Hard-boiled Dude
The Big Sleep (Howards Hawks, 1946)
The Big Lewboaski (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, 1998)
Sometimes there’s a man… and he’s the man for his time and place. If the time and place in question happens to be the flat of a fledgling cinephile discovering cult movies whilst a lay-about student, then the hero of The Big Lebowski is most definitely that man. I don’t know why I had been put off by the cover or the title of the Coen brothers’ L.A. slacker-noir, but for some reason, I’d always shunned it in my local video rental shop. Then, one evening, a university housemate produced the VHS from his – surely uninhabitable – bedroom and I joined Sam Elliot’s Stranger in marvelling at The Dude.
The Coens almost always produce films that I enjoy but since that initial viewing, The Big Lebowski has grown to be my most beloved of their pictures. I’ve seen it countless times and I’m more than capable of mouthing along with much of the dialogue. As is doubtless true with many a reader, I’ve been known to exchange quotes with friends – especially if we ever find ourselves out bowling. “I’m throwin’ rocks tonight.” What has become more apparent on revisiting the film, however, is just how clever and loving a spoof and homage to Film Noir, and particularly The Big Sleep, it actually is.
It was at a recent screening of the film, on a rooftop in Peckham, that it struck me just how great The Dude’s own version of hard-boiled dialogue is. Jeff Bridge’s performance as the perpetually stoned and laid-back Jeffrey Lebowski smoothes the edges, but there are lines and sarcasm that could easily have come directly from the mouth of Bogey himself. When the two goons - who micturate on The Dude’s rug and set the entire plot in motion - find a bowling ball in his bag and ask incredulously “[what] the fuck is this?” the response is pitch perfect. “Obviously, you’re not a golfer.” Previously, as they forced his head into the toilet whilst asking “where’s the money, Lebowski?” The Dude had come up, gasping for air, and laconically responded “it’s down there somewhere. Let me take another look.” Sam Spade would be proud.
The Dude subsequently becomes an unwitting gumshoe, but before that he has a scene that playfully echoes Philip Marlowe’s visit to the Sternwood mansion, the point at which he is hired in Chandler’s detective yarn and Howard Hawks 1946 film. Here, as with so many of the characters, the Coens toy with the originals often turning people and relationships entirely on their heads. The butler is sent up by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliantly observed Brandt; the other Jeffrey Lebowski (the ‘big’ one, played by David Huddleston) replaces the invalided General Sternwood and in the process sets up a gag about the wheelchair that will play out later on.
Sternwood’s flighty youngest daughter, Carmen, is intrinsically involved in the mystery and the same is true of her replacement, Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid). They are both sexpots who are the subject of notes received by their respective patriarchs; one regarding unpaid gambling debts, the other informing of abduction and demanding ransom due to the same. Bunny is Lebowski’s obscenely young wife, however, and it is a fact impressed upon a perceptive audience all the more given that her role is that of the daughter - which she is more than young enough to be.
When The Dude is finally hired by the other Lebowski, to get Bunny back, it sparks a labyrinthine plot with a lot of ‘in and outs and what-have-yous.’ This is ultimately the goal of the brothers whose design was to craft a ‘hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant,’ [1] as they have themselves attested. Just as in all of the best Noir, The Dude finds himself embroiled in a spider’s web of a mystery with all manner of different parties involved. As one might expect, however, they are coloured by the Coens’ signature weirdness. There are a group of German Nihilists (led by Peter Stormare), the pornographer Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), pederast bowling champ, Jesus Quintana (John Tuturro), an actual shamus (Jon Polito), not to mention a significant twist on the femme fatale, Maude Lebowski (Juliane Moore). As The Dude is sent from pillar to post, he encounters many of the cornerstones of Noir - a seedy underworld, police hostility, regular bouts of unconsciousness - and through it all he abides.
The real joy is that on an initial viewing, it is the slacker sipping White Russians and his ragtag friends that everyone remembers. They remember the bowling, the marmot, and what Lenin said - ‘I am the walrus.’ It speaks volumes to the quality and care of the Coens’ script and subsequent treatment of their story that it almost passes without notice that this is a neo-Noir of sorts. The narrative and the themes hold Chandler (not just The Big Sleep but equally The Long Goodbye and others) dear to their heart whilst crafting something new and entirely enjoyable, not to mention consistently funny. The ex-military character of Walter (John Goodman) provides lots of laughs whilst also chiming with a genre in which many characters had experienced WWII.
People may not immediately make that connection when taking about the hilarious The Big Lebowski but its the pitch-perfect juxtaposition of these elements with the bowling alley aesthetic that is why it endures. Like its protagonist, the film defies expectations not only by involving the so-laid-back-he’s-horizontal Dude in a dastardly mystery of missing persons and chopped limbs, but then by having his vodka and marijuana-addled mind stumble across the correct solution. The fact that the performances are uniformly excellent - and endlessly humorous - or that the cinematography and production design perfectly evoke its early 1990s setting are icing on the cake. Like in all the best Noir, you ultimately just want the detective to come out on top and in this case for The Dude to be left to bowl in peace. Perhaps he’ll even get to finally settle on a new rug, after all, the old one really tied the room together.
[1] Doug Stone, ‘The Coens speak (reluctantly)’, IndieWire, 9 Mar 1998 [available here]