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superheroes who put on a good show and are much more clever and wittier than other, conventional characters. A character such as Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs is at first terrifying, then entertaining, and finally humorous as, in the film's final frames, he responds to a question as to his plans by saying, wryly, that he'll be having an old friend for dinner.

      Noir, Nihilism, and Comedy in The Big Lebowski

      The comic denouement of The Silence of the Lambs signals the unraveling of the hero genre from within, a point driven home with great gusto in such spoofs of the genre as Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) and Scary Movie (Keenan Ivory Wayans, 2000) and their sequels. If the gravity of the quest to understand and fend off evil produces no great insight about good or evil, just the surface aesthetics of the evildoer, then the audience, having become jaded, anticipates the aesthetics of evil and sees the whole drama as a farce. There is, thus, an opening for a democratic rejoinder to the sort of angst-ridden nihilism that celebrates the tragic heroism of the loner who faces the meaninglessness of life with gravity. The democratic and comic response is: Why bother? What's all the fuss about? If there is no meaning, then why get worked up about anything? And what, in a pointless universe, could possibly provide a basis for distinguishing, as Nietzsche wants to, between noble and base ways of facing the abyss? This sort of comedy mocks radicals of all sorts, whether they be nihilists or zealous reformers. Such is the inspiration for the Coen brothers’ comic leveling of nihilism in The Big Lebowski (1998).

      The Big Lebowski begins and ends with the noir commonplace: voice-over narration. As a tumbleweed blows down the streets of Los Angeles and over a beach, the narrator introduces “the Dude,” a name no one else would “self-apply.” “Our story,” he relates, is set in the early 1990s, at the time of our national “conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis.” Sometimes, the narrator continues, “a man is, I won't say a hero, but sometimes a man is just right for his time and place.” That man is the Dude, the “laziest man in LA County,” an achievement that puts him high in the “running for laziest worldwide.” The camera turns to the Dude, wearing shorts and a bathrobe and shopping for groceries. A television in the store plays President George H. W. Bush's speech about the Iraqi threat: “This aggression will not stand.”

      Later that day, the Dude is attacked at home by intruders who call him Lebowski, stuff his head in the toilet, and demand that he repay the money his wife owes Jackie Treehorn. A perplexed Dude objects that no one calls him Lebowski and that he's not married—gesturing to the raised toilet seat as confirming evidence. The intruders suddenly come to their senses and one of them asks, “Isn't this guy supposed to be a millionaire?” In a parting gesture, they urinate on the rug—an act of defilement that the Dude regrets because “that rug really tied the room together.”

      These opening scenes introduce readily identifiable neo-noir themes. There is the theme of the loner, certainly not the hero of the old westerns, but rather the uprooted drifter, symbolized in the tumbleweed blown by chance forces beyond its control or comprehension. Then there is the motif of a shallow and artificially constructed political culture, suggested in the television coverage of the Gulf War. As we shall see, the film replays 1960s themes of the establishment versus the antiestablishment, especially in the contrast between the two Lebowskis. Finally, there is the noir staple of the “wrong man,” the chance misidentification of an ordinary man as a culprit or criminal of some sort, a misidentification that sparks a series of trials on the part of the wrongly accused. Comic incongruity arises from the theme of the wrong man and from the repeated presence of the Dude in settings where he clearly does not belong, what the Coens call the anachronism of incompatibility.

      The Dude's social life revolves around bowling with his friends Walter (John Goodman), a Vietnam vet and recent convert to Judaism, and Donny (Steve Buscemi), a pleasant, shy follower. Learning about the intruders, Walter insists that the issue is not the rug but the other Jeff Lebowski, whom the men were after. The Dude decides to visit the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), a man confined to a wheelchair as a result of injuries suffered in the Korean War. When the Dude asks for remuneration for his destroyed rug and proclaims, “This aggression will not stand,” Lebowski taunts him, saying that, when he lost his legs in Korea, he did not ask for a handout. He “went out and achieved”: “Your revolution is over. The bums lost.” Soon after this encounter, a humbled and weepy Lebowski invites the Dude back to the house and shows him a ransom note, indicating that his wife, Bunny, has been kidnapped. The Dude takes a drag off his joint and says, “Bummer, man.” Lebowski offers the Dude twenty thousand dollars and his own beeper to act as a courier. An incredulous Dude asks Lebowski's assistant, “He thinks the carpet pissers did this?”

      Throughout much of the film, someone in a blue car follows the Dude. Late in the film, he runs up to the car and yanks out the driver, who explains that he is a “private dick,” working on the same case as the one the Dude's working on. He then admits fawningly, “I admire your work. The way you play one side against the other.” Here, the Dude once again plays the wrong man role; this time he is misidentified as a professional, a private detective with the knowledge and cleverness to manipulate human character types for his own ends.

      This is, of course, a complete illusion; to underscore the Dude's impotence, the Coens immediately shift to a scene in which a group of Germans break into his apartment and find him in his bathtub. As he complains that this is a “private residence,” they drop a marmot into the tub just between his legs and announce, “We want the money. We believe in nothing. If we don't get the money, we will come back tomorrow and cut off your johnson.” Walter shares the Dude's dislocation, but he, unlike the Dude, is troubled by his rootlessness. The Dude is often irked at Walter's strange Jewish devotion. When the Dude accuses him of living in the past, Walter responds, “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you're goddamn right I'm living in the fucking past!” Walter wants to have an identity, to define himself in relation to a way of life, a tradition larger than himself. How badly he wants this is clear from his willingness to rate National Socialism above nihilism on the “ethos” scale. Yet his own embrace of Judaism, a result of his marriage to a Jewish woman from whom he is now divorced, serves to underscore the absurdity of attempting to introduce an ethos into a fragmented contemporary culture. His Judaism is an incoherent mixture of various elements, dislocated from contexts in which they originally may have made a kind of sense. Walter ranks bowling on about the same level as his religious devotion. Concerned about the Dude's preoccupation with the case of the missing wife, Walter exclaims, “We can't drag this negative energy into the tournament.”

      Without any direct contribution from the Dude, the case wraps up nicely. It turns out that Bunny was just on an unannounced vacation. Outside the bowling alley, the Germans, who think that Bunny is still missing, torch the Dude's car and demand money, claiming that, if they are not paid, they will kill Bunny. A timid Donny asks: “Are these the Nazis?” Walter replies, “No, these men are nihilists. There's nothing to be afraid of.… These men are cowards.” When the Dude tells them that Bunny is alive and there will be no financial transaction, one of the Germans complains, “It's not fair.” Walter taunts them: “Fair? Who's the fucking nihilist here? What are you, a bunch of fucking crybabies?” In the ensuing conflict, Donny has a heart attack and dies.

      Walter here puts his finger on the problem of self-described nihilists and of the incompatibility between nihilism and human life, no matter how debased. Nihilism cannot, strictly speaking, be lived. An utterly amorphous and completely pointless life would deprive an individual not just of any inspiring sense of purpose but even of the basis for deliberating and pursuing anything whatsoever. Moreover, everyone complains about something, and this is rooted in some sense, however misguided and self-interested, of injustice or wrongs suffered. Full-blown nihilism cannot be lived; it can only be approached asymptotically.

      Although the Dude is not foolish enough to proclaim himself a nihilist, his life borders on nihilism. He is skeptical of large-scale beliefs such as those to which Walter assents. He does not need an ethos, except insofar as that is mere style, which is about what the Jewish religion is for Walter. But the Dude has beliefs. He believes, for example, in private property, at least for himself. He thinks of himself as a respectable citizen; he is a low-class, minimally ambitious version of what

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