Abstracts of Papers
Michael Lattek:
Abduction & Adoption:
Searching for the "Western Contamination" of The Big Lebowski
The Coens 1998 film, despite being reviewed by critics as a weaker Coen movie, still has an
ongoing appeal to its audience. Scholars working on the Coen brothers nearly unanimously
dismissed TBL as an "exercise in postmodern pointlessness" (Barton R. Palmer) and
concentrated on the film as homage to Raymond Chandler stories such as The Big Sleep and
The Long Goodbye. This interpretation however seems incapable to explain the film’s cult
status and the continuous celebration of its way of life in fan meetings such as the annual
Lebowski Fest.
My approach argues that the dominating imagery behind TBL able to explain its
ongoing appeal is that of the western. In fact, the plot of TBL resembles that of The Searchers
every bit as much as those of Hawks’ and Altman’s films. The presentation will interpret the
film as a postmodern western that deploys a story line of abduction, quest and adoption
similar to Ford’s classic western. However, it will also provide an analysis of the film’s yet
understudied aspects of language and class and give an example of how to interpret TBL’s
interest in violence and ethnicity.
Interpreting TBL as a western allows for different results: First, it enables us to
understand the film as part of the Coen oeuvre depicting malfunctions of communication and
only here these malfunctions seem irreconcilable on the ground of ethnic diversity. Second,
one can discuss this stance in connection to the way in which the western imagery of the film
functions in depicting otherness as foreign aggression. Thus TBL offers a complex critique of
the sharply divided morality of the western. Third, in critiquing the western’s morality and, at
the same time, setting TBL during the 1991 Kuwait invasion, the film also comments on the
relation between U.S. foreign policy and issues of domestic policy.
A version of this paper has been published in:
Picturing America. Trauma, Reality, Politics and Identity in American Visual Culture.
Antje Dallmann, Reinhard Isensee, Philipp Kneis (Editors). Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007.
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