"The Dude abides": The Big Lebowski and Politics as Tragic Farce

David Haglund over at Slate just posted a fascinating piece unpacking some of the contemporary political resonances that The Big Lebowski raises today. I have to admit, it was a ballsy choice to publish an article about a cult farce on Sept. 11, but it struck a chord in me in a way that nothing else on the net did yesterday, seven years after (or is it into) the national trauma that 9/11 marked. (Honestly, I didn't even see much online to mark the occasion, other than a few article-of-the-day postings on Wikipedia--perhaps it's because I look mostly at media sites... Although I did find the bottom paragraph of Jim Emerson's post strangely affecting also...). This has always been seen as the fluffiest of the brothers Coen's fluff pieces, a strange genre exercise that views film noir through a marijuana haze.

But I also think it was an effective choice. I have to admit that I never caught the political commentary that seems to frame the film the first (few) time(s) I saw it: George Bush's speech to open the film as The Dude chooses his Half-n-Half, Walter's comments about the "camel-fuckers in Iraq," etc. It's something that creeps up on you as you re-visit the film, and, I would argue along with Haglund, it only creeps up on you because of its nostalgic retrospective lens. Walter is a neo-con before the term even existed, Haglund suggests, and The Dude's pacifism is the yin to Walter's yang. There's a genuine sweetness in the relationship, an intimation of intimacy among folks so politically divided, a friendliness among the hawk, the dove, and the guy who is constantly "out of [his] element" and who doesn't fit neatly into the prescribed labels of red-state and blue-state. Haglund writes:

This gentle, comic conclusion came to mind while I watched the Coen brothers' new farce, Burn After Reading, which revolves around the misplaced memoirs of an ex-CIA analyst. The new film is a similarly sharp satire of American life, and there are parallels with the Lebowski plot: a greedy attempt at extortion, multiple schemes incompetently botched. The contrast in tone, though, is stark. There's no real friendship in the world of Burn After Reading, there's even less heroism, and paranoia abounds. No one mentions 9/11 or the war in Iraq, but these characters, like their audience, are living in a darker world. The cult of Lebowski, I've begun to suspect, has more than a little nostalgia in it—for a decade when one could poke brilliant fun at the national disposition and the stakes didn't feel so high.

I think it's a great reading of the film, but, more importantly, I think it articulates something deeper about how we relate to media, and particularly to representations of politics within the everyday (as crazy as the everyday in this film is). Haglund notes that the cult of Lebowski has a certain nostalgia for simpler times at the heart of it, but I would suggest that equally important to the nostalgia is the work of mourning that we perform as we watch something like this. I'm reminded of Marx's dictum that history happens first as tragedy and is repeated as farce, but this film seems to suggest that the reverse can be true as well. It would be reductive to suggest that the politics worked themselves on a completely passively ignorant audience when the film was first distributed, but I do think that there's a certain sadness in seeing the politics of it now that wasn't necessarily as present as it is when watching the movie today. The film itself even seems to anticipate this trajectory from farce to tragedy, as it manages to kill off the most likable character in the most over-the-top confrontation in the film. But the film also seems to contain that, to reign it in in a way that history can't, as the Cowboy slowly intones in his comforting drawl that he himself takes comfort from the fact that "The Dude abides."

But in this historical repetition--the repetition whereby we watch a film from two different vantage points, and the repetition that allows us to see Lebowski's Iraq I in the context of Iraq II--to what does The Dude abide? Seemingly, the answer is the intensity of affect that flows personally and politically from one moment to the next. Walter may be an overt neo-con avant la lettre, but The Dude is the one who finds the truth with his gut, the one who in the end realizes that the solution to the mystery really means nothing but its truthiness. He's a desiring-machine--caring only about sensations, like the movement of bowling, or being high, or finding a rug that nebulously "ties the whole room together"--who (despite a politically Leftist past) cannot connect to any politics in the present, but this only makes him resonate more tragic-comically as we move from one political moment to the next. He becomes a better signifier for the kinds of tragedy we live out in our less innocent world today.

I will say, every time I get stressed (and this is definitely true of several of my friends), my first instinct is to watch The Big Lebowski, to find solace in its utter silliness. The experience (for me at least) is becoming more and more bittersweet to me over the years, and this perhaps points to one reason why.