About Entertainment – Magazine – Lebowski lives
About Entertainment – Magazine –
It’s 10 years since the release of The Big Lebowski, a film that split cinema audiences down the middle but created a strange cult. Is The Dude a slacker prince for our times?
Not everybody likes The Big Lebowski.
The Big Lebowski is a cult film. That is to say, not everybody likes it but those who do, in the main, have a special relationship with it.
One of the dream sequences (photo courtesy of Universal Pictures)
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When it was released, as the follow-up to the Coen brothers’ well-regarded and academy-impressing Fargo, many critics found themselves underwhelmed. Fargo was a film that hung together well – tightly paced and plotted, full of dark humour and moments of pathos.
The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, could be viewed as two hours of wild self-indulgence, packed to the gills with bowling, White Russian cocktails, and swearing.
Variety said it “doesn’t seem to be about anything other than its own cleverness”, while the LA Times moaned that the “story line is in truth disjointed, incoherent and even irritating”.
Even its staunchest fan would have to say the plot, a pastiche of a Chandler or Hammett mystery, takes a little decoding.
The central character is Jeff Lebowski, aka The Dude, who has his rug urinated on by thugs, setting off a complicated chain of events.
Power of quotability
In 1998 the film failed, initially at least, to set the box office on fire.
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QUOTABLE LINES
The Dude:
Nice marmot
Careful man, there’s a beverage here
This aggression will not stand, man
That rug really tied the room together
Walter Sobchak:
This is not Nam, this is bowling, there are rules
You’re entering a world of pain
I did not watch my buddies die face down in the mud…
Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature
You want a toe? I can get you a toe… hell, I can get you a toe by three o’clock this afternoon, with nail polish
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The flicks were then being bestrode by Titanic, a big sentimental monster of a replica-ship melodrama. The ordinary cinemagoer preferred Celine Dion’s heart going on, and Kate Winslet threatening to jump to a watery grave, to the antics of a bearded slacker in Los Angeles.
But while The Big Lebowski did not initially put bums on seats, it was not a total turkey and proved something of a very slow-burn hit, particularly on DVD.
It became a popular choice for midnight screenings. Fans liked to go along and quote the dialogue. It was perhaps not surprising when four years after its release, it spawned Lebowski Fest, a chain of conventions, centred on Louisville, Kentucky, celebrating the film. There have even been Lebowski celebrations in the UK.
“The first night we watch the movie, the second night we become the movie,” says Will Russell, who describes himself as “co-founding dude” of the Lebowski Fest.
At the annual events, fans dress up as the Dude himself, or as crazed Vietnam veteran Walter Sobchak, German nihilists, purple-clad Jesus Quintana, bowling pins, Valkyries and even as the dancing landlord. Then they read quotations to each other, much as might be seen at a Monty Python convention.
Will Russell (right) with another co-founder, Bill Green
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“It is fun to drink and bowl,” says Mr Russell, co-author of I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski. And they are all united into one temporarily tight-knit community by their love of the film.
“The characters are so loveable and it is a really quotable movie. Not everybody gets it. A lot of people see the movie and they don’t like it. Other people fall in love with it.”
It’s a key element in cult appeal. Not just loving something, but also relishing the fact that not everybody does.
“It was considered a flop at the time. Titanic was in its 20th week and it still beat the Big Lebowski. US Marshals beat it.”
But neither have the quotability of The Big Lebowski. At the festival the “achievers” – as the fanatics of the film call themselves, after the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers mentioned in the movie – shout “nice marmot” or “careful man, there’s a beverage here”.
John Goodman’s character, Walter Sobchak, provides many of the most glorious lines with his preposterous ruminations on his experiences in Vietnam such as: “This is not Nam, this is bowling, there are rules”.
Regular swearing
The fans love the glorious level of deadpan wit. In one scene the two protagonists enter a house and see a famous TV writer ensconced in an iron lung, his laboured breathing audible across the room. “Does he still write?”, they ask the woman who answers the door. “No, no, no, he has health problems,” she replies.
Fans regard Jesus Quintana as one of the great movie cameos
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And then there is the swearing. Mr Russell estimates the F-word is used 281 times.
Lou Harry, author of the as-yet-unpublished Behind the Screen: The Big Lebowski, says the film’s appeal lies in its “compulsive rewatchability”.
“It is in a line of Coen Brothers films – it has the same quirkiness and unexpected 180 degree turns until you have seen it 17 times. It does that in a way that is satisfying.”
With a marijuana-smoking burned out hippie as the protagonist, it’s easy to place The Big Lebowski as one of the forerunners of today’s wave of slacker comedies like Knocked Up, Pineapple Express and The Wackness.
But its place is really in the line of under-appreciated-at-time-of-release cult films – a list featuring everything from Tod Browning’s Freaks to Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
The Big Lebowski is of an era where fanatics find it easier to discover the shared nature of their fanaticism thanks to the internet and now, to social networking.
The result is the continuance of the concept of “cult”.
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