The Big Lebowski and how it Relates to DudeismBy: Thomas Adams

Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for the main character in The Big Lebowski

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Though Dudeists believe their world view has existed for thousands of years, there is no deny-ing that Dudeism got its start from The Big Lebows-ki. The journalist based in Thailand named Oliver Benjamin got the idea to make the religion after having failed to make a religion for atheist. He en-countered various eastern religions during his time, but felt none of them fit in well with modern times. That was when he saw The Big Lebowski, and realized that it was the movie of its time and place. It was the lifestyle of the dude that drew Benjamin to The Dude. A lot o people would look at the Dude’s lie style and de-scribe him as a useless bum or a burnt out hippie. Oli-ver himself saw something more though. Where most of society would have seen a failure, he saw a mentor. The movie is set in the early 1990’s, during the Gulf War. The main char-acter is Jeffery “The Dude” Lebowski. He is not a very active person himself. He tries to take life in stride. The movie starts with him coming home from get-ting milk, and having two thus try to extort money from him. They think he is

another person who also hap-pens to be named Jeffery Lebowski,

who lives in a mansion. In this process they soil The Dude’s rug, which is the im-petus for everything else that happens in the movie. The dude has two friends. One is a former Vietnam veteran played by John Goodman. His name is Walter Sob-chak. He is in many ways the polar op-posite of The Dude. He is also stressed out over something and takes every-thing way to seriously. In one of the movies more iconic moments, he threat-ens to murder a bowler because the bowler refus-es to change his score on a card. Walter insist that the other bowler went “over the line”. The Dude’s

The Movie that Started it All

other friend is named Don-ny, who is played by Steve Buscemi. He doesn’t get to talk much, because Walter always yells over him and tells him to be quiet. The

three of them bowl together.The plot of the movie unravels like a detective story. The directors, fa-mous duo Joel and Ethan Coen, came up

with the idea after they imagined a friend of theirs named Jeff Dowd being the central character in a com-plex detective case. They say they got a lot of influ-ence from Raymond Chan-dler novels. The movie can work as a great guide to show what Dudeism is and is not.

Crescent Bowl in Bowling Green

The Big Lebowski may be what started Dudeism, but just what is it all about?

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Jeff Bridges, the actor that plays “The Dude in The Big Lebowski.

The Dude acts according to Dudeism. Walter acts in ways that go complete-ly against Dudeism. All throughout the movie, bad things happen to The Dude. He tries to accept it in stride. What about most of the bad things that hap-pen throughout the movie though? A lot of them are the result of the aggres-sive Walter, who never takes any time to chill out. It is Walter that convinces The Dude to try to reclaim his rug from the richer “big” Lebowski. Without Walter The Dude would have just lived on with a soiled rug. As I have men-tioned in previ-ous blog post, the favorite sport of The Dude is bowl-ing. It is an easy sport anybody can get into. It’s inclusion in the film has made Bowling a major part on Dude-ism. You can see the influence of bowling in Dude-ist writings and imagery. Walter, though, is very much not in line with Dudeism. This can be best seen in the scene where he threat-ens to murder someone over a

technicality in the game of bowling. Even in the most relaxed environments, Walter takes things to far and ruins the fun everyone else was having. “It’s just a game man.” The dude tells Walter. Walter responds by talking about how important the game is. The Dude in Walter clearly are opposites, which may be why they are friends. The Dude is not always calm and relaxed throughout the movie. He tries to take life in stride, but events that occur throughout the movie do stress him out. In perhaps one of his

lowest points in the movie, The Dude is very stressed out and yells at Walter to leave him alone. In an ear-lier scene a group of nihil-ist broke into The Dude’s home and dropped a ferret into his bath while he was bathing. After a few sec-onds of pure terror, they threatened The Dude with amputation. After he yells at Walter though, The Dude starts up a conversa-tion with a man dressed up as a cowboy known as The Stranger, who is played by Sam Elliot. The Dude seems to relax during the con-versation. The dude gets stressed out like everyone else, but throughout the movie he is able to calm himself down. The philoso-phy of the Dude is summed up nicely at the end of the movie where, once again talking to The Stranger, he is told to take it easy. In response, The Dude says “The Dude Abides.”

An grafitti image of Walter with a famous line from the movie

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Jeff Dowd is a friend of the Coen Brothers, the directing duo that created The Big Lebowski. Jeff Dowd was a member of The Seattle Seven, a group of protes-tors from the Vietnam Era. The Dude makes a reference to this later in the movie when he mentions that he also was a member of the group. Years later on the Coen’s would meet Dowd in Hollywood. He did some work on movies, the most famous of which is Ferngul-ly. The idea for The Big Leb-owski came from the Coens imagining how ridiculous it would be if someone like Dowd were to become stuck in a huge detective mystery full of intricite twist and turns.

So who is Jeff Dowd?

Jeff Dowd, inspiration for The Dude

Jeff Bridges was born into acting. His dad played the main character on pop-ular show from the late 1950’s known as Sea Hunt. Bridges has appeared in numerous other films, such as Tron, True Grit, and Iron Man. Though The Dude was based on Jeff Dowd, Jeff Bridges related very well to the role. When he was offered the role, he joked that the Coens must have been spying on him during his college years.

Jeff Bridges, the actor who plays The Dude

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