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By Oliver Benjamin
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There's an old saying about theater: if it ends in a funeral it's a tragedy, if it ends with a wedding it's a comedy. Funerals are rarely funny.
We are provided one of those rare exceptions in the Coen brothers' 1998 film The Big Lebowski. It ends with a funeral, and a fairly hilarious one at that.
Fans of The Big Lebowski (and theater in general) have suffered two stinging losses in the past few years—Ben Gazzara and Philip Seymour Hoffman. And now another beloved Big Lebowski actor has died, this time the titular Big Lebowski himself, David Huddleston.
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Cast as nemesis to Jeff Bridges' groovy protagonist "The Dude", Huddleston brought a comic gravitas to the role, offering a sort of dark obverse to the deeply casual Dude. Though Bridges' character tends to get all the glory, Huddleston's Lebowski provides us with the film's most indelible lesson, now made even more salient with his passing: You can't take it with you, so you might as well take it easy.
Nearly 20 years after its release, one of the most common questions the uninitiated have about The Big Lebowski is, "Why is this still a thing?" After all, nowadays nothing cool is expected to retain that temperature for long. Despite this, an unabashed love for the movie continues to flow like the Dude's White Russian cocktails through the bloodstream of modern culture. Books, festivals, YouTube mashups, podcasts, and the religion I founded (Dudeism) pay daily testament to this abiding affection. There is no bottom.
The Big Lebowski changed my life—and not just because it provided me with a new and unlikely career (religious prophet). Prior to seeing the film, I was a student of many different philosophical and spiritual disciplines. Yet it wasn't until watching the movie that I understood how they all fit together—perhaps even how the entire world fit together.
Of course, people often laugh when they hear big talk like this about what is essentially a low-budget stoner flick with arthouse pretensions. And yet, it's not just some high-induced hyperbole—like Alice through the looking glass, once they peer a little deeper, a whole new world opens up to them. As the Dude puts it, "It's down there somewhere. Take another look." This is what great art does: it flourishes and it scatters seeds.
The idea that a work of art can continue to guide and inspire a culture is one that no literary critic would deny, it's only that it's so rarely true with movies—and decreasingly so. As we move into a post-cinema age in which movies are now two hours of either sound and fury or recycled jokes, the notion that a movie might be watched over and over again, stimulate communities, fan fiction and works of art and philosophy may come to seem increasingly unlikely.
Along with The Big Lebowski, I will remember David Huddleston from his work in another ingenious comedy/social satire: Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974). Like Lebowski, it too started out its life as an ugly duckling, nearly axed by the studio, but went on to become a cult phenomenon. It would be nice if there was a way to encourage the creation of more of these far-out, limber-minded films rather than just funneling all the money to The Big LeBlockbusters. But perhaps that era has passed. Around the time of The Big Lebowski's release in 1998, screenwriters became obliged by movie studios to hew as surgically as possible to Joseph Campbell's hero myth. After which, there was little room for heroic epics like that of the Dude's.
With the passing of every great actor, it feels as if the door is slowly shutting on a certain type of cinema. And that's okay. As the Dude said, "Can't be worried about that shit. Life goes on!" Just as television resurrected itself from disrespect with the advent of cable, and now even more so with online streaming, so might movies get to someday enjoy a renaissance. As Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) puts it in the movie, "New technology permits us to do very exciting things." No Luddite, I'm anticipating hanging out with the Lebowskis in a well-crafted virtual reality someday.
Thanks for the laughs, Mr. Huddleston. Good night, sweet prince.
Oliver Benjamin is the founder of The Church of the Latter-Day Dude (Dudeism, a religion based on Taoism and inspired by The Big Lebowski that currently has ordained over 350,000 Dudeist Priests worldwide. He is the author of "The Tao of the Dude, The Dude De Ching" and co-author of "The Abide Guide."
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