You know, Ace Ventura and The Big Lebowski were both basically attempts to write Raymond Chandler stories about the kind of people that still lived in Hollywood in the ‘90s
the running theme of the big lebowski is that the mystery genre is basically incoherent, that you can’t really just assemble clues into a story, and searching for them is ridiculous. the dude doing a pencil rubbing of jackie treehorn’s notepad thinking he’s finding the clue that will break the bunnie case wide open. in any real life situation that would simply reveal a dead end - shorthand only treehorn can read, a note that means nothing outside of the context of a conversation he didn’t hear. the movie takes this completely over the top, revealing that jackie treehorn literally doesn’t save information from phone calls at all - he simply doodles huge dicks to pass time
it’s one of my favorite gags
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my favorite running theme of the big lebowski is the poverty of the human intellect. everyone is pretty much running on autopilot, repeating things they’ve heard, and rehashing images from culture. it’s not that all the characters are stereotypes, it’s that all the characters are people trying to be stereotypes. the only actual stereotype is the cowboy, who is an omniscient idiot
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the big lebowski ends with the cowboy treating the story like it’s a conventional narrative with a happy ending, even acting as though the dude acting as a sperm donor is creating a happy family somehow. the attitude of idiotic benevolence he takes into both the closing and opening narrations goes a long way to making them classics of postmodern comedy
Shuffling these separate posts together for the sake of riffing off all of them.
I’ve mentioned that the framework that I’ve found productive for understanding The Big Lebowski is that it’s a Raymond Chandler tribute. I didn’t get that until I read Chandler’s short stories but when you do it’s really obvious.
And one thing about them is that you read them and you think you’ve read a story about an investigator unraveling a mystery. I mean, there’s a mystery, and at the end there’s not, and in between the protagonist applies investigative techniques, information is periodically revealed that makes you reevaluate what you knew already, there’s a lot of witty dialogue and enthralling characterization and scene-setting and a bit of violence.
But when you go back and look at it closely you realize that these things happened in sequence and in proximity, but none of them really lead to the others. The protagonist never really mastered any challenge, but just maneuvered into place for the next coincidence.
The notepad bit isn’t the only “actual” detective technique that goes nowhere. Walter tracking down the kid who left his homework in the Dude’s stolen car - that’s actually clever and competent. It’s clever competence applied to a clue discovered by accident about a crime that has nothing to do with anything else, and used to set up an incompetent interrogation on the basis of another “clue” - the new car - that’s completely unrelated.
That might be my favorite bit of the movie, that Walter does “good cop, bad cop” backwards, alternating both roles towards different people in front of each other, and then getting rough with an unrelated third party. It really plays to the defining nature of his character - that he demands that proper respect be paid but constantly focuses this respect on completely ridiculous objects - the rules of competitive bowling, his ex-wife and her religious heritage, the Vietnam War dead, retired showrunners, himself - making grandiose gestures at the expense of the petty respect of everyday life the people around him are trying to maintain.
In the end it’s a story about failure, about people completely failing to overcome their own limitations. As far as I remember there are only two times when characters actually succeed at something they attempt - Maude gets pregnant, the guys get In-N-Out - and it’s no accident that both happen offscreen and are completely irrelevant to anything else.
But, a story about people failing due to their own inherent limitations, we have a term for that. That’s why the cowboy’s there as chorus/narrator, because the brilliant thing about The Big Lebowski is that it isn’t a stoner comedy, it’s a stoner tragedy.
