The Dude Testament

35. The whole concept abates.

In many ways, the Dude is like the original Jesus, who briefly got his day in the sun and then was buried and resurrected as someone rather different. Though there are several pretenders to the throne, the Dude is the only “true Jesus” in the film. Donny’s sacrificial death places him high in the running, and the Jesus has the name and the Latin pedigree, but it is only the Dude who embodies the reformist attitude that the Church never allowed to come to full flower. While St. Paul and the Council of Nicea refashioned the sage of the sagebrush as a god, the Dude’s humanistic spirit slouched down through the ages, westward the wagons, through new Bethlehems, ultimately ending up on Venice Beach waiting to be reborn.[26]

The Dude represents a possible break with this crusty old tradition, incorporating the best of the Axial Age philosophy and freeing it from the fascist imperatives that our civilization perniciously added later. The whole Judeo-Christian concept abates because it doesn’t adequately represent its original virtues. And as a result, it continues to throw out ringers for ringers.

So what, then, are our Biblical “dirty undies”? The linear, progressive notion of life and time; the necessity of justice and retribution; the need for an overarching meaning and explanation for everything; the myth of the hero; the idea of an end of history and a grand reckoning; the promise of a great reward for toeing the line until then; the sense of tribal “specialness”; and perhaps most outdated of all, the fucking TOE—the idea that we can ever arrive at a stone-chiseled “theory of everything.”

There’s more to this than our sick civilization thing, however: We’re still living in the past biologically. So we have to learn to stop teasing the monkey. As an example, the Dude stands out as the only character who can properly control his limbic system. Everyone else is buffeted around by their emotions, yawping like so many marmots or Pomeranians, addicted to drugs of their own production. Walter’s anger, as it turns out, has very little to do with Vietnam. Every time he blows his top in the film, it comes on the heels of a mention of his ex-wife or other unfaithful women (“You’re entering a world of pain!” “Shomer Shabbos!” “V. I. Lenin!”). Walter is not angry after all—he’s just down in the dumps. That’s just the depression talking.

The Dude is radically progressive, then, not in a political sense, but in an existential one. His character represents both a break with the emotional imperatives of biology and society and with millennia-old ideology that is long past its sell-by date. Whereas everyone else is miserable and unfulfilled and lost because they think they need a “direction,” the Dude shows us a way to be “at home” in the world even without a destination in mind. Like an old Taoist monk, he goes with the flow even as he remains utterly still.

After this revelation, Walter and the Dude arrive in Pasadena and find that Bunny has returned to the mansion with all her toes intact. Not only was there no money, but there was never was any fucking kidnapping. Everything’s a travesty, man! And the no-longer-so-Big Lebowski is unrepentant as he is revealed. He too is shown to be as miserable and overcompensating as Walter, sobbing on the floor, mourning a life not yet lived despite its approaching end. It is a ghost of Christmas or a picture of Dorian Gray or a Marty McFly moment of redemption for the Dude, affirming once and for all that it is this Small Lebowski who deserves our admiration. That’s terrific because, in most cases, we are that Lebowski.