The Big Lebowski by J.M. Tyree;Ben Walters; & Ben Walters

Author:J.M. Tyree;Ben Walters; & Ben Walters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Useless men (clockwise from top left): Blood Simple; Barton Fink; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Fargo

The Coens’ No Country for Old Men – unreleased at the time of writing – is adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel whose characters are consumed and often destroyed by the determination to act like ‘real men’. Its climactic exchange sees the central character – a decorated Vietnam veteran – questioning his status as ‘a war hero’, considering whether his father was ‘a better man’ than himself and suggesting that he is ‘not the man of an older time they say I am. I wish I was. I’m a man of this time.’64 In each of their films, then, the Coens offer case studies in the pursuit of manliness as a hiding to nothing, a vain, shallow and frequently hypocritical exercise in hubris that leaves one at best embarrassed, at worst dead.

When America was The Man

The Big Lebowski, like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, has characters who gesture specifically to Reaganite notions of individualistic accomplishment without help from the state or the outside world. The Big Lebowski is lost in the 1980s just as the Dude is lost in the 1960s. ‘I suggest you do as your parents did, and get a job, sir!’ screams the Big Lebowski, a loather of ‘handouts’ and ‘bums’. But this phoney millionaire – who, we discover later on, has himself ‘failed to achieve’ at running the Lebowski companies – is not a follower of his own philosophy, any more than Reagan served in America’s armed forces anywhere outside a sound stage. In light of this, it hardly seems accidental that The Big Lebowski shows news footage of Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, the ‘wimp’ scoffed at for going through the postures of the Gulf War as a kind of public muscle-building display. Ironically, of course, Bush Snr actually was a combat-hardened military hero. But his wan, stuttering, bespectacled threats about Saddam Hussein’s ‘unchecked aggression against Kuwait’ aptly resonate throughout a film that in many ways is about losers pretending to be real men. Their inane posturing is thrown into relief by the thought that, across the ocean, others are genuinely putting their lives on the line for (what they at least perceive as) righteous causes: as Eddie Robson has noted, The Big Lebowski shares with The Big Sleep and Altman’s Vietnam-era The Long Goodbye the setting of a Los Angeles far removed and isolated from a distant overseas war. Chandler himself had developed Marlowe against the backdrop of World War II prior to US engagement, publishing Farewell, My Lovely in 1940. Barton Fink too completes his first screenplay as Pearl Harbor is attacked.65

While the Coens’ use of Saddam and a backdrop of war in Iraq might seem bizarrely prophetic in light of later events, it also carries a whiff of the fin-de-everything political and cultural atmosphere of late 1990s America. Saddam’s remarkable endurance as both a national bugbear and a comedic butt, including the depiction of the tyrant

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