Back in the 2000s there was a period when no party was complete without some idiot in a dressing gown, White Russian in hand, telling non-existent Steve Buscemi’s (Buscemae?) to shut the fuck up. But exactly what is it about The Big Lebowski (1998), the shaggiest of the Coens’ shaggy-dog stories, and its ageing stoner hero (Jeff Bridges) that resonates so strongly with the time-rich and taste-poor? Sure, it’s funny in places, and the supporting cast is unimpeachable (John Goodman, Philip Seymour-Hoffman, Julianne Moore), but it so desperately wants to be a cult film, it forgets that’s not how cult films work. You can’t set out to create one. And, as viewers, they don’t just land in your lap. You have to unearth them.
We’ve discussed the perils of giving yourself a cool-sounding soubriquet (see Sting, The Shermanator, or this, but even these guys aren’t as precious about it as the supposedly laidback Lebowski. “Let me explain something to you,” he says in a rare moment of actually being able to string a sentence together. “Um, I am not ‘Mr Lebowski’… I’m the Dude. So that’s what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing…” Clearly not into the whole brevity thing either, the film spends an inordinate amount of time telling us how quite cool El Duderino is, while showing us the exact opposite. This is, after all, a man who writes out cheques for 69 cents (dated 11 September, as George Bush Sr talks war on the TV news, conspiracy fans), but doesn’t pay his rent, keeps himself in Kahlua and Thai stick, but dodges the bill when it comes to – SPOILERS – his own friend’s cremation, and spends his time bowling, driving round and experiencing “the odd acid flashback”.
And what about those friends? Look closely and you’ll see The Big Lebowski falls prey to what we’ll call Happy Days Syndrome, whereby the hero looks cool only in relation to the people he hangs around with – in this case psychotic Walter (Goodman) and sadsack Donnie (Buscemi) – who are even bigger losers than he is. Perhaps that’s the same reason students love The Dude: he makes it OK to not try. But it isn’t OK, at least not if you’re nearer 50 than 15.
There’s always someone at the party who refers to himself in the third person, refuses to pay his way and parks in the disabled spot. You’d just better hope he isn’t the coolest guy there. Or worse, he's you.
