This is certainly an unfair reduction of the movement's shortcomings, but my purpose is a provocative lead-in to a film that has matured into a hilarious homage to the Sixties antiwar movement.
The 1998 Coen Brothers cult movie The Big Lebowski was a sleeper that slowly grew on audiences and continues to grow in stature. For me it is the perfect movie antidote for our times. The movie is already famous for having generated a following akin to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Star Trek. I've now seen it four times. In earlier viewings, I didn't realize the subtext that so wonderfully speaks to the frustrations of leftist antiwar activists. When my fellow peace-activist wife and I watched it together the other night we were laughing so hard we were in tears.
The film opens on a piece of tumbleweed rolling through scrub desert with the Sons Of The Pioneers singing "Tumbling Tumbleweeds." The legendary cowboy voice of Sam Elliot tells us about the film's protagonist, a man known as The Dude. By this time the tumbleweed has reached the top of a hill to reveal the vast lights of Los Angeles at night. We begin to get it: We're at the end of the trail of Manifest Destiny. From here westward, it's Vietnam and all the rest.
The Cowboy says the story he's about to tell took place "just about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis. I only mention it because sometimes there's a man. I won't say a hero, "cause what's a hero? Sometimes there's a man -- well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there."
Jeff Bridges as The Dude is standing at the end of a long supermarket dairy case. He's in sandals, ratty shorts, a torn dirty white t-shirt and a bathrobe. The camera moves in on him as he picks up a carton of half & half, opens the top and sniffs to see if it's fresh. Then, with half & half in the hairs of his mustache, he's in the check-out line writing a check for 69 cents. He looks up and on a nearby TV monitor President George Bush Senior is saying, "This aggression against Kuwait will not stand!"
The Tumbling Tumbleweed tune picks up again as The Dude scampers back to his apartment with his half & half to make himself one of his beloved white Russians. But, instead, he's jumped by two thugs, one who repeatedly dunks his head into his toilet demanding information as the other urinates on his Persian rug. This sets up the movie's plot: The thugs have beaten up the wrong Jeffrey Lebowski, the real one being a rich, wheel-chair-bound corporate magnate with a young nymphomaniac wife named Bunny who owes the thugs' boss money.
The Big Lebowski is, of course, a parody of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep with The Dude standing in for LA tough guy Philip Marlowe. The movie unfolds as a Chandleresque plot full of eccentric characters.
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