang from the scenes between Barton Fink [Turturro] and Charlie Meadows, who was played by John Goodman. That’s the reason why the bowling seemed an appropriate context: it’s not that the sport isn’t played by women, but they have their own teams. In bowling, there’s a real segregation of the sexes. In The Big Lebowski you spend time exclusively in the company of men. The worlds of the private eye and the Western, which we refer to at the end of the movie, are also very masculine.”

To his point about The Dude’s relationship to Walter being so central, that was the biggest surprise to me on rewatch. I remembered Walter as a supporting character in two or three scenes but in fact he is a constant presence throughout.

Even Jeff Bridges got in on the action, insisting to Susman at the Phoenix the film has a moral dimension. “I think it’s a film about grace, how amazing it is that we’re all allowed to stay alive on this speck hurled out into space, being as screwed up as we all are. Like, Fargo had a moral resonance to it. This one, I think, does as well. It may not be apparent to most people at first. But working in it, kind of bathing in this thing, it rang for me. It’s not a real clear thing that you can say, ‘That’s what it means.’ It’s a little different.”

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Well anyway, that’s enough interpretation. It’s a shaggy movie and this is a shaggy article and I don’t have a grand conclusion for once. What else is there to say about Lebowski except that it’s extremely fucking funny, still? Let’s watch some clips, shall we?

Maude shows The Dude Logjammin’ (Warning: includes grainy VHS nudity):

Fun fact: the other actress in Logjammin’ is Asia Carrera, a real porn star who also has an IQ of 156 and is in Mensa. (I know IQ is fake, don’t @ me).

Walter teaches Larry Sellers a lesson:

I love the runner of The Dude’s car being progressively trashed over the course of the movie.

The Dude talks with Jackie Treehorn:

God, Ben Gazzara is the greatest. Watch Killing of a Chinese Bookie immediately if you’ve never seen it. This scene also highlights just how amazing Jeff Bridges is as well. His line “For you, maybe” goes by so fast but it’s so good and he delivers it perfectly. The dick drawing is a laugh out loud moment for me every single time.

The Dude objects to listening to The Eagles:

Stray thoughts

• The Coens believe deeply that private detectives drive blue VW bugs. Here’s M. Emmett Walsh in Blood Simple:

And here’s Jon Polito’s car in Lebowski:

• Philip Seymour Hoffman RIP, you are perfect in this film, Brandt the GOAT.

• One more Chandlerism: the scene where The Dude is berated by the police chief of Malibu, who tells him that Jackie Treehorn draws a lot of water in that town and says “We got a nice quiet little beach community here… Stay out of Malibu, deadbeat!!” is a close recreation of a scene in Farewell, My Lovely in which the corrupt chief of Bay City tells Marlowe much the same thing.

• This film marks the Coens’ first collaboration with T Bone Burnett as music supervisor, a relationship that will continue with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Inside Llewyn Davis. Carter Burwell’s soundtrack is excellent as always but Burnett makes his presence felt in the way each character sort of has their own soundtrack. Said Ethan to Positif, “It’s the music that defines the character. For the cowboy played by Sam Elliott, Dylan’s “The Man in Me” was chosen at the time of writing. As was “Lujon” by Henri Mancini for Ben Gazzara’s character. The German nihilists are accompanied by techno-pop and Jeff Bridges by Creedence. So there’s a music signature for each of them.”