Summary
The Dude notices the Volkswagen that has been following him parked out on the street in front of his house. As he walks towards it, the driver tries to start it, but keeps stalling out. The Dude pulls him out of the car and asks who he is, and the man eventually reveals his name is Da Fino, and he's a "private snoop." Da Fino says he admires the way that the Dude is playing all of the various people off each other, and the Dude tells Da Fino to stay away from Maude, his "lady friend."
Da Fino then reveals that he has been hired by a family called the Kneutsons, Bunny's birth parents. Bunny (whose real name is "Fawn") has been missing for about a year and her parents want her back. Da Fino shows the Dude a photograph of the Kneutson family farm outside Moorehead, Minnesota, that he has been tasked with showing to Bunny when he finds her.
The Dude informs Da Fino that Bunny is missing, and when Da Fino suggests that they pool their resources, the Dude declines, just as Walter pulls up in a van to pick him up.
We see the German nihilists at a diner. As the camera pans down to the foot of a woman sitting with them, we see that she is missing a toe.
In Walter's van, the Dude explains his new theory about the whole situation, hypothesizing that Lebowski didn't want his wife back, and hired the Dude precisely because he would be an incompetent sleuth. "He's had enough. He no longer digs her. It's all a show!" the Dude suggests, adding that the briefcase with the million dollars in it must have been empty. "The asshole was hoping that they would kill her!" the Dude says.
Walter is frustrated because he broke Shabbos to come and fetch the Dude, even though he is only supposed to drive a car on the Sabbath if it's a matter of life and death. The Dude grills Walter for saying this, insisting that Walter is Polish Catholic, not Jewish, but predictably, this angers Walter. The Dude gives Walter a hard time about his devotion to his ex-wife, Cynthia, even though they have been divorced for five years.
As they arrive at Lebowski's mansion, they see Bunny's car has crashed into the fountain in the driveway. When they come inside, they see Bunny dancing naked outside and the Dude asks Brandt where she's been, smugly. They charge into Lebowski's study, despite Brandt's discouragement, and the Dude asks the millionaire where the money is.
"We know the briefcase was fucking empty," the Dude says, incensed that he was used for the millionaire's crooked plot. As Lebowski orders them to leave his house, Walter posits that his disability is fake and pulls him out of his wheelchair, trying to get him to walk. Lebowski is not faking, of course, and he falls to the ground with a scream.
We see the Dude, Walter, and Donny at the bowling alley. As Walter talks about Vietnam, the Dude applies some kind of polish to his finger, (probably a protective coat for bowling, though it looks like he's just painting his nails), when suddenly they are interrupted by Quintana, who is upset about the fact that Walter observes Shabbos. "You don't fool Jesus!" he yells, threatening them that he's going to beat them at the tournament on Wednesday.
When Walter, the Dude, and Donny come out of the bowling alleys, the Dude's car is on fire and the nihilists are standing around threateningly, techno playing from their boombox, as they ask about their money. "You don't have the fucking girl, dipshit. We know you never did!" The Dude yells at them, but they still want the money. The Dude tells them that they never had any money, and the nihilists consult with one another. They turn around and tell the group that they want the money that they have on their persons and they will call it even.
While the Dude and Donny are happy to oblige, Walter says, "What's mine is mine," and challenges them. Uli pulls out a large sword and the nihilists begin to charge towards them, but Walter throws his bowling ball at one of them, knocking him to the ground. He then bites off Uli's ear and calls him an anti-Semite, as the Dude fights with the other nihilist.
After they manage to subdue the nihilists, Walter and the Dude notice that Donny is lying on the ground. Dude thinks he's been shot, but Walter insists that he's having a heart attack. The Dude runs inside to call an ambulance.
The scene shifts and we see the Dude and Walter meeting with someone at a mortuary about Donny's death. Walter tells the man that they do not need an urn, but the man insists that the $180 urn is their "most modestly priced receptacle."
We see Walter and Dude carrying a Folgers coffee canister with Donny's remain to the edge of a cliff. Walter says some words, but his speech soon becomes less about Donny and more about Vietnam. He opens the canister and the ashes fly behind him and into the Dude's face. The Dude gets angry, yelling, "Everything's a fucking tragedy with you!" and begins to cry. The two friends hug and decide to go bowling.
At the bowling alley, the Dude orders a drink and notices the stranger in the cowboy hat, who he encountered earlier, sitting there. The Stranger asks the Dude how the tournament is going and they engage in some small talk. "Take it easy...I know that you will," says the stranger, to which the Dude responds, "The Dude abides."
The Stranger looks directly at the camera and says to the viewer, "I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that. It's good knowing he's out there, the Dude, taking her easy for all us sinners." He mentions that a "little Lebowski is on the way, then rambles a little bit, and wraps up the film.
Analysis
In this beginning of this final section of the film, the loose ends of the plot begin to tie together. We see the German nihilists at a diner with a woman companion, and the camera knowingly drifts down to show her feet, where there is a toe missing. We have already seen Bunny's toes when she was driving earlier, so we know that the toe that was sent to Lebowski was not Bunny's, but this clears it up even more. The audience is privy to more information throughout much of the film, but the Dude is not far behind.
In a flash of inspiration, the Dude sees everything clearly, realizing that Lebowski has never wanted his ungrateful wife back. "You threw out a ringer for a ringer!" he says to Walter, triumphantly understanding everything that has happened and feeling vindicated for having finally discovered the truth. After so much confusion and outlandish convolution, the Dude is overtaken by enlightenment, in spite of still not having all of the puzzle pieces at his disposal.
Walter, the combustible Vietnam veteran with an unexpected commitment to his Jewish faith, provides perhaps the most comic relief in the film. When he follows the Dude on his misadventures, his anger management issues become a comic foil to the Dude's decidedly laissez-faire approach. If anyone even looks at him in the wrong way, he explodes with anger, and a great deal of the film's comedy comes from his feeling that he is not being treated as respectfully as he ought to be. His inflated sense of self, and his irrational outbursts as a result, are often extreme and humorous.
The confrontation with Jesus Quintana at the bowling alley provides an example of Coen brothers' sly, clever intelligence. When Quintana complains about Walter's obsessive following of Jewish law—"what's this day-of-rest shit? [...] it don't matter to Jesus," he is essentially repeating the critique made by that other Jesus—Jesus Christ—of his fellow-believers' over-emphasis on law as opposed to spirit than spirit. The scene is both a hilarious comic sketch, and a quick summary of religious doctrine. This kind of irreverant mash-up runs throughout the Coen Brothers' work.
After a grotesquely comedic fight scene between the Dude's group and the nihilists, a sobering event happens when Donny suffers a heart attack. While Donny is not a very developed character, and functions mostly as the victim of Walter's verbal abuse throughout, he is an integral part of the friend group, and his death is upsetting to the Dude and Walter. His funeral follows the same bittersweet tragicomic tone of much of the film, with the darkness of his death being lightened by Walter's enduring incompetence; when Walter goes to throw his ashes into the Pacific Ocean, the wind sends the remains flying backwards all over Dude.
The Stranger, that mysterious man in the cowboy hat drinking sarsaparilla at the bowling alley bar, closes out the film. He rhapsodizes directly to the camera, as if he is a narrator that we never even knew we had, and tells us that the fact that "the Dude abides" is a comfort to him. In his view, Dude's relaxed and stoned attitude towards life serves a social function, providing a calm foil to the anxiety and bustle of everyday life, "for all us sinners."
