Bush threatening Saddam Hussein and files the president’s tough talk away for his own use later on. Paying for a carton of milk at the supermarket on the eve of the first Gulf War, he sees news footage of George H.W. which would place him high in the running for laziest worldwide” is backed up by Bridges’s soporific comportment, which suggests a character hypnotized by his own passivity-a waking trance state that leads him to subconsciously absorb information from the world around him. The claim made by The Stranger that Jeffrey Lebowski is “possibly the laziest man in Los Angeles County. One of Bridges’s specialties as an actor is transparency-as in John Carpenter’s Starman (1984), where he empties out entirely as an alien adopting a human form-and his guilelessness as The Dude is really quite remarkable not a good-ole-boy tour de force like Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona or Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy but the weariness of a man whose idealism has long since departed and left him running on empty. Yet there’s more to the performance than impersonation. It’s a matter of record that the character-and Bridges’s look and basic mannerisms in the role-was based in part on the American film producer and political activist Jeff Dowd, who helped the Coens navigate the distribution market back in the days of Blood Simple. The Dude’s basic malleability is a running (or rolling) joke throughout The Big Lebowski, which is constructed more or less as an obstacle course for a character who can barely be motivated to get out of bed in the morning.
He is happy to follow the tumbleweed’s lead and just roll with the flow. In The Dude’s hallucinations, he’s cruising on a flying carpet or floating facedown along the polished length of a ten-pin bowling lane. When Norville Barnes drifts off to sleep at his desk, he imagines himself trapped in a tango with a beautiful woman who keeps gracefully eluding his grasp. It’s a fantasy of upward mobility versus a daydream of horizontal stasis. The difference between the films lies in the divergent attitudes of their protagonists, one who embodies skyscraping ambition and one whose aspirations have long since atrophied.
Where The Hudsucker Proxy’s grandiosity arguably smacks of showing off-a feeling consistent with it being the brothers’ first foray into studio-subsidized filmmaking- Lebowski’s virtuosity serves a sense of modesty. The film it most closely resembles in the first part of the Coens’ career, however, is The Hudsucker Proxy, with which it shares several key elements, including a good-hearted simpleton protagonist (The Dude, aka Jeff Lebowski, played by Jeff Bridges, for whom the role was written) a folksy narrator (The Stranger, played by Sam Elliott, whose name was similarly invoked by the Coens in their early screenplay drafts) a general sense of good cheer more indebted to the screwball optimism of Raising Arizona than the icy detachment of Blood Simple or Miller’s Crossing and an overall embrace of wild stylization (in terms of camera movement, set and costume design, and soundtrack curation) in place of Fargo’s bloody simplicity.
It was originally written in the early nineties, around the same time as Barton Fink, which accounts for similarities between the characters played in both films by John Goodman (who was not available to shoot closer to the completion of the script because of his commitments on ABC’s sitcom Roseanne). The Big Lebowski was released in 1998, after the success of Fargo had rerouted the Coens’ career.
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