Does The Dude abide in ‘The Big Lebowski’?
Hot on the heels of their first hit movie, Fargo, the Coen brothers conjured up another classic, which set the benchmark for stoner comedies to come. They saw their own plotline of a husband having his own wife kidnapped and raised it to a wife kidnapping herself.
The Big Lebowski meanders through a fistful of mostly bad and ugly characters and their tangled mess of ludicrous crimes with the aura of cool and calm embodied by its protagonist, Jeff ‘The Dude’ Lebowski. While it ends in apparent tragedy, the film’s laid-back tone never lets up, as hard as Walter Sobchak tries to change that.
The Dude, played by Jeff Bridges, is the antidote to the maelstrom of angry, grasping madness around him. A hero looking to get things straightened out the straightforward way without breaking a sweat — and preferably in his pyjamas.
It’s only fitting, then, that his final words in the film are, “The Dude abides”. He ultimately accepts the world as it is, that what will be will be, tolerates others regardless of their (often criminal) hangups), and is all the better for it.
But how does the movie end?
The film climaxes with the death of Donny, one of The Dude’s bowling teammates, along with Walter, from a heart attack during a violent encounter with a gang of nihilists demanding their ransom money. The irony of the death itself is that the cardiac arrest-inducing level of stress Donny found himself under during the fight couldn’t have been further from The Dude’s own condition.
After a botched attempt at scattering Donny’s ashes, Walter and The Dude return to the bowling alley, which features throughout the film. It’s here that we encounter the movie’s final scene.
The Dude goes to the bar at the alley and runs into the same mysterious old cowboy he met earlier in the film as a country song plays in the background. The Dude tells him things have been “strikes and gutters, ups and downs” before seeing him off with his famous final line.
The old cowboy, known as ‘The Stranger’ and played by Sam Elliott, is then revealed to us as the narrator from the start of the film. He explains how he “takes comfort” in The Dude “takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners”. He concludes the story with a meditation on the “human comedy” of life “perpetuating itself”, revealing that The Dude is set to become a father.
So, what does this ending actually mean?
The set-up of The Dude and The Stranger sitting at the bar of the bowling alley facing the camera invokes the saloon bar motif of old Western films. The Stranger appears as a wise frontiersman, part of the furniture of the “saloon”.
The camera perspective and fourth wall breaking of this final scene (as well as the joke about The Dude not using “so many cuss words” when they first meet) frame the entire movie as a kind of modern-day Western. Rather than gunslingers, the “cowboys” propelling the story are duelling with bowling balls. Hence The Dude’s metaphor about “strikes and gutters”.
Except that these characters are already out West. There’s nowhere further to go and no more meaningful duels to be fought. The Dude is somehow both the antithesis of a heroic Western cowboy and the contemporary version of one. There’s nothing more heroic to be done out West at the turn of the millennium than just abide. And The Dude does that pretty well.
Did the movie really start a new religion?
Movies starting entire religions is, surprisingly, not a new thing. Jedi is now an officially recognised religion with thousands of confirmed devotees. And, likewise, The Big Lebowski started its own, slightly tongue-in-cheek form of devotion, known as Dudeism.
Though apparently not affiliated with the movie, though this feels more like a clever sidestep of litigious Hollywood-types, the official website for the religion claims that it is a sense of being that has been present for thousands of years. It reads: “The originator of Taoism, Lao Tzu, basically said ‘smoke ’em if you got ’em’ and ‘mellow out, man’ although he said this in ancient Chinese so something may have been lost in the translation.”
The main ethos seems to take a relaxed look at the world and allow it to pass through you, which, for the most part, feels like a pretty safe way to go about living your life.
