"Trapped by Their Pasts": Noir and Nostalgia in the Big Lebowski (Critical Essay‪)‬

Although the Coen brothers routinely deny the possibility of any calculated meaning in their films, they nevertheless produce subtle and substantive works even in their most seemingly frivolous exercises. Perhaps no film better exemplifies this sly denial and assertion of meaning than their 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski. A parody of hard-boiled fiction and film noir--combined with Westerns, Cheech and Chong comedies, Busby Berkeley musicals, and of course bowling--the film nevertheless contains a serious treatment of the role of the past, particularly the antiwar tradition of the 1960s, in contemporary anxieties over politics, war, and masculinity. The Coens have appropriated the themes and conventions of crime fiction and film noir to produce a film about the disjunction between the counterculture of the sixties and the politics of the nineties, a film about the impassable gulf between past and present. Not so much a nostalgia film, then, as a film about nostalgia, The Big Lebowski represents the past through a wide-ranging and voracious cultural pastiche. One of the most important referents in that pastiche is the Coens' appropriation of the plot and characters of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel The Big Sleep. Superficially, this appropriation appears to be strictly parodic as the Coens update private eye Philip Marlowe into perennial stoner Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski. Yet their adaptation is also more scrupulous than it first seems, replicating many of Chandler's themes and creating a noirish narrative in which the characters are "trapped by their pasts" (Ethan Coen, qtd. in Robertson 99), gripped by an unshakable and often destructive nostalgia. This nostalgia renders the Dude, like Philip Marlowe before him, "an outsider in the modern world" (Phillips 249), a living relic of the sixties counterculture who has somehow survived into a world that vilifies him and his values.