When the Dude asks for remuneration for his destroyed rug and proclaims, “This aggression will not stand,” Lebowski taunts him, saying that, when he lost his legs in Korea, he did not ask for a handout. He “went out and achieved”: “Your revolution is over. The bums lost.” Soon after this encounter, a humbled and weepy Lebowski invites the Dude back to the house and shows him a ransom note, indicating that his wife, Bunny, has been kidnapped. The Dude takes a drag off his joint and says, “Bummer, man.” Lebowski offers the Dude twenty thousand dollars and his own beeper to act as a courier. An incredulous Dude asks Lebowski's assistant, “He thinks the carpet pissers did this?”
Throughout much of the film, someone in a blue car follows the Dude. Late in the film, he runs up to the car and yanks out the driver, who explains that he is a “private dick,” working on the same case as the one the Dude's working on. He then admits fawningly, “I admire your work. The way you play one side against the other.” Here, the Dude once again plays the wrong man role; this time he is misidentified as a professional, a private detective with the knowledge and cleverness to manipulate human character types for his own ends.
This is, of course, a complete illusion; to underscore the Dude's impotence, the Coens immediately shift to a scene in which a group of Germans break into his apartment and find him in his bathtub. As he complains that this is a “private residence,” they drop a marmot into the tub just between his legs and announce, “We want the money. We believe in nothing. If we don't get the money, we will come back tomorrow and cut off your johnson.” Walter shares the Dude's dislocation, but he, unlike the Dude, is troubled by his rootlessness. The Dude is often irked at Walter's strange Jewish devotion. When the Dude accuses him of living in the past, Walter responds, “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you're goddamn right I'm living in the fucking past!” Walter wants to have an identity, to define himself in relation to a way of life, a tradition larger than himself. How badly he wants this is clear from his willingness to rate National Socialism above nihilism on the “ethos” scale. Yet his own embrace of Judaism, a result of his marriage to a Jewish woman from whom he is now divorced, serves to underscore the absurdity of attempting to introduce an ethos into a fragmented contemporary culture. His Judaism is an incoherent mixture of various elements, dislocated from contexts in which they originally may have made a kind of sense. Walter ranks bowling on about the same level as his religious devotion. Concerned about the Dude's preoccupation with the case of the missing wife, Walter exclaims, “We can't drag this negative energy into the tournament.”
Without any direct contribution from the Dude, the case wraps up nicely. It turns out that Bunny was just on an unannounced vacation. Outside the bowling alley, the Germans, who think that Bunny is still missing, torch the Dude's car and demand money, claiming that, if they are not paid, they will kill Bunny. A timid Donny asks: “Are these the Nazis?” Walter replies, “No, these men are nihilists. There's nothing to be afraid of.… These men are cowards.” When the Dude tells them that Bunny is alive and there will be no financial transaction, one of the Germans complains, “It's not fair.” Walter taunts them: “Fair? Who's the fucking nihilist here? What are you, a bunch of fucking crybabies?” In the ensuing conflict, Donny has a heart attack and dies.
Walter here puts his finger on the problem of self-described nihilists and of the incompatibility between nihilism and human life, no matter how debased. Nihilism cannot, strictly speaking, be lived. An utterly amorphous and completely pointless life would deprive an individual not just of any inspiring sense of purpose but even of the basis for deliberating and pursuing anything whatsoever. Moreover, everyone complains about something, and this is rooted in some sense, however misguided and self-interested, of injustice or wrongs suffered. Full-blown nihilism cannot be lived; it can only be approached asymptotically.
Although the Dude is not foolish enough to proclaim himself a nihilist, his life borders on nihilism. He is skeptical of large-scale beliefs such as those to which Walter assents. He does not need an ethos, except insofar as that is mere style, which is about what the Jewish religion is for Walter. But the Dude has beliefs. He believes, for example, in private property, at least for himself. He thinks of himself as a respectable citizen; he is a low-class, minimally ambitious version of what the social critic David Brooks has called a Bobo, a bourgeois bohemian, someone who combines elements of 1960s counterculture with degrees of bourgeois conformity and standards of success.11 Brooks's new social standard–bearers are much more bourgeois than bohemian; inversely, the Dude is more bohemian than bourgeois. He is little concerned with societal standards of success and insouciantly repudiates the work ethic. But, like Walter, he is also passionate about bowling and is deeply concerned with how his team will perform in the upcoming competition.
The Dude accepts the basic absurdity of the cosmos, of life in the most advanced civilization ever to grace the face of the earth. His way of life affirms the equal significance or insignificance of all human endeavors, but none of this stops him from judging certain things to be unseemly. The Dude has not so much an ethos as a style, a way of taking it easy, living lightly. Despite his lack of conscious planning and his absence of ambition, he manages to contribute to ongoing natural processes. At one point, he has sex with Maude, the Big Lebowski's libidinous and artistically rebellious daughter. Afterward, she asks a number of questions about his life and his habits of recreation. The zenith of his life was organizing campus protests in the 1960s; his recreation consists in car cruising and the occasional acid flashback. He gets out of bed and notices that Maude remains on her back cradling her legs, a strategy designed to increase the chances of conception. “What did you think this was all about?” she asks. When he expresses worries about the responsibilities of fatherhood, she explains that a deadbeat dad is exactly what she wants.
The Dude is a kind of comic hero, at least for our narrator (Sam Elliott), who shows up onscreen in the final scene at the bowling alley, where he and the Dude exchange pleasantries. The cowboy matter-of-factly reiterates the Dude's own self-referential proclamation, “The Dude abides,” and offers some reflective, concluding observations:
The Dude abides. I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin’ he's out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope he makes the finals. Welp, that about does her, wraps her all up. Things seem to've worked out pretty good for the Dude ’n’ Walter, and it was a purt good story, dontcha think? Made me laugh to beat the band. Parts, anyway. Course—I didn't like seein’ Donny go. But then, happen to know that there's a little Lebowski on the way. I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands a time until—aw, look at me, I'm ramblin’ again. Wal, uh hope you folks enjoyed yourselves.
The Dude's abiding signals an escape, or at least a reprieve, from the world of noir; in spite of the threats to his life, the Dude emerges from the noir plot, from its labyrinth, unscathed. The tone of the ending, the suggestion that the human comedy perpetuates itself through the ongoing birth of new humans, strikes a comic note different from that of mere satire or denunciatory cynicism. Here, the impulses and resources of nature toward reproduction and survival are seen as more powerful than the destructive forces of noir. As Pascal puts it (a sentiment later stolen by Hume), “Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”12
Basic Familial Instincts in Coen Comedy
As one critic has noted, The Big Lebowski is about “friendship and surrogate families.”13 This strikes a note of comic affirmation absent in even the most complex noir films, wherein the family is nearly always a source of the noir trap, and marriages and the begetting of children provide no way out. If surrogate families are at the heart of The Big Lebowski, real families figure prominently in other Coen films, especially in the brothers’ most critically acclaimed neo-noir, Fargo. With a plot akin to that of A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998), Fargo features criminals undone by their own futile, criminal plans. The characters are blood simple, a phrase that the Coens borrowed from Dashiell Hammett, who borrowed it from
