THAT CREEP CAN ROLL

When you have that thing that’s special to you, you don’t want it corrupted. And ‘The Big Lebowski’ is special to me. It wasn’t always that way. When I saw it upon its initial release back in 1998, I was still in a post-‘Fargo’ lovefest. ‘Lebowski’ seemed slight in comparison, like the Coens were falling back on their worst habits – casting and production design straight out of an Alka Seltzer commercial, lazy plotting, etc. (see ‘The Ladykillers’ for a textbook study). It was a fun movie. I laughed. But it just didn’t mean anything. And ‘The Big Lebowski’ slipped from my memory.

Jump to earlier this year. I needed to watch ‘Lebowski’ for work-related purposes. I picked up the $9.99 DVD and watched. My jaw hit the pavement. Suddenly it made sense to me. Every scene is a comic masterpiece. It features the best performances that Jeff Bridges and John Goodman will ever turn in. And it’s got heart. Lots of it. Sure, it’s loaded with the Coen Bros’ usual camera tricks, and so many of the characters are outsized to cartoonish levels. But it all made sense in a way that is just dead on great. I got it.

Some people complain that the ending to the movie is weirdly dissatisfying. But the Coens are just playing by the rules of Los Angeles crime fiction: iconic detectives way over their head, small fish in a big pond, things almost never get wrapped up in a nice neat package. Always plenty of guilt and suffering still left on the table. And even though the ‘mystery’ has been ‘solved’, the truly guilty just keep on keeping on because they’re the ones with the biggest bank accounts.

That’s how it went for Jake Gittes. And Jim Rockford. And Philip Marlowe. (The Coens make no bones about where they want their film to fit in: ‘The Big Sleep’? ‘The Big Lebowski’? Get it? It took me waaaaay too long to pick up on that one.) One exception to the rule is ‘Columbo’, wherein the title character would regularly bring down some of the biggest fish in Los Angeles. But that show is minimalist to the point of being theoretical. It takes place in a vacuum. I mean, forget about the running gag about Mrs. Columbo – we’ve never seen Columbo in a fucking police precinct!

I was weirdly compelled to watch and re-watch ‘The Big Lebowski’. I ended up seeing it five times in a week. I’ve since watched it a handful of times since. And it went from being great to being The Perfect Movie. And while it’s still one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, it’s not really a comedy to me anymore. I don’t laugh at it. I admire it. Some of the shots are just so fucking Beautiful that I could cry, like when one of Julianne Moore’s goons punch The Dude in the face, and the impact explodes into a giant firework, which takes us into the first of The Dude’s two fantasies. Oof!

I saw ‘Lebowski’ a couple weeks ago at Anthology Archives as part of The Onion Film Series. It was slightly unsettling to see the movie with an audience after watching it by myself for the better part of 2004. The crowd was partying with the movie. Cheering when John Turturro makes his first appearance, laughing at every little joke… it’s clear they’d all seen it at home and were laughing at all the subtleties, but a movie like ‘The Big Lebowski’ has five hundred small moments. And I wouldn’t mind hearing the fucking dialogue now and again.

But that’s my problem, not theirs. The movie turned into something that it wasn’t necessarily designed to be. And that’s why Lebowski-Fest scares me. (Again, I have no idea how to make the words magically light up with hyperlinks, so I will just write out www.lebowskifest.com ) If the Anthology Archives experience threw me for a loop, I can only imagine what watching the movie in a theatre full of people dressed like Jesus Quintana would do to me. As undeniably fun and quotable as the movie is – put it up there with ‘Caddyshack’, no problem – I don’t want to see ‘The Big Lebowski’ turned into some sort of participatory ‘Rocky Horror’ experience. ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ sucks. It’s a lousy movie. ‘The Big Lebowski’ is a masterpiece. And you don’t piss all over masterpieces. So I’ll probably be at home next weekend watching The Dude in the comfort of my little home, marveling at the Coen Brothers’ best movie by far.

Tom Scharpling