Enduring and Abiding

Abstract

By the time I delivered the ideas in this chapter, in September 2006, in a dowdy wood-paneled "conference room" in a bowling alley in Louis­ville, Kentucky, during the annual Lebowski Fest held in the city and at those lanes, everything had been said. Mine was the final paper, and during the previous two days the film had been turned upside down and shaken, and then carefully situated with regard to fluctuations in the L.A. real estate market, the subgenre ofbowling noir, the Brunswick color palette, nihilism and fluids, Paul de Man and Rip Van Winkle. Ev­erything had been said, some things multiple times, and everyone was happy. Most people were happy. It became apparent to many of us that the film did not suffer from this critical vulturism, that the conversation could go on, potentially forever, without it being a problem that we were repeating ourselves and offering quite obviously contradictory views on many important aspects of the movie. The chatter did not exhaust the film, did not debase it or use it up, but it did not really exalt it either. The ability of the film to sustain such conversation was not due to its being a "classic," timeless or otherwise. It seemed, rather, that the film was not so much full of a complexity that needed endless "unpacking" -this despite the fact that The Big Lebowski, like all the Coen brothers' mov­ies, lavishes loving, even obsessive, attention on all its details-than it was offering itself as genially underdetermined, available for any and all projections, investments, analyses, even mimicries.