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No Country for Old Men Explained

You’re probably here because you’re confused about the ending of  the Coen brothers’ Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). Specifically, you probably want to know the meaning of the two dreams shared by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) before the film cuts to black and the credits roll.

Well, you’ve come to the right place.

To definitively explain the ending of this complex movie, though, we need to go through the film piece by piece, exploring its less urgent mysteries first before arriving at Sheriff Bell’s dreams. That way, we’ll know what the stakes are for the ending, and what thematic meanings we can derive from it.

So let’s begin. No Country for Old Men’s thematic conflict is largely displayed on the surface, so we needn’t dwell on it too long. We’ll summarize, though, that the film follows an aging sheriff who’s forced to confront the apparent rise in senseless, outrageous violence in his small Texas community. This trend comes to a head when a local man (Josh Brolin) comes across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong and walks away with two million dollars—leading him to be pursued by Mexican drug dealers and a frighteningly ruthless, persistent killer. Eventually, the man is murdered, and the sheriff retires, having come to feel “overmatched” by a growing sinister presence in contemporary society.

Our primary mystery, then, is the exact nature of the sinister presence. And it isn’t easy to identify, because Sheriff Bell is a man of few words and doesn’t pontificate much on the matter.

Fortunately for us, the Coens have given us a character that personifies what’s troubling him: the film’s primary antagonist, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). In other words: to find out what’s troubling Bell, we need to examine Chigurh’s behavior.

Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) is the only character with any real knowledge of Chigurh, and he tells us:

He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.

What are these principles? We learn about them through Chigurh’s actions during the film. What I will go on to demonstrate as my first major point in this analysis is that Chigurh harbors a complex, bizarre understanding of human encounters. In short, he perceives every situation as a chance collision between people and objects that is predestined to lead to the individual either living or dying, and he aims to ensure the “correct” outcome without interfering himself.

I’ll explain, don’t worry.

The fullest look we get of Chigurh’s eccentric belief system is his remarkable interaction with a gas station owner early in the film. This encounter first demonstrates Chigurh’s obsession, which will recur throughout the film, with how things got to their present location. He’s especially interested in where the man is from and how he came to own the gas station: “You’ve lived here all your life?… So you married into it.” And it’s not only the man’s path he’s keen on: he also invokes the origins and journey of a coin that he wants the man to call heads or tails: “It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here, and now it’s here, and it’s either heads or tails.”

By contrast, when the man asks Chigurh where he is from, Chigurh responds with a rude retort: “What business of it is yours where I’m from, Friend-O?”

In summary, Chigurh spends the conversation with the gas station owner gathering details about the man’s journey and invoking details about the coin’s journey—while fiercely resisting giving any such details about his own.

And Chigurh’s focus on the paths of people and objects doesn’t just make for an odd conversation. Alarmingly, it appears to inform his intention to potentially kill this random man on the spot for no reason, contingent on the toss of the coin. Chigurh’s strange logic appears to be that since the coin has traveled such a long, winding journey to arrive at its current place, it has inherent authority as to the outcome of the encounter. Later, Chigurh will echo this same reasoning to Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) after demanding that she call a similar life-or-death coin toss: “I got here the same way the coin did.”

There’s another notorious movie villain who flips coins to determine victims’ fates: Batman’s adversary, Two-Face (coincidentally played by Jones in 1995). But as we can see by the aforementioned remarks, Chigurh, unlike Two-Face, doesn’t use the coin as a tribute to (in the movies) randomness or (as in the comics) indecisiveness, but rather out of respect for the coin itself.

From our viewpoint, of course, this is absurd, because it devalues Chigurh’s own role in the outcome. Deferring to an inanimate object negates the fact that Chigurh himself is the one who will potentially execute the victim despite his clear option to desist. But Chigurh doesn’t see it that way, dismissing that very objection from Carla Jean (“The coin don’t got no say!”) by again invoking the meandering path of the coin. In his mind, it seems, the human free will doesn’t take precedence, as we believe it does. Rather, Chigurh believes that he must carry out the will of the coin, an object. He’s not a meaningful participant in the matter—just an enactor of what the coin ordains.

His dedication to refraining from interfering in the outcome is such that he refuses to call the tosses, demanding that the potential victims do so instead. This also demonstrates his acknowledgement of the target’s agency in addition to the coin’s. It appears, then, that what Chigurh truly values is the interaction between the person and the object (the coin).

It’s not only the coin, after all, that has followed a remarkable path to arrive at this moment. The potential victim has, too. Thus, as we’ve observed, Chigurh expresses interest in these people’s paths, for example inquiring about the gas station owner’s life story (“You married into it”) and asking Carson Wells, “If the road led you to this point, of what good was the road?” He’s musing about these unfortunate individuals’ chance arrival into a circumstance in which they may die. That circumstance, from his perspective, is embodied by the coin, an object with which the potential victim has improbably, randomly collided, and which will reveal to Chigurh whether that collision was meant to result in the individual’s death. If so, he’ll faithfully enact that outcome.

But, you might wonder, why doesn’t Chigurh flip a coin for all of his victims? Most of them, after all, don’t get such a luxury (including Wells).

This is because Chigurh for most of the film is on a larger mission: to retrieve the missing money.

It’s never made clear whether Chigurh has been hired by the American drug buyers to get the two million dollars, or by an outside party, or by no one at all. But what is absolutely clear is that Chigurh, for whatever reason, wants that money. Badly. Once he has set himself to this goal, we can observe through his actions that he not only perceives every human being that comes in his way to be expendable, but that he is positively obligated to murder them.

After all, throughout his bloody rampage, Chigurh has various opportunities to spare victims: the Mexican in the motel shower, Wells offering him the briefcase, Carla Jean, the American accountant (“You’ve seen me?”), and various civilians that he kills for their cars or other reasons. In all cases he puts them to death only for being in his way, even if incidentally.

Based on what we have already said about Chigurh, we can deduce that this is because Chigurh believes that he is predestined to retrieve the money, and that those who might obstruct him are consequently predestined to be killed. A coin toss would be redundant for these individuals, because it’s already evident that the circumstances they have wandered into necessitate their deaths. Their need to be executed is already assured.

In fact, Chigurh makes a telling comment to Wells that outlines this manner of viewing his retrieval of the money as a foregone, fated conclusion: “I know where it’s going to be… It will be brought to me and placed at my feet.” Again, Chigurh believes that his recovery of the money is destiny; therefore, all who get in his way (in this case, Wells) are destined to die. The coin doesn’t need to confirm this.

Chigurh’s belief that he is fated to recover the money also helps us to explain possibly his signature trait: his utter ruthlessness. Throughout the film, his behavior is notable for its disregard of all etiquette or rules of engagement. An officer leaves him unsupervised while handcuffed in the precinct, assuming that he’ll comply with the process. He doesn’t. A man pulls over in deference to an apparent policeman, assuming that he has a good reason for strangely wielding a cattle stun gun. He doesn’t. These expectations of mutual decorum are of no import to Chigurh, who simply takes advantage of the opportunities they offer him.

And his viewing of his retrieval of the money as a foregone conclusion also engenders his memorably blunt, simple style. Chigurh isn’t glamorous (as anyone can see by his haircut), but he is extremely efficient. When he kills, he doesn’t waste time with drama or flair. He doesn’t even use a gun when possible, since it would leave messy traces behind, but instead prefers to use, of all things, a pressurized cattle stunner, symbolically minimizing even the humanity of his victims—slaughtering them simply and quietly, like animals. Unimpressive aesthetics like these owe to the fact that Chigurh follows only one rule: that he will obtain the money. Style can wait.

We now have a fairly good idea of what Wells means when he says that Chigurh “has principles.” As we’ve seen, Chigurh sees himself as bowing completely to circumstance, executing only those who are meant to die, which unfortunately includes most of the characters in No Country for Old Men, since they are obstructing his predestined retrieval of the two million dollars. For those whose deaths aren’t so obviously necessary, he uses a coin as a proxy for the mandate of circumstance.

No one obstructs Chigurh’s retrieval of the money more than Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), who, thanks in part to his military training, has the wherewithal to stay a step ahead of Chigurh for much of the film. But Moss has stark weaknesses compared to Chigurh, of which Wells unsuccessfully tries to advise him in the hospital.

As Wells knows, the fact that Moss is even in the hospital makes him eminently vulnerable; Chigurh, by contrast, when injured manages to stay off the grid by blowing up a car and stealing medical supplies in the ensuing chaos without so much as quickening his stride. Wells tries to illustrate to Moss that Chigurh’s monomaniacal persistence will eventually overcome him, noting that Chigurh could easily endeavor to kill Moss’s wife just to demoralize him. But the physically battered Moss can only respond to these well-founded warnings with the type of swashbuckling, tough-guy remark that, as we’ve established, would be completely alien to Chigurh: “Maybe he’s the one who needs to be worried. About me.” Wells in turn assures him, correctly, “Well, he isn’t.”

The chivalrous, old-school Moss, then, is really no match for the hyper-efficient Chigurh, so, as Wells predicts, it’s only a matter of time before Moss is found and killed. In addition, Chigurh had promised to kill Carla Jean if he defied him, which Moss disregarded—so Chigurh finds her to finish the job. He explains to her, “I gave my word,” to which she replies, “That don’t make sense.”

We, however, can make sense of it, or at least follow his thought process, because we know that Chigurh now perceives her as just one more person whom circumstances have ordained to die. In Chigurh’s mind, he isn’t choosing to kill her, just effecting what is supposed to happen based on Moss’s decisions. Chigurh offers her a coin toss (“It’s the best I can do”), just to be sure that it was meant to be—but she declines, and he kills her, checking his feet for blood as he leaves the house.

But now an intriguing scene ensues wherein Chigurh’s vehicle is hit by a car that runs a red light, apparently breaking his arm. Two boys witness the crash, and he pays one of them for a jacket to refashion as a sling and for their silence about seeing him. What is the meaning of this scene?

Well, the moment recalls an earlier scene in which a grievously injured Moss, still in possession of the two million dollars, overpays a group of young men on the border for a jacket. It’s an essential purchase, possibly saving his life, and it’s possible only because he is, if only temporarily, rich. Similarly, the car crash scene with Chigurh, which also includes a medically essential purchase, emphasizes the fact that Chigurh has the two million dollars now, and can likewise use it to get himself out of trouble.

The scene shows that Chigurh himself is not immune to the potentially deadly consequences of the twisting, random paths of objects and people that he puts so much stock in. But now that he has the two million dollars, he can overcome some of those unfortunate hands inevitably dealt by fate.

Perhaps this is why Chigurh—whose reasons for getting involved in this saga, remember, are never made clear—is so invested in obtaining the lost money in the first place: maybe he just wants to get an edge on fate, knowing from his own meditations that it’s only a matter of time before his meandering path leads him into harm’s way, too. Remember that his rude “Friend-O” retort to the gas station owner seemed to indicate his resistance to (and therefore his awareness of) the potential for the rules of fate to apply to him, too.

Let’s get back to Sheriff Bell. Our initial undertaking was to define the evil that troubles him and ultimately leads him to retire, by examining Anton Chigurh’s behavior. Now, we can state our findings. If Chigurh carries out his crimes, as we’ve said, as only an agent of circumstance, a completely dispassionate executor of an apparently a priori mandate—then this must be the way that Bell perceives the contemporary violent crimes of West Texas: not as though they were enacted by a conceivable human will, but rather as though they were fated, inevitable occurrences akin to natural disasters.

This perspective, of course, allows for no meaningful intervention from a law enforcer like himself. Therefore he indeed must feel “overmatched,” compelled to retire in defeat.

But does this monumental shift in crime, so discouraging to Sheriff Bell, truly reflect a change in the West Texas countryside, or only in Bell himself? Bell thinks it’s the former, opining to an agreeing fellow officer that things in America are generally in decline: “Any time you quit hearin’ Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.” However, Bell’s cousin Ellis later challenges this view in a pivotal conversation, telling Bell an old story of a senseless family murder and concluding: “What you got ain’t nothing’ new. This country’s hard on people.” He even goes on to chastise Bell for his dejection:

You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.

Thus, in response to Bell’s despair that he can no longer control the violence ravaging the country—represented by Chigurh, whose belief system is immune to human reason or fear of the law—Ellis asserts that Bell in fact could never control it. He accuses Bell in his old age of retaining a stubborn “vanity” regarding the capabilities of his profession. Bell doesn’t refute this argument, and it seems to me unmistakably the more persuasive one.

That finally brings us to Bell’s two dreams, which conclude the film.

The first one is vague, involving Bell waiting in town for his father to give him money, which he then loses. Luckily, we’ve already covered the symbolism of money in No Country for Old Men. It’s a means of alleviating dangerous and even deadly situations, as conveyed in the two separate scenes involving Moss and Chigurh in which they essentially pay their way out of dire trouble. In this dream, Bell loses money given to him by his father. This must mean that Bell is reflecting that he has lost the means of averting danger and death, which were conferred on him by his father, a sheriff himself.

This dream, then, is a meditation on Bell’s impending mortality. He had always felt, as a sheriff like his father, that his skills and importance to the community lent him a measure of security or even invulnerability. But now that he’s retired, which his father never was, and now that he’s significantly older than his father ever was, he’s coming to feel that this invulnerability has worn off: he’s getting closer to death.

The second dream is somewhat more complex. It entails Bell’s father riding out ahead of him in a cold, dark, mountainous pass with fire in a horn to light ahead and wait for his son. Bell remembers that his father “rode on past me, kept goin’, never said nothin’” with his “blanket wrapped around him.” This imagery can only be interpreted as symbolic of the father’s early death.

Thus, this dream, like the first, is a meditation on mortality. Unlike the first, though, Bell remembers a feeling associated with it: “I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there.” The hopefulness of this sentiment, however—referring, it seems, to a benign afterlife where father and son can reunite—is shattered by Bell’s next sentence, the last words of the film: “And then I woke up.”

These final words and their abrupt, blunt delivery are unmistakably meant to undermine the content of the preceding dream as fantastical and starry-eyed, and therefore we know that Bell’s optimistic feeling of his father being “out ahead” waiting for him in the afterlife has been revealed to be merely a dream, a fantasy, with Bell having now “woken up” to the harsher reality of a true, final death.

So why does Bell end the movie haunted by thoughts of his own mortality? Well, again, his being retired is surely a factor, as he’s now unavoidably in the final stage of his life. But more important is the change that we see in Bell over the course of the film. Remember that he increasingly perceives himself as helpless to curtail the violent crimes plaguing the countryside, culminating in his feeling of being “overmatched” and his consequent retirement. Based on our interpretations of Bell’s two dreams as meditations on death, we can deduce that as Sheriff Bell has come to realize his relative ineffectiveness in staving off others’ deaths, he is starting to realize his inability to stave off his own, as well.

With the illusion of his own agency over death punctured by the ineluctable crimes of Chigurh and others, Bell in his retirement is forced to face the inescapable corollary of that powerlessness: that he, too, will die. Now that his “vanity,” as correctly diagnosed by Ellis, is finally fading, he’s coming to face all facets of that chilly truth:

“You can’t stop what’s coming.”

That’s the story of No Country for Old Men. The intensely bleak ending to this film is attributable, of course, to Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed novelist who wrote the source material, and whose works are famously desolate in their portrayal of human frailty.

Both the novel and the movie are cognitively challenging works of art, and both have proponents and detractors. I myself have mixed feelings about this film, so I won’t end this essay with my usual glowing tribute to the filmmakers’ achievements. I think it’s too reliant on regional tropes to fully transcend its setting (and its genre: the Western), and maybe more importantly, it isn’t peopled with great characters the way a masterpiece should be. We have a near-stereotype (Bell), a surreal monster (Chigurh), and a weak, unfortunate, would-be hero (Moss): none of these strike me as the vibrant personages of a true classic.

NCFOM‘s 2007 counterpart, There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, could never be accused of this weakness, even though it’s less complex in its mysteries and philosophizing. I therefore esteem it higher and submit my critical opinion that the Best Picture prize of that year was awarded to the lesser film. The ambition of the Coen brothers, however, in creating such a difficult work can’t be denied, and therefore I hope this essay strikes the movie’s more enthusiastic admirers as a faithful exploration of its themes and symbolism.

 

–Jim Andersen

For another Coen Brothers classic, see my explanation of The Big Lebowski.

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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

——————–

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.