The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski - Paperback

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The Big Lebowski
  • The Big Lebowski
The Big Lebowski - Paperback

The Big Lebowski - Paperback

by J. M. Tyree , Ben Walters
$17.95
$17.95
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Book Overview

Ethan and Joel Coen's The Big Lebowski was released in 1998 to general bafflement. A decade on, it had become a cult classic and remains so over 20 years later, inspiring a thriving circuit of 'Lebowski Fests' during which costumed devotees gather at bowling alleys and guzzle White Russians. Beyond its superabundance of deliciously quotable lines, how has the movie inspired such remarkable affection? And why does its critical stock continue to rise?
The film's unlikely anchor is Jeff Bridges' career-best performance as Jeffrey Lebowski, a fully-baked 1960s radical turned Venice Beach drop-out known to his friends as 'the Dude'. Mistaken for an identically-named grandee whose young trophy wife is in trouble, the Dude finds himself embroiled in an impossibly convoluted kidnap plot involving pornographers, nihilists and threats to his 'johnson'. Worst of all, it conflicts with his bowling commitments.

In part an irreverent pastiche of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (as filmed by Howard Hawks), The Big Lebowski is also a jukebox of film history, littered with playful references to everything from Hitchcock and Altman to Busby Berkeley. This riot of addled quotations reflects the film's Los Angeles setting, a discombobulated world inhabited by flakes, phonies and poseurs with put-on identities.

Like many Coen films, the movie plays havoc with the conventions of the crime genre and the absurdities of classical American 'heroism'. But it's also that rare thing: a comedy that gets richer, funnier and more affecting with each viewing. Beneath its breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed ribaldry, the Dude's story offers disarmingly humane lessons in the value of simple things: friendship, laughter and bowling.

In their foreword to this new edition, the authors reflect on Lebowski's cult status and its contemporary resonances as a film about gentle non-conformity and friendship in an increasingly polarized world. The new edition also includes an interview with the Coens, revealing the origins of the name 'Jeffrey Lebowski'.
ISBN9781838719609
Author J. M. Tyree , Ben Walters
PublisherBritish Film Institute
GenreArts
FormatPaperback
PublishedMay 2020
Edition2
LanguageENG- English
Pages128
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Nonfiction Performing Arts

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More by J. M. Tyree

The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski - Paperback

The Big Lebowski - Paperback

By J. M. Tyree and Ben Walters

About J. M. Tyree

Michael McGriff's books include Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection; Dismantling the Hills; a translation of Tomas Tranströmer's The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer, 2010); and an edition of David Wevill's essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire. He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his work has been recognized with a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. J. M. Tyree is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman, and the coauthor, with Ben Walters, of BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski, from the British Film Institute. His writing on cinema has been published in Sight & Sound, The Believer, and Film Quarterly. A former Truman Capote-Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, he currently works as an associate editor of New England Review.

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