The Dude Testament

34. You’re goddamn right, we’re living in the past.

When Maude tells the Dude that her father doesn’t have any money of his own and in fact has been a lifelong failure in business and everything else, the Dude realizes that he has been played for a fool. There never was any fucking money! The Big Lebowski embezzled the money and gave the Dude an empty suitcase to give to the kidnappers. Suddenly, the world has gone downright Biblical: The meek shall be exalted, the mountain shall be laid low. As the Dude is raised up, the Big Lebowski is revealed to be puny. And also, the lion gets in bed with the lamb. And soon, we’ll happen to know that there’s a Little Lebowski to be begat, down through the generations.

Moreover, as if to emphasize the Old Testament nature of all this new shit, the secret of Walter’s Jewishness is subsequently addressed. And it is here that the whole scope and scale of the film is illuminated. As it turns out, The Big Lebowski is even bigger and wider and deeper than we could have imagined.

Because his ailing car won’t make it all the way to Pasadena, the Dude calls on Walter again, demanding that he give him a ride even if it is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. Walter obliges, but complains that it’s not really an emergency worthy of his breaking strict 3,000-year old laws. Here the Dude finally hits Walter where he is weakest, pointing out that he’s not really Jewish, that he converted to please his ex-wife and only holds onto the old religion as a way to maintain a connection with his loss.

It’s easy at this point to see this as just a funny little bit of character development—that Walter’s obsession with Judaism is just an arbitrary reflection of how sad he still is about a five-year-old divorce. But in a movie in which the Dude is dressed like a Biblical Jesus and upholds the Nazarene’s moral code; in which there actually is a debased character called “The Jesus”; in which Persian carpets, Babylonian ziggurats,[25] Hebrew traditions, and the Canaanite landscape of Los Angeles play so prominently, it’s hard not to see this not only as a means to “wrap ’er all up” but to “wrap up” the last “3,000 years of beautiful tradition” as well.

Just as the Dude is reluctant to blindly ride the “wave of the future,” rejecting much of the code of progress, so is he acutely aware of the crippling gravity of history. Ideology in all forms is a pernicious combination of “living in the fucking past” and anxious attempts to ride the “wave of the future.” Like many a popular self-help guru, the Dude spends most of his time living in his “time and place,” and borrowing only cautiously from other time zones, lest they bump him into a higher existential tax bracket.

Thus it is here that the Coen Brothers provide the widest of all angles in the entire sweep of their cinematic oeuvre. In having Walter scream, “3,000 years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax…You’re goddamn right I’m living in the past!” the breadth of what they’re imparting appears fairly staggering. It seems that, like Walter, we too are living in the past, attached to a worldview we have grown apart from. It’s all a part of our sick civilization thing!

Aside from minor modifications, America and a large part of Western civilization still operates from an ancient mind-set derived from the earliest beginnings of Western culture, one that is rather outdated and arguably maladapted for our time and place. We must ultimately move on and leave it behind if we’re ever to enter the New Dude Age.