The Dude Testament

2. Allow there are some nice folks out there.

First of all, the narrator is a friendly guy. That’s evident right off the bat. “They call Los Ang-elees the City of Angels. I didn’t find it to be that exactly, but I will allow there are some nice folks there.”[4]

The fact that he’s essentially kindly is one of the reasons he’s the only feller in the film who truly sees the Dude for what he is: an unlikely savior, despite his outward appearance and strange moniker. If you’re not going to approach “the whole durn human comedy” with an open, affable attitude, then you’re not going to get the point. Friendliness is the only asset you can share that doesn’t cost you anything—and in fact makes you richer the more you give it away. It’s the ultimate anti-gyp,[5] a pyramid scheme inverted.

In a day and age marked by greed, mistrust, and corruption, where neighbors don’t even know each other and people are divided along party lines, religious lines, lifestyle lines, and all variety of other arbitrary squiggles in the sand, it’s easy to forget just how much we have in common. It seems as if we have been divided and conquered by the interests of others, not our own. Yet our differences are far more minor than we are led to believe. And though the Stranger is so friendly and accommodating that it borders on the humorously anachronistic, it is the Dude who truly raises humanistic fellow-feeling to the level that Socrates, the Buddha, and Jesus intended. Shoosh. Three thousand years of civilization really lost its train of thought there.