A Serious Man or No Country For Old Men usually top polls of the Best Coen Brothers Films, but those lists are wrong. Both are great movies, masterpieces even, but they are not the singular cinematic achievement that is The Big Lebowski (1998). Joel and Ethan Coen’s finest hour (and 57 minutes) is a hilarious riff on a classic detective story, a Californian neo-noir, a hangout movie, a quest, an examination of male friendship... it’s a lot of things to a lot of people. What it is undeniably, after 25 years in the wild, is one of the funniest and most purely entertaining films of modern times.
It’s also one of the last mainstream Hollywood films to achieve cult status — an accidental condition in which a product aiming to be enjoyed by anyone becomes something else: beloved by a very specific group of self-selecting enthusiasts. In the process it also became the first cult movie of the internet era, when those same obsessives discovered that they could connect with each other across time and space, without ever having met in what would later become known as RL.
Jeffrey Lebowski, aka The Dude, a truly great performance by Jeff Bridges, is caught in a case of mistaken identity, which morphs into a missing-persons hoo-hah that descends into a where’s-the-money ding-dong. Along the way The Dude goes bowling with his friends, drinks White Russians, is rendered unconscious twice (leading to two dream sequences, the latter of which is an all-time classic), suffers damage to his car and his home furnishings, is propositioned by a woman and her father’s wife (only one is successful) and accidentally communes with the ashes at his friend’s memorial service.
The Big Lebowski was the Coen’s follow-up to Fargo (1996), their biggest box-office hit and winner of the Best Screenplay Oscar. That film had been made with neither awards nor even commercial success in mind. The lesson Ethan Coen took from the experience: “You might as well make whatever kind of movie you want and hope for the best.”
“Fuck it! Yes! That’s your answer! That’s your answer to everything. Tattoo it on your forehead!” This line, nowhere near the top 50 quotable lines from The Big Lebowski, sums up nicely the siblings’ laissez-faire approach to picking their projects. In the case of The Big Lebowski especially, laissez is definitely more. Its inspirations include The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman’s laconic 1973 Raymond Chandler adaptation but, perhaps more crucially, the brothers’ real-life friends and acquaintances — one laid-back guy whose nickname was The Dude, another whose stories of playing in an amateur softball league informed some of the funniest scenes in the movie, when Lebowski and his buddies go bowling. Bowling, according to the Coens, being infinitely more cinematic than softball.
(Laissez-faire absolutely does not describe the Coens’ approach to actual filmmaking, which is exacting. They storyboard their films in great detail, they sweat over the script, and they stick to the words on the pages. Bridges said that he tried to add in a ‘man’ here and a ‘dude’ there to the TBL screenplay, but it just didn’t feel right.)
Bridges did supply some of The Dude’s wardrobe: the jellies he wears when not in bowling shoes or white Otomix weightlifting shoes, and a three-quarter raglan sleeve baseball shirt with the Japanese outfielder Kaoru Betto on the front (which Bridges also wore in The Fisher King and Cold Feet). With his bathrobe, faded hoodie, checked shorts, gaudy pyjama trousers and Pendleton Westley cardigan, The Dude was in goblin mode decades before the rest of us started referring to our tracksuit bottoms as loungewear.
Critics and film academics have long enjoyed searching for meanings in the Coens’ films: classical allusions, pop culture references. But it’s the fans who made The Big Lebowski a phenomenon. In the late 1990s, internet use in the West was rising rapidly. And though fans of all stripes had been using message boards and other forms of domestic electronic communication to amplify their enthusiasms, when people started accessing the net easily at home, they could more readily find others who shared their passions, no matter how niche. The Big Lebowski lovers started fan sites and congregated in chat rooms. The most obsessive called themselves “Achievers”, after a reference in the film, of course, and then they decided to meet in person.
The first Lebowski Fest, in 2002 in Louisville, Kentucky, was attended by 150 Achievers. At the tenth annual gathering in New York in 2011, Bridges and fellow cast members John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi and John Turturro reunited on stage at the Hammerstein Ballroom in front of a sell-out crowd of 2,200. Moore, asked for comment by a New York Observer reporter at the event, said “I’ll suck your cock for a thousand dollars” – a line from the film that isn’t even one of hers.
Then there is Dudeism, the religion styled on the Dude’s Zen-like attitude and utterances, which has ordained over 600,000 Dudeist priests.
On 4 March this year, there will be trivia and costume contests and bowling at the likely much more intimate Lebowski Fest in Raleigh, North Carolina (14 followers on Twitter as of writing). So some of the fair-weather Achievers have fallen by the wayside, but the magic of the movie itself has not dimmed. After (or even despite) a quarter-of-a-century of analysis and academic symposia, devoted internet fandom and literal religious devotion, The Big Lebowski has aged wonderfully, the lightning in its bottle crackling now with more even more energy.
Jeff Bridges was once asked how he’d feel if The Dude would turn out to be the role he’d be most remembered for. “I’d be fucking delighted,” came the reply. The Dude is a magnificent part, which the Coens wrote for specifically for the man who played it, but Bridges’ performance is still indelible. Jeff Bridges did not look like that before this film. He was a hunk, a smoothie, a leading ladies’ man. Since 1998, it’s been hard to picture him and, sometimes, his characters, not having evolved from the personage of The Dude, physically and holistically. He really ties the film together, you might say, but TBL is more than him and so much more than the sum of its great performances, fine gags, deft daft turns, terrific needledrops and loads else besides.
In an episode of the excellent podcast The Rewatchables, which revisits those rare movies that repay the joy of multiple viewings, the commentator Chris Ryan says, of The Big Lebowski that it’s “almost impossible to pick a most rewatchable scene in a movie this rewatchable.” True, but it’s absolutely worth trying to see if you can.
