Summary
The Dude and Walter arrive at Larry Sellers's house, and the Dude laments that, given the nice car outside the house, Larry has already spent most of the money. They knock on the door, which is answered by a woman named Pilar. Walter introduces himself and tells her they need to speak to Larry, and she brings them inside. Nearby, we see Larry's father, the screenwriter, hooked up to an iron lung and seemingly unconscious, and Walter tells him that they are fans.
Larry comes in and sits down, and Walter opens a briefcase and presents the homework they found in the car. "Is this your homework, Larry?" Walter says to the stone-faced teenager. When Larry doesn't respond, the Dude yells at him, "Where's the fucking money, you little brat?" When Larry doesn't respond, their anger escalates, with the Dude threatening to cut Larry's penis off, and Walter telling the boy that he's killing his father.
When Larry still doesn't talk, Walter goes out in front of the house, pulls a crowbar out of the Dude's trunk, and destroys the Corvette parked out front. In the middle of his destruction, a man runs out of another house and tries to get Walter to stop, claiming that it's his car. In retaliation, the neighbor destroys the Dude's car, much to the Dude's chagrin.
The trio of friends drivse on the highway, eating In-and-Out burgers in silence. Later, at home, Dude gets a call from Walter apologizing, and he tells Walter that he wants to handle all future issues by himself. The Dude puts a chair under the door handle to prevent intruders, but the door opens immediately, and Woo and the other of Jackie Treehorn's assistants open the door and tell him that Jackie Treehorn wants to see him.
We see a half-naked woman being tossed in the air with a large sheet being held by a group of people near a bonfire on the beach. There, Jackie Treehorn introduces himself to the Dude and brings him into his lavish, modernistic house.
"How's the smut business, Jackie?" the Dude asks, but Jackie tells him that he doesn't think of it that way. Jackie laments the rise of porn video, in which filmmakers can no longer invest in feelings and story. "You know, people forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone," Jackie says.
Jackie then asks the Dude where Bunny is, but the Dude tells him he doesn't know. Then, Jackie gets a phone call and writes something down, excusing himself to the other room. Suspicious, Dude runs over to the pad where Jackie just wrote something down, tracing the indentation on the next page, which reveals a lewd drawing of a man with an erect penis. Hearing Jackie coming back into the room, Dude crumples up the paper and runs to sit back down on the couch.
When Jackie comes back, he offers Dude another drink and the Dude accepts. As he goes to mix the drink, Jackie offers the Dude a 10% finder's fee for the found money. "Your money is being held by a kid named Larry Sellers," the Dude says casually, telling Jackie where Larry lives, and asking for a check. In the middle of his second White Russian, the Dude begins to pass out, slurring, "All the Dude ever wanted was his rug back...It really tied the room together."
The Dude passes out and has a dream about starring in a pornographic film with Maude Lebowski called Gutterballs. We see a trippy dreamscape in which the Dude gets some bowling shoes from a man who looks like Saddam Hussein. After walking down a large flight of stairs, he approaches Maude, who is dressed in a Wagnerian Viking costume. They bowl together, and the Dude's flies down the bowling lane after the ball, looking up the skirts of a long line of chorus girls. At the end of the lane, he knocks all the pins down. We see Uli and the other nihilists carrying giant pairs of scissors and running towards the Dude, as he tries to outrun them.
We see the Dude running down the street, pulled over by a cop. He is brought in for questioning and a policeman tells the Dude, "Mr. Treehorn tells us that he had to eject you from his garden party, that you were drunk and abusive." The Dude is still screwed up from being drugged and slurs, "Mr. Treehorn treats objects like women, man." The policeman calls the Dude a "jerk-off" and throws a mug at his face, yelling, "Stay out of Malibu, deadbeat!"
In the cab on the way home, the Dude asks the driver to change the station from The Eagles, but the driver refuses. "Man, come on. I had a rough night and I hate the fucking Eagles, man." The cab driver pulls over and pulls the Dude out, driving away and leaving him on the side of the road.
Suddenly, a red convertible drives by. Bunny Lebowski is driving and we see that she has all her toes, but the Dude doesn't see her. When the Dude goes home, his house has been vandalized and torn apart. He finds Maude there waiting for him. She removes her robe and the two of them sleep together.
The scene shifts to Maude and the Dude in bed after having sex. He tells her about his professional past, mentioning that he was a roadie for Metallic. When she asks him what he does for fun, he tells her, "The usual: I bowl, drive around, the occasional acid flashback." Maude then asks him who trashed his house and the Dude tells her it was Jackie Treehorn's men, then tells her that Larry Sellers has the money.
When the Dude refers to the money as belonging to Lebowski, Maude corrects him, saying the money belongs to the foundation and that Lebowski doesn't have any money. "The wealth is all Mother's," Maude says, adding that she is in charge of his allowance.
As Maude stretches a bit, the Dude asks her why, and she tells him that it increases her chances of conceiving a baby, which causes Dude to do a spit take. "I don't want the father to be someone I have to see socially or who will have any interest in raising the child himself," she says, and the Dude realizes that this is why Maude wanted him to go to the doctor.
Suddenly, the Dude gets a flash of inspiration and calls Walter. He asks Walter to pick him up, but Walter tells him it's a Jewish holiday and he cannot. The Dude tells Walter that they have to go to Pasadena.
Analysis
The film is a series of loose ends and red herrings pursued needlessly. When Walter and the Dude go to visit the home of Larry, they grill him about the money, threatening him horribly. The Dude turns the threat of the nihilists on Larry, threatening to castrate him. Walter takes the tactic of telling Larry that his silence is killing his very ill father. Meanwhile, Larry Sellers stares at them, expressionless. The Dude and Walter's vitriol strikes a comic contrast with Larry's apathy. Lo and behold, the Corvette parked out front that Walter destroys in retaliation does not even belong to Larry.
While it seems like the questions surrounding Bunny's disappearance should all have some centralized answer, that the different elements of the case should fit together, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to any of it. Just when it seems that someone has more information to impart, they are just as clueless as the next person. Jackie Treehorn knows nothing about Bunny's whereabouts, and like the others, turns to the Dude for answers.
In the middle of this section of the film, Jackie Treehorn drugs the Dude and we see an elaborately staged dream sequence which outlines the Dude's emotional and psychological state. The beginning half of the dream is a jubilant production number, with Dude dancing towards Maude through a phalanx of sexy chorus girls. The second half is a castration nightmare, with Dude running away from the nihilistic Germans, who all brandish giant scissors. The Dude is trapped between his own feelings of eros and his castration anxiety, which come to light in the dream.
While the film is not explicit about its political perspectives, terms like "nihilist," "pacifist," and "fascist" are thrown around fairly frequently. The Dude, a laidback stoner who takes life as it comes, can best be described as a pacifist, and takes a beating from the world around him. The Germans are described as the "nihilists" and they move through the world with an amoral disregard for others, abusing people and destroying things in a chaotic mess. The cop who escorts the Dude from Jackie Treehorn's Malibu house throws a mug at Dude and abuses him, and as he does so the Dude calls him a "fascist." The cast of characters in the film becomes a survey of different political groups, representations of various philosophies of life.
Not only are the more dramatic events of his life confusing to the Dude, but even sex with Maude becomes complicated when she admits that she only slept with him to conceive a child with a man who would never be involved as a father. Even sex becomes a way to use the Dude, and his status as the film's "pacifist" becomes even more heightened.
