What remains as laughably heroic as it did during the release of The Big Lebowski is its protagonist’s unfaltering ability to “take it easy” amidst the societal chaos of his community. The protagonist, whose government name is Jeff Lebowski, despite being strictly referred to as “The Dude,” his friends Walter and Donnie, and their social dynamic in the context of late-capitalist Los Angeles serves as the Coen Brothers’ articulation of the commodified personalities propagated by the dying American Dream and the universal neglect its failure entails. The Dude’s character can ultimately be viewed as heroic due to his reclamation of the contemporary American Dream in the era of identity politics.
Embedded within the narrative’s inciting rug-soiling and the Dude’s reaction to it are socioeconomic articulations of the American Dream’s corruption. Wesley Leckrone summarizes the plot’s relation to this event in “Hippies, Feminists, and Neocons: Using ‘The Big Lebowski’ to Find the Political in the Nonpolitical,”
Set in Southern California during the early 1990s, the movie revolves around the exploits of a 1960s ex-hippie named Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski. He is mistaken for a wealthy, aging paraplegic with the same name whose young wife Bunny is indebted to a pornography producer Jackie Treehorn. To collect the debts, Jackie Treehorn sends two ruffians to collect from the wrong Lebowski, one of which urinates on Lebowski's rug. The remainder of the movie focuses on Lebowski gaining restitution for the rug from the older Lebowski (130).
As Leckrone describes above, what begins as a comically misdirected act of aggression results in the Dude’s quest for “restitution” when he is convinced by his friend and bowling teammate Walter, that he is owed some financial reward by the real Lebowski he was mistaken for. While an argument could be made for any number of characters being to blame for the Dude’s rug, this kind of reaction is indicative of the chaotically misdirected aggression rampant in a society enduring the ideological fallout of the American Dream. In “The Dream Abides: ‘The Big Lebowski,'' Film Noir, and the American Dream,” ShauneAnne Tangney remarks that evidence of this systemic failure is apparent, “in the Dude’s fondness for his rug. The Dude's rug is shabby at best, but as he says on more than one occasion, ‘it really tied the room together, man’” (184). Though it is shabby, since the rug is principally representative of a possession of his which is carelessly disrespected by a member of the opposing upper-class, the Dude’s insistence on reparations suggests an emotional investment in the categorically limitless monetary potential advertised by the American Dream as well as the rug’s symbolism his relation to the American Dream itself.
The Dude’s fight for possession of the rug symbolizes the film’s re-evaluation of the American Dream insofar as it accounts for his material and social alienation in context of the widening cross-class dichotomy. Tangney remarks similarly that,
The Big Lebowski, like those classic films noir, also offers a similar critique (of the alienation that the failure to achieve the American Dream creates), but because the film is set in a late-twentieth-century, a late-capitalist America, the alienation (that comes with the failure to achieve the American Dream) is amplified and focused on the widening gap between the rich and poor, and on an intolerant multiculturalism, and prompts a reevaluation of the American Dream itself (176).
As the Dude gets further into his journey for restitution, his desire to pursue the financial award is corrupted by his growing opposition to extroversion. As an underachieving member of the lower class, the Dude relaxes in stark contrast to a gaggle of American archetypes including inept thugs, paraplegic overachievers, ivy league ass-kissers, nymphomaniac trophy-wifes, perverted bowling legends, porn producers, cowboys, hyper-feminist artists, scandinavian nihlists, irate beach policemen, and machine-operated TV writers. Despite the broad range of identities featured in the film, the pursuit of financial success or its appearance with minimal links almost every character in The Big Lebowski, as does their determination to prevent The Dude from achieving the same and berate him for failing to do so. I argue that this competitive greed fostered by the advertised American Dream gives each of these characters ‘commodified personalities’ in the context of late-capitalist identity politics. Important to note is that I don’t mean to imply each of these characters’s behavior and mannerisms are defined by the size of their bank accounts, but rather by their pursuit of an image associated with virtuous financial success in America. In his own attempt to do so, the Dude succumbs under the weight of his status’ belittlement and the toxic rigidity of capitalist individuality to multi-categorical intolerance and introversion. McGowan states that, “the universal, as Plato grasps it, exists insofar as it is never fully manifested in an object. Understanding the universal requires seeing the importance of absence for making sense of what is present” (41-42). Though he does revert to antisocialism, it is only a temporary drawback in the attempt to reclaim the dying American Dream precisely because the Dude is unable to see the universality of his situation in the absence of his rug, or rather, in the presence of his failure to obtain it’s restitution.
The incoherent subjectivity of the narrative’s investment in the Dude’s perspective evident in The Big Lebowski’s genre-blending mystery is indicative of its exploration of the social disconnect in capitalist identity politics. In "This Aggression Will Not Stand’: Myth, War, and Ethics in ‘The Big Lebowski,” Todd Comer recognizes the movie’s structure as,
"an interrupted narrative insofar as it fails to bring cohesion to the differences that mark it. Examples are numerous. I will simply point to the intrusion of the pornographic and detective genres in what is framed as a Western film and, moreover, shot through with western stylistic motifs. Lebowski can then be understood as a traumatized filmic narrative that attests to the impossibility of absolute immanence, the notion that identity can exist apart from relation to others (99)".
Though Comer’s genre interpretations might seemingly discount the film’s noir-like relevance to the American Dream, its incorporation of genre-blending is actually affirmation of this relevance. The Big Lebowski is initially framed in Western conventions during the Stranger’s introduction to the Dude before it spirals, along with his investigation, into comedy, crime, sport, and eventually drama. In the history of its cinema, the American western is emblematic of the country’s breeding ground for potential achievement. It is no surprise then, that the film begins with images of the vast California desert before entering the story at the border of this frontier: Los Angeles. It is also no surprise that the Dude is described as “not a hero, but a man…the man for his time and place”, because despite his markedly unheroic laziness, namelessness, and impoverishment, Lebowski ultimately achieves non-material success in the antithesis of the open American frontier that is Los Angeles. Though it is likely the city that contains and generates more American Dreamers than any other in the country, it is rife with the underbelly of this dream’s fallout; a collection of laughably desperate caricatures who cling onto the possibility of their own virtue measured in the capitalist chalice of financial success. For that reason, the total exploration of the American Dream’s re-evaluation in such a place involves the separate emotional frameworks within which these caricatures encounter the dream’s modern failure.
Upon understanding the relevance of The Big Lebowski’s genre-blending approach to its re-evaluation of the American Dream, the Dude’s relation to his friends as well as the strangers he meets throughout the story can be analyzed in the context of capitalist commodification. McGowan states that commodity form, “dictates not just economic relations but every way in which people interact and even how they think about themselves. Their value relies on how they view themselves as commodities on the market,” (119-120). The desire to create the self-perception of identity as a valuable commodity is perhaps best evidenced by the alleged millionaire, The Big Lebowski (the man who the dude is mistaken for). His daughter Maude’s fitting description of him as a victim of vanity echoes Lebowski’s requirement for a perception of wealth greater than he actually possesses. The contrast between him and the Dude is then so comical because it is a reflection of their oppositional presentation in society: as a sensitive paraplegic desperate to overcompensate for his physical weakness, Lebowski’s argument over the rug fiasco is entirely separate from the Dude’s. For the Dude, the conflict is located in the misidentification of his personality on behalf of Jackie Treehorn’s thugs as well as Lebowski. To Lebowski, his self-proclaiming ramblings of “I am the Dude” are perceived from the “millionaire” Lebowski as an attempt by the bums to panhandle his money away. Though few characters are quite as apparently capitalist as Lebowski, this misidentification of the Dude proves common throughout the story across his encounters with strangers. In a city of people trying to present themselves as more valuable than their wealth suggests, the Dude’s pursuit of financial compensation for his rug comes off as another effortless scheme for money. Though the Dude does initially seek money for the damaged rug because of Walter’s insistence upon it, his investigation ultimately takes him away from the rug, after Lebowski’s replacement is taken back by Maude, and into an exploration of his belittled perception in the identity politics of modern capitalist America. McGowan states that, “Identity politics is the reactionary compensation for the empty isolation that capitalism imposes on the subject. Rather than challenging the dictates of capitalism, this form of politics keeps capitalist subjectivity going” (122). That Lebowski is ultimately deciphered by the Dude as a phony millionaire is indicative of his personality’s construction around the social “virtue” of financial success as well as the damage this belief does to his universality. The Dude’s victory ultimately resides in his ability to differentiate from Lebowski and the rest in this sense; he is able to reclaim a form of non-material, American success and keep his tested universality intact.
The Dude’s ability to subvert impaired universality in the face of identity politics is evident in the ultimate survival of his friendship with his bowling partner Walter. McGowan states that “When we fail to see the universal operating and neglect the appeal to universality, we lose touch with its emancipatory power and come to view it as a shackle that we must cast off. Suspicion about universality ends up as capitulation to our situation,” (117). The Dude finds that as he gets deeper into the complexities of the investigation, the threat of his harm is, on multiple occasions, exacerbated by his association with Walter. The Dude gets fed up to the point where he stops answering Walter’s calls and even threatens to quit the bowling team their friendship is anchored in. What’s so interesting about their dynamic (and that of the bowling team as a whole) is if not for bowling, the Dude, Walter, and Donnie would likely not be friends given the prominent categorical social differences of their characters. Much of the group’s conflict is initiated by Walter in that he perceives everyday social interactions as a threat to the values that comprise his identity. As a Vietnam veteran of the lower-middle class, Walter interprets the soiling of the Dude’s rug - which the phony millionaire Lebowski actually didn’t incite - as a violation of the Dude’s first amendment rights. As ludicrous as it sounds, he continues to take harmless speech and activity as a semi-hostile attack on the rights he, as he likes to say, watched his brothers die for to protect. In this way, Walter is another character who pursues virtue in financial success, not because he insists the Dude get the money but because he intends to counteract the cross-class aggression Lebowski believes is ok to dump off onto lower-class citizens like the Dude. This habit of creating conflict where it doesn’t exist becomes so trying for the Dude because what Walter perceives as intended aggression, the Dude and many other non-violent members of capitalist society would perceive as everyday interaction. Though they see the world in a completely different light and Walter endangers him in ways that he would not be if Walter weren’t present in his life, the Dude ultimately remains Walter’s friend. The survival of their friendship, therefore, suggests hope for the survival of the American Dream in the scope of contemporary identity politics.
The cycling microcosm of strained universality that the Dude’s position in his friend group embodies is evidence of the success and sinfulness inherent in the re-evaluated American Dream of identity politics. Tangney states that, “We associate success with virtue, and failure with sin; both success and failure are seen as personal or individual conditions” (191). No, the Dude is not ultimately successful in conceiving of or achieving the great American Dream (as represented by his failure to gain restitution for his soiled rug). But, he does obtain some measure of success in accepting the sinfulness of himself and others as Tangney expands on,
“The Dude abides; he accepts this measure of success. He also accepts his own sinfulness, as well as the sinfulness of others, which is possible when we accept a different, perhaps lower, measure of success: just enough. After all, all the Dude wanted was his rug back, “because it really tied the room together, man,” which might just be the ultimate lesson of The Big Lebowski : if we respect one another, we might just be able to pull together, we might just be able to reclaim something of the American Dream” (192).
By reconciling his success and sin as a commodified subject in the identity politics of modern capitalist society, the Dude becomes heroic in his reclamation of the updated American Dream.
Comer, Todd A. “‘This Aggression Will Not Stand’: Myth, War, and Ethics in ‘The Big Lebowski.’” SubStance, vol. 34, no. 2, 2005, pp. 98–117. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3685746. Accessed 15 May 2021.
Leckrone, J. Wesley. “Hippies, Feminists, and Neocons: Using ‘The Big Lebowski’ to Find the Political in the Nonpolitical.” PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 46, no. 1, 2013, pp. 129–136. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43284293. Accessed 15 May 2021.
McGowan, Todd. Universality and Identity Politics. Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.
Tangney, ShaunAnne. “The Dream Abides: ‘The Big Lebowski," Film Noir, and the American Dream.” Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 66, no. 2, 2012, pp. 176–193. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41763556. Accessed 15 May 2021.