Summary
Maude explains that she does not care that Bunny is a pornographic actress, nor that she is "banging Jackie Treehorn," but goes on to explain that she and her father are the only trustees of the Lebowski Foundation, the foundation that serves underprivileged schools. "I asked my father about his withdrawal of a million dollars from the foundation account, and he told me about this abduction, but I tell you it is preposterous," she says. Maude tells the Dude that while she doesn't get along with her father, she doesn't want to bring his embezzlement to the police, and so is requesting that the Dude retrieve the million dollars that she believes he handed over to Bunny's abductors. "I will compensate you to the tune of 10% of the recovered sum," she tells Dude—$100,000—and sends him to a doctor to get his jaw looked at from having him knocked unconscious earlier.
The Dude gets driven home. The driver, Tony, tells a funny story, and the Dude sits in the backseat drinking Kahlua and venting about his hard day. When Tony drops the Dude off at his house, he calls the Dude's attention to a Volkswagen that followed them there. When the Dude looks, another driver grabs him and throws him into a limousine across the street. In this limo, Lebowski and Brandt try to get some answers out of him. "They did not receive the money, you nitwit!" yells Lebowski, and the Dude stammers through a completely empty explanation, finally telling Lebowski that he believes Bunny kidnapped herself to get some more money and pay back the pornographers to whom she is indebted.
When the Dude asks for his $20,000 in cash, Brandt hands him an envelope containing one of Bunny's toes wrapped in gauze. Lebowski tells the Dude that he has instructed Bunny's abductors to seek their ransom money from the Dude himself.
The Dude goes to a diner with Walter, who insists that the toe does not belong to Bunny. The Dude is indignant, insisting that the nail polish on the toe was identical to the nail polish he saw Bunny applying on the day he visited Lebowski's mansion. "They're gonna kill her, and then they're gonna kill me," the Dude says. When Walter yells argumentatively at the Dude, the waitress asks him to be quiet, which only makes him angrier. The Dude leaves, frustrated with Walter.
At home, the Dude lights some candles, takes a bath, puts on some whale sounds, and smokes a joint. While he's in the bath, the phone rings, and he receives a message from a representative of the LAPD, who informs him that they have recovered his car. He is excited about the news, when suddenly he notices a group of men, including the man from the pool, Uli, with a ferret on a leash. Uli throws the ferret into the tub with the Dude, and the Dude screams. "Where is the money?" Uli asks, threatening to come back the next day and cut off his penis if he is unable to locate the money.
Dude goes to retrieve the car, which is horribly beat up and does not contain the briefcase with the money, but does still contain the tape deck and the Creedence Clearwater Revival tapes. When he gets in the car, the Dude is appalled by the smell, and asks the cop if he has any leads on who stole the car. The cop sarcastically laughs at Dude's desire for more information.
At the bowling alley, the Dude commiserates with Walter and Donny about his predicament. Walter suggests that the men who visited his apartment were Nazis. "They were nihilists, man. They kept saying they believed in nothing," Dude tells them. When the Dude is dismissive about the bowling tournament, Walter and Donny walk away.
As the bartender brings the Dude another white Russian, a cowboy appears next to him at the bar and asks the Dude how he's doing. "Not too good, man," says the Dude, to which the Stranger replies, "Well, a wiser fellow than myself once said, 'Sometimes you eat the bear...and sometimes the bear, well, he eats you." After telling the Dude that he shouldn't swear so much, the Stranger leaves.
The bartender brings the Dude a telephone. On the other end is Maude, who notes that the Dude hasn't gone to the doctor and tells him she wants to see him immediately.
Dude goes to Maude's apartment, where he meets an effeminate man named Knox sitting in one of Maude's chairs, giggling. When the Dude tells Maude that he thinks that Bunny was kidnapped after all, she insists that this is not the case. The Dude tells her that Uli threatened him in his home, and Maude tells him that she knows Uli from way back, because he was a musician in a techno-pop band called Autobahn from the 70s.
As Knox giggles, the Dude becomes very annoyed and asks who he is. Maude informs the Dude that the man is Knox Harrington, a successful video artist. When Maude gets a call, she picks up the phone and begins speaking in Italian.
The Dude visits the doctor, listening to rock music on headphones as the doctor examines him, unexpectedly asking to look at his genitals. After, he drives his car listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival, when he notices the Volkswagen from before following him from a short distance. He throws the joint out the window, but the window was closed, so the joint falls into his lap and he crashes the car trying to put it out. Looking around his car, he finds a piece of crumpled paper in the backseat, a student essay on the Louisiana Purchase with the name Larry Sellers on it.
The scene shifts to an experimental dance piece that Dude, Walter, and Donny are attending. His landlord, Marty, is performing in a wreath of fake leaves to dramatic music. Arriving late, Walter informs the Dude that Larry Sellers, the boy whose paper the Dude found, lives in North Hollywood, is in 9th grade, and is the son of Arthur Digby Sellers, a writer for a television show, Branded. They plan to go intimidate Larry and get the money out of him.
Analysis
Part of the comedy of the film comes from the fact that, in spite of being the worst and least reliable courier possible, the Dude continues to get commissioned to do inside jobs for the Lebowskis. In the moment that all hope seems lost for the Dude, after Walter has botched his job completely, Maude offers him 100,000 dollars, and sends him to the doctor. The Dude, a simple man with simple needs, continually finds himself in situations far more complex than he is ready to handle.
The stakes are raised when Lebowski gets sent one of Bunny's toes in the mail. While the Dude has coasted by on his wits up until now, he finds himself in hot water with Lebowski, who tells the violent abductors to find the Dude if they want the million. Not only does the Dude find himself in a complicated and multifaceted scenario, one that operates at a much faster pace than he is used to, but he is also contending with the fact that there are men who could likely kill him.
Even as the Dude's life comes into more and more danger, the film maintains its lighthearted and humorous tone. The darker edges of the film are always accompanied by something absurd. Lebowski is vitriolic and menacing, but he is often so enraged as to seem powerless and ridiculous. Likewise, the group of German abductors who break into the Dude's apartment threaten to castrate him and are clearly violent thugs, but their German accents are cartoonish, and their leader, Uli, has a ferret on a leash. The more unsettling elements of the plot are often grotesque to the point of comedy, which keeps the tone of the film light.
Oftentimes The Big Lebowski, in spite of its convoluted and action-packed plot, seems to be a movie that isn't about much of anything, more a sitcom than anything. The structure of the narrative, in spite of being a mystery and a crime movie, follows the rhythms of its protagonist, the Dude, who wanders through life rather randomly, one minute bumming around at the bowling alley, the next smoking a joint in his tub. The crime plot always arrives as an interruption to this steady, aimless, and stoned pace, as surprising and disorienting as a ferret in a bathtub.
The sitcom nature of the film gives it a certain stoner profundity, as the narrative follows various loose ends and introduces unusual characters. The logic of the plot sounds like something devised by the Dude himself, in a stoned revery. The Los Angeles of the film is one inhabited by pretentious conceptual artists, Vietnam veterans with a passion for bowling, screenwriters' children who live near the In-and-Out Burger in North Hollywood, and a pack of menacing German nihilists.
