Abiding With The Dude

Twenty years after it was released, The Big Lebowski remains a pop-culture tour de force. Here’s why this noir-meets-Americana flick is so special.

- Vaibhav Sharma

The year was 1998. The cynicism of the banking crisis years was nowhere on the horizon and restaurants still served food on plates and not the first garden implement they could lay their hands on. In March of that year, Joel and Ethan Coen, riding the success of Fargo, unleashed upon the world their tale of eccentric folk making their way through a quintessentially American landscape.

But The Big Lebowski, a rambling, surreal noir, didn’t quite set the box office on fire. The meandering plot was panned, some said the characters were unrealistic, and many thought it would disappear from memory, consigned to shelf corners.

That was then. Things changed, and the Lebowski train, instead of rolling to a halt, kept gathering momentum. Years after its release, it found a new lease of life, with a fan following that adopted it not just as a great movie, but something far more profound. The nihilists were wrong. We’d found something to believe in.