Jeffrey Lebowski: Sometimes There's a Man

Jeffrey Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) is not Mr. Lebowski (David Huddleston), the millionaire Lebowski, the “Big Lebowski” in The Big Lebowski (1997). No, Jeffrey is simply known as The Dude. 

Thinking about the title. It evokes the image of the Dude and his small world. Yet, it specifically refers to the millionaire Lebowski. Why him? Does it tell us what the film is really about? The world of Mr. Lebowski. A very un-Dude world, to say the least. If the film is deliberately misnamed and misleading, what else is? Perhaps having a narrator for story about the Dude!

The prelude to the film is a narration by The Stranger (Sam Elliott), introducing us to a man who could be “the laziest in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide.” However, the Stranger has already qualified his remarks such that the Dude may be a man for his time and place. The time is 1990 during the First Persian Gulf War:

 “I only mention it because 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.”

Well, how does the Dude do it? Become the man for his time and place? And what exactly does it say about the time and place where he is “the man”?

We first see the Dude in a supermarket buying a carton of Half & Half. The latter is the mainstay of his drinking regimen: White Russians (also referred to in the film as “Caucasians”). Since we have been given the setup, the audience doesn’t have a high bar of expectation for the Dude. When he gets to the cashier, he writes her a check for $0.69.

Why a supermarket? The Coen Brothers are notorious for referencing its own and other films. In this case, it’s a film I mentioned in the previous blog, The Long Goodbye (1973), and detective Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould), who has a finicky cat. He’s out of cat food, goes to the supermarket, but can’t find the kind he wants. He purchases a substitute brand and, arriving home, puts the new cat food in the old cans. He shows that he’s taking the food from the preferred brand’s can. Only the cat won’t eat it.

Besides the supermarket scenario, both movies’ lead characters are depicted as stumblebums. Gould’s Marlowe is the anti-detective. As it happens, the Dude will be hired to do detective work and becomes the anti-anti-detective. And like another Marlowe film, The Big Sleep (1946), The Big Lebowski shares with it a convoluted plot that involves pornography, sociopaths, and heiresses with gambling debts, but, alas, no murders. Using “The Big” in the title recalls other noir films: The Big Clock (1948), The Big Heat (1953), The Big Combo (1955), and The Big Knife (1955).

Throughout the film, the Dude is labeled a deadbeat and loser, not a great distance from the Stranger’s label “lazy”. The Big Lebowski sees him as part of the Sixties Revolution against the establishment and declares: "Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost." The Dude later remarks how he helped write the S.D.S.’s Port Huron Statement, the first uncompromising one, but his campus radicalism was combined with bowling and drug taking. By his late forties, bowling and smoking weed won out. It’s not apparent how he gets money. His friend Walter (John Goodman) owns a security firm and is a Vietnam Vet. Aside for his love of bowling, he has nothing in common with the Dude.

So, if the Dude is the laziest man around, and he’s the man for his time and place, the film must be about the time and place. We hear George H. W. Bush on the television: “This will not stand.” The Dude repeats these words when he talks about two enforcers peeing on his rug. This act of aggression against Jeffrey initiates his contact with the Big Lebowski and in getting back Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid) from kidnappers. In one of the Dude’s nightmares, Saddam Hussein appears behind the counter handing out bowling shoes.

The place is Los Angeles, the setting for many essential noir films, but in the larger space, it is the United States. Coen Brothers’ films wryly critique American habits, obsessions, and values. (In Burn After Reading [2008], a middle-aged woman wants several elective plastic surgeries but cannot get her insurance to pay for them. Her pursuit of this goal leads to the death of two men,puts another in a coma, and a fourth leaves the country in fear for his life.) This brings us back to the title of the film. We have rich American who believes he has worked for his money and doesn’t want society’s deadbeats to have any part of his wealth.

The Dude versus the Big Lebowski. Yet, it turns out that the Big Lebowski didn’t earn a dime of his wealth, has mostly squandered it, and is using Jeffrey in a scheme that’s meant to cover up his embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollar from the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers. The Big Lebowski turns out to be a bigger deadbeat than the Dude; worse, he’s a failure at being a philanthropist (his foundation helps “inner city children of promise but without the necessary means for a higher education.”)

Perhaps the “man for his time” is really the millionaire Lebowski. He embellishes his work ethic and civic duties to obscure his true nature. He cares for nothing but himself. He doesn’t care that his trophy wife of twenty years has no interest in him except to back her increasing indebtedness to gamblers.

The Dude is equally self-absorbed but has fewer illusions about himself. He desires very little and seems content. Indeed, the major fracture in his existence occurs when he’s inadvertently knocked into the Big Lebowski’s orbit. Like Philip Marlowe, he takes many beatings, and his car, a 1972 LeBaron, gets worse treatment, being involved in multiple crashes and then is finally killed when the Nihilists, Bunny’s faux kidnappers, burn it.

Or are the Lebowskis the two sides of the American coin? Besides being used by the Big Lebowski, Jeffrey becomes the instrument for Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore) to have a child. The Dude's child will be the Big Lebowski's grandkid. The Stranger remarks: " I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself. . . ."

One of the first bits of trivia from the IMDb mentions that Jeffrey says “man” 147 times. Perhaps this is his best claim to being the "man" of his time. We’re also told that he “fits right in.” The yang to the Big Lebowski’s yin? The Dude’s purges himself of wanting much, just keeps to simple things, gets high regularly, and holds little resentment or vitriol against the world of the Big Lebowski. This is why he can say with no irony that “the Dude abides.”