It strikes me as a bit ironic that fans of the Coen Brothers' stoner comedy
The Big Lebowski (1998) refer to themselves as "Achievers." At the
Lebowski Fest website, home of the annual multi-city festival devoted to the movie and its values, official merchandise includes t-shirts and hoodies with the word "Achiever" on them, and there's a section called
Achiever Nation with photos of fans. I was among the interviewees in Mike Chang's documentary
The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans, and I belong to a Facebook group devoted to the film called "Shit Yeah,
The Achievers!"
That's a lot of achieving for a film
ostensibly devoted to the art of "takin' 'er easy." The film's hero, shambling hippie Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), is defined by his very lack
of achievement. One of the most comforting lessons of this
film is that a man cannot be judged solely on the basis of his
worldly accomplishments. Those who are lauded and respected
for their professional triumphs or grandiose acts of public
philanthropy may be morally bankrupt, while an unemployed ex-roadie
with a penchant for laziness, bowling, and pot may emerge as a
modern-day hero, "the man for his time and place."
To properly decode one of the familiar green "Achiever" t-shirts, as Bob Barker was once famously unable to do on The Price is Right, you first need to know that an important element of the film's plot is a fictional charity
called the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers. This organization is devoted
to providing the underprivileged youth of Watts with college
educations.
The film's principal villain, a cranky, wheelchair-bound millionaire (David Huddleston) who shares the name "Jeffrey Lebowski" with its hero, is one of the charity's two trustees, the other being
his estranged bohemian artist daughter, Maude (Julianne Moore). The elder Lebowski certainly seems to enjoy the attention
and adulation that come with this high-profile position. Mr. Lebowski's office,
after all, is cluttered with various trophies and certificates of
recognition, and he has mounted photographs on the wall to prove that he has met with Republican politicians and conservative movie stars.
The elder Jeffrey Lebowski is
not a man who administers charity in a humble, anonymous manner. He
wants these acts to be formally documented. He strikes a
paternalistic pose in a portrait of himself with the underprivileged
youth he thinks of as his "children," and he has eagerly
participated in photo ops with such luminaries as Nancy Reagan and
Charlton Heston. Mr. Lebowski's nervous and fastidious assistant, Brandt (Philip Seymour Hoffman), deems it necessary
to tell the Dude that his boss met Ronald Reagan but that "unfortunately there wasn't time for a photo opportunity." In Mr. Lebowski's world, the only good deed worth doing is the kind you can
thoroughly document and hang on the wall. It's a value Brandt has internalized.
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| They honored a scumbag. |
It is the older, wealthier Lebowski,
once honored as "Achiever of the Year" by Variety Clubs
International, who introduces the "achievement" motif to the film. Other characters, including Maude, the Dude, and the Dude's
belligerent Vietnam veteran sidekick, Walter (John Goodman), utter the word "achiever," but only
in reference to the charity and its recipients. Mr. Lebowski,
however, works it into his dialogue frequently.
Commenting on the Korean War injuries that have confined him to a motorized wheelchair, the elder Lebowski tells the younger in their first meeting, "I went out and
achieved anyway." After Mr. Lebowski's young wife
Bunny (played by Tara Reid and pointedly called a "trophy" by both Maude and the Dude)
has supposedly been kidnapped, the blustery old man says that he "can
look back on a life of achievement – on challenges met, competitors
bested, obstacles overcome." He refers to the kidnappers as “men
who are unable to achieve on a level field of play.”
Later in the
film, when the Dude has apparently botched a ransom drop and thus doomed Bunny, Mr.
Lebowski testily declares that the younger man has "failed to achieve, even in
the modest task which was your charge." Clearly, Mr. Lebowski is a man who
neatly divides the world into two categories: achievers and
non-achievers.
How strange, then, that the film's
biggest proponent of "achievement" is also its most reprehensible
scumbag. As we have learned by the end film, Mr. Lebowski is a
blustery fraud who pretends to be a busy tycoon and who embarks on a
truly vile scheme that more or less amounts to selling his underaged
wife for $1 million, embezzling from the very charity he pretends to
love, and framing an innocent "sap" for the whole thing.
All
of this is done, mind you, out of mere vanity. This man already lives in
opulent comfort and receives a "reasonable allowance" from his
daughter. What could he possibly need with a million dollars? He just
wants some money to call his own, strictly as a matter of male pride. Like the title
character in The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Lebowski is ultimately
exposed as a humbug, but unlike that ersatz sorcerer, he is not a "very
good man" underneath, merely a coward and a thief.
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| Jackie Treehorn: A faint hint of sulfur in the air? |
There are two other characters in the
film who mirror Mr. Lebowski in their desire to flaunt their status
as social achievers. One is Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), the mysterious Malibu
pornographer seemingly modeled after Hugh Hefner. Treehorn is the one
who took Bunny Lebowski (nee Fawn Knudsen) and transformed her from a
Minnesota farmgirl into a drug-addicted porn star with a “sizable
debt.” Besides “treat[ing] objects like women,” Jackie employs
two musclebound thugs and does not hesitate to deploy them like
attack dogs when needed.
Jackie is a shady character indeed, perhaps
the movie's closest stand-in for Satan incarnate. His dramatic entrance, deep
into the movie, occurs at night during a beach party where the only illumination is provided by roaring bonfire. As he slowly emerges
from the shadows to greet the Dude (and the audience, since this is
filmed as a POV shot from the Dude's perspective), the viewer may detect a faint hint of sulfur
in the air. At first, the Dude is impressed by Jackie's "completely
unspoiled" home, but our hero shows a Groucho Marx-esque disrespect
for Mr. Treehorn's profession.
"How's the smut business, Jackie?" the Dude casually inquires.
"I wouldn't know," responds Jackie. "I deal in publishing, entertainment, political advocacy."
"Which one's Logjammin'?" counters the Dude, cannily referring to one of Treehorn's lowest-common-denominator porn films.
Here, as at the Lebowski mansion, it is
outward appearance, rather than inner truth, that seems to matter
most. Instead of copping to what he really is, Jackie Treehorn
rattles off his socially-acceptable achievements. I am reminded of
the late author Robert Anton Wilson's satirical sci-fi book Reality
Is What You Can Get Away With. In that singular work, published a
mere six years before the release of The Big Lebowski, Wilson
imagines a future in which lying or "bullshit" is extinct, and
the earnest historians of the future are puzzled by the doublespeak
of the Twentieth Century. A representative passage: "Realize that
the function of Bullshit lies in concealing the facts, especially
uncomfortable facts, and you begin to enter the reality-tunnel of
this astounding ancient semantics."
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| A real reactionary: The corrupt police chief of Malibu, CA |
Jackie's subterfuge appears to have
worked brilliantly, at least judging by the scene in which the Dude,
at the behest of the aforementioned smut peddler, is arrested on
trumped-up charges by the Malibu police and taken by squad car to the
station house. At the Malibu police station, we meet the bellicose
and possibly corrupt chief (Leon Russom), who insults and abuses the Dude in what
seems to be a comical SoCal parody of Christ's treatment by the
Romans.
The police chief of Malibu is the third prominent "achiever" in the film, and like the other two, he does not inspire our
sympathy. Evoking Mr. Lebowski's ostentatious workspace, the Chief's
office is decorated with a whole assortment of plaques and
parchments, all attesting to his status as a guardian of law and
order, endorsed by the upscale porn-funded "beach community" that bankrolls
his petty, small-scale fascism. The good chief also reinforces Jackie
Treehorn's vaunted place in society when he soberly tells the Dude, "Mr. Treehorn draws a lot of water in this town. You don't draw
shit, Lebowski." It seems that Jackie's considerable financial
resources have convinced the local law enforcement – and the
community at large – to ignore his blatantly unsavory activities,
while the harmless Dude is treated as a menace.
If Mr. Lebowski, Jackie Treehorn, and
the Police Chief of Malibu are the pillars of your community, then
your community is rotting from the inside out. These men have all
“achieved” in ways that are recognized by American society. The
duplicitous Lebowski and the venal Treehorn live in fancy houses,
surrounded by material comfort and lauded by the world for their "success," while the thuggish police chief wears a badge which
designates him as an official gatekeeper of modern civilization.
The
Dude, meanwhile, has very little in the way of extrinsically
verifiable status. His wardrobe, vehicle, employment history, and
living accommodations are all extremely modest. Repeatedly broken
into and vandalized over the course of the film, his bungalow is far
from "unspoiled." The collars of his t-shirts sag after decades
of washings. He doesn't seem to have held a job in years. And that
misbegotten 1973 Ford Gran Torino of his – "green with some brown
rust coloration" – takes nearly as much abuse as the Dude
himself. All of these factors show us that the Dude is not a man who
puts much stake in "achieving."
Yet, when the movie is over, which
character would we most like to emulate?
