Exploring the Stranger: Sam Elliott’s awesome ‘The Man’ antonym to The Big Lebowski’s ‘The Dude’
“A man is a coin,” the late great Norm Macdonald once wrote, “no obverse without reverse.” While Macdonald went on to say that this notion means you can remember Jeff Epstein as a monster, or as the man who killed Jeff Epstein, the pertinent point for our little story is that it captures the stark yet abiding duality of man.
The Dude, or El Duderito if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, might be worlds apart from the Stranger who Sam Elliott depicts, but their spiritual postcodes are a mere perspective trip away from living in casual abodes on the same street. Therein lies the beauty of this cowboy character, a man from afar who wandered onto the pages of our tale only to make it all the more illuminating.
As an incongruous, glinting metropolis rises out of the dark depths of desert, flickers, and then pans further into view, during the opening sequence of The Big Lebowski, we hear a conversational ode of sorts to ‘The Dude’. Within that opening stanza, Sam Elliot drawls out the following: “Sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place, he fits right in there.”
In Los Angeles, 1991, that man is ‘The Dude’ and ‘The Man’ is his polar opposite—he fits in about as well as the square peg of a priest in the round hole of an orgy. And their amicable meeting is like the last bastion of a dying breed making peace and reconciling with the ways of an invasive species. It’s the last lone cowboy of the old west making way for the bums in the final frontier of society with a handshake—it’s a society that he strived to set up and now must acquiesce into its unspooling equanimity with acceptance or forever hold his peace.
As directors, the Coen brothers have always been disciples of the old Alfred Hitchcock mantra: ‘If it happens anywhere it matters not’. However, Ethan Coen stretched that message regarding time and place a little further and referred to the sort of movies they make as having a sense of “Natural History.” It’s not only a time and place they want to capture but also “the creatures that survived there.” Sam Elliott is a creature dying in the new west, ‘The Dude’ is one looking to survive but thriving is a feat hardly worth the fight.
However, survival itself was a fight for the old cowboys of this town. Long before you could pay for milk with a cheque, you had to battle off a bear before you could put your feet up in Hollywood. This is wisdom that ‘The Man’ imparts to ‘The Dude’ when their paths meet at the point where Lebowski’s peace has been thrown into turmoil: “Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes, well, he eats you.” It says a lot that the old western pronunciation of ‘bear’ is often confused for ‘bar’ and ‘The Dude’ himself asks, “Is that some kinda eastern thing?”, “Far from it,” the ‘Man’ drawls back.
The way that the Coen brothers wove this meeting into place is a piece of movie magic. In ‘The Man’ they crafted an ingenious construct that allowed the narrator to infiltrate the very story that he struggled to keep tabs on. Only the Coens were not simply content with this original act of movie wizardry, as the very construct they crafted becomes a character who could have a movie of his own. Only that movie would not be set in 1991 like The Dude’s stupefying tale, much like the rest of Sam Elliott’s oeuvre, his film would be 100 years earlier.
Now, he has to hand over his western realm to the new guy. And it’s a guy he admires for the most part because he abides by the same potholes and windfalls, strikes and gutters, bear feasts and butcherings along life’s winding road that he struggled through. The only element he laments is when things feel less wholesome than they should. As he kindly asks: “Just one thing Dude, do you have to use so many cuss words?” Nevertheless, he’s happy when things are in the family way when he hears that a “little Lebowski is on the way”.
It would be an insult to refer to an interwoven narrator as a clever gimmick, even if he was only there to provide that quirk alone, but the fact that he is a three-dimensional fully formed fellow in his own right, elevates the ‘Third Man-Esque’ narration to a higher level.
This is true right down to ‘The Man’ not knowing which way to turn in the gaudy world of the bowling alley once he departs the scene to drift into the background once more—no matter how much he might understand about the fates of his fellow humble sapiens, regardless of what guide they come in, the flashing lights of the stupefying so-called City of Angels will always confound.
He is a man out of place and out of step but not without understanding, and that empathy means he can sit back and “die with a smile on his face without feeling like the good lord gypped” him; unlike the Jeffrey Lebowski who goes out shaking his fist and failing to grasp anything as he does so.
All the while, society continues to tumble along its chaotic diegesis like a tumbling tumbleweed forevermore and “the whole darn human comedy keeps perpetuating itself down through the generations”. Of course, this could all be bullshit and maybe the Coens simply thought there’s no point hiring Sam Elliott just to have him narrate, but it says a lot about the depth of a character who is in it for no more than a handful of minutes that such corroborations can be drawn. After all, ‘The Man’ really ties the room together.
