if you grew up with my generation, you know who the Dude is. I learned this in college, when I saw lebowski for the first time. after the film, jeff bridges came out in a bathrobe, slouched on a chair, and rambled a bit about filming the movie. jeff bridges, imdb tells me, has had trouble with pot in the past. imdb also tells me the Dude wears clothes that belong to jeff bridges. one other time, at my shitty job in a smoothie place that I worked for a short while, jeff bridges came in - or was it the Dude? he was wearing shaggy hair and a tie-dye shirt. it seemed like something to get really happy about. as the Stranger says, it feels good to know the Dude's out there, taking it easy for the rest of us.
I think about these things when I watch lebowski, which I have done countless times in the past few months. someone in high school told me he smoked pot because he "thought faster than other people" and pot helped "slow him down." the big lebowski is better than pot. it is reliable as anti-anxiety medication. it will not kill your brain. it returns to its themes and characters like an obsessive. for a movie about a slacker, it's incredibly tight. there are moments that I still have not fully embodied, corners of the lebowski universe whose meaning is still cryptic to me, though of course by now I know the plot. somehow lebowski achieves a blend of plot and setting and most of all character that cannot be deconstructed. take any of them away - take away Jesus the pedophile, take away the dream-sequences, hell, take away even one bowling pin and the movie wouldn't be the same. everything's lined up in this film, for the sole purpose of telling a good story. so is that it? is the therapeutic power to be had simply from seeing a story told well? does lebowski work as some kind of social, or even philosophical, statement? what about these people who have tried to make a religion out of "dudeness?"
first we must ask: who is the Dude? what is a deadbeat? I would highlight the second part of that compound word: "beat". the Dude has a lot in common with the Beats. he is counter-cultural as allen ginsberg, but what is his poetry? how does he embody "Dudeness"?
the trick is that the coen brothers have disguised a hero as an anti-hero. for consider this: the lebowski universe has as its central pillar a division between those who can chill the fuck out, and those who can't. if you understand this, you understand why the Dude is the undeniable hero, and why it would make sense to get into some kind of worshipping behavior, although personally I think this is defeating the purpose of Dudeness, by instutitionalizing it.
a character can always be defined by his degree of agency. with a character like the Dude, who would seem to be content to drink white russians all day, there could easily be no story, and there arguably isn't. technically, by having the Dude care about how his rug tied the room together, the coen brothers are violating his Dudeness, but it's theirs to toy with. there's a tug-of-war going on with the Dude's essential will, which is just strong enough to get pissed off. the Dude himself is actually very un-Dude throughout the film. there are basically no characters that don't get shit from him. usually it rolls off them with no consequence; this is a poignant lesson in Dudeness. it is actually Dude-like to express when you are pissed off. in the lebowski universe, people yell a lot, but they don't really do anything. this is important.
take the bowling alley trio: the Dude, whose power to take things as they come is undefeated; donny, who can't handle conflict; and walter, who represents a kind of hybrid of the two of them. walter's will is his main attribute, wielded like an out-of-control chainsaw. at times he worries even less than the Dude, but yet is undeniably uptight, irrational, plagued with paranoia. walter is selectively Dude-like, his will filtered in a fractured fashion through his two domains of thought: vietnam, and his jewishness.
donny is the opposite of the Dude, being so fearful that, as conflict erupts, he can't even run like he wants to, but rather leans lamely backward from the action, cowering in the back of the frame, as though if he just stands a little away from the gun that'll both keep him safe and not make him conspicuously absent. he is perhaps afraid of appearing afraid. it's hard to read donny's consciousness in this film, because his dialogue is composed almost completely of non-sequiturs.
the Instutition in this film, the Big Lebowski and his money, operate independently of these three. they are the default, the world itself, running along on a scale bigger than we can comprehend. all we can know is what walter and the Dude are up to; all we can follow is their game of wills. the story continues with the basic of question of how much is enough: how long do they try to play along with the Big Lebowski, keep up appearances? their disillusionment at learning of the falsity of the kidnapping is characteristic of the generation that didn't know what they were fighting for, didn't understand why it was so necessary to get real jobs and neat haircuts, etc. walter and the Dude are the dropouts from the carefully plotted world of the Big Lebowski. the counter-measures of the germans who are determined to fuck things up becomes more of the same bull. maude and jackie treehorn, as well, both prove to have ulterior motives. the Dude is rather innocent in his dealings with these characters, which is another sign of his Dudeness: the oddly hippie-ish idea that people will do what they say they will do, or that they are actually interested in you for you. even a fifteen-year-old kid named larry has more deviousness than the Dude.
the Dude and walter are just the little men. they are the pegs who will never fit in the holes. their complete inability to do so is another subliminal message that the film sends out: don't bother trying to be part of a machine. sit in a bathtub and listen to whale sounds. the universe will reward you by keeping you alive.
for who actually does die in lebowski? the one character who could not chill the fuck out. perhaps because he has been too afraid to muddle in the events of the film thus far, but also too afraid to distance himself from them completely, donny is overwhelmed by the sight of germans with swords. the world is much darker to him than it is to the Dude and walter, who with their various levels of will were at least active in trying to figure out some of its workings. donny simply has not tried to understand, and so dies of confusion, thinking that his life is actually at risk as he stands in the parking lot. the film reveals that anxiety actually can kill you.
thus, Dudeness is some combination of will and not-will, where one is interested enough to learn a system but not interested enough to become part of it. the world will impose itself on you, perhaps even pee on your figurative rug, but you should not take this to mean that it is driving you away. to embrace Dudeness is to express discontent, which is an act of will; it is also to feel fear - not all the time, but when it is appropriate. at least, by proving that you are concerned about the appearance of a severed toe, you will prove your humanity, though you will have been duped. but Dudeness is about being human, and having a favorite drink. now if you'll excuse me, I've had a rough night and I hate the fucking eagles.
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