The Big Lebowski In the Classroom
Students Like the Movie, But They Can't Abide The Dude
I spent my 72nd birthday week reading and grading final papers. It is still in progress because there are always stragglers. I don't penalize these late papers much, if at all, because my colleagues and I often ask ourselves one question: How would you like to be in college right now? I've just finished my ninth year teaching at St. John's University (SJU). In the last two years, I taught two semesters via video, and two semesters in-person. Teaching in-person is so much better, whatever the risks, though SJU requires 100 per cent vaccination. Covid and its variants, the summer of the murder of George Floyd, cancellation of many normal club and social activities, the required masking, social isolation, required quarantine for those exposed or testing positive: They are necessary.
But the fun part of college: the socializing and meeting new people, the exposure to different ways of living, this rite of passage that is as essential for personal growth as it is for learning stuff: It's been taken away. It's been four semesters of mental health triage, levels of anxiety that required many to take the "mental health days" I offer. My theory of teaching now is to make classes so appealing that all students feel safe, want to come to class for compassionate presentations, even entertainments, in which some learning seeps in.
My students are multicultural and many are the first in their families to get a college education. Some live in multigenerational households, others work one or two jobs to support themselves and contribute to their families. I should not have been too surprised that while most of them enjoyed the movie The Big Lebowski, most of the papers in which this Coen Brothers classic figured, they really did not like The Dude.
I was baffled. How could one not like The Dude, the embodiment of delayed development, of the last hurrah of 1960s hippiedom alive in a 1990s stoner culture? But many resented his lifestyle. He was lazy, though that was a given, as the movie begins with the cowboy stranger, Sam Elliott, declaring The Dude to be "Quite possibly the laziest [man] in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide." Elliott's hard "g" on Los Ang-eles really pulls the soliloquy together.
The Big Lebowski came out in 1998. I was in college at the time at age 48, getting my Masters degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism (CRC) at NYU's graduate school of journalism. I had a 25-year career behind me but didn't know what was next. I was freelancing for MSNBC.com, ESPNet Sportszone, and Michael Goldberg's pioneering online 'zine Addicted to Noise, but didn't have a job. The late Ellen Willis created the CRC division, and not only got me a scholarship, but a paid fellowship: $10,000 for the 1997-1998 academic year. I was the first and last Elizabeth Arden-Chen Sam Fellow, as far as I know. You should have seen the expressions on the faces of the HR people at Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics company, when I applied for a job there after I graduated, "Elizabeth Arden-Chen Sam fellow" at the top of my c.v. This nearly 50-year-old dude was a walking definition of what HR people call, with such passive-aggressive cruelty, "not a good fit." Over the years I have quizzed well-informed people if they know who Chen Sam was. No one has ever gotten it. I will put the answer at the bottom of this post.
I fulfilled most of the journalism requirements during the year-long fellowship, but it was a three-semester M.A. program; I had to take out a student loan to finish my graduate degree, a loan that I paid off last year.
I had some very entertaining classes as electives. My independent study was with the prolific writer and teacher Todd Gitlin, most recently at Columbia. I don't think I had to write a paper. I had taken the 1995 buyout when New York Newsday closed, so most of my teachers were familiar with my work. Gitlin and I agreed my independent study would be the 19th century roots of pop culture. The books we talked about included Ken Emerson's Doo-Dah: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (1998) and, Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993). Lott's book is the implied source material for some of Bob Dylan's 2001 album, and the reason that title has parentheses around the title: " 'Love and Theft.' "
In The Big Lebowski, The Dude's singular claim to have lived an activist life was his insistence that he signed "The Port Huron Statement, the original." The Port Huron Statement was the cannon shot across the bow of American political life as the formative decree of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962; I believe Gitlin was one of the original signers, as well as a president of SDS (1964-1965). Some of my students think that The Dude is suffering from some kind of PTSD, a more passive kind than Vietnam Veteran Walter Sobchak (John Goodman). Without knowing much about the Sixties, and the thwarted goals of SDS, they might be right.
Sobchak talks about nihilism and Nietzsche in the movie. The most magical course in my last semester at NYU grad school was a philosophy course, Totemism, Fetishism, and Idolatry. It was taught by the world's greatest expert on this triad, W.J.T. Mitchell, visiting for a semester or year from his base at the University of Chicago. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, for those who lived in New York or not traveling, Mitchell arranged for us to have a private tour of the Santería exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. Then, with Mitchell as host and guest of honor, we had a small party at a student's upper west side apartment, that when it came to ideas, indulgence, and chemistry, may have been the greatest party I'd ever attended.
I loved the concepts in Mitchell’s class, but running around my head much of the time was the preposterous jargon of some of my fellow students, some of whom were PhD candidates in Philosophy.
Alternately known as art historian, media theorist, and editor of the influential interdisciplinary academic quarterly Critical Inquiry, Mitchell is renowned across so many fields . . . I just thought he was a really smart and accomplished guy. When I tell people who know something about this arcane area of knowledge that I studied with and got to hang out with Mitchell for a semester, they react as if I'd told them I spent four months on the road playing guitar with the E Street Band, or taught Kafka how to think about bugs. There was only one paper, and I could not compete with the academic language that the other grad students wielded to impress Mitchell. I gave it my best shot, hoping for a "D" but realistically expecting worse. When he gave back the papers, I was elated. He wrote something like, “I understand this is really just kind of an outline for an academic work on this topic, but it's such a pleasure to read clearly written prose instead of all that jargon . . . “ I got either an A or A minus for the course.
This week I was featured in Sari Botton’s Substack, Oldster magazine.
I also took a course on the international detective novel with Dr. Kristin Ross, Professor of Comparative Literature. I'm guessing we read Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep as a sort of baseline, but we focused on books such as Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrious and Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto, as well as Dutch and Scandinavian writers whose books, turned into movies and TV shows, are now commonplace on subscription streaming services.
My final paper for Ross' class, The Big Sleep Meets The Big Lebowski was almost certainly the first on the topic, coming on the heels of the release of the movie. Now there is a website devoted to comparisons. As IndieWire reported from a hectic 1998 Lebowski press conference, Joel Coen said, "We wanted to do a Chandler kind of story – how it moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery. As well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant."
That's also true of The Big Sleep, which the careful reader will note has an extra corpse unaccounted for. Not even the scriptwriting team for the 1946 Howard Hawks movie, credited to William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett, could figure it out, and called Raymond Chandler for help. His reply was somewhere along the lines of, "damned if I know." You watch the movie because of Bogart and Bacall, cracking wise, crackling eyes.
Plot doesn't matter much in either movie, but character, in both senses, does. Offered the chance to write an essay imagining themselves the offspring of the one night stand with The Dude for intentional impregnation initiated by Maude Lebowski, few of my students thought that having a child might change The Dude. Some saw it as a no-win situation: Maude too strict, rigid, and wealthy, The Dude a slob, too obsessed with getting stoned, drinking White Russians, and bowling to pay any attention to them on visitations alternate weekends. Only one saw the possibility of the best of both worlds: a rich mother who was famous as the Jackson Pollock of vaginal art, and a dad with some eccentric friends, including Uncle Walter, who helped turn her into a national junior bowling champion by the time she was eight years old.
As I said, these are hard times for optimists, and the burden of my students' pessimism is based on experiences that no adolescent or young adult should have to live through. Their mental health crisis looms large as an element of the pandemic. They've earned our kindness. I just wish they didn't find The Dude such a bummer, man.
Answer to the question: Chen Sam was the press agent for Elizabeth Taylor. Her name would frequently appear in the New York Newsday gossip column of Liz Smith. Elizabeth Taylor represented Elizabeth Arden, hence the memorialization in the form of my fellowship.