Stephanie Weaver

Dr. Badley

ENGL 4860-002

25 November 2008

“Fuck it, Dude, let’s go bowling”:

Existentialism in The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Big Lebowski

Joel and Ethan Coen are known for their quirky off-shoots of film noir, from the film

blanc of Fargo to the sepia-toned Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. However, the Coen brothers do

more than reuse noir themes and devices; they also instill their films with the philosophical

underpinnings of classic film noir. In this paper I will examine how the Coen brothers use

existential themes to create an authentic noir film with The Man Who Wasn’t There and subvert

existentialism for humor in The Big Lebowski by juxtaposing these films with the works of such

writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Existentialism owes its birth to a number of philosophers, including Friedrich Nietzsche,

Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger, but “the French novelist-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre

did the most to give it form and popularity.” Finding its place in the disillusionment that

followed World War I, existentialism embraces the meaninglessness of human existence; indeed,

“the existentialist assumes that existence precedes essence, that the significant fact is that we and

things in general exist, but that these things have no meaning for us except as we can create

meaning through acting upon them” (“Existentialism”). Although Christian existential thought

has been thoroughly explored, existentialism is largely atheistic, concluding that there is no

creator to give man essence before his existence. Accordingly, “[m]an is nothing but what he
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makes himself” and he must take full responsibility for his actions, or as Sartre puts it, “man is

condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is

free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does” (Human

Emotions 15, 23).

Film noir has long been recognized as an aspect of existential literature; Emanuel Levy

describes the genre as “the American counterpart of European existentialism, a romanticism with

a protective shell, with cynical heroes who had reached the end of the line” (218). The French

existentialists were drawn to these American noir films for a number of reasons. They had

become fascinated with such American writers as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James

M. Cain, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner who influenced American noir. Sartre admired

Faulkner’s use of multiple perspectives and “praised the way Americans used a free-indirect

style” (Naremore 22). He considered “the familiar voice of American pulp fiction [...] ‘a

technical revolution in the art of storytelling’” because of its lack of authorial comment and strict

adherence to existential experience (Naremore 24). This interest in American literature spilled

over into American film. As James Naremore writes,

[f]or critics who were influenced by existentialism, film noir was attractive

because it depicted a world of obsessive return, dark corners, or huis-clos [...]

These pictures were often based on the novels of respected authors; they were

sometimes narrated from multiple points of view; and they offered a labyrinthine,

enclosed mise-en-scène people with alienated characters. (22, 25)

Existential thought became an integral part of film noir and consequently an aspect of neo-noir

as well, though like all aspects of film noir, it has been twisted and subverted in a variety of

ways.
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Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2001 film The Man Who Wasn’t There is neo-noir at its most

sincere. Set in 1940s California, printed in black-and-white, and narrated by protagonist Ed

Crane, it immediately has the look and feel of a classic noir film. R. Barton Palmer examines this

film’s resemblance to Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, noting that

[u]nlike Cain’s scheming adulterers, who are trapped by limited economic

horizons and oppressive institutions, especially marriage and social class, all the

characters of the Coens’ film suffer from a vaguer but perhaps deadlier malaise,

the deep feeling of the age that [...] “like life itself, values seemed to come and

go, without pattern or reason.” (64)

Indeed, the Coens immediately present the Ed Crane’s world as stifling and hopeless with no

escape. In the first few minutes of the film, his brother-in-law Frank reads from the newspaper

that the “Russians exploded an A-bomb and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

Religion offers no consolation; Ed says that he and wife attended church once a week, usually on

bingo night because as Doris would explain it, “[o]ur reward is on this earth and bingo is

probably the extent of it,” reflecting the atheistic tendency of existentialism.

Set before this broad world of despair is Ed’s own personal cage: the barber shop. Ed

begins his narration by saying, “Yeah I worked at a barber shop, but I never considered myself a

barber.” He explains that he married into the business and now works for his brother-in-law in a

position that he never would have chosen for himself. Ed later describes his inability to move

beyond the barber shop, calling it an “instinct that kept [him] locked up [...], nose against the

exit, afraid to try turning the knob.” He is strikingly similar to the characters of Sartre’s play No

Exit who, even when the door is opened to them, are unable to leave the room that is their own

little corner of hell (No Exit 42). Likewise, the natures of their hells are akin; Garcin of No Exit
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concludes that “Hell is – other people!” while for Ed, hell is the “gabbers,” people who talk

without ceasing or meaning, a group including Frank; Big Dave Brewster, his wife’s boss and

lover; the new barber that Ed hires to replace Frank; and a psychic that Ed visits to get some

answers concerning his dead wife (No Exit 45).

Ed views no event of this life as having more or less importance that any other event.

Through everything that occurs, the business deal with Tolliver, Doris’s affair with Big Dave,

Doris’s arrest and suicide, and his own arrest and impending electrocution, Ed maintains the

same blank, distant expression. Nothing fazes him, even murder. Before Big Dave’s late night

phone call and consequent demise, Ed’s voice-over recounts his courtship of Doris as he sits at

the foot of the bed where she is passed out drunk. He says, “It was only a couple of weeks later

she suggested we get married.” The phone rings; Ed goes to visit Big Dave at Nirdlinger’s

Department Store where Dave attempts to kill Ed and Ed succeeds at killing Dave in self-

defense. Ed’s response to this is to return home and again sit at the foot of the bed while Ed’s

voice-over again says, “It was only a couple of weeks later that she suggested we get married,”

and continues the story as though nothing has happened. Illustrating how existentialists believe

that things and events have no meaning beyond what we ascribe to them, Ed has chosen to

ascribe no meaning to the murder of Big Dave Brewster. It is of less importance to him than

wondering if perhaps his marriage went wrong before it even began.

Through the course of the film, Ed Crane confronts and accepts the futility of his life.

Palmer writes that “The Man Who Wasn’t There [...] is about the hope for spiritual growth, the

leap of faith made possible by the embrace of meaninglessness,” and Ed embodies this notion

(66). He begins to become aware of his position at the barber shop while cutting a boy’s hair:

ED. Frank?
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FRANK. Huh?

ED. This hair.

FRANK. Yeah.

ED. Do you ever wonder about it?

FRANK. What do you mean?

ED. I don’t know. How it just keeps coming. It just keeps growing.

FRANK. Yeah, lucky for us, huh pal?

ED. No I mean, it keeps growing. It’s part of us, and we cut it off and throw it

away.

Ed has been confronted with the myth of Sisyphus, the figure of Greek mythology who was

sentenced by the gods to push a large stone up a mountain, but as soon as Sisyphus reached the

top, the stone rolled back down to the bottom of the mountain and he was forced to start all over

again. Ed’s own work is like the work of Sisyphus: he cuts the hair, but the hair grows back and

he must cut it again. He seems to suddenly realize the absurdity of it and becomes bitter towards

the hair; he says he wants to throw the hair in the dirt, to defile it beyond the point of being “part

of us” any longer. Philosopher and writer Albert Camus points out that this type of unceasing

labor only becomes tragic when the laborer realizes the relentlessness of it: “The workman of

today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd [than the fate of

Sisyphus]. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.” Through the

contrasts of Ed and Frank, the Coens illustrate this difference between consciousness and

unconsciousness that Camus presents. Frank is completely oblivious to the uselessness of his

work, perfectly happy to “cut the hair and chew the fat,” as Ed puts it. He does not realize the

absurdity of it as Ed does.
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Related to this is a central theme of The Man Who Wasn’t There: the question of

knowledge. In creating his defense for Doris, hotshot lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider refers to

the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in the context of creating reasonable doubt for Doris killing

Big Dave. He concludes that “[t]he more you look the less you know” because looking changes

things. Consequently, this would imply that the less you look the more you know, and according

to Big Dave’s widow Anne, “[s]ometimes knowledge is a curse.” Ed, who is completely

unconcerned with the hair, who is not really looking at it, who considers cutting it only a series

of “moves,” is the one who comes to understand its true, meaningless nature, and he does find

this knowledge to be a curse until he embraces it. In his narration, he is sure to point out that

during drama of Doris’s indictment and trial, “through all of it [they] cut the hair,” accepting it as

his duty. Indeed, by the time the film closes and Ed is facing the witnesses at his execution, he

notices solely their hair as he speaks peacefully about the possibility of seeing Doris again.

An earlier Coen brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski (1998), deals with characters that seem

to equally embrace the meaninglessness of life. Set in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, The Big

Lebowski follows the adventures of a pot-smoking slacker who calls himself the Dude through a

case of mistaken identity, a soiled rug, a billionaire’s missing trophy wife, run-ins with

pornographers and nihilists, a brief sexual liaison with a feminist artist, and a bowling

tournament. Intending to usurp and parody as many aspects of film noir as possible in one film,

the Coens chose the most anti-heroic figure possible, inserting a pacifist hippie into the role of

the hard-boiled detective. While the film has been called “an exercise in postmodernism” and “a

messy comedy-adventure” by some critics, it too is suffused with deep ideas and existential

themes, though often the moments that these themes surface are more humorous than

enlightening (Palmer 12; Levy 230).

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The structure of The Big Lebowski is important. The events of the film come one after the

other, often without explanation or even any sort of connection. In the end, it is difficult to

understand exactly who double-crossed who, or even what just happened, but according to

Sartre, that is how life is: “Sartre claimed that modern life had become ‘fantastic,’ made up of a

‘labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot

routes and signify nothing’” (Naremore 24). Each clue or conclusion that the Dude stumbles

upon in his search for Bunny, the trophy wife of the Big Lebowski, is just a signpost that

signifies nothing. Also, that each event follows the previous one so quickly reflects Sartre’s

description of adventures in general. In his novel Nausea, written as a series of diary entries, the

protagonist, Antoine, recounts the events of the previous day, suddenly realizing that he actually

did not have an adventure as he thought he had. Instead that feeling came from the way that the

events happened: “This feeling of adventure definitely did not come from events [...] It’s rather

the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly

feel that time is passing, each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on [...]”

(Nausea 79). Like Ed’s perception of the murder of Big Dave, each event that occurs in The Big

Lebowski is just as insignificant as any other event; it is only how they come together that feels

like an adventure.

Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski is perhaps the epitome of the existential man. He is a man

without a past; the Stranger mentions his parents once in the opening voice-over, only to say the

Dude had rejected the name that his parents had given him in order to create himself as the Dude,

just as Sartre said that every man must make himself. This concept seems to rule the world of

The Big Lebowski; while berating the Dude for his unemployment in their first meeting, the Big

Lebowski, a billionaire and noted businessman, says that “every bum’s lot in life is his own
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responsibility, regardless of who he choose to blame.” The Dude does not refute this. He is well

aware that he has chosen his life and blames no one, no matter what the Big Lebowski would

imply. Sartre writes that man is “nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his

life,” and the Dude’s acts, from bowling to smoking marijuana, from drinking white Russians to

worrying about his rug, have made him the Dude.

The Dude also recognizes that man is a creature first of existence, then of essence.

During his second meeting with the Big Lebowski when the billionaire asks him to serve as

courier to the kidnappers, the following exchange takes place:

LEBOWSKI. What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

DUDE. Dude.

LEBOWSKI. Huh?

DUDE. Uh, I don’t know, sir.

LEBOWSKI. Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn’t

that what makes a man?

DUDE. Sure, that and a pair of testicles.

While the Dude’s answer is subversive and funny, it also demonstrates a practical application of

the existence-before-essence stance of the existentialists. While the Big Lebowski would like to

define man by the abstract, intangible quality of doing the right thing, the Dude defines man by

testicles. The Dude has accepted that man has no meaning beyond testicles and that trying to

give man any meaning beyond testicles is futile.

Serving as the foil to the Dude is Walter Sobchak, the Dude’s bowling partner and best

friend. Unlike the Dude, who seems to have no past, Walter is living in his. His rants are littered

with references to his time in Vietnam, even when such references are non sequitur and even
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distasteful, such as in his eulogy for his bowling partner Donny. He has continued to practice

Judaism though he converted only to marry his now ex-wife, whose Pomeranian he still keeps on

occasion. Walter thoroughly embraces the past; when the Dude says to Walter, “You’re living in

the fucking past,” Walter responds, “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to

Sandy Koufax, you’re goddamn right I’m living in the fucking past!” Walter spends a great deal

of time trying to define himself in clear-cut terms. His most common question is “Am I wrong?”

because to him the world may be viewed in terms of wrong and right. For the Dude, the

existentialist, the answers are not so clear. The Dude finally answers Walter’s rhetorical

question: “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.” As Thomas S. Hibbs writes,

“Walter wants to have an identity, to define himself in relation to a way of life, a tradition, larger

than himself” while “[t]he Dude accepts the basic absurdity of the cosmos, of life in the most

advanced civilization ever to grace the face of the earth” (143, 145).

However, Walter does have his own existential moments. The first, and more trivial, is a

striking parallel to Sartre’s protagonist in Nausea. At the library one day, Antoine suddenly feels

like the statue standing outside the building wants him to leave. His reply is, “I shall not leave

before I finish this pipe” (43). Likewise, in the coffee shop, Walter is asked to leave because he

refuses to lower his voice or censor his language; he answers, “I’m staying. I’m finishing my

coffee.” In both cases the characters refuse to ascribe any meaning or value to the desires of the

other party involved in the exchange. However, Walter has an even more important line, perhaps

the most existential line in the entire film, which occurs twice, both in the face of death: “Fuck it,

Dude, let’s go bowling.” After he and the Dude have botched the money hand-off and Bunny

Lebowski stands to suffer for their ineptness, this is Walter’s solution, just as it is his response to

the loss of Donny. It implies an acceptance of hopelessness; just as Ed can do no more than cut
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the hair that keeps growing, the Dude and Walter can do no more than continue to roll bowling

balls down the lane, only to have them return, and so that is what they choose to do.

As Sartre writes, “[p]rogress is betterment. Man is always the same” (Human Emotions

44). This is true of both The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Big Lebowski. Though Ed and the

Dude have perhaps learned a few lessons concerning the futility of human endeavors, neither of

them has managed to better himself. In the end, they are the same. Yet both films embrace the

meaninglessness of life, and through this acceptance, the characters in some ways become free

from the despair that accompanies the hopelessness of existence.