Without question, The Big Lebowski is the most popular movie the Coen brothers ever made. I’m not talking about box office receipts—Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou had higher domestic grosses—but in terms of ubiquity and fandom, the 1998 stoner comedy has no equal. Louisville, Kentucky hosted its tenth annual Lebowski Fest last year, wherein diehard fans celebrated all things Dude. They quoted lines from the movie, dressed as their favorite characters, and drank more White Russians than they probably should have. What’s missing from the conversation, however, is not how the movie has become an underground pop culture phenomenon, but how The Big Lebowski stacks up as a movie. Quite simply, The Big Lebowski does not belong among the canon of the Coens’ best films, no matter how much the fans and urban achievers protest.
Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but whenever I bring the topic up with friends, I’m invariably met with, “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Indeed, repeating your favorite lines is part of the fun, especially when presented with the appropriate context. But there are other Coen comedies, too, and their meticulous consistency is what makes them better films. In terms of full-on kookiness, the introduction of Intolerable Cruelty’s Heinz, the Baron Krauss von Espy lands better and harder than the introduction of Jesus, the bowling pederast. With a mix of broad and focused diction, the central trio of O Brother, Where Art Thou has more consistent comic chemistry than uneven Lebowski heroes; Donny (Steve Buscemi) amounts to a one-note joke, drilled into the ground by the Coens. Come to think of it, Raising Arizona’s stolen baby is more a useful conceit than Donny is: when Ed (Holly Hunter) sobs with joy, it’s a captivatingly funny character moment. “Shut the fuck up, Donny” is merely a dismissive statement, repeated too much.
I don’t mean to imply that I think The Big Lebowski is a bad movie, or a bad comedy. As Sam Elliott’s character would say, “Far from it.” The Big Lebowski is a good comedy because it features smart lines for stupid characters. The Stranger (Elliott) introduces The Dude (Jeff Bridges) as the laziest man in all of Los Angeles County, but he’s also a quick wit. Other characters don’t reward his jokes—Maude’s (Julianne Moore) “Don’t be fatuous, Jeffrey” is the warmest response he gets—so the audience has an instinctive sympathy for The Dude. Nobody else but the viewers notice the sharp mind at work underneath the fog of weed, vodka, and sunglasses. Walter (John Goodman) is The Dude’s opposite and equal: while Walter’s broad gestures initially define him, it’s the smaller lines (e.g. “You mean beyond pacifism?”) that push him beyond caricature into something unique. And with a tapestry of odd secondary characters, The Big Lebowski ambles along without much fuss.
“Ambles” is the key word here. The weakness of The Big Lebowski—and the reason it does not deserve mention among the Coens’ best—is that it amounts to little more than a well-written shaggy dog story. First and foremost, meticulously tight plotting define the best films by the Coen Brothers. Blood Simple and Fargo, for example, are examples of pure cinematic storytelling, and they deal with the repercussions of murder in an inexorable, brutally logical way. Ardent Lebowski fans like to say the meandering plot and zany asides are deliberate, reflecting The Dude’s abiding nature. I’ve heard other defenses which claim that the movie has an airtight plot, and it’s The Dude’s stoner fog that makes it all appear so hazy. The problem with both theories is that they ignore how the Coens consistently put their characters in a narrative fog, even without the White Russians or pot. Fargo’s Jerry Lundegaard and even No Country’s Llewelyn Moss could not make their way through a dense narrative from the Coens, yet the directors’ command of plot is held to a higher standard than the flawed, imperfect information their characters are given. Put another way, the Coens fall into the trap of the Dude’s laziness in The Big Lebowski, and the Coens are at their best when they’re being very un-Dude.
Look, celebrating The Big Lebowski is not beneath me. Back in 2009 I went to a mini-Lebowski party at my friend’s apartment. In the email chain leading up to the party, I dropped multiple references to lines in the movie, including a couple that are in this article. I know what it is to be a fan, but it is important to separate fandom from analysis. The former can obfuscate the latter, which is a shame since some scrutiny might illuminate the secret of The Big Lebowksi’s unlikely endurance. Our answer is more than a throwaway line, or an annual festival. Say what you like about the tenets of actual criticism, Lebowski fans, at least it’s an ethos.
Alan Zilberman is the film editor of Brightest Young Things, as well as a contributor to Tiny Mix Tapes, Washington City Paper, and The Atlantic. Follow him on Twitter here.
Matt Zoller Seitz: Do the Coens believe in God? Can we even say that for sure? Do they believe in the non-rational, the supernatural? Or are they just pranksters pulling our chains and hoping to spark conversation pieces like this one, while they sit there snickering? What do you think?
But here’s the really interesting part for me: in a Coen brothers film, you can never be entirely sure if good really defeated evil or if evil destroyed itself, through overconfidence or inattention or just plain bad luck. 
That is why I think there is
MZS: Then what do you think the work reveals, about God, about faith, about the possibility of a moral code that can help us make sense of things? I feel like the Coens are very culturally conservative beneath it all, and not anything close to the snickering secular humanists you might think they are, considering their reputation as pranksters. I felt like the Nihilists in The Big Lebowski were the Coens’ playful mockery of critics who’ve called them Nihilists—”Ja, we are nihilists, we believe in nothing!” they repeat, chasing the hero through his dreams with huge castrating scissors. The Coens aren’t nihilists. They believe in something. And yet they don’t spell that something out. It emerges organically while you’re watching their films, maybe because they’re not entirely sure what “it” is, either. They can see the contours but not the details, maybe? It’s tricky and very subjective, what they’re doing, and what we’re doing as we watch they’re doing. It’s like looking for shapes in clouds. You see what you want to see, and maybe you’re right to see it, or maybe if you were a couple of miles in the other direction you’d see something else entirely. 
Chuck Jones clearly loved his Looney Toons characters. He loved their language, their exaggerated features, their cleverness, their vanity, their folly. But he loved those characters. And his depictions of human folly in the circus of those cartoons was a form of insightful humility, about all of us ridiculous human beings. So I think the Coens’ work disturbs audiences because it reminds us that, contrary to so many Hollywood messages, “being good” isn’t the answer. Being good is good, but—as Bill Murray says in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom—it isn’t enough to fix things. Their movies “ring true” when they remind us that there is a “wrath that’s about to set down,” as Rooster Cogburn says. If that wasn’t true, it wouldn’t strike such a resonant chord in audiences. The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona is coming, and there’s something elemental and true about him. We ourselves have unleashed him, as H.I. declares. In No Country, we’re warned that we “can’t stop what’s comin’.” There is a moral code, yes, and we violate it in countless ways. We’re screwed.
The Hudsucker Proxy is a screwball comedy about entropy, physical and, more crucially, moral. Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes arrives in the big city as a fresh-faced rube, right off the bus from small-town U.S.A. Proudly clutching his diploma from the Muncie College of Business Administration (Go Eagles!), he’s come to claim his position in the rat race, but at every turn, the way is barred. Only when fate intervenes, as it frequently will, does he luck into a mailroom job in Hudsucker’s basement, slipping through the company’s revolving door just as the body of its soon-to-be-late founder, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) is plummeting from the 44th floor (not counting the mezzanine). 
Norville’s fall is as meteoric as his rise—as Hudsucker’s circles imply, what goes around comes around. His corn-fed ingenuousness turns to arrogance, he’s schemed out of a job, and we find ourselves where we began, with Norville stepping out onto the ledge adjoining Hudsucker Industries’ looming clock. But the cycle is finally broken, if only by some serious bending of the rules, a happy ending that suggests such endings only happen in the movies. Optimism and pessimism walk hand in hand.
At the center of the film are two portraits of domesticity, one warm and loving, the other bitter and resentful. When we first encounter these families there is little to distinguish them: they all seem to communicate in cheerful idioms suggesting all is hunky dory, you betcha. As the horrible crime instigated by the secretly resentful Jerry Lundegaard begins to unfold, however, we see the void at the heart of the chirpy Midwestern family. In the terms of Icelandic saga, we might say that the Lundegaards marry
These very different families are brought together by a series of murders that unfold as a result of a peculiar crime instigated by Jerry Lundegaard that reads like a bad Midwestern joke: “D’ja hear the one about the guy that had his own wife kidnapped?” What drives him to this act remains something of a mystery. When Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) asks him why anyone would want to do such a thing, he smiles nervously and stutters, “Well, that’s, that’s, I’m not go inta, inta—see, I just need money.” As the hired kidnappers press him, he nervously responds, “See, these are . . . personal matters.” Like his two hapless goons, the audience learns little more of Jerry’s motives, as he turns away all unwanted scrutiny with a wooden smile and conversational clichés. In what remains William H. Macy’s greatest performance, he transforms the annoying patter of the used car salesman into an accomplice to murder.
Suddenly the picture resolves into an episode of the PBS show Nature. The soporific voice of the narrator, in stark contrast to Showalter’s rage, intones: “The bark beetle carries the worm to its nest where it will feed its young for up to six months.” We then see Marge and Norm Gunderson in bed, bathed in the stark light of the television, Marge watching with a glazed look while Norm sleeps against her side, both lying amidst a spilled bag of Old Dutch Potato Chips. The narration continues: “In the spring, the larvae hatch and the cycle begins again.” Since Marge is visibly pregnant, the program seems to comment on her own young, soon to hatch. The Gunderson nest seems a placid place, a place of mindless gestation and hibernation. But when the phone call comes summoning Police Chief Marge Gunderson to investigate a double homicide, their home becomes a retreat, a sanctuary from the world of meaningless violence in which we have been immersed. It is a sanctuary from which Marge must emerge, restoring the world with love and order so that she can rear her child in peace.
[Editor’s note: The following is a collection of essays on the critical overestimation of No Country for Old Men, by Lincoln Flynn, Stacia Kissick Jones, and Alan Pyke.]
No Breathing Room: The Crucial Flaw of No Country for Old Men
Consider, for example, the fact that most Coen films revolve around showdowns between ego figures and id figures. (Think of the super-domestic mom in Raising Arizona, fighting to keep her reformed outlaw husband from being “seduced” by a pair of prison escapees and a demonic biker figure who first appears in a dream. Think also of Fargo, which contrasted pregnant cop Marge’s super-orderly, even dull home life against the random, whoremongering viciousness of the film’s nomadic criminals.) Think also of the Coens’ subtextual suggestion, in film after film, that even when evil is often stronger, cleverer, more charismatic and more ruthless than good, evil often destroys itself anyway because it’s more chaotic, more id-driven, than good, and thus more unstable. Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy and Fargo all revolve around criminal schemes that ultimately collapse beneath the weight of their participants’ accumulated selfishness, dishonesty and bravado (with help from a clever hero, or a deus ex machina). The buried narrative of most (though not all) Coen movies finds an orderly universe being plunged into chaos, then meticulously repaired. The repair work is often performed by disreputable outsider heroes (Jeff Lebowski, Marge in Fargo, Tom in Miller’s Crossing) who do good under the radar, so deftly (or instinctively) that society has no clue how much it owes them.
Tom Hanks’ criminal “mastermind,” Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, a pretentious dandy who dresses like Colonel Sanders and talks like a cross between James Lipton and Wile E. Coyote, supergenius, is obviously a devil figure, like the biker in Raising Arizona, or Robert Mitchum’s preacher in The Night of the Hunter. He first appears while decent church-going old lady Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall) is talking to a portrait of her late husband, whose supernatural presence is certified by a point-of-view shot that looks down on Marva’s orderly living room from above. Dorr’s arrival is heralded by a sudden gust of wind that makes a candle flame flicker, and a shot of Dorr’s spooky silhouette against the window glass of Marva’s front door. Under the guise of renting a room and securing rehearsal space for his Renaissance and Rococo ensemble, the bad guy assembles a team of lowlife experts to tunnel through the wall of Marva’s basement and steal money from the nearby vault of a casino. The casino’s employees include Dorr’s inside man, the idiot casino janitor Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans), a foulmouthed cretin who wears a dollar-sign necklace.
Spy thrillers appeal to the pleasures of secret knowledge, the idea of knowledge as power. God is Truth, and Truth is always hidden, available only to the worthy, jealously protected and obfuscated by the clerics. Conspiracy theories are theologies, but they are also power fantasies. One legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, who successfully petitioned (or bullied) Hollywood into taking the side of his knowledge-seeking G-men, is that the most common representation of government agents in American films is of technically skilled poobahs of the panopticon. This is especially true of conspiracy thrillers, whose verneer of subversive or cynical intent is usually itself subverted, because there is nothing more flattering to government agencies than to portray them as dangerously powerful. (It is better to be feared than loved.) Popular chronicles of conspiracy, whether tales of heroes or martyrs, give us lone wolves hunted by all-seeing feds or monolithic, hyper-competent corporations. Such stories leave no room for the everyday mess of bureaucracy, for institutionalized incompetence, for the slips and serendipities of inevitable human error, for technical glitches, for stupidity, for ignorance, for chaos. Power-flattering representations serve the acronymed agencies well, providing them with an aura of omniscience, authority, infallibility.
Their yearning for complex explanations and Hollywood thrills blinds the characters to the unexciting, unflattering truths in front of them. We see this right from the beginning: Osborne protests his demotion and scorns the idea that he has a drinking problem, insisting, “This is political! Don’t tell me it’s not!” He storms out of the office and we cut to him at home, making a drink. Again and again, the film will show us that Osborne is a man with a violent temper who drinks a lot. The reason the CIA decided to demote him may be, in fact, exactly what they said. Osborne Cox believes that a man of his stature could not be relieved of
A superficial interpretation of the film would propose that the Coens think all these characters are stupid and that we should laugh at their follies—that we should, in fact, revel in our superiority to these schmucks. Hence the occasional (or more than occasional, depending on where you look) criticism of the Coens for mocking their characters, for holding them in contempt. I cannot speak for the Coens, who may, in fact, be sneering smartypants bathed in fumes of schadenfreude, but the feelings ultimately produced in my experience of their movies are not ones of superiority for the characters so much as sympathetic solidarity. Not for all the characters, of course. Inevitably, there are bullies and tyrants whose sufferings are sweetly just deserts, but look, for instance, at a character like Linda. We (or I, at least) start out laughing at her, at her oblivious self-absorption, her bumptiousness. Ohhh, look at this silly woman getting all marked up by the plastic surgeon, this woman who thinks her health insurance company will pay for her expensive nips and tucks. Ha ha ha, isn’t she hilarious, isn’t she ridiculous, isn’t she just—
And then there’s Coming Up Daisy, the Claire Danes and Dermot Mulroney movie-within-the-movie that Linda always takes her dates to. It is, apparently, a fluffy romance, a sappy fantasy of eternal love and perfect happiness and beautiful people. (The sort of fantasy that makes a woman like Linda hate herself and her life, the sort of fantasy that keeps many cosmetic surgeons in business.) Linda goes to the movie twice, once on a bad date (with Alan) and once on a date that seems to come out of just such a movie (with Harry). This is not the end of this reference, though. When Harry’s wife, Sandy, goes on a TV show in Seattle, one of the later guests is Dermot Mulroney. Harry is oblivious to his wife’s faithlessness, her ability to deceive him even more effectively than he thinks he is deceiving her—oblivious, in other words, to her agency. After Harry shoots Chad, he tries to make a salad for Katie, but only ends up chopping an enormous pile of carrots. In Seattle, though, Sandy kisses her boyfriend in the dressing room of the TV show while a segment about the “Sultan of Salad” plays above them. Sandy, it turns out, is the one character who lives in a world where fantasies of perfection are not quite so fantastical.
The shows that exploded in the early aughts, starting with Survivor and Big Brother, represented a new historical relationship between reality TV actors and employers. Most reality shows today enjoy a spectacularly profitable exploitation of their actors. These shows are attractive to produce because creating the content and, ultimately, much of the show’s value requires them to utilize a class of unorganized low-paid laborer: the American reality contestant. 
There has only been one brief moment where the American middle class grew at all in the last thirty years: during the tech bubble of the late 1990s. Reality television as we know it began just after this anomalous growth spurt began reversing itself. Shows like Survivor, Big Brother and Fear Factor dramatized the new economic realities: vicious competition, humiliation, hard work for little reward, and winner-take-all ethics. These shows reflect the American economic policymakers’ ideology, where policy is decoupled from ethics, as well as from common sense. As wealth is more and more shifted from the middle class to a small concentration of the upper classes, demand begins to shrink, and with it, the ability to recover from the cyclical crises that are part of our economic system. The middle class is the main consumer class of the United States, and consumption is two thirds of the US economy. As the middle class shrinks, consumption shrinks. As consumption shrinks, the time it takes to recover after recessions grows. Increasing income inequality also translates into increasing economic instability and slower growth. Since the 1980s the job market has taken longer and longer to recover after every bust. More than five years after the great recession of 2007, the job market still hasn’t recovered, but the stock market is booming. Because of this, the wealthy are enjoying full recovery, while the middle and working classes are falling behind, largely because of high unemployment. Corporate profits are booming, but only during the Great Depression has the share of GDP going to salary and wages ever been lower. American workers are less and less part of American prosperity.
The early rounds of American Idol feature inappropriate contestants with little or no talent who are intentionally let through the cattle call weeding process. This represents an ugly and compelling entertainment spectacle that allows viewers to enjoy the drama of a few elite upper class celebrities verbally torturing some unfortunate neurotic caught in their web. These early scenes are job interviews designed to go horribly wrong. The hopeless contestants seem to deserve this fate because their grotesquely delusional overestimation of their talents and complete lack of understanding of what is expected of them by their prospective employers violates some primal sentiment of self-preservation in us. What they are really being punished for is not a lack of talent. They are being punished for being socially maladapted. Sadistic spectators at a ritual enforcement of conformity, we enjoy watching these sickly deer being culled from the herd.
The host Steve-O (Stephen Gilchrist Glover), a graduate of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, went from working in a Florida flea market circus to being one of the most visible performers on Jackass, the MTV reality show featuring self-harming stunts. His role on that show was marked by the extremity of his stunts, his oddly calm and polite demeanor, and his notorious struggles with drugs and alcohol. The inane and sublime poetics of Jackass inform Killer Karaoke to a significant degree. The qualities the now drug-free Steve-O brings with him from his former show—a particular combination of affability, masochism, encouragement, and sunniness in the face of pain and humiliation—help form much of the tone of Killer Karaoke and differentiate it from a host of other reality shows. He is a man dumb enough to consent to be choked unconscious six times in a row, and sensitive enough to tenderly French-kiss a giraffe. He helps steer the contestants to do their best to accept the challenges in the Jackass spirit, and some of them do seem to have fully embraced the idea that their suffering and fear are meant to bring joy to others.
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