The Dude Testament

25. This is a complicated case. Lotta ins and outs. Lotta what-have-yous. Lotta strands in old Duder’s head.

Called back to Maude’s loft, the Dude finally loses his cool with her. Like everyone else in the film other than the Dude, she stubbornly believes that she’s got everything figured out already.

It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong. But it takes a far bigger man to admit he doesn’t have any fucking clue in the first place. Of all the claims leveled against religion, surely the worst is its outright, blatant, and unapologetic arrogance. To claim to “know” how the world came into existence could easily be diagnosed as acute megalomania if it weren’t such a universal malady. It seems that human beings would rather give a wrong answer to an impossible question than say, “I don’t know, sir.” Am I wrong? Okay then.

Though most of the characters he encounters in the film pretend to have everything figured out, the Dude labors under no such delusions of omniscience. What’s wrong with the world? What’s right with it? What really matters? The Dude makes no such elaborate, outrageous territorial claims to some sort of philosophical high ground. At several points throughout the film he happily admits his ignorance outright. While Walter is 100 percent certain that Bunny kidnapped herself, and Maude states that Bunny is “most certainly” the perpetrator of the scam, and the Big Lebowski pretends to be assured that it is the Dude who is “unrepentantly” at fault here, the Dude is the only one holding fast to the idea that the whole thing might be more complex…it might not be such a…a…you know?

Critics of the Dude make a lot of hoo-hah about how inept the Dude is as a private eye, how he can’t manage to put a coherent thought or theory together until the very end of the film. What they overlook is that coherence is the opposite of creativity. What’s the point in being coherent until the parts of an argument actually begin to cohere? Until then, the Dude with his jazzy, roundabout mode of expression and investigation is exactly the right type of existential detective for these complex, convoluted times—arguably even more so than Douglas Adams’ existential detective Dirk Gently,[22] who stated in particularly Dudeish fashion, “Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.” Like Dirk Gently, the Dude doesn’t always have answers, but he has lots of strands waiting to be woven. That’s both far-out and far-sighted.