Read an Excerpt
The Big Lebowski
By Zachary Ingle Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-247-8
CHAPTER 1
The Comforts and Pleasures of Repetitive Dialogue in The Big Lebowski
Jeff Jaeckle
->The Big Lebowski can be a difficult film, especially for first-time audiences. While not as cerebral as Barton Fink (1991), nor as graphically violent as Miller's Crossing (1990) and Fargo (1996), the film's sprawling plot and barrage of cultural references are nonetheless tricky. As the eclectic cast of over three dozen characters wanders through Los Angeles, bizarre storylines intersect, often resulting in narrative detours and dead ends, including kidnapping, embezzlement, the adult film industry, community theatre, castration, pregnancy and, of course, a bowling tournament.
Peppered throughout are allusions to popular and high culture, which the characters use with little context, among them nihilism, the Biennale, National Socialism, Theodor Herzl, the first Gulf War, Vladimir Lenin and human paraquats.
Unsurprisingly, many early reviews were negative, with critics claiming that the film's plotting and allusions made it 'deliriously fractured' (The Hollywood Reporter), 'incomprehensible' (Time), 'hopelessly twisted up' (New Statesman) and 'thick with nonsequiturs' (Sight and Sound), thus ensuring 'an almost complete lack of structural integrity' (Boxoffice). These reviews make the film sound onerous and pretentious, yet The Big Lebowski is perhaps the most popular cult film of the early twenty-first century. The preponderance of midnight screenings and festivals, special editions and merchandizing, and numerous books on its making, philosophy, religious significance and all-around brilliance suggest that the film's difficulty is not overwhelming, nor without its admirers.
One possibility is that fans enjoy the film despite its difficulty. They can delight in its surreal dream sequences and bawdy humour without becoming bothered by, for instance, Bunny Lebowski's (Tara Reid) unexplained motivations for leaving Minnesota or the vague logic of the Dude's (Jeff Bridges) insult of the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston) as a 'human paraquat' – an oblique reference to a herbicide once used by the US government to destroy marijuana plantations. This pick-and-choose experience could effectively pare the film down to a simple buddy flick or, as film critic David Edelstein puts it, a 'scattershot druggy' comedy in the tradition of the Cheech and Chong series (Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin, 1978–84). Another possibility is that fans appreciate the film because of its difficulty, giving over to and relishing in its sheer complexity. Sight and Sound critic Jonathan Romney suggests that, for these types of fans, the 'story enables us to enjoy a whole catalogue of narrative dead ends, cruel gags and bravura character routines'. Repeat viewings would only strengthen these pleasures, as audiences could easily rekindle their stoner experiences or diligently seek out new details and references.
But what about first-time audiences faced with confusing plots and obscure allusions? How do they navigate these twists and turns, and what keeps them in their seats for the duration of the nearly two-hour film? To paraphrase the Dude, what ties the movie together? One possibility is mise-en-scène. Given that the entire film is set in and around Los Angeles, audiences can conceivably latch on to geography to ground their experiences of the film. However, the visual palates of these locations – like Los Angeles itself – vary widely. In The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film (1998), cinematographer Roger Deakins admits, 'I'm not sure I ever really had a handle on what Lebowski should look like [...] It's such a mix, I don't think it has one style.' In an interview for the same book, Joel Coen concurs, 'There are parts of the movie that want to be real and contemporary-feeling and other things that are very stylized, like the dream sequences. And then there's the bowling stuff. So this is more of a mix.'
As these shots of the bowling alley, the Dude's drug-induced dream and Larry Sellers' house illustrate, the compositions of these scenes are quite distinct, hardly making mise-en-scène a through-line for audiences.
Another unifying feature could be the Dude, who appears on- screen in all of these visually disparate settings and interacts with every character. However, the Dude isn't the most articulate of guides. He frequently finds himself overwhelmed, admitting at one point to Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), 'There are a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, a lotta strands to keep in my head, man.' When he attempts to explain his experiences, the Dude is often unreliable, uttering ill-formed or nonsensical lines. According to Paul Coughlin, in his essay for the Film Journal, the entire movie is based on such nonsense, 'embodied in the Dude's inability to verbalize anything remotely like a reasonable explanation for his circumstances'. The same could be said of the film's other potential guide, the Stranger (Sam Elliott), a voice-over narrator that loses his train of thought in the film's opening scene.
So, then, if the linchpin of The Big Lebowski is not any single plot, location or character, what holds it together? I propose that the answers are found in the film's sound design, specifically its uses of dialogue. As James Mottram explains in Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind (2000), 'Wayward as the script may be [...] what distinguishes the film from any [other], again, is the attention paid to speech patterns.' He is especially struck by the repetitive nature of these patterns, which 'flood the film, with characters reusing each others' words sub-consciously'. Justus Nieland dubs these patterns 'Dudespeak', in The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies (2009), arguing for the importance of mimicry, 'a compulsive borrowing from the stylized tissue of verbiage whose repetitions, loopings and displacements constitute the film's linguistic world'. For first-time audiences, these repetitions lend coherence to the film's sprawling plot and perplexing allusions, making it more comprehensible. For repeat audiences, they reward close listening by making the film into an aural game based on short-term memory skills and adept recollection. In short, these dialogue patterns draw us into the film and keep us coming back for more.
In these respects, The Big Lebowski meets a chief criterion of cult films, as defined by Umberto Eco in his oft-cited essay, 'Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage' (1985): 'It must provide a completely furnished world, so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were part of the beliefs of a sect, a private world of their own, a world about which one can play puzzle games and trivia contests.' The Big Lebowski is satisfying as a cult film, in part, because it provides first-time and repeat audiences a world of eminently quotable lines that aid comprehension and encourage verbal gamesmanship. Regardless of what happens, who appears on-screen or what characters allude to, the film's dialogue keeps audiences comfortably on track while providing aesthetic pleasures based on repetition.
Verbal coherence
Recounting the plot of The Big Lebowski is akin to telling a riddle. Why would a draft-dodging stoner and a militant Vietnam veteran be best friends? What do an unemployed bowler and a wheelchair-bound philanthropist have in common? What connects muscle-bound, porn-star thugs to skinny, leather-glad nihilists? Even when using character names, these questions can be difficult to answer, especially when removing the superficial response of 'the Dude'. What connects Maude and Walter Sobchack (John Goodman)? What do Larry Sellers (Jesse Flanagan) and Uli Kunkel (Peter Stormare) have in common? What links Walter with the Malibu Chief of Police (Leon Russom)? The answer is dialogue, as characters that would otherwise have no relationship find themselves drawn together through language. The Coens' strategies here are twofold: repetitive dialogue simplifies characterization, making the large cast easier to distinguish and recall, while dialogue echoes link seemingly unrelated locations, characters and events.
The Coens exaggerate verbal repetition to the level of parody in The Big Lebowski, often reducing characters to easily graspable types; their repeated phrases become shorthand descriptors – a form of verbal typecasting – much like product slogans. For instance, the band of German Nihilists that claim to have kidnapped Bunny and threaten to castrate the Dude are quickly summed up in the phrase 'funny stuff', which appears in the text of their ransom note, during the ransom drop off, in their initial attack on the Dude and in their final encounter with him, Walter and Donny (Steve Buscemi) – a total of six times. The repeated line betrays their amateur status and marks them, ironically, as 'funny' characters: comically inexperienced and inept kidnappers. As J. M. Tyree and Ben Walters note in their BFI guide to the film, 'by the fifth time the nihilists warn against the consequences of "funny stuff", it's clear there's nothing to worry about'. Instead of needing to recognize and distinguish these three characters, audiences can recall one simple and silly idea whenever they appear on-screen. Likewise, the Big Lebowski's use of 'bums', which he applies on nine occasions to the Dude and any man who fails to achieve his professional goals, reduces the character to a rabid classist; this repetition also typecasts him as an aggressive and economically powerful antagonist to our mellow and unemployed protagonist, the Dude. (Seasoned audiences also recognize 'bum' as a Freudian slip that reveals the Big Lebowski's anxieties about subsisting entirely on his deceased wife's inheritance).
Perhaps the most condensed form of verbal typecasting occurs when the Dude is brought before the Malibu Chief of Police, a fascistic disciplinarian who recalls the character of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). In under two minutes, the character's repetitive dialogue makes plain his function in the film in relation to the Dude: 'I don't like your jerkoff name. I don't like your jerkoff face. I don't like your jerkoff behavior. And I don't like you, jerkoff.' As with the Nihilists' repetition of 'funny stuff', the police chief's use of 'jerkoff' stands in for the character: he's the kind of jerkoff against which the Dude defines himself, making him another obvious antagonist. Audiences don't need to think much more about him.
When shared between multiple characters, repetitive dialogue links disparate events and locations. In some cases, characters recycle lines they overhear, which recalls and clarifies aspects of one scene in another. The ransom plot, for instance, is held together in part by a grave proclamation about the kidnapped Bunny. The Big Lebowski's assistant Brandt (Philip Seymour Hoffman) initiates the pattern when stressing that the Dude is in a position to save Bunny by delivering the ransom: 'Her life is in your hands' – a line that his employer asks him to repeat. Later that evening, minutes before the Dude and Walter botch their mission, the Dude laments, 'Her life was in our hands!' Days later, when the Dude meets again with the Big Lebowski, the enraged husband insists, 'Her life was in your hands!' These repetitions make the apparent purpose of these characters' actions impossible to mistake; despite the chaos and confusion surrounding the kidnapping and ransom, this line makes the plot fairly obvious, if not overly simplistic. (For seasoned audiences, the line also masks the truth that Bunny's life is in her own hands, since she never was kidnapped.)
The Coens take repetitive dialogue even further by creating lines that pass between characters that do not share the screen. Nieland refers to these as 'impossible repetitions' in which 'characters recycle fragments of speech from contexts in which they were not physically present as auditors' (original emphasis). Although these repetitions are admittedly subtle and fleeting, they nonetheless connect these characters and provide some measure of coherence. Take the terms 'jerkoff' and 'goldbricker', two unusual words that become more conspicuous because of their frequent repetition. The Dude starts the pattern when telling adult-film mogul Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), 'Yeah, well, I still jerkoff manually,' in response to his account of the frontiers of electronic porn. After Treehorn drugs the Dude and throws him on the streets of Malibu, the Dude encounters the chief of police, who repeats 'jerkoff' four times (see above); he also introduces the term 'goldbricker' when demanding, 'Keep your ugly, fucking goldbricking ass out of my beach community.' Later that night, when the Dude solves the mystery of the missing ransom, Walter uses the term to castigate the Big Lebowski for embezzling funds from the Achiever's Foundation and for pretending (he believes) to be paraplegic: 'This guy's a fake. A fucking goldbricker.' These repetitions verbally link these characters and scenes while drawing parallels between ostensibly opposed situations, such as the ways in which the two Jeffrey Lebowskis are, as the police chief and Walter insist, goldbrickers. The same can be said of other shared terms, among them 'clams' (Maude and Walter), 'amateurs' (Jackie Treehorn and Walter) and 'johnson' (Maude, the Dude, and the Nihilists) – these words connect characters through language while encouraging audiences to consider deeper similarities.
Verbal typecasting and echoes make The Big Lebowski more coherent and comprehensible; however, these dialogue patterns don't always do the trick. Some first-time viewers still find the film unfathomable. For these audiences, the only solution is to rewatch the movie, so that the incantatory power of its dialogue can take root. Anecdotes of these viewing experiences abound online, such as this one from a fan in Poland, which Barbara Klinger records in her article on The Big Lebowski for the journal Screen: 'The film really didn't seem interesting after the first viewing, but when I saw it a second, third time (via repeats on cable TV), everything changed. I [found] brilliant dialogue [...] favorite lines, hidden comic situations that one must really see the film a few times to notice.' These fans go beyond mere comprehension of the film to relish in dialogue complexities that reward close listening and encourage verbal gamesmanship.
Word games
Among diehard fans of The Big Lebowski, a badge of honour is the ability to recall and recite the film's dialogue flawlessly. As editors Aaron Jaffe and Edward P. Comentale explain in their introduction to The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies, 'there are essentially two behaviors central to the cult: catchphrases and dressing up. We'd argue that both have less to do with identification than achievements in citation'. Referring to the game-like aspects of this dialogue, they observe that diehard fans 'refuse to limit themselves to the Coens' most pithy utterances, but retrieve lines wholesale from the multiple viewings as if pulling pieces from a large puzzle box'. The Big Lebowski offers these verbal puzzle pieces in droves, rewarding audience members who listen closely and frequently.
The simplest reward is the pleasure of reciting the dialogue, which fans often do by yelling the movie's many quotable lines at the screen. Film blogger Julian Ayrs explains, many fans seem to have 'caught an infectious bug [...] that compels them to return to each screening [and] scream out dialogue amid a raucous round of wild guffaws'. Perhaps the quintessential example of this scream-worthy dialogue comes during Walter's destruction of a new corvette, during which he exclaims, 'This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!' The seventeen variations of this line make it highly quotable, while an exact recitation of Walter's monologue would likely constitute what Jaffe and Comentale describe as an 'achievement in citation'. Much is true of other catchphrases, including 'shut the fuck up [Donny]' (7x), 'is this your homework?' (5x), 'where's the [fucking] money?' (5x) and 'a world of pain' (4x). Each example attests to what Klinger dubs 'replay culture' in which, through repeat screenings, 'dialogue may be burned into the viewer's memory, becoming signature aspects of meaning and pleasure'. The Big Lebowski taps into this culture by building replay into the film itself: the repetitive nature of the dialogue makes it more memorable and pleasurable to recall.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Big Lebowski by Zachary Ingle. Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
