Essential Noir Films: Sean Geraghty on THE BIG LEBOWSKI
The film begins with an enigmatic, gravelly voiceover. A hard-drinking, constantly smoking gumshoe gets dragged into a complicated web of deception and intrigue involving double-crosses, a mysterious kidnapping, slipping the Mickey, and ransom demands that come complete with severed appendages. Shady characters populate this ever-twisting tale, including a porn kingpin and his hired goons, a millionaire with a dark secret, his missing trophy wife, a shell-shocked war veteran, villainous Germans, and even a femme fatale. And of course, it all takes place in Los Angeles, the city of CHINATOWN, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and THE BIG SLEEP.
And tying this whole whodunit together… is a rug.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI is what happens when you take that Raymond Chandler formula and swap out the detective’s tobacco for marijuana. Make no mistake, The Dude might be pounding back White Russians instead of double whiskeys, but this aimless, aging hippie has found himself in the center of a classic film noir.
The Coen Brothers had long been fans of the genre when they wrote and directed this beloved cult favorite back in 1998. They’d already done more relatively straightforward renditions with MILLER’S CROSSING and BLOOD SIMPLE and even one with a Minnesotan twist in FARGO. But for all its Busby Berkeley dream sequences, disastrous homework interrogation scenes, and marmot-toting New Wave Nihilists, THE BIG LEBOWSKI is their film most directly inspired by the tales of Philip Marlowe.
In place of a cynical, haunted Humphrey Bogart, we find the preternaturally serene Jeff Bridges in the role of Jeff Lebowski, aka The Dude, His Dudeness, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing. And much like The Dude in Los Angeles, Bridges just fits right in there. The Dude is unencumbered by the regrets about the past that plague most noir protagonists, floating through life in jelly sandals and a musty bathrobe instead of a fedora and trench coat.
But after he is mistaken for a millionaire of the same name, two toughs break into Dude’s house and pee on his rug while attempting to collect on the debts of the richer Lebowski’s wife. The Dude hits up the millionaire to get a replacement for his soiled rug, but ends up getting hired to track down this Big Lebowski’s missing spouse instead. What follows is a convoluted case with a lot of in’s and out’s and what-have-you’s, a story every bit as confounding as the traditional potboilers. Just like in THE BIG SLEEP, you’re not quite sure how you got from one plot point to another with all the twists and turns and narrative detours — but in this film all the confusion stems naturally from the stoned logic of the main character.
Alongside The Dude is his unlikely best friend and bowling compatriot, Walter Sobchak, indelibly played by the mighty John Goodman — the best performance in a career of brilliant and under-recognized performances. Walter is a war vet, a common character in the genre, but instead of WWII, he served in Vietnam, a fact he never misses an opportunity to mention. And if the opportunity doesn’t exist, he mentions it anyway. While The Dude reluctantly and unwillingly investigates Bunny Lebowski’s disappearance, Walter dives in with an uzi, eager to take on a new mission after years of treating bowling tournaments like tours in the jungle.
Steve Buscemi plays their meek teammate, Donny. He’s out of his element.
Julianne Moore is deadpan genius as the film’s femme fatale, Maude Lebowski, daughter of the titular millionaire. Maude is a Mid-Atlantic accented avant-garde artist who helps The Dude follow her stepmother Bunny’s trail to the porn underworld — and, of course, winds up in our hero’s bed for some “coitus”… along with attempted conception.
For a stoner, The Dude is every bit the active Brother Seamus as J.J. Gittes. Despite the religious reverence among film geeks for The Dude’s abiding philosophy, you forget that Bridges spends most of the runtime freaking out, desperately tracking down leads, having stress nightmares about castration, and generally being bummed. This leaf-in-the-stream layabout may be out there taking her easy for all us sinners, but he gets tossed through a noir maelstrom first.
Every new lead and development makes the case that much more absurd, from a severed toe to an attack ferret to the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers. Deceit and coincidences and mix-ups abound as you’d expect, but as The Dude digs deeper he finds that beneath every lie is just another misrepresentation, and beneath that a diversion, and beneath that only further confusion. The whole story is a ringer-for-a-ringer.
With that many layers to dig into, the obsession LEBOWSKI has inspired in fans is understandable. There’s always some new gag or line you missed the first dozen times. There’s John Turturro’s iconic Jesus Quintana and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perfect portrayal of Brandt. There’s T. Bone Burnett’s all-timer of a soundtrack. There’s also a deft examination of masculinity and political ethos from Pacifism to Feminism to Nazism — which, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, it’s still better than Nihilism.
See, the central case may just be one misunderstanding piled upon another, and there’s no actual murder or kidnapping or harm done — besides an incidental heart attack, a fouled-up rug, and the voluntary loss of a little toe — but what the film plays as absurdist humor doubles as the sort of bleak theme you’d find in classic noir. Because in the end, the nihilists are right. It all means nothing. In fact, the film’s resolution is so nihilistic even the members of Autobahn complain that it’s “not fair!” And while that may be true, it’s just so dern entertaining along the way. It makes you laugh to beat the band. Which might be the only meaning we can expect to find in life. So, when you’re confronted by all the senseless chaos in this world, you can despair like all the black-and-white detectives do, or you can remember… The Dude abides.
But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
