I come late to everything. My first R.E.M. album was “Green.” I just started “Deadwood.” I have not seen the entire “Gangnam Style” video. The great exception to my tardiness is “The Big Lebowski.” While most fans of that Los Angeles story from Coen brothers about mistaken identity, German nihilists, Sabbath observance and bowling were straphangers on the bus — the movie was no hit when it was released — I grokked its genius on first viewing, at a cineplex in North Haven, Conn., in 1998.

How did I love “Lebowski”? Dude, let’s count the ways. I loved Jeff Bridges as Jeff Lebowski, the pot-smoking, White Russian-drinking, pacifist bowler known as the Dude. I loved Philip Seymour Hoffman as the obsequious toadie to the other Lebowski whom the Dude is mistaken for. I loved the absurdist plot, something about a missing rug. And I seriously loved Tara Reid, pruriently painting her toenails.

But above all I loved the movie’s deep unseriousness. In the second year of graduate school I spent my days jostling with Foucauldians, trauma theorists, critical-race-studies scholars and other people generally hostile to frivolity and fun. Seeing “The Big Lebowski” was like sneaking over the monastery wall for a night at the Chicken Ranch.

It was with befuddlement and a nontrivial amount of anger that I saw come-lately DVD fans turn “The Big Lebowski” — a movie I thought resisted cultural criticism — into a text to be groped for meaning. Some of the worst offenders have been the armchair Buddhists, who have found Zen koans in various catchphrases from the movie, to be puzzled over in their quest for enlightenment.