Sign In
Register
Help
Pretty funny. Fun performances.
At a certain point, I was trying to think what the movie reminded me of. Couldn't, so I said out loud "I've never seen a movie like this."
But not long after that The Dude arrived at the police chief's office, and I realized we were watching the Coens turn Chandler inside out. It's THE BIG SLEEP (and probably lots of other Philip Marlowe novels); Los Angeles, rich father hires dick to find nympho-porno daughter, blackmail, knotted plot.
Loved that final shot, the two monologues framed with strikes. Wonder how many takes? Depends how good the bowler was.
Love to hear what people make of this. There's more going on than meets the eye.
But how much more? It's seemed to me over the years that Christians make much of this movie. Surely it's not just because one of the bowlers is named Jesus. Or is there something going on with that that's eluding me? And it seems like there's something here about contrasting the rich and poor Lebowskis - one making a fetish of success and ambition (though in a wheelchair, living off his wife's money), the other mostly, well, just chilling. Sabbath stuff thrown in the mix. And that strange cowboy character, who's glad there's somebody out there like The Dude, "for all us sinners" (or something to that effect). Makes me think of the Marlowe character in Chandler's books, a "good man" in a mean world: is The Dude a similar sort of tarnished innocent?
Has anybody decoded this? Seems like a hodge-podge to me, but I'm willing to be enlightened.
Ron
P.S. And lest you think I'm making this stuff up, here's an excerpt from a CT piece related to THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST that I liked. But now I'm wondering how LEBOWSKI fits with BREAKING THE WAVES or MAGNOLIA (and how LOST IN TRANSLATION fits with any of them, for that matter).
Madeleine L'Engle writes wittily that God "chooses his artists with as calm a disregard of surface moral qualifications as he chooses his saints." If God uses anyone he pleases to tell his stories, we never know when or where he is going to show up. We never know when a door might open to the numinous, and so we must be alert to all art.
In fact, we might pay attention to "secular" films even more for this reason. L'Engle continues, "If I cannot see evidence of incarnation in a painting of a bridge in the rain by Hokusai, a book by Chaim Potok or Isaac Bashevis Singer, in music by Bloch or Bernstein, then I will miss its significance in an Annunciation by Franciabigio, the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, the words of a sermon by John Donne." To translate this into modern, filmic terms: if we are unable to see hints of incarnation in Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, the Coen Brothers' Big Lebowski, P.T. Anderson's Magnolia—we are likely to miss the truth in Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ.
P.P.S. The conclusion of Chandler's "The Simple Art Of Murder";
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
P.S. The above entry originally said "THE BIG CHILL" instead of "THE BIG SLEEP." Gratitude to Mr T'shuvah for pointing out that rather misleading - and slightly embarassing, for a Chandlophile such as myself - error.
This post has been edited by Ron: 11 November 2006 - 03:38 AM
MultiQuote
