The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, page 5
The Dude’s social life revolves around bowling with his friends Walter (John Goodman), a Vietnam vet and recent convert to Judaism, and Donny (Steve Buscemi), a pleasant, shy follower. Learning about the intruders, Walter insists that the issue is not the rug but the other Jeff Lebowski, whom the men were after. The Dude decides to visit the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), a man confined to a wheelchair as a result of injuries suffered in the Korean War. When the Dude asks for remuneration for his destroyed rug and proclaims, “This aggression will not stand,” Lebowski taunts him, saying that, when he lost his legs in Korea, he did not ask for a handout.
He “went out and achieved”: “Your revolution is over. The bums lost.” Soon after this encounter, a humbled and weepy Lebowski invites the Dude back to the house and shows him a ransom note, indicating that his wife, Bunny, has been kidnapped. The Dude takes a drag off his joint and says, “Bummer, man.” Lebowski offers the Dude twenty thousand dollars and his own beeper to act as a courier. An incredulous Dude asks Lebowski’s assistant, “He thinks the carpet pissers did this?” Throughout much of the film, someone in a blue car follows the Dude.
Late in the film, he runs up to the car and yanks out the driver, who explains that he is a “private dick,” working on the same case as the one the Dude’s working on. He then admits fawningly, “I admire your work. The way you play one side against the other.” Here, the Dude once again plays the wrong man role; this time he is misidentified as a professional, a private detective with the knowledge and cleverness to manipulate human character types for his own ends.
This is, of course, a complete illusion; to underscore the Dude’s impotence, the Coens immediately shift to a scene in which a group of Germans break into his apartment and find him in his bathtub. As he complains that this is a “private residence,” they drop a marmot into the tub just between his legs and announce, “We want the money. We believe in nothing. If we don’t get the money, we will come back tomorrow and cut off your johnson.” Walter shares the Dude’s dislocation, but he, unlike the Dude, is troubled by his rootlessness. The Dude is often irked at Walter’s strange Jewish devotion. When the Dude accuses him of living in the past, Walter responds, “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you’re goddamn right I’m living in the fucking past!” Walter wants to have an identity, to define himself in relation to a way of life, a tradition larger than himself. How badly he wants this is clear from his willingness to rate National Socialism above nihilism on the “ethos” scale. Yet his own embrace of Judaism, a result of his marriage to a Jewish woman from whom he is now divorced, serves to underscore the absurdity of attempting to introduce an ethos into a fragmented contemporary culture. His Judaism is an incoherent mixture of various elements, dislocated from contexts in which they originally may have made a kind of sense. Walter ranks bowling on about the same level as his religious devotion. Concerned about the Dude’s preoccupation with the case of the missing wife, Walter exclaims, “We can’t drag this negative energy into the tournament.” Without any direct contribution from the Dude, the case wraps up nicely.
It turns out that Bunny was just on an unannounced vacation. Outside the bowling alley, the Germans, who think that Bunny is still missing, torch the Dude’s car and demand money, claiming that, if they are not paid, they will kill Bunny. A timid Donny asks: “Are these the Nazis?” Walter replies, “No, these men are nihilists. There’s nothing to be afraid of. . . . These men are cowards.” When the Dude tells them that Bunny is alive and there will be no financial transaction, one of the Germans complains, “It’s not fair.” Walter taunts them: “Fair? Who’s the fucking nihilist here? What are you, a bunch of fucking crybabies?” In the ensuing conflict, Donny has a heart attack and dies.
Walter here puts his finger on the problem of self-described nihilists and of the incompatibility between nihilism and human life, no matter how debased. Nihilism cannot, strictly speaking, be lived. An utterly amorphous and completely pointless life would deprive an individual not just of any inspiring sense of purpose but even of the basis for deliberating and pursuing anything whatsoever. Moreover, everyone complains about something, and this is rooted in some sense, however misguided and self-interested, of injustice or wrongs suffered. Full-blown nihilism cannot be lived; it can only be approached asymptotically.
Although the Dude is not foolish enough to proclaim himself a nihilist, his life borders on nihilism. He is skeptical of large-scale beliefs such as those to which Walter assents. He does not need an ethos, except insofar as that is mere style, which is about what the Jewish religion is for Walter. But the Dude has beliefs. He believes, for example, in private property, at least for himself. He thinks of himself as a respectable citizen; he is a low-class, minimally ambitious version of what the social critic David Brooks has called a Bobo, a bourgeois bohemian, someone who combines elements of 1960s counterculture with degrees of bourgeois conformity and standards of success.[11] Brooks’s new social standard–bearers are much more bourgeois than bohemian; inversely, the Dude is more bohemian than bourgeois. He is little concerned with societal standards of success and insouciantly repudiates the work ethic. But, like Walter, he is also passionate about bowling and is deeply concerned with how his team will perform in the upcoming competition.
The Dude accepts the basic absurdity of the cosmos, of life in the most advanced civilization ever to grace the face of the earth. His way of life affirms the equal significance or insignificance of all human endeavors, but none of this stops him from judging certain things to be unseemly. The Dude has not so much an ethos as a style, a way of taking it easy, living lightly. Despite his lack of conscious planning and his absence of ambition, he manages to contribute to ongoing natural processes. At one point, he has sex with Maude, the Big Lebowski’s libidinous and artistically rebellious daughter. Afterward, she asks a number of questions about his life and his habits of recreation. The zenith of his life was organizing campus protests in the 1960s; his recreation consists in car cruising and the occasional acid flashback. He gets out of bed and notices that Maude remains on her back cradling her legs, a strategy designed to increase the chances of conception.
“What did you think this was all about?” she asks. When he expresses worries about the responsibilities of fatherhood, she explains that a deadbeat dad is exactly what she wants.
The Dude is a kind of comic hero, at least for our narrator (Sam Elliott), who shows up onscreen in the final scene at the bowling alley, where he and the Dude exchange pleasantries. The cowboy matter-of-factly reiterates the Dude’s own self-referential proclamation, “The Dude abides,” and offers some reflective, concluding observations:
The Dude abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope he makes the finals. Welp, that about does her, wraps her all up. Things seem to’ve worked out pretty good for the Dude’n’ Walter, and it was a purt good story, dontcha think? Made me laugh to beat the band. Parts, anyway. Course—I didn’t like seein’ Donny go. But then, happen to know that there’s a little Lebowski on the way. I guess that’s the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands a time until—aw, look at me, I’m ramblin’ again. Wal, uh hope you folks enjoyed yourselves.
The Dude’s abiding signals an escape, or at least a reprieve, from the world of noir; in spite of the threats to his life, the Dude emerges from the noir plot, from its labyrinth, unscathed. The tone of the ending, the suggestion that the human comedy perpetuates itself through the ongoing birth of new humans, strikes a comic note different from that of mere satire or denunciatory cynicism. Here, the impulses and resources of nature toward reproduction and survival are seen as more powerful than the destructive forces of noir. As Pascal puts it (a sentiment later stolen by Hume), “Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”[12]
Basic Familial Instincts in Coen Comedy
As one critic has noted, The Big Lebowski is about “friendship and surrogate families.”[13] This strikes a note of comic affirmation absent in even the most complex noir films, wherein the family is nearly always a source of the noir trap, and marriages and the begetting of children provide no way out. If surrogate families are at the heart of The Big Lebowski, real families figure prominently in other Coen films, especially in the brothers’ most critically acclaimed neo-noir, Fargo. With a plot akin to that of A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998), Fargo features criminals undone by their own futile, criminal plans. The characters are blood simple, a phrase that the Coens borrowed from Dashiell Hammett, who borrowed it from police talk to describe the way criminals lose control of full rationality at the moment of committing the crime and, thus, inevitably leave incriminating clues behind. Apparently cold and calculating, they nonetheless act without adequate foresight; the consequences of their acts quickly swirl out of control. Called a film blanc because of the near-whiteout conditions that prevail in the film’s setting in the plains of North Dakota, Fargo features criminals who suffer “snow blindness,” the self-deceiving illusion of infallibility.[14] As in Blood Simple, here too criminals are subject to a comedy of errors. Yet Fargo is a very different film from Blood Simple; it inscribes the comedy of criminal error within a more traditional structure of the detective who affirms the goodness of conventional mores, a married and pregnant female detective named Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand in an Oscar-winning performance).
In the final scenes of Fargo, Marge’s role as commentator eclipses in significance her role as investigator. Indeed, the criminals seem destined to destroy themselves. Marge’s comments about her expected baby affirm a certain way of life as making sense, as bearing fruit, and as something worth preserving and handing on to the next generation. Her domestic life is void of the sort of calculating, radically individualist spirit that infects the families of the criminals in the film and the typical families that inhabit other noir films.
Despite its gruesome violence and somber tone, Fargo’ s conclusion calls to mind certain features of classical comedy, which often ends with a wedding, an affirmation of order, especial y of the marital bond as the cornerstone of hope in society. Affirming the reasonableness of conventions, classical comedy mocks radicals—be they criminals or well-intentioned reformers.
Marge does not seek deeper meaning beneath the surface; committed to a conventional understanding of justice, she is not on a great quest to discern the nature and causes of evil. The causes, if there are any discernible (greed for a “little bit of money”), are readily available on the surface of criminal action; yet, given the risks, the cost, and the affront to natural goodness (“It’s a beautiful day”), evil remains inexplicable: “I just don’t understand it.” Marge witnesses at close range the noir trap of criminality, but it does not destroy her—or even tempt her.
In a review of Fargo entitled “The Banality of Virtue,” Laura Miller observes the “dullness of the Midwestern characters” and the essential emptiness of their values. She wonders, “In the universe of Fargo, where virtue is a kind of ignorance and wickedness a nullity, where do real people fit in?”[15] Indeed, the Coens’ alternatives to nihilists, the characters who avoid entrapment by the noir vices of lust and greed, seem not so much virtuous as incapable of the complexities of vice. They seem to suffer from a sort of Forrest Gump syndrome, a sort of banality of goodness, a strange and comic counterpoint to Hannah Arendt’s famous thesis concerning the banality of evil.[16] If this line of interpretation were correct, then we might see the substance, or lack thereof, in the Coens’ films as a “knowing, highly allusive” form of filmmaking that is no more than “pastiche.”[17] Yet the gentle levity with which the Coens treat these characters and the way the characters embody natural tendencies, which they cannot themselves articulate, suggest the presence of something more than mere banality. Foster Hirsch, for example, describes McDormand’s character as “a cockeyed optimist, wide-eyed but hardly stupid.”[18] Indeed, the interweaving of comedy and fertility harks back to pagan and Shakespearean comedy, with the celebration of rites of fertility and marriage, of an order of nature that overcomes human vice and frailty and reconciles opposing forces and conflicting wills. No such complete reconciliation is possible in neo-noir, not even in the Coens’ comic neo-noir. Yet the Coens’ penchant for presenting fertility and, in some films, familial fidelity as ways of avoiding entanglement in the noir traps of lust and greed points in the direction of such comic reconciliation.
The themes of family and procreation are the preeminent issues in the Coens’ early pure comedy, Raising Arizona (1987), the story of a recidivist petty thief, Hi (Nicolas Cage), and a female prison guard, Ed (Holly Hunter).
Over a number of years and many return trips to prison, Hi falls in love with Ed, and she accepts his proposal of marriage. The film includes a number of noir themes—crime, repetition, entrapment, and the spoiling of the future by deeds committed in the past. Yet here those noir themes are, ultimately, inscribed within an overarching comic structure that contains both the theme of fertility and that of hopeful reconciliation. Throughout much of the film, Hi appears incapable of learning or altering his behavior. He admits in a voice-over that he is not sure where folks stand on the incarceration issue, whether it is about rehabilitation or just revenge. As we watch him being arrested yet again, he comments that he has begun to believe that revenge is the only possibility that makes any sense.
His marriage to Ed seems to have a salutary effect, at least until Ed is diagnosed as barren. Hi comments that her “insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.” Seeing the announcement of the birth of the Arizona quints, born to the wealthy Nathan Arizona and his wife, Ed suggests that they kidnap one of the boys since the Arizona family has more than it can handle. Hi scales a ladder, enters the boys’ bedroom, and takes Nathan Jr. In a surprise twist, Hi is the one who cannot live with the thought of their deed. His conscience exacts revenge in a dream where he is pursued by the “lone biker of the apocalypse,” a vengeful giant of a man sporting a tattoo: “Mama Didn’t Love Me.” The tattoo is a whimsical statement of the core theme of the film, that familial love is the essence of human life. The crimes that Hi and Ed commit are but a perverse pursuit of properly human goods, one in which there is a twisted acknowledgment of the primacy of familial bonds.
The few noir elements in the film are subordinate to a larger narrative, a story of fidelity and the hope for fertility. Hi and Ed eventually come to their senses and return the baby. Relieved of their burden of conscience, Hi has another dream, which may, he concedes, have been just wishful thinking, a dream of the future in which Nathan Jr. is happy and successful and Hi and Ed gather around a dinner table with their numerous offspring.
What the Coen brothers hint at in a number of their noir films they explicitly embrace in Raising Arizona: the resilience of human nature’s basic instincts, not the instincts for lust and domination of others, but those for love, affection, and procreation, instincts that steer human beings toward a happy ending, in spite of the damage done and the detours caused by their calculative misjudgments.
Notes
[1] For a nice discussion of neo-noir and a division of it into modernist and postmodernist stages, see Andrew Spicer, Film Noir (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2002), 130–74. Also indispensable is Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir (New York: Limelight, 1999). [<<]
[2] J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989), 218. [<<]
[3] Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 10. [<<]
[4] Jean-Pierre Chartier, “Les Américains aussi font des films ‘noirs,’” Revue du cinéma 2 (1946): 67. [<<]
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), bk. 1, “European Nihilism,” no. 2, 9. [<<]
[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1968), 129. [<<]
[7] Nietzsche, Will to Power, no. 22, 17. [<<]
[8] Ibid. [<<]
[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), no. 257, 201. [<<]
[10] For further discussion of the relation between Nietzsche, nihilism, and noir, see Mark T. Conard, “Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir,” in The Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006), 7–22. [<<]
[11] See David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). [<<]
[12] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), no. 131, 64. [<<]
[13] James Mottram, The Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind (Dulles, Va.: Brassey’s, 2000). [<<]
[14] Ibid., 124. [<<]
[15] Laura Miller, “The Banality of Virtue,” Salon.com, http://archive.salon.com/09/reviews/farg01.html. [<<]
