Plot Summary:

The Big Lebowski is a stoner comedy, crime drama, noir film about a middle-aged hippie who likes to go bowling. The main action of the plot begins when two thugs break into Jeffery Lebowski’s (The Dude) apartment and try to shake him down for debt his wife has incurred. After some physical abuse, a lot of yelling, and a rug-urination incident, The Dude is able to convince them that they have the wrong man: he has no debt, he has no money with which to pay such a large debt, and more importantly, he has no wife. The thugs have come to the wrong Jeffery Lebowski’s house- there is another man by the same name with an expensive wife named Bunny and much more money. At the instigation of his bowling buddies (the violent Vietnam veteran Walter, and the meek and rarely heard Donnie) he takes his soiled rug to the mansion of the “big Lebowski” to demand a replacement. He eventually leaves, having taken a replacement rug off the floor of the big Lebowski’s floor.

This odd incident leads to his involvement in the complicated kidnapping of Bunny. Though he insists that the woman has simply gone on vacation without bothering to tell her much-older husband, the Dude finds himself inextricably involved in a plot involving a pornographer, nihilists, and a kind-of love-affair with the big Lebowski’s daughter Maude.

Eventually the Dude unravels the entire complicated plot, and reveals that (as Maude suspected) the big Lebowski has embezzled money from a charity to pay the ransom, but kept the money for himself, giving the Dude only paper to pay with. Though this is a smaller concern given that Bunny has indeed kidnapped herself, and returns after a brief trip; her friends, the nihilists had faked the kidnapping, hoping to get the money before she came home. In a side plot, Maude has decided to have the Dude’s baby, assuring him in no uncertain terms that he will not be welcome in its life. This baby, the inexplicably Western-derived narrator tells us, is meant to balance out the recent death of Donny, who had a heart attack during a confrontation with the nihilists.

This jumbled, complex ‘case’ all unravels through a haze of the marijuana and white Russians the Dude continuously imbibes, while assuring his companions that everything will be alright, and that they should all “just relax man.”

The Big Lebowski as Cult:

It does not take much to show where The Big Lebowski fits in the world of cult cinema. It adheres to the noir genre in several broad, overarching ways (we’ll get to that in a bit), but it also mixes in many classic elements of the Western (Sam Elliot’s character rolls into the screen with cowboy hat and tumbleweeds, looking almost as though he wandered over from a Western and decided to stay). And in apparent direct contradiction to these two more serious genres, the most obviously visible genre is the stoner comedy, complete with the laziest sport the Coens could think of: bowling. This transgression of genres (along with integration of the Vietnam and Gulf wars, and heavy involvement of the L.A. setting) makes it, as one critic says, “a remake of Cutter’s Way strained through The Big Sleep, a poison-pen love-letter to LA and all the movies made about it, a cowboy’s opium dream of life at the end of the trail, and a bowling movie about Desert Storm” (Bergan 190).

This transgression of genres is also one of the largest ways in which The Big Lebowski presents its intertextuality. Sam Elliot [The Stranger] and his trademark handlebar mustache is himself a reference to the Western genre. The title of The Big Lebowski is even derived from the 1946 film The Big Sleep.

The loose ends show up in the neat wrap-up to the film, where the Dude settles accounts with all the antagonists, Donnie’s death satisfies the morbid requirements of the noir, and The Stranger [Elliot] provides a philosophical outlook on the preceding events. Tidy as this sounds, the film does little to resolve several strings- the nihlists are apparently left to go about their business (with one 9-toed member), the titular Big Lebowski will be left to the punishment or reprieve decided by his daughter after his embezzlement, and Bunny, the over-sexed absentee femme fatale, is presumably left to continue gambling, and dominating her elder husband’s life.

As for the devoted following requisite by most standards of cult, I will simply refer my readers to Lebowski Fest– an annual festival held in New York to celebrate “all things related to The Big Lebowski” complete with White Russians, and costumes (pics above).

The Big Lebowski as Noir



At first viewing, I refused to admit The Big Lebowski was a noir film. This nonsensical, pot-filled, dark comedy with its outdated hippie protagonist could not possibly be a noir; the protagonist bowls for goodness sake! However, upon further investigation I had to admit, all the elements were there. In fact, in one way or another, all the elements are represented in The Big Lebowski.

This film represents a direct repurposing of the elements of noir, and a complete subversion of the genre. It faithfully represents all of the major elements of Film Noir, but in a situation that almost dares the audience to take it seriously.For example:

The city setting. Noir settings are almost always in cities, at night, with a heavy dose of rain. The Big Lebowski uses the Los Angeles city setting, and even uncovers a fair amount of seedy underbelly and corruption, but this city is bright, well lit, filled with pools and neon.

There is a nod towards the use of mirrors to distort the image, or only provide reflections instead of a straightforward character in the well-known TIME picture. This time instead of showing the distorted nature of a character the mirror suggests an impossible award: something happy and good which is at the same time so farfetched as to be ridiculous.

The protagonist is a heavy drinker and drug user, always on the cusp of poverty, who finds himself hoplessly immersed in an intricate plot, being manipulated by friends, enemies, and women alike. He faces down heavy-hitters, pimps. He is beaten and drugged (using a common trick, slipping something into the private eye’s drink). He even unravels the entire scheme in a moment of perfect clarity, and understands how the overly complex and unrelated events have woven themselves into the plot centered on himself. However, these aspects have been superimposed on a very different and ostensibly incompatible setting and protagonist. The Dude, in reality, is an aging hippie, laid back and prone to saying “take ‘er easy man.” Suave Detective meets Money and Power

Even the minor characters come from the classics. In a nod to The Big Sleep, the Dude confronts the pornographer Treehorn who mirrors Gieger. He deals with people from across the social spectrum of L.A. from his own broke friends to the rich (and corrupt) upper-echelons; “The novels of Raymond Chandler deal with all social classes in Los Angeles. But, like the eponymous character in The Big Lebowski, there is always a dominant, all-powerful figure who serves as a catalyst. He represents Money. He is also present in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. He is the man who has contributed to the construction of the city. He symbolizes the old order, and, at the end, he discovers it is all a sham…The Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), in his wheelchair, recalls the equally paralyzed General Sternwood,

while his wife Bunny and daughter Maude are reminiscent of the two Sternwood daughters, Vivian and Carmen” (201). These two women also provide that all-important aspect: the femme fatale. Bunny is the flighty, sexualized woman who acts (and spends) without thinking, and lives by the charity of the elderly husband who just can’t tell her no. Maude is the dark, intelligent, manipulative woman. She works in the background, accomplishing what she wants, only telling others what they need to hear for her to get what she wants.

The similarities are not coincidental, as the Coen brothers have admitted that “The Big Lebowski owes much to The Big Sleep, as reflected in the title. ‘We wanted to do something that would generate a certain narrative feeling—like a modern Raymond Chandler story…there are lots of references to Chandler novels. More than one book in our minds. I think the story about the rich old guy in Pasadena who sparks off the entire plot, is typical Chandler. In The Big Sleep it’s the two daughters who set everything in motion, here it’s the fake kidnapping” (200).



The Big Lebowski, despite first impressions, and apparently obvious contradictions, fits very neatly into the specifications of a noir film. It is only the particular touch of the Coen brothers which subverted the entire film into its more noticeable genres as a stoner-flick and black comedy.

Bergan, Ronald. The Coen Brothers. New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000. Print.