The Big Lebowski
(1998)
The Coen Brothers
The Big
Lebowski
(1998)
Cast
The Coen Brothers
The Coen Brothers
Raymond Chandler
(1888-1959)
Novels Include:
The Big Sleep
Farewell, My Lovely
The High Window
The Lady in the Lake
The Little Sister
The Long Goodbye
Playback
Poodle Springs
The Coen Brothers
California
If earth is an interplanetary lunatic asylum, Southern
California is one of the violent wards.—Source
Unknown
The Coen Brothers
Cult Media
The Coen Brothers
The Big Lebowski
(1998)
The Coen Brothers
The Coen Brothers
The Critics on Lebowski
The Coen brothers' ``The Big Lebowski'' is a genial, shambling
comedy about a human train wreck, and should come with a
warning like the one Mark Twain attached to ``Huckleberry
Finn'': ``Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.'' It's
about a man named Jeff Lebowski, who calls himself the Dude,
and is described by the narrator as ``the laziest man in Los
Angeles County.'' He lives only to go bowling, but is mistaken
for a millionaire named the Big Lebowski, with dire
consequences.
This is the first movie by Joel and Ethan Coen since ``Fargo.''
Few movies could equal that one, and this one doesn't--but it's
weirdly engaging, like its hero.—Roger Ebert
The Critics on Lebowski
Hot directors coming off major successes often follow up with
quirky, more idiosyncratic pictures and so it is with the Coen
brothers' follow-up to "Fargo." Spiked with wonderfully funny
sequences and some brilliantly original notions, "The Big
Lebowski," a pseudo-mystery thriller with a keen eye and ear
for societal mores and modern figures of speech, nonetheless
adds up to considerably less than the sum of its often
scintillating parts, simply because the film doesn't seem to be
about anything other than its own cleverness. World
premiered at Sundance as a special screening, this Gramercy
release looks headed for a mixed critical and luke-warm B.O.
reception upon its release in March.--Variety
The Coen Brothers
The Critics on Lebowski
The Coens have a grand time establishing Bridges'
character, and the bowling alley scenes they've
written for the Dude and his buddies -- a loosecannon Vietnam vet played by Goodman and a nearly
wordless dunce played by Buscemi -- are pure gold.
You can have all that ransom shtick: I would've been
happier hanging out in the bowling alley for the
whole picture.—Edward Guthmann, San Francisco
Chronicle
The Coen Brothers
The Critics on Lebowski
In a word, The Big Lebowski is a mess. But what a glorious,
wonderfully-entertaining mess it is. This film, the Coen
Brothers' follow-up to the critically-lauded Fargo, isn't likely to
generate the same degree of universal praise. In fact, those
expecting something along similar lines to the 1997 Oscar
nominee may be disappointed. The Big Lebowski is an off-thewall comedy that has more in common with Raising Arizona
than with Fargo. Its single weakness, and what amounts to
little more than a minor distraction, is that it doesn't have
much of a plot, and what there is contains the kind of gaping
holes that even the most obtuse viewer can identify.—James
Berardinelli
The Coen Brothers
The Critics on Lebowski
Of course, the Coens have never done the same thing twice in
a row, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that The Big
Lebowski is so far afield from Fargo. Nevertheless, the
brothers' inimitable style is very much in evidence; if anything,
it may be more pronounced here. This is one weird motion
picture, but I use that term in the kindest fashion, because all
of the quirkiness adds up to a level of delightful humor that
few films this side of a Monty Python enterprise can match.
This is a comic amusement park ride – a wildly uneven movie
that offers tremendous pleasure for the moment, even if it
doesn't stand up well to post-screening analysis and scrutiny. –
James Berardinelli
The Coen Brothers
The Critics on Lebowski
Like meeting the Three Stooges after they've blasted
their brains with mind-altering drugs, time-traveled
into the 1990s and landed in a vintage bowling alley. –
Judith Egerton, Louisville Courier-Journal
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
(Jim Sharman, 1975)
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film
Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film
Liquid Sky (Slava Tsukerman,
1982)
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film
Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film
LIVING TEXTUALITY. The authentic cult work, Eco observes, must
seem like "living textuality," as if it had no authors, as postmodernist
proof that "as literature comes from literature, cinema comes from
cinema" (199).
The Coen Brothers
Eco, Umberto. "Casablanca: Cult Movies and
Intertextual Collage." Travels in Hyper Reality. Trans.
William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1986: 197-211.
The Cult Film
A COMPLETELY FURNISHED WORLD. Another closely related
prerequisite of The Cult, Eco observes, is its capacity to "provide a
completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and
episodes as if they were aspects of the fan's private sectarian world,
a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games
so that the adepts of the secret recognize through each other a
shared experience" (198).
The Coen Brothers
Eco, Umberto. "Casablanca: Cult Movies and
Intertextual Collage." Travels in Hyper Reality. Trans.
William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1986: 197-211.
The Cult Film
The Coen Brothers
A COMPLETELY FURNISHED WORLD.
Eco, Umberto. "Casablanca: Cult Movies and
Intertextual Collage." Travels in Hyper Reality. Trans.
William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1986: 197-211.
The Cult Film
The Coen Brothers
A COMPLETELY FURNISHED WORLD.
Eco, Umberto. "Casablanca: Cult Movies and
Intertextual Collage." Travels in Hyper Reality. Trans.
William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1986: 197-211.
The Cult Film
DETACHABILITY. The cult work, according to Eco, must also be
susceptible to breaking, dislocation, unhinging, "so that one can
remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship
with the whole." The cult viewer watching these moments--indeed
watching for such moments—may let out an audible "I love this."
The Coen Brothers
Eco, Umberto. "Casablanca: Cult Movies and
Intertextual Collage." Travels in Hyper Reality. Trans.
William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1986: 197-211.
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
What is the relationship of camp and cult-ivation?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
What is the relationship of camp and cult-ivation?
What are the specific relations between genre hybridity/genre
bending and cult status?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
What is the relationship of camp and cult-ivation?
What are the specific relations between genre hybridity/genre
bending and cult status?
Does box office failure enhance culthood? Can a blockbuster
success become a cult film?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
What is the relationship of camp and cult-ivation?
What are the specific relations between genre hybridity/genre
bending and cult status?
Does box office failure enhance culthood? Can a blockbuster
success become a cult film?
Why is the fantastic, “left of real” (J. J. Abrams’ term), such a fertile
ground for cult film?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
What is the relationship of camp and cult-ivation?
What are the specific relations between genre hybridity/genre
bending and cult status?
Does box office failure enhance culthood? Can a blockbuster
success become a cult film?
Why is the fantastic, “left of real” (J. J. Abrams’ term), such a fertile
ground for cult film?
Is it possible for a movie to gain cult status largely through
nostalgia?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad”
film more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be
discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
What is the relationship of camp and cult-ivation?
What are the specific relations between genre hybridity/genre
bending and cult status?
Does box office failure enhance culthood? Can a blockbuster
success become a cult film?
Why is the fantastic, “left of real” (J. J. Abrams’ term), such a
fertile ground for cult film?
Is it possible for a movie to gain cult status largely through
nostalgia?
Are “B.Y.O subtext” films(Joss Whedon’s phrase) ipso facto
cult films?
The Coen Brothers
The Cult Film: Some Questions
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film
more likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
What is the relationship of camp and cult-ivation?
What are the specific relations between genre hybridity/genre
bending and cult status?
Does box office failure enhance culthood? Can a blockbuster
success become a cult film?
Why is the fantastic, “left of real” (J. J. Abrams’ term), such a fertile
ground for cult film?
Is it possible for a movie to gain cult status largely through
nostalgia?
Are “B.Y.O subtext” films(Joss Whedon’s phrase) ipso facto cult
films?
What role do intertextuality, metaxtextuality play in the growth of cult
film?
The Cult Film: Some Questions
The Coen Brothers
What is the connection between “cult” and quality? Is a “bad” film more
likely to become a cult film?
Can a cult film be consciously created or must it be discovered?
Do certain actors/actress inspire “cultishness”?
What is the relationship of camp and cult-ivation?
What are the specific relations between genre hybridity/genre bending
and cult status?
Does box office failure enhance culthood? Can a blockbuster success
become a cult film?
Why is the fantastic, “left of real” (J. J. Abrams’ term), such a fertile
ground for cult film?
Is it possible for a movie to gain cult status largely through nostalgia?
Are “B.Y.O subtext” films(Joss Whedon’s phrase) ipso facto cult films?
What role do intertextuality, metaxtextuality play in the growth of cult
film?
Is cult film always counter-cultural?
Table of Contents
Introduction / Edward P. Comentale
and Aaron Jaffe
Part 1. Ins (Intrinsic Models and
Influences)
1. The Really Big Sleep: Jeffrey
Lebowski as the Second Coming of
Rip Van Winkle / Fred Ashe
2. A Once and Future Dude: The Big
Lebowski as Medieval Grail-Quest /
Andrew Rabin
3. Dudespeak: Or, How to Bowl like a
Pornstar / Justus Nieland
4. Metonymic Hats and Metaphoric
Tumbleweeds: Noir Literary Aesthetics
in Miller’s Crossing and The Big
Lebowski / Christopher Raczkowski
5. The Dude and the New Left / Stacy
Thompson
6. The Big Lebowski and Paul de
Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing
Historicism / Joshua Kates
Edited by Edward
P. Comentale and
Aaron Jaffe
The Coen Brothers
The Coen Brothers
7. Lebowski and the Ends of Postmodern American Comedy / Matthew
Biberman
8. Found Document: The Stranger’s Commentary and a Note on His
Method / Thomas B. Byers
9. No Literal Connection: Mass Commodification, U.S. Militarism, and the
Oil Industry in The Big Lebowski / David Martin-Jones
10. "I’ll Keep Rolling Along": Some Notes on Singing Cowboys and
Bowling Alleys in The Big Lebowski / Edward P. Comentale
Part 2. Outs (Eccentric Activities and Behaviors)
11. What Condition the Postmodern Condition Is In: Collecting Culture in
The Big Lebowski / Allan Smithee
12. Holding Out Hope for the Creedence: Music and the Search for the
Real Thing in The Big Lebowski / Diane Pecknold
13. "Fuck It, Let's Go Bowling": The Cultural Connotations of Bowling in
The Big Lebowski / Bradley D. Clissold
14. LebowskIcons: The Rug, The Irong Lung, The Tiki Bar, and Busby
Berkeley / Dennis Hall and Susan Grove Hall
15. On the White Russian / Craig N. Owens
The Coen Brothers
16. Professor Dude: An Inquiry into the Appeal of His Dudeness for
Contemporary College Students / Richard Gaughran
17. Abiding (as) Animal: Marmot, Pomeranian, Whale, Dude / David
Pagano
18. Logjammin’ and Gutterballs: Masculinities in The Big Lebowski /
Dennis Allen
19. Size Matters / Judith Roof
20. Brunswick = Fluxus / Aaron Jaffe
21. Enduring and Abiding / Jonathan Elmer
Endnote: The Goofy and the Profound: A Non-Academic's Perspective on
the Lebowski Achievement / William Preston Robertson
Works Cited
Index
List of Contributors
The Coen Brothers
Joel: Well, it’s one thing making up stories, and quite another having a
conception of the human race. One doesn’t necessarily have anything to
do with the other. But, it is true, most of the characters in our movies are
pretty unpleasant—losers, or lunkheads, or both. But we’re also very fond
of those characters, because you don’t usualy see movies based around
those kinds of people. We’re not interested in burly superhero types.
--The Coen Brothers Interviews (96)
The Coen Brothers
Ethan: I don’t remember how the idea
[for The Stranger in Big Lebowski ] came
to us. But we’ve always liked to create a
certain distance that takes us away from
reality by enclosing the story in a frame.
Joel: The Stranger (Sam Elliott) is a little
bit of an audience substitute. In the
movies adaptations of Chandler it’s the
main character that speaks offscreen, but
we didn’t want to reproduce that though
it obviously has echoes. It’s as if someone
was commenting on the plot from an allseeing point of view. And at the same
time rediscovering the old earthiness of a
Mark Twain.
--The Coen Brothers Interviews (102-103)
The Coen Brothers
The Coen Brothers
Go here for a taste of Berekeley.
The Coen Brothers
“The Port Huron Statement was written in Port Huron, Michigan, at a meeting of
Students for a Democratic Society. Tom Hayden, the driving force behind the
manifesto, was a student at the University of Michigan and came from a workingclass family. The Port Huron Statement reflects the dissatisfaction and
disillusionment many young people were feeling in the 1960s. College enrollments
were booming in the 1950s and 1960s, and many students objected to the way
college administrators attempted to control their personal lives. Others students
were beginning to be involved in the civil rights movement and were disappointed
that the mainstream liberals were not supporting those efforts. (We refer to the
student radicals of the 1960s as the "New Left" to distinguish them from the more
mainstream Left of the Democratic party.)
After 1962 the student movement increasingly focused on opposition to the
Vietnam War, though it built on the basic principles outlined in this manifesto.” -smv
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111huron.html
The Coen Brothers
from David Lavery, “’Secret Shit’: The Uncertainty Principle,
Lying, Deviation, and the Movie Creativity of the Coen Brothers”
Famous for their send-ups of film genres, the Coens parody other
forms as well with a panache that belies their media personas as
unassuming, sometimes anti-intellectual, kids-in-a candy store. In the
delightful introduction they co-authored for the book publication of the
script of The Big Lebowski, for example, they offer an excerpt from
But Is It Funny?, a scholarly assessment of the film, beginning with a
convoluted analysis of Three Stooges slapstick and eventually
scrutinizing Lebowski, by the British critic Sir Anthony Forte-Bowell—
“the editor of Cinema/Not Cinema, a journal of movie semiotics.
Since Perry and Walker have not seen fit to include this seminal work
of Coen criticism in these pages, allow me to requote it here in its
entirety:
The Coen Brothers
from David Lavery, “’Secret Shit’: The Uncertainty Principle, Lying,
Deviation, and the Movie Creativity of the Coen Brothers”
Humor may also derive from the distribution of pain among characters
whose buffoonery precludes the viewer’s, reader’s or listener’s
identification To cite a familiar example, Moe raises two fingers in a
horizontal V-shape and impels them toward the eye-socket of Curly, who
interposes his upraised hand and catches the V at its apex, thereby
inhibiting the fingers from achieving their end. After expressing his
satisfaction through the repealed utterance of a laugh-syllable commonly
rendered “nyuk”, the attention of Curly is diverted by the right hand of
Moe as it flutters up to and above eye-level while the audience, though
presumably not Curly, hears a high-pitched tweeting sound. While thus
distracting Curly with one hand, Moe strikes him sharply in the abdomen
with the other, at which the audience, though presumably not Curly,
hears a strike upon a tympanum. The final “nyuk” of Curly is thus
interrupted so that he may retrieve his forcibly ejected breath, and this
new breath”1 more gradual expulsion is so operated upon by hi larynx as
to form the sound commonly rendered “ooo”. . . .
The Coen Brothers
from David Lavery, “’Secret Shit’: The Uncertainty Principle, Lying,
Deviation, and the Movie Creativity of the Coen Brothers”
When Curly meanwhile drops the hand formerly used to parry the
assault upon his eyes in order to massage his insulted midriff, Moe
avails himself of the opportunity to renew his digital attack upon the
unprotected eyes, and succeeds in poking him, upon which success (he
audience, though presumably not Curly, hears a sound commonly
associated with the release of a bent-back spring and usually rendered
either “doing or “ba-doing (which sound curiously, bears no relation to
the sound the eyeballs actually give out upon being forcibly
compressed). Moe will in some cases, if sufficiently angered either by
Curly’s smugness or by some previous evasion of a punishment deemed
appropriate by Moe, so far press his advantages as to quickly and
repeatedly slap both of Curly’s cheeks, alternately forehand and
backhand, while the audience and perhaps, in this instance Curly
himself (the convention here being ambiguous) hears the slapping
sound amplified to an unnatural degree.
The Coen Brothers
from David Lavery, “’Secret Shit’: The Uncertainty Principle,
Lying, Deviation, and the Movie Creativity of the Coen Brothers”
The pulling of Larry’s hair will not be considered here.
I will pause to note, however, the whimsy implicit in the very
name given Curly either in wry acknowledgement or in absurd
refusal to acknowledge what is striking about his physical
appearance, videlicet his want of hair, et ergo a fortiori his want
of curly hair. Analysis reveals no comparable whimsy at work in
the assignment of names to Larry and Moe, and an historian
might here note that Lawrence and Morris were the given names
of the actors by whom they were respectively depicted.
The Coen Brothers
from David Lavery, “’Secret Shit’: The Uncertainty Principle,
Lying, Deviation, and the Movie Creativity of the Coen Brothers”
At the end of this pitch-perfect parody of academic obscurity,
pomposity, and pretension, the Coens Forte-Bowell admit(s) that
“repeated viewings of [The Big Lebowski] have failed to clarify for me
the genre-relevance of the themes of bowling, physical handicap,
castration and the Jewish Sabbath. But perhaps we should not
dismiss the possibility that they are simply authorial mistakes.
Certainly the script could not be held up as a model of artistic
coherence.”*
*The Coens also spoof academic excess in the introduction to
the screenplay of The Hudsucker Proxy, authored by the utterly
fictional Dennis Jacobson professor of cinema studies at the
University of Iowa, who in turn interviews the utterly real (though
larger than life) Joel Silver, the blockbuster-driven Hollywood
mogul who had bankrolled the big-budget Hudsucker.
Coen Motifs:
Howling Fat Men: Walter Sobchak, of course.
Blustery Titans: The other Jeff Lebowski
Vomiting: None, “though John Goodman does spit out part of a nihilist’s
ear.”
Violence: Severed toe, a car smashing, a near drowning in a toilet, a
marmet in a bathtub
Dreams: Two major dreams, one very Busby Berkeleyish
Peculiar Haircuts: The Dude’s, Walter’s flat-top, Jesus’ hairnet
The Coen Brothers
From Tricia Cooke and William Preston Robertson. The Big
Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1998: 16-23.
The Big Lebowski
April 1, 2010
Time: TBA
Bathrobes Required
The Coen Brothers