The Comforts and Pleasures of Repetitive Dialogue in The Big Lebowski

Jeff Jaeckle

->The Big Lebowski can be a difficult film, especially for first-time audiences. While not as cerebral as Barton Fink (1991), nor as graphically violent as Miller's Crossing (1990) and Fargo (1996), the film's sprawling plot and barrage of cultural references are nonetheless tricky. As the eclectic cast of over three dozen characters wanders through Los Angeles, bizarre storylines intersect, often resulting in narrative detours and dead ends, including kidnapping, embezzlement, the adult film industry, community theatre, castration, pregnancy and, of course, a bowling tournament.

Peppered throughout are allusions to popular and high culture, which the characters use with little context, among them nihilism, the Biennale, National Socialism, Theodor Herzl, the first Gulf War, Vladimir Lenin and human paraquats.

Unsurprisingly, many early reviews were negative, with critics claiming that the film's plotting and allusions made it 'deliriously fractured' (The Hollywood Reporter), 'incomprehensible' (Time), 'hopelessly twisted up' (New Statesman) and 'thick with nonsequiturs' (Sight and Sound), thus ensuring 'an almost complete lack of structural integrity' (Boxoffice). These reviews make the film sound onerous and pretentious, yet The Big Lebowski is perhaps the most popular cult film of the early twenty-first century. The preponderance of midnight screenings and festivals, special editions and merchandizing, and numerous books on its making, philosophy, religious significance and all-around brilliance suggest that the film's difficulty is not overwhelming, nor without its admirers.

One possibility is that fans enjoy the film despite its difficulty. They can delight in its surreal dream sequences and bawdy humour without becoming bothered by, for instance, Bunny Lebowski's (Tara Reid) unexplained motivations for leaving Minnesota or the vague logic of the Dude's (Jeff Bridges) insult of the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston) as a 'human paraquat' – an oblique reference to a herbicide once used by the US government to destroy marijuana plantations. This pick-and-choose experience could effectively pare the film down to a simple buddy flick or, as film critic David Edelstein puts it, a 'scattershot druggy' comedy in the tradition of the Cheech and Chong series (Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin, 1978–84). Another possibility is that fans appreciate the film because of its difficulty, giving over to and relishing in its sheer complexity. Sight and Sound critic Jonathan Romney suggests that, for these types of fans, the 'story enables us to enjoy a whole catalogue of narrative dead ends, cruel gags and bravura character routines'. Repeat viewings would only strengthen these pleasures, as audiences could easily rekindle their stoner experiences or diligently seek out new details and references.

But what about first-time audiences faced with confusing plots and obscure allusions? How do they navigate these twists and turns, and what keeps them in their seats for the duration of the nearly two-hour film? To paraphrase the Dude, what ties the movie together? One possibility is mise-en-scène. Given that the entire film is set in and around Los Angeles, audiences can conceivably latch on to geography to ground their experiences of the film. However, the visual palates of these locations – like Los Angeles itself – vary widely. In The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film (1998), cinematographer Roger Deakins admits, 'I'm not sure I ever really had a handle on what Lebowski should look like [...] It's such a mix, I don't think it has one style.' In an interview for the same book, Joel Coen concurs, 'There are parts of the movie that want to be real and contemporary-feeling and other things that are very stylized, like the dream sequences. And then there's the bowling stuff. So this is more of a mix.'

As these shots of the bowling alley, the Dude's drug-induced dream and Larry Sellers' house illustrate, the compositions of these scenes are quite distinct, hardly making mise-en-scène a through-line for audiences.

Another unifying feature could be the Dude, who appears on- screen in all of these visually disparate settings and interacts with every character. However, the Dude isn't the most articulate of guides. He frequently finds himself overwhelmed, admitting at one point to Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), 'There are a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, a lotta strands to keep in my head, man.' When he attempts to explain his experiences, the Dude is often unreliable, uttering ill-formed or nonsensical lines. According to Paul Coughlin, in his essay for the Film Journal, the entire movie is based on such nonsense, 'embodied in the Dude's inability to verbalize anything remotely like a reasonable explanation for his circumstances'. The same could be said of the film's other potential guide, the Stranger (Sam Elliott), a voice-over narrator that loses his train of thought in the film's opening scene.

So, then, if the linchpin of The Big Lebowski is not any single plot, location or character, what holds it together? I propose that the answers are found in the film's sound design, specifically its uses of dialogue. As James Mottram explains in Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind (2000), 'Wayward as the script may be [...] what distinguishes the film from any [other], again, is the attention paid to speech patterns.' He is especially struck by the repetitive nature of these patterns, which 'flood the film, with characters reusing each others' words sub-consciously'. Justus Nieland dubs these patterns 'Dudespeak', in The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies (2009), arguing for the importance of mimicry, 'a compulsive borrowing from the stylized tissue of verbiage whose repetitions, loopings and displacements constitute the film's linguistic...