The detail that reveals the greatest bowler in The Big Lebowski
“Woo! I’m throwing rocks tonight,” our beloved little Theodore Donald Kerabatsos proclaims in the opening lines of The Big Lebowski—which is, essentially, a film about bowling. Amid the myriad other waxes and wanes swirling in the welter of the film’s wavering point, the gutters and strikes of the bowling hall remain one solid constant. That sacred space is a bastion of community, rules, and some of the finest sarsaparilla in the county.
The Dude might be laissez-faire in his approach to the lanes, Donny may well do it for the love of the game, and Walter might be a stickler for the rules, but there is one ace striker who plays to win and seemingly he usually does. In the stomach-churning scene where Jesus Quintana wafts his hand over the ball distributor, the shot reveals three esteemed rings which denote his ability to roll a perfect 300 game, a 299 game, and the near-impossible 800 series. In short, this creep can roll.
So, in true Big Lebowski fan fashion, let’s self-indulgently over-analyse the hell out of this. After all, it’s a detail that has been put there by the Coen brothers for some reason—surely, it couldn’t possibly just be Costume & Design fulfilling their role of making things look accurate and throwing in a little nod to the genuine bowling nerds in the audience.
However, if it wasn’t merely a case of fittingly depicting a sleazeball with a suitably jewelled hand, then why was ‘The Jesus’ singled as the one finest paedophilic bowlers the world has ever seen? Well, it certainly seems to tie into the film’s motif that achievement and integrity are two separate things in a society gone awry and blinded by success where people celebrate their own good fortune and berate others for their lack of it.
Take, for instance, the human paraquat: this pontificating scumbag is a fool and a fraud who bullies ‘bums’, but it is almost because of this that he resides in a big house on the hill. And it is also because of this and his pride in his position that he was set to lose a lot of cash. This is, in short, all part of the film’s tireless insistence of portraying the absurdity of true realism.
After all, why wouldn’t Jesus be a superb bowler just because he’s a bad man? I’ve watched enough documentaries with express praise from his colleagues to know that the BTK Killer was a brilliant electronics technician. In fact, perhaps like The Jesus himself, he found a sort of solace away from the glare of society in a realm where he excelled. If you had to go door-to-door professing your sins, then it’s highly likely that you’d lay-low in the lanes too (not to daub you with the same abhorrent brush of The Jesus, god forbid).
If there’s any justice, then we can only hope that once the scheduling difficulties with the league office got amended, that The Dude and Walter kicked his ass in honour of Donny—the film’s only true innocent bystander just trying to throw rocks in peace.
