The Big Lebowski Explained

“This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you’s. And, uh, lotta strands to keep in my head, man.” – The Dude

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A deep dive into the symbolism and historical implications of The Big Lebowski (1998) doesn’t appeal to everyone. After all, the Coen brothers’ classic stoner comedy is already plenty enjoyable for its memorable gags and the hilarious performances of Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. It doesn’t need intellectual analysis to provide a good time.

But many are interested in such analysis anyway, and bits of Sam Elliott’s narration as “The Stranger” seem to openly invite it. So in this essay, let’s get to the bottom of what The Big Lebowski is thematically about and what larger meanings we can derive.

We’ll start with the introductory narration. Immediately we notice that the Stranger, a down-home cowboy, seems to be introducing Jeffrey Lebowski (Bridges), a.k.a “The Dude,” as one would the protagonist of a traditional Western. This is intriguing because the Dude is, to put it mildly, an unlikely choice for the part, given his slovenly appearance, lackadaisical attitude, and residence in Los Angeles County.

Nevertheless, the Stranger entreats us to keep an open mind, testifying, “After seeing Los Angeles, and this here story I’m about to unfold, well, I guess I seen something about as stupefying as you could see in any of those other places.” Meanwhile, the accompanying visual of a tumbleweed rolling into L.A. from the desert confirms that the ensuing events will be the type of story that we’re accustomed to seeing unfold in the desert.

The other theme of interest in the Stranger’s opening narration is his belief that the Dude is somehow important in a historical context: “Sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place… He fits right in there.” The Stranger notes that the events of The Big Lebowski took place during “just about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis,” and we see a video of George H.W. Bush declaring that Iraqi aggression in Kuwait “will not stand.”

Already, then, the Stranger has given us a lot to unravel. What does the Dude have in common with a hero of a Western? Why is he so appropriate for his “time and place,” especially, apparently, regarding the Gulf War?

For the former question, fortunately, we can arrive at some leads by examining the structure of the film. Consider that The Big Lebowski revolves around missing money. Rival factions are after it, and the protagonist, a loner of sorts by nature, is caught up in the middle. Perceived that way, the movie actually does harbor a very Western setup; the plot in fact resembles another Coen Brothers feature: the Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men (2007), which applies many hallmarks of the Western genre to contemporary America.

In addition to the “missing money” setup, the Dude, like most conventional Western heroes, seeks revenge. Not for a murdered friend or lover, as we might expect from the genre, but for his beloved rug, which a thug urinates on in an early scene. And throughout the Dude’s quest, he endures violence and abuse from various parties, as many Western heroes do. The Dude returns at the movie’s conclusion to the simple life he prefers—admittedly not on a ranch with his cattle, but at the bowling alley, spending his days drinking, smoking, and having a relaxed good time.

Is there so much fundamental difference, then, between the Dude and a John Wayne-style Western hero? Their situations and goals are largely the same, with only the superficial conventions of the genre playfully subverted. The Dude wears flip-flops, not spurred boots. He gets in trouble with a skeevy pornographer, not a drug cartel. His lover is a sex-obsessed bohemian artist, not a country damsel. He downs white Russians, not hard whiskey. His friend dies of a heart attack in a parking lot scuffle, not of a gunshot in a dramatic shootout.

These differences have the potential to throw us off, but the Dude, like any Western hero, is a man under siege, caught up in a deal gone wrong, looking to restore justice. We should view him, therefore, as a comic subversion of a type, a cowboy of the urban sprawl.

It might be helpful at this point, since I’ve mentioned the missing money, to back up and go over what actually transpires in The Big Lebowski, since the plot is extremely convoluted and nearly impossible to apprehend with only one viewing. This summary might be what you were looking for in the first place. So give me three paragraphs, and I’ll do my best to clear up the confusion.

First, representatives of Jackie Treehorn, a pornographer to whom L.A. resident Bunny Lebowski (no relation to the Dude) is in considerable debt, break into the Dude’s apartment and urinate on his rug. They want to extract the repayment of Bunny’s debt, and they mistakenly believe that the Dude is her husband. They eventually realize that they’ve broken into the home of the wrong person and leave. The Dude subsequently locates Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), his namesake and the intended target of the goons, who is an elderly, well-off philanthropist, and requests compensation for his rug, but the elder Lebowski refuses (although the Dude takes a replacement rug anyway).

Later, when Bunny (Tara Reid), the elder Lebowski’s trophy wife, takes a social trip out of the city, nihilist friends of hers attempt to extort one million dollars from her apparently wealthy husband by falsely claiming to have kidnapped her. The philanthropist Lebowski uses this opportunity to withdraw one million dollars (which had been reserved for underprivileged children’s college educations) from the charity and pretend to give it to the Dude in a briefcase to deliver to the supposed kidnappers for ransom, while actually keeping the million for himself and giving the Dude only an empty briefcase. He has contacted the Dude for this task because he knows from their earlier meeting that when the money inevitably fails to turn up (since the elder Lebowski still has it), the Dude, due to his perceived unreliability, will be blamed for its disappearance.

Thanks to the interference of his best friend, Walter Sobchak (Goodman), the Dude fails to deliver the briefcase, instead leaving it in his car, which is promptly stolen while the two go bowling. (The theft may or may not have been perpetrated by local teen Larry Sellers; it’s never determined conclusively.) Not realizing that there was never any money in the briefcase, the two friends spend the movie unsuccessfully attempting to track it down while pursued by 1) the nihilist friends, who still want the ransom money for their fake kidnapping, even mailing someone else’s toe to strengthen the charade; 2) Treehorn, who’s still after the debt Bunny owes and suspects that the Dude has kidnapped Bunny and stolen the ransom money for himself; and 3) the elder Lebowski’s daughter Maude (Julianne Moore), who wants to recover the ransom money because she, not the elder Lebowski, controls the family fortune, and the money is therefore hers. Once Maude reveals to the Dude the crucial fact that she and not her father inherited her mother’s wealth, the Dude realizes that “The Big Lebowski” has tricked them all to steal from the charity, and confronts him with Walter. Lebowski, however, refuses to admit to the scheme.

And that’s a wrap.

Quite the saga. But are all of these details necessary to address our question of the film’s larger meaning? I don’t think so. In fact, I think only one point is crucial to our understanding going forward:

There was never any money.

Yes, not only is The Big Lebowski a Western that takes place in Los Angeles County and stars a stoner, it’s a Western about a hunt for lost money…with no money. The entire adventure is a fraud.

Let’s try to tie that back to the Stranger’s assertion that the Dude is “the man for his time and place.” This time and place, as previously mentioned, is the United States during the Gulf War, which was waged by the first Bush administration against the Iraqis on what many historians believe to be flimsy pretenses, leading to many Iraqi deaths in the Middle East. It’s also the late stages of the “conservative revolution,” the political movement that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and cemented the modern Republican Party ethos of limited government and social conservatism, ending the relatively free-spirited and liberal sixties and seventies.

Reagan’s name might ring a bell if you’ve just watched the film, because one of the characters is explicitly associated with him—that would be Jeffrey “The Big” Lebowski, the philanthropist. As Lebowski’s assistant Brandt (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) excitedly informs the Dude, Lebowski has met Reagan and his wife, Nancy. Not surprisingly, then, Lebowski in his first encounter with the Dude uses rhetoric reminiscent of Reagan’s, accusing the Dude of “looking for a handout” and going on to emulate Reagan’s tone regarding the war on drugs and opposition to welfare expansion:

Lebowski: “Your revolution is over … Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did: get a job, sir. The bums will always lose!”

Lebowski’s Reagan-esque attacks imply that he views the Dude, with his habitual drug use, perpetual unemployment, and indifference to properness and etiquette, as a remnant of the sixties and seventies—a hippie rebel whose time has passed. And Lebowski appears to be on to something: later in the movie the Dude reveals in bed to Maude that he helped author the Port Huron statement, an actual manifesto of sixties-era liberal campus activism, and that he was one of the Seattle Seven, a real activist protest group in the seventies. The two Jeffrey Lebowskis, then, appear to represent the opposing values of two different eras: the Dude embodies the free-spirited liberalism of the sixties and seventies, and the “Big Lebowski” personifies the accountability-focused capitalism of the eighties and early nineties.

We don’t need a magnifying glass to see that the movie takes sides in this conflict of values: it prefers the ethos of the Dude. But to analyze a step further, we need to consider that the Coen Brothers have chosen as “the man for his time and place” a hippie who is blamed and hunted for the disappearance of money that he was never given in the first place. The stodgy capitalist still has it, but he’s succeeded in sneakily shifting all the responsibility, and by extension the danger, to the hippie.

This, then, is how the Coen Brothers perceive America in the early nineties at the end of the conservative revolution: a frame job in which the elites have made off with all the money but have blamed its disappearance on the passive free spirits who thrived in the sixties and seventies. The Big Lebowski’s ranting against “the bums” and “looking for a handout” typifies how the blame for the country’s problems was shifted using cultural warfare and political messaging, such that unsuspecting, vulnerable everymen like the Dude were demonized despite only seeking occasional common fairness (as in the movie when he requests compensation for the rug).

Note also that the million dollars that the Big Lebowski steals was originally intended to fund college educations for inner city children. It’s the poor who ultimately suffer from his scheme. If we’re viewing the Dude’s quest as an American allegory, as I’m suggesting we do, then the Coen Brothers are asserting that the elites of the conservative revolution screwed over the nation’s most underprivileged and stuck the hippies with the bill (or at least the blame).

Despite the ingenuity of the Big Lebowski’s plan, though, he isn’t a very intimidating figure, and that’s important, too. A year later, in 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick would portray his elitist bigwig as an untouchable, horrifying menace; by contrast, the Coen Brothers opt instead to portray theirs as blustering and weak: the Big Lebowski can’t use his legs (as Walter memorably confirms in a late scene), is disdained by his flirtatious trophy wife, and has no real access to the wealth he oversees. He’s not intelligent or dangerous, just a sad blowhard. Again, we can infer that this is the Coens’ larger assessment of America: unlike Kubrick, they don’t think too much of our ruling class capitalists.

But why doesn’t the Big Lebowski have any wealth of his own in the movie? He’s supposed to represent the rich, after all; yet he has only an allowance from Maude, the true holder of the fortune, which apparently doesn’t satisfy him, since he endeavors to steal more. And who is Maude in this allegory—the source of all the money?

It seems to me that she can only represent Mother Nature herself. Maude is comically Zen and preoccupied with female sexuality. Her paintings are abstract and chaotic. She doesn’t say a whole lot in the movie, so she’s tough to analyze very deeply, but there’s no doubt she gives off a distinct earthy vibe. Within the confines of an urban comedy, an obscure artist of vaginal persuasion is, I suppose, a reasonable choice for a Mother Nature figure.

If Maude is Mother Nature, then that expands the allegory: the Big Lebowski, the representative of conservative capitalism, receives his relatively meager wealth from her, from nature. He doesn’t truly own anything—all belongs to nature. That’s a hippie sort of thing to say, but we’ve already established that the Coens are firmly in the hippies’ camp, at least for this film. It fits.

Also fitting, given this interpretation, is that Maude is pregnant with the Dude’s child at the end of the film. This child, we can easily deduce if we don’t turn off the TV set too quickly, is now the heir to Maude’s wealth. If that wealth symbolizes, as we have concluded, the wealth of Mother Nature, from which all human fortunes only borrow, then the Dude’s descendants are set to receive that limitless inheritance.

And of course they are! The Dude might have been scammed out of the million dollars, or at least a commission on it, but so what? He has all he wants, really: bowling, weed, drinks, a good friend. He has the natural pleasures of life, and that’s the important thing (as any good hippie would say, at least)—so it’s no surprise that the film’s Mother Nature is set to bequeath her symbolic fortune to the “little Lebowski on the way.”

I wish I could end this essay on that happy note, but there’s still a hitch I have to address, and I’ve already alluded to it: Donnie’s (Steve Buscemi) death. What is the significance of it?

Within the literal context of the story, it means that all doesn’t turn out quite well. Despite the revealed fraudulence of the whole adventure, and the Dude’s returning to his peaceful bowling alley with White Russians in tow, real damage was done. Donnie will never bowl another frame, and this weighs down the ending. The Stranger seems to understand this, specifically noting in his closing monologue, with an uncharacteristically troubled affect, “I didn’t like seeing Donnie go.” We’ve already pointed out that the Big Lebowski’s deception may have ruined the college education prospects of numerous underprivileged children. Now, in addition to this harm, we grapple with the death of an innocent side character.

Symbolically, this death serves to illuminate, we can deduce, the collateral damage caused by the high-up corruption of the 80’s and 90’s that the Coens are so interested in. Here we return to the Gulf War. The USA entered it primarily for economic reasons, as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait threatened to lead to long term Iraqi control of huge oil reserves in the Middle East. Thus, the war is just the sort of capitalist-influenced activity that fits the Coens’ vision of the country at that time. And as I previously mentioned, the conflict led to mass death on the Iraqi side; but it also led to the deaths of about three hundred US troops, about half in non-combat accidents.

Donnie’s death might be symbolic of those Gulf War deaths, although I choose instead to interpret it as a more inclusive representation of the lives lost to greed in its various forms during that era: those who died in the Gulf War, yes, but also those like the children who never got their education and whose lives were surely bumped off course in potentially dangerous ways.

Either way, Donnie’s death, like all the deaths ultimately attributable to the detestable Big Lebowskis of America, is completely unnecessary: it’s no less than an outrage. But there won’t be any justice for it, because due to the underhanded nature of the Big Lebowski’s dealings, there’s no way to prove who was truly responsible (“You have your story, I have mine!”).

The Dude’s passivity, then, is useful, even essential for this moment; because if he were to react explosively (an understandable reaction) or to succumb to grief, the easygoing ways of the hippie generation would perhaps be lost for good. If the Dude failed to “abide,” even in the face of an avoidable tragedy like Donnie’s death, then we would be cut off from the pleasures that were enjoyed in the sixties and seventies. His descendants—meaning us, metaphorically—wouldn’t be inheriting Mother Nature’s endless fortune.

Conveniently, the Coens have given us a foil to the Dude who displays what, exactly, it would look like if one reacted to these modern-day injustices with commensurate outrage. Enter Walter, a Vietnam vet who can’t abide a competitor stepping over the lane line in league play, let alone any of the absurdities that befall him and the Dude during their adventure. On one occasion he reacts to a sneering teen by destroying a parked car that turns out to belong to someone else. When the man at the mortuary informs him that the mere receptacle for Donnie’s ashes will cost $180—yet another swindle job—he can’t help but bark, “GodDAMMIT!” Later, giving Donnie’s eulogy, Walter bitterly accuses God “in your wisdom” of taking Donnie “like so many young men of generation, before his time,” going on to invoke grisly deaths in Vietnam.

It’s significant, then, that Donnie’s ashes wind up all over the Dude, because the Dude is the one who has to emotionally absorb Donnie’s death. Walter, it’s clear to all of us, isn’t capable of doing so on his own. And that explains a curious line from the Stranger’s closing monologue: “it’s good knowing he’s out there… The Dude. Taking it easy for all us sinners.” We need the Dude to “abide” for us, because, as Walter shows, if we always insisted on fairness in these times of greed and corruption, we’d lose our minds—and many of the great enjoyments of life that we do still have. And the Coens don’t fail to take this allegory to its logical endpoint: the Dude is seen preparing for a competition with a bowler named Jesus.

Considering all this, we have to agree that the Dude is “the man for his time and place”—a Western hero for his day. I hope the heady nature of this piece doesn’t detract from the movie’s comedy for you, but I doubt it will. If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re only looking for more reasons to enjoy this classic film, and hopefully I’ve given you a few occasions to conclude:

“New shit has come to light!”

 

–Jim Andersen

Follow for more at @jimander91, and for related content, check out my explanation of Eyes Wide Shut.