Smoking Weed, Occasional Acid Flashback and Bowling

The first I heard about Big Lebowski was on TV commercial, the idea looked like another failure from SNL, cheap effect humour and half-interesting story. My interest was sparked the moment the movie started. As we go into the story, the narrator (Sam Elliott), establishes the mood of the movie by stopping in the middle of the introduction and confessing that he lost his train of thought. The story is composed as a marijuana trip, everything looks new and interesting and at the same time, almost nothing in the world matters, well nothing but the rug and bowling.

It is a story about The Dude (Jeff Bridges), a deadbeat enjoying the very attribute, a guy whose pastime includes, by his own words: smoking weed, occasional acid flashback and bowling. The character was based by the Coen brothers early producer and distributor Jeff Dowd, tall, large, shaggy figure full of enthusiasm, a man who played an important role in Coen's indie filmmaking career, even though much more successful than Dude, he is as much a creature of the moment as Dude.

His best friend, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), is a former catholic Polish, converted to Judaism by his ex-wife who orders him around even after a divorce. Walter is also a former Vietnam veteran, who cannot cope with the fact that the war has ended and his heart is still heavily into military, he compares bowling to Vietnam, he looks at life as if it were a cartoon.

This is a movie with no real plot, it contains lot of stories that start, then melt with Dude's acid flashbacks into another stories, as Twain says at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, "Persons attempting to find a plot will be shot."

Dude is mistaken for other Jeffrey Lebowski, the millionaire whose wife owes a great deal of money to the porn king (Ben Gazzara) who sends some goons to rough him up, so they urinate on Dude's rug, 'that really tied the room together'. Dude is set on returning the beauty of the rug so he goes to the other Lebowski, who treats him with contempt, but involves him in the returning of his wife that got kidnapped in the meantime. Dude involves Walter for help, which produces nothing but trouble, and whenever Walter makes a mistake, he behaves as if it never happened with words "let's go bowling."

They bowl against the pederast Jesus, a guy in ridiculous bowling attire. Walter will later describe that Jesus was ordered by the court to go from door to door telling everyone about his perversion, and we see a man walking down the street of some suburb, knocking on the door and another man who answers it, in a baseball cap, beer in his hand, five-day beard on his face.

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