The Dude Testament

3. It’s down there somewhere, let me take another look.

The story starts in earnest with the Dude arriving home to his modest Venice bungalow with his carton of half-and-half, only to be assaulted by thugs who have broken into his house. “Where’s the money, Lebowski?” one shouts while shoving the Dude’s head in his toilet. Even during this distressing interlude, the Dude is accommodating and clever enough to joke, “It’s down there somewhere, let me take another look.”

When The Big Lebowski came out in 1998, it too went straight into the toilet. Where was the money, Lebowski? It barely made back its investment. Luckily, it was indeed down there somewhere, and people did eventually take another look. In retrospect we now know that its original failure was because it was too unprecedented, too complex, and just too plain weird for audiences to digest right away. Even die-hard fans contend it takes at least three viewings before the whole thing begins to make sense, to snap into focus. And yet, life is far more complicated and unpredictable than a standard Hollywood movie—more like The Big Lebowski, actually. The plot doesn’t make sense, for one thing. Maybe the problem with life is the same as the problem with Lebowski: We just don’t give it enough chances to explain itself to us. And we expect it to make sense and wrap up all the loose ends. Fat chance! Life is an endless string of funny shtuff, language problems, and ringers being thrown out for ringers.

Even the Dude admits, later in the film, that his thinking “has been very uptight” and that certain assumptions had prevented him from solving the movie’s central mystery. We who have taken The Big Lebowski as a commentary on what life is all about make it a point to be on guard against our own “uptight thinking.” We have to try to treat the world in the same way as we treat the movie—as a complicated case, but one that we can enjoy nonetheless, if we keep our minds flexible enough. In the end it may not be a problem to solve, but a story to enjoy.