Anne Lehwald 
The Coens’ Effort The Big Lebowski [PDF ebook] 

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies – Literature, grade: 2, 0, Dresden Technical University (Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik), course: Hauptseminar ‘Outstanding Film Directors’, language: English, abstract: In this paper for the seminar “Outstanding Film Directors“ I want to analyze the movie The Big Lebowski (TBL)by Joel and Ethan Coen. Released in 1998TBLis the seventh effort of the Coen brothers and – after Raising Arizona(1987) and Fargo(1996) – their third movie that deals with kidnapping.TBLhas been praised by most authors of the feature pages of newspapers and magazines. For Jan Distelmeyer, author of the magazine Spex, for example, TBLis an `extremly entertaining tasty morsel` (in www.gezetera.ch). The main characters´ favorite cocktail, White Russian, has become a cult drink not only among TBL-fans. While the audience for the most part enjoy the laconic irony of the Coens´ hommage to the hard-boiled classics of Raymond Chandler, some academics question the significance of the movie. R. Barton Palmer, director of the South Carolina Film Institute, believes that TBLadds only little importance to the general account of the Coens´ place within the history of the contemporary American filmmaking scene (6).
In this paper I want to introduce the Coen brothers and their typical style that is even referred to as “Coen-esque”. The indepth analysis of their effort TBLis the principal concern of this paper. After a brief introduction of the plot and the characters I will analyze the references and allusions that occur in TBL.The meaning of the music and the peculiarities of the dialo gs are also being discussed. The analysis of the used imagery in TBLand some of the emerging postmodern elements are also subjects of discussion.
The Coen brothers refuse to intellectualize and stress the fact that they “simply” want to entertain their audience. With this paper I want to show that TBLis much more than 112 minutes of entertainment. It is a political statement and a perfect cinematic symbiosis of pictures, music, and dialogs.