The Dude Testament

28. We’ve got a language problem here.

After driving Dude’s rapidly deconstructing car to his house in the Valley, Walter and Dude enter the alleged thief’s house and confront the 15-year-old kid by thrusting his homework at him (in a plastic baggie, for dramatic effect), demanding an answer. And then, the incredible happens. In a film where all the characters “blather” without end, the kid who contains the answer to the whole thing (parts anyway) won’t say a peep while they’re doing business here!

For a man accustomed to using language (as well as handguns) in order to dominate other people, stonewalling is an inexcusable infraction of the rules of engagement—remember that, for Walter, nihilism is worse than nazism because even an evil argument is preferable to none at all. Little Larry’s refusal to play by Walter’s rules naturally drives Walter insane. “We’ve got a language problem here!” he shouts, before heading outside to exact punishment by smashing the brand new Corvette that he thinks Larry procured with a portion of the million dollars. Echoed here is the cruelly delivered threat to Cool Hand Luke by his prison warden: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” In other words: The problem is that you refuse to let me dominate you. And in fact, Little Larry is foreshadowing a later scene in which the Dude does exactly the same thing. Little Larry may in fact be a Little Lebowski on the way.

In many ways, the entire movie can be seen as an exegesis on “the language problem” Walter objects to. Though Walter resents the fact that Larry won’t reply to him, he himself doesn’t ever allow anyone to disagree with him. What’s the use of engaging with someone who has already drawn his lines in the sand? Though he may supposedly be “a fucking dunce,” Little Larry has sized up his predicament and reflexively determined that he must employ Dude-jitsu in dealing with his adversaries. It is a mute echo of the Dude’s principled “Fuck it” in front of Lebowski.

Perhaps it is due to the fact that he has been so expertly out-Duded, that here we see the Dude for the first time utterly out of his element. Certainly this is his most un-Dude point in the film; he sinks so low as to curse out the youth in front of his dying father, and even maintains that they “know” Larry took the money! Dude, you’re being verrry un-Dude. Thankfully, this brief Dude-parture doesn’t last for long.

As modern politics and Gallup polls prove, very few people budge from their tightly guarded positions, nor even listen to the arguments of others. As Steven Covey puts it in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, few people actually listen to each other. To employ “emphatic” listening is to understand that communication is far more complex than just a series of signs, signals, and symbols. If someone isn’t prepared to listen, why waste your energy? As a Dudeist version of that cheesy pop song might go: “You say it best/When you say nothing/Stonewall.”

Yet to understand language as a fluid, creative process that must be played with and batted around is the first step toward being more Dude. No cunning linguist, but a cuddly one, the Dude plays with words and phrases like they’re part of some crazy game, echoing things he’s overheard from other characters in the film, always reinventing ideas to suit new situations. Other characters utilize language and conversation aggressively. For example, Walter steers every discussion toward the Vietnam War, Maude uses language as a method of social stratification, and Jackie Treehorn employs conversation merely as a tool of distraction and manipulation. But the Dude uses it to seek synthesis. By borrowing ideas and phrases from other characters, he weaves a sort of epic stoner poetry from the threads of other people’s assertions.[23]