Summary
The narrator begins: "Way out West there was this fella...fella I wanna tell you about. Fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski, least that was the handle that his loving parents gave him, but he never had much use for it. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude." We see a tumbleweed blowing over a hill in Los Angeles, then rolling over a bridge over the highway, then down a city street, then onto the beach.
"Now this here story I'm about to unfold took place back in the early '90s," the narrator tells us, "just about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis." We see Jeff Lebowski, the Dude, walking around the grocery store in a bathrobe as the narrator mentions that he is perhaps "the laziest [man] in Los Angeles county." The Dude smells some half and half, then goes to buy something, writing a check for 69 cents. He looks up at a television near the register, which shows George H.W. Bush speaking about Kuwait.
When he gets home, he is attacked and dragged into the bathroom, where one of his assailants puts his head in a toilet and asks him where the money is. "Bunny says you're good for it!" he yells, pushing Lebowski's head underwater. The Dude has no idea what the man is talking about, but the man doesn't buy it, saying, "Your wife owes money to Jackie Treehorn, that means you owe money to Jackie Treehorn." Meanwhile, the other attacker pees on the Dude's living room floor.
"Nobody calls me Lebowski. You got the wrong guy. I'm the Dude, man," says the Dude, insisting that he does not have a wife. He pulls his sunglasses out of the toilet as his attacker looks at a bowling ball and asks what it is. "Woo, isn't this guy supposed to be a millionaire?" the man asks his friend, and they realize they have the wrong guy, leaving.
We see a man, Donny, bowl a strike at a bowling alley, and tell the Dude to mark it, as another man, Walter, commiserates with the Dude about the fact that a man peed on the Dude's rug. Walter and the Dude argue about what the Dude should do about his rug, with Walter getting very angry and insisting, "I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude," and in the next moment scolding the Dude for referring to the man who peed on his rug as a "Chinaman." "Asian-American, please," he says, but the Dude doesn't want to hear it.
Walter suggests that the Dude investigate more about the Jeff Lebowski, the millionaire, for whom he was mistaken. "This is the guy who should compensate me for the fucking rug," says the Dude, agreeing with Walter.
The Dude goes to Jeff Lebowski the millionaire's house, and a butler, Brandt, shows the Dude all of Mr. Lebowski's awards, degrees, and honors. The Dude looks at a picture of Lebowski with Nancy Reagan and notes that Lebowski is disabled. He then sees Lebowski surrounded by a multi-racial group of children, who Brandt tells him are the "Little Lebowski Urban Achievers," whom Lebowski is sending to college. The Dude then sees a mirror with a frame made to make the user look like Time Magazine's "Man of the Year," and scoffs.
Lebowski comes in in a wheelchair and asks the Dude what he needs. The Dude tells him the story of the rug, but Lebowski's already heard it from Brandt, and simply wants to know what the Dude wants. "Every time a rug is micturated upon in this fair city, I have to compensate the person?" Lebowski says, sarcastically. Dude tries to explain that he simply wants money for the rug from Lebowski's wife, but the mention of his wife incenses Lebowski, who rails against the Dude's request for "handouts." Seeing that he's getting nowhere, the Dude leaves, and Lebowski only yells at him more, telling him to get a job and assuring him, "The bums will always lose!"
In the hallway, Brandt asks the Dude how the meeting went and Dude tells him that Lebowski told him to take any rug in the house. Brandt believes him and escorts him out with a rug. On the way, they run into Lebowski's wife, Bunny, who is painting her toenails. She asks him to blow on her toenails, and the Dude asks if a man asleep in a pool flotation device will mind. Bunny insists that the man, Uli, is a nihilist, and doesn't care about anything. When Brandt tries to usher the Dude along, Bunny offers to perform oral sex on the Dude for $1,000.
At the bowling alley that night, the Dude gets mad at Walter for arriving late. Walter has a small cage with a terrier (though he thinks it's a pomeranian) he is dog-sitting for a couple named Cynthia and Marty Ackerman. It turns out that Cynthia is Walter's ex-wife, and the Dude scolds Walter for being so compliant with his ex's demands. Suddenly, Walter gets in a fight with a man named Smokey about his bowling, and Dude tries to diffuse it, but Walter pulls out a revolver and threatens Smokey with it.
As Walter yells, the Dude marks down that Smokey scored no points. Outside, the Dude tries to tell Walter that he cannot be so violent, explaining that he is a pacifist and Smokey was a conscientious objector. As they get in a car, a cop car arrives at the bowling alley and a group of cops run in. "Take it easy, man," the Dude says, as Walter rails against Saddam Hussein and explains that pacifism is not something to hide behind.
We see Lebowski's rug on the Dude's floor as a voicemail plays on his answering machine from Smokey. Smokey tells him that he has to report Walter's behavior to the league. Then a message plays from Brandt, asking the Dude to call when it's convenient. Then a message from a representative at the bowling league plays.
Hearing a knock on the door, Dude goes and opens it to find his landlord, Marty, who invites Dude to a performance by his dance group at a local theater, then tries to hint to Dude that he's late on rent. When Dude comes back inside, there is another message from Brandt on the machine, telling him to call so they can send a limo over. He does Tai-chi on the rug as the message plays.
The scene shifts to the Dude back at Lebowski's mansion, where Brandt tells him that they've recently received terrible news. In the west wing, the Dude finds Lebowski sitting in front of a blazing fire mournfully. "What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?" he asks, adding, "Is it being prepared to do the right thing, no matter the cost?" The Dude cannot help but agree, and asks if he can smoke weed. Suddenly, Lebowski tells the Dude that he received a $1 million ransom note by fax from men holding Bunny hostage. Brandt pulls the Dude out of the room to give him the details.
Analysis
Tonally, the film begins as if in a fable. A narrator with a voice somewhere between a surfer voice and a Southern drawl tells us about Jeff Lebowski, otherwise known as "the Dude." The Dude is something like a hero, a stoner fixture of Los Angeles, and, as we are told early on, the protagonist of the story. The film gets comic mileage from the fact that the Dude hardly meets the requirements of a protagonist, let alone a hero, as he is "quite possibly the laziest [man] in Los Angeles county," and he wanders through life in a kind of benign, stoned daze.
The Dude's status as unlikely protagonist only becomes more humorous and unusual when he returns home to find that he is being mistaken for someone else. Even with the limited knowledge we have about the Dude, the viewer can already tell that he leads a fairly uneventful life. Thus it is all the more shocking and ridiculous when he returns home only to get waterboarded in his own toilet by a menacing stranger.
The Dude's assailants leave him be when they realize they have the wrong man, and it seems like the Dude's life will go back to normal, but he and his friends are still disturbed by the fact that a man wrongfully peed on the Dude's rug, a piece which "tied the room together," as they say several times in their meeting at the bowling alley. With a simple wish, that the millionaire Jeff Lebowski replace the rug he unjustly lost, the Dude travels to a monied corner of Los Angeles that is foreign to him, complete with butlers and trophy wives, and changes the course of his life in dramatic ways.
The Dude finds that the issue is not as simple as he had suspected when he goes to visit the millionaire Lebowski. While Lebowski is a wealthy philanthropist, earning honorary degrees and paying for the college tuition of underserved youth, his personal ethics are ungenerous and impatient. The embodiment of a fiscal Republican, Lebowski insists that every man must take responsibility for their own lot in life, insulting the Dude's appearance and talking down to him. As the Dude realizes that the photo of Lebowski with Nancy Reagan captures more of Lebowski's attitude than he had imagined, he puts on his sunglasses, throws up his hands and says "fuck it."
The film, as is typical of a Coen brothers film, exists on the edge between comedy and a darker underbelly of society. This contrast is what motors the story; the Dude, an affable pacifist, gets caught in between some violent competing interests at various moments. For instance, at the bowling alley, Walter, a friend of the Dude's, who has some anger issues, but seems friendly enough, threatens a man with a gun simply over a point in a game of bowling. In this ,we see that the Dude's world is not all simply "live and let live," but that it contains some unsavory and dark corners.
