Why do some films sink while others soar into the stratosphere, sky-high, where they remain as living monuments? It’s a good question, but a much better question is: Why do some films do both? I think I can be of some help in the matter, at least as it pertains to The Big Lebowski.

First off, it was marketed wrong. One of the primary trailers that Working Title Films first ran had nothing on its soundtrack but “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” (an admittedly wonderful song by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition) playing over a collage of moments from the film that do little to convey its greatest asset: the idiosyncrasies of the characters, whose attributes in the movie are conveyed mostly through the spoken word.

Then, of course, there were the critics. Some of the harshest were out of England, and can therefore be forgiven for finding Lebowski about as funny as I, for instance, find Monty Python. But what of the Americans? Most of them rolled directly into the gutter on their first try, and years later would do much better with a second ball.

The movie found its audience eventually, as great movies tend to do, but then it did something altogether more grandiose. It became a literal religion — the Church of the Latter-Day Dude, or Dudeism — and the subject of scholarly research that transcended even academia’s absurd standards. Two species of African spider have names derived from the film. There are Big Lebowski-themed bars around the world. There is an annual Lebowski Fest of ever-expanding popularity. I could go on, but I won’t.

The Dudeism religion’s official logo.

Suffice to say, Lebowski has become the kind of cultural phenomenon that can never be achieved deliberately — the kind that strikes precisely the right spot at precisely the right angle, with an idiosyncrasy that cannot be contrived or calculated. And what is that spot? What is that angle? Reductionists will tell you, simply, that it makes being a slacker seem cool. Although there’s a lot of truth in this, it doesn’t come anywhere near a suitable explanation, and misses one crucial point.

It’s about the personal passions — about the importance of one’s own passions in leading a meaningful life, and about how our interests define us in an otherwise meaningless world. That’s the simplest way of articulating what the movie so eloquently demonstrates. It tells the story of a group of recreational bowlers whose lives are disrupted when a cabal of nihilists mistake the Dude — given name: Jeffrey Lebowski — for a different Jeffrey Lebowski, the so-called Big Lebowski, a wealthy man living in the same general area of Los Angeles.

It all starts when some thugs invade the Dude’s home, assault him, threaten him, break some stuff, and then piss on his living-room carpet. (“Hey, man, not on the rug.”) After all this, the thugs look around and realize they’ve got the wrong place — this guy’s not even rich. They leave the Dude’s place, but the Dude, for all the things he can abide, can’t abide his rug’s ruination. Cleaning it, apparently, having never occurred to him, he decides to get a new one by tracking down this rich guy whose name is also Jeffrey Lebowski.

Thus our journey begins.