The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski is a 1998 crime comedy by the Coen Brothers. It stars Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, and Steve Buscemi. The Big Lebowski follows along in the style of old Raymond Chandler books, where characters would get caught up in convoluted stories, not by their own design, but by pure accident, and then a mystery would unfold organically without the main character actually trying to solve anything. This is exactly what happens to the Dude in the Big Lebowski. He falls into the plot, and stumbles through the movie, not really knowing what’s going on, and eventually falls onto the ending, not by his clever detective work, but by unfortunate circumstances that end up happening to him. 

And that’s what makes the Dude such a loveable character. He’s not really trying. He’s just trying to get along. He didn’t want to get pulled into this whole debacle. The debacle pulled him in. He didn’t want to keep going with it, but people kept calling him and harassing him. All the Dude ever wanted was to go bowling and be left alone. Is that so much to ask? I don’t think so. All I ever really want is to be left alone. I can see where the Dude is coming from on this one.  

And Jeff Bridges plays the Dude’s character so well, he’s become a literal cultural icon. An entire religion has sprung up around this movie. A literal religion. People have written books about this movie. They teach college courses about this movie. The characteristics and philosophies of the Dude have become so engrained in American culture, it’s a mystery what this world was like before this movie even existed. 

How great can a movie really be that it changes a literal culture? An entire generation of people have taken this movie so much to heart that it has changed their lives enough to dedicate a portion of their personality to it. If that doesn’t tell you that this is a great movie, I don’t know any other way to convince you. When you can start a quote from this movie, and somebody nearby hears it and finishes it, somebody that you don’t know, somebody that you’ve never met before, that means that it is a great movie. That it can forge an immediate relationship between two people that have never been in the same place at the same time before. But yet, upon hearing a few words of a sentence that is so important to them, they immediately finish it for the other person… You know this is a movie that means something. 

And movies like that don’t come along very often. Movies like that are the hidden gems in the movie industry. They appear without the creators knowing it was going to happen. Without anybody who worked on the movie knowing it was ever going to turn into this whole big thing. And then it becomes this giant unstoppable force. Like Star Wars, no pun intended. When George Lucas made Star Wars, he didn’t expect it to become what it is 50 years later. But, 50 years from now, kids will still probably be swinging lightsabers at each other.  

So, yeah. Go and see The Big Lebowski. You owe it to yourself. It’s an important piece of American cinema, and one of the funniest movies there is. I think it’s the Coen Brother’s best movie. Some people disagree. But some people are idiots. And as always, keep on watching, with a smile on your face…