Illustration by Noah Hickey/The Dispatch (Photo courtesy of Working Title Films).
Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski is no hero, the ever-mustachioed Sam Elliott tells us at the start of the Coen brothers’ 1998 cult classic, The Big Lebowski. But “sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place.” For the Dude, the time is the early ’90s, and the place is Los Angeles; the United States is about to go to war, and the Dude’s rug has just been urinated upon. It’s an act that sets off a series of events that includes a faked kidnapping, an attempted ransom handoff, and a clash with a sword-wielding German nihilist and his two nihilist compatriots.
We’re never told why the Dude is the man for this time and place. It’s unlikely that he himself knows. He drifts through life like the tumbleweed that rolls across the screen at the start of the film, spending most of his time at the bowling alley with his two friends, Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam veteran, and Donny, “who loved bowling,” as he is fittingly eulogized at the end of the film. (Donny is the only one of the three whom we actually see bowling.) He’s not even the only Jeffrey Lebowski in Los Angeles: A millionaire known as the Big Lebowski shares his name—which is cause for much confusion.
The plot is hard to summarize. But the Coen brothers’ inspiration for the film was the detective novels of the American-British mystery writer Raymond Chandler. As Joel Coen told IndieWire in 1998: “We wanted to do a Chandler kind of story—how it moves episodically and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery, as well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.”
But what is important in The Big Lebowski? At the heart of the meandering plot is the Dude’s stand against nihilism. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosopher of nihilism, the Dude could be misunderstood as a nihilist himself, but he is concerned with finding meaning and order, not deconstructing these concepts.
There’s a section of Nietzsche’s 1886 book Beyond Good and Evil that is perhaps even more perplexing than the plot of The Big Lebowski. Suddenly, after three essayistic chapters on the nature of truth (which could be summed up imperfectly in the Dude’s words that the truth claims of the philosophers are “well, you know, just, like, uh, your opinion, man”), Nietzsche launches into a series of “aphorisms and interludes,” two-to-three-sentence witticisms that may or may not be connected in any meaningful way. “When you look long into an abyss,” he writes in one of them, “the abyss also looks into you.” It’s the ultimate description of the consequences of nihilism and one of Nietzsche’s most famous lines.
The Dude has certainly looked into the abyss. His constant refrain that his rug “really tied the room together” might seem superficial in the face of the drama going on around him, but it is a cry for help as the abyss swallows what little order and structure existed in his drifting existence. His room is no longer tied together; the unity of his life is beginning to fragment. Because of this, the Dude’s standoff with the nihilists is more than literal. It reflects his internal conflict with nihilism.
What is it that gives the Dude a sense of meaning by the end of the film? It’s hard to say. He did not make something of himself as the big Lebowski told him he should at the start of the film. But it is not the big Lebowski with his key to the city of Pasadena nor Maude with her fashionable tastes and artwork that triumphs over the nihilists, but the Dude. He will likely continue “taking it easy for the rest of us sinners,” but as Martin Luther once quipped, “God made man out of nothing, and as long as we are nothing, He can make something out of us.”
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