What's Genre For? or "Yeah, Well, That's Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man": "The Big Lebowski"
"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills," begins Raymond Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, from 1939. "I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."
"Now this story I'm about to unfold took place back in the early nineties, just about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis," says the narrator – known as the Stranger – at the beginning of Ethan and Joel Coen's The Big Lebowski, from 1998. "I only mention it 'cause sometimes there's a man – I won't say a hero, 'cause what's a hero? But sometimes there's a man, and I'm talkin' about the Dude here, sometimes there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude, in Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man – and the Dude was certainly that, quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide – but sometimes there's a man...sometimes there's a man... Lost my train of thought here... But... Aw, hell, I done introduced him enough."
Chandler's distinctive voice and narrative style – he did not plot out his books in advance as so many mystery writers do but wrote them scene by scene, giving them a uniquely byzantine feel – helped give birth to a deeply American genre of fiction, the hardboiled crime novel. The Stranger's story about the Dude is a descendant of Chandler's tales, a grandchild born to the family's weird son, perhaps, but still a member of the family in good standing.
The Big Lebowski is, in other words, a work in the same genre as Chandler's novels.
This is an observation, I think, that not only helps one enjoy this particular movie but also reveals one of the most important functions of that set of family-resemblances we call genre: tying us into the deep history of the stories we come across.
Like tales by some of the authors spiritually and temporally related to Chandler – Dashiell Hammet, Paul Cain, Ross MacDonald, perhaps even Jorge Luis Borges and William Faulkner – the plot of The Big Lebowski defies simple summary; this is because, at least in part, complexity is the point of these stories.
The movie is about a guy named Jeffery Lebowski who self-applies the name “the Dude” (played to immortality by Jeff Bridges). At the opening the Dude gets mistaken for a far wealthier Jeffery Lebowski (David Huddleston) by some low-end debt collectors who urinate on the Dude’s rug to make a point about their formidableness. The Dude's bowling team buddies Walter and Donny (John Goodman and Steve Buscemi) convince the Dude to ask the other Lebowski – the big, rich one – to replace the rug, which in turn leads to the Big Lebowski hiring the Dude to be the bagman in a kidnapping payoff: the Big Lebowski's much younger wife, Bunny (Tara Reid) has been abducted, and the people who have her – a group of nihilists who used to play in a techno-pop band called Autobahn – are demanding a million dollars.
This would all be well and good, except that Bunny hasn't really been kidnapped – she's just gone out of town – and the nihilists have taken advantage of this to pretend that they kidnapped her, even cutting off the toe of one of their female compatriots to feign evidence. Oh, and also, the Big Lebowski isn't really wealthy: the fortune belonged to his deceased wife and is now controlled by his daughter Maude (Julianne Moore) who upon meeting the Dude decides that she wants to have a baby with him because she'd like to raise it herself and he's exactly the kind of guy who will let her do that unimpeded. Oh yeah, also, when the Big Lebowski gave the Dude the million dollars to deliver to the nihilists (a delivery which the Dude and Walter screwed up) he actually didn't give them money at all but a ringer with a couple of telephone books in it; instead, he kept the million dollar ransom for himself.
Oh, and there's some other things too: Bunny has fallen into the world of L.A. pornography and there's a real private detective trying to find her on behalf of her family back in the Dakotas; the debt collectors at the beginning work for pornographer Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) and they want the money Bunny owes him; the Dude's bowling team is locked into a death match with a team headed by the fearsome purple-wearing pederast Jesus Quintana (John Turturro); the Big Lebowski's assistant Brandt is impeccably confused about everything and should be mentioned because he's played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the finest American actors of his, or any, generation; and the narrator of the film, The Stranger (Sam Elliot), pops in a couple of times from wherever it is filmic narrators reside, to talk to El Duderino and drink a sarsaparilla.
It's a magically entertaining film and a genuine cult classic (a genre term itself) that has a rabid (or maybe pretty laid-back) following. And the way it moves through the paces of a hardboiled crime story allows it to dance impishly with the viewers of its own time while also tying them into a longer tradition of similar stories, and thus viewers and artists of other times. (A note on the term "hardboiled": for the aficionados of crime fiction out there, I'm not using this in a definitional sense – as opposed to "noir" fiction, or "mystery" fiction, etc. – but in a tonal one: one of the important connotations of the hardboiled moniker comes from its roots in the Great Depression and the rather bleak view of things spawned by those years.)
Take the idea of the detective himself. (In other contexts, such as that of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple or more contemporary stories, we might talk about the detective herself, but in the early hardboiled tradition it's almost always a man). As opposed to his predecessors, like Sherlock Holmes or C. Auguste Dupin, the American hardboiled detective is not a man of ratiocination. He is, instead, a man of street smarts whose greatest strength is his doggedness. He doesn't put together arcane clues like a stain on the cuff or a footprint in the bed of begonias so much as he relies on what Ernest Hemingway called, in a slightly different context, a "built-in, shockproof, shit detector." And although he triumphs in the end, this nearly always comes at the cost of a part of his own beleaguered belief, because one cannot be this devoted to finding the truth without becoming at least a little bit cynical.
This display of unflinching perseverance in fictional characters arose during the Depression as a way to sell books to readers - one must represent some element of reality accurately to do this - in a moment when half the country was out of work and the bread lines stretched around the block. As the decades passed, though, the character trait passed down into the DNA of many crime stories; importantly, instead of becoming outmoded it proved to be an adaptable way for these stories to pry open key elements of their own moments.
After the Second World War, for example, when novels like The Big Sleep that had been written during the Depression began to be adapted to film, this tough as nails detective took on a new resonance. He became a corrective to exuberance, a way for filmmakers to explore an almost subterranean unease with the new and more prosperous American society that was materializing. Thus many heroes (or anti-heroes) of the so-called film noir cycle, in which this archetype serves as a way to vent the suspicion that beneath the glossy surface of the emerging America lay some kind of unseen, dark doppelganger.
By the 1970s the times had changed again, but the character was still functional. Instead of embodying the grit of the Depression or the sense of a seedy underside to prosperity, the hardboiled detective of that decade came to stand for a disillusionment with the utopic dreams of the 1960s – in films like Altman's The Long Goodbye (made from Chandler's greatest novel) and Penn's Night Moves – as well as the supposed decadence of liberal American society, in fare like Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series.
The Big Lebowski participates in the tradition of using these materials to be relevant to its own time. Comedically, it does this by conjuring a detective who's a funhouse reflection of Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Like Marlowe, the Dude has a gaming hobby (chess for Marlowe, bowling for the Dude), and loves his substances (cigarettes and alcohol for Marlowe, grass and White Russians for the Dude.) But where Marlowe is relentless, the Dude is lazy, where Marlowe is capable, the Dude is inept.
Beneath these surface riffs, the most important fact about both men is that the signal elements of their personalities function as spotlights that put on display the tragedies of their world. Marlowe is a character honorable to the point of sentimental, who faces again and again the realization that these qualities may help him solve the case but also render him outmoded in a society that is for the most part corrupt. The purity of his integrity – leavened by his famously acerbic voice – draws us in, and the realization that this integrity is the minority standpoint leaves us, with him, forever wistful.
The Dude – quite possibly the laziest man in Los Angeles county – is a character who wants nothing so much as to relax, smoke a joint, and bowl a few frames. He's confronted by an ocean of characters who revile these dreams – "My advice is to do what your parents did," hollers the Big Lebowski at him, "get a job, sir! The bums will always lose!" – and instead want to do things like cheat each other out of money, steal each other's cars, trick one another into unknowing sperm donation, and find illicit ways to get rich. From the Dude's perspective, that is, the world is a tragic place where too many people don't understand that the purpose of life is actually to enjoy life.
In the same way that Marlowe’s nobility casts into relief the more dismaying elements of his time, the Dude’s laziness highlights the relentless, mechanistic achievement-dreams that attended so much of the late 1990s. And his very being, his Dudeness, serves as a kind of salve for those afflictions. "I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that," says the Stranger at the end of the film. "Knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' ‘er easy for all us sinners." The sinners here being the ones who work too hard and care too much about how we look in the eyes of society, or perhaps, on the flip side, the nihilists who believe in nothing except the criminal payday.
One is tempted to go on. The hardboiled tradition rests as often as not on the machinations of a malevolent female character – the so-called "spider woman" trope – which The Big Lebowski playfully inverts with Maude, who just wants a baby, and Bunny, who's actually not involved at all; the hardboiled tradition uses its Los Angeles location as a way to work through the promises and failures of The American Dream at the westernmost spearhead of its progress, and The Big Lebowski delightfully recasts this in a (pretty accurate, it must be said) vision of a city filled with naked artists splattering paint from harnesses, TV writers in iron lungs, and landlords with dreams of making it as avant-garde dancers. From top to bottom, the film lovingly uses the materials of its genre to its own comedic ends, and is so well constructed that virtually every element gains in depth the more one thinks about it and about how it relates to other stories with which it shares a genre connection.
Which brings us back to the question of the complexity of these kinds of tales. Chandler, famously, simply forgot to account for the death of one of the characters in The Big Sleep. Far from being a flaw in the book, this represents one of its greatest strengths, because it aids the feeling that our detective, armed with only his common sense and hard head (as does the Dude, Chandler's hero inevitably gets knocked out at least once a novel) must confront a world that is fundamentally un-understandable.
In The Big Lebowski, this element is present from the very beginning, in the Stranger's introductory voice-over. He sets out to tell us the significance of the story he's about to relate – "Sometime there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place" – but before he can even get through this explanation he loses his way. The various events and meanings and significances of his own tale escape him, and he falters his way into exclaiming “Aw, hell, I done introduced him enough." The most that he and we can do, in other words, is immerse ourselves in these manifold twists and turns and be swept along with them. Comprehension is beyond us.
In this way, the complexity is far more than a matter of plot. It is, instead, an ontological assertion. Even when the mechanics of the villains' machinations eventually become clear, the reasons behind them can never be fully grasped. Why are people corrupt? Why are they rapacious? Why do they do things like kill and steal, or draw naked tumescent men on notepads when they're on the phone and drop weasels into the bathtubs of peaceful bathers?
The answer – in both the classic hardboiled novels and films and The Big Lebowski – goes to the nature of our existence: the deepest mysteries in which we find ourselves embroiled are never really about the facts of what has happened. Instead, they’re about why we and other people do what we do. In an attempt to wade through to the other side of this quagmire the complications of the plot put the viewer exactly into the shoes of the detective, fronting them with the idea that the enigma they’ve entered is not some menagerie of undeciphered clues but the irreducible labyrinth of human beings.
Like reading essays about film? Subscribe for free and receive a new one in this series in your email inbox every Friday. And please take the time to re-post and share if you’re so inclined…