‘The Big Lebowski’ (1998)
“What I call Ideas are images that make one think.” -1-
According to Jacques Derrida, “cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms, it’s the art of letting ghosts come back”, a progressive art since, “ghosts are part of the future and … the modern technology of images like cinematography … enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us”. For Derrida, we must “learn to live with ghosts … To live otherwise and better … more justly. But with them … [as] a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (Derrida 2000: xvii-xviii). These latter words indicate the reach of this idea and the responsibility to past, present and future; towards what Gilles Deleuze called the formation of “the people to come”; a definition of community and region unscripted or fixed by the past or by systematic representations. Given the history of the American West, its expansionism and legacy of conquest, we might see post-Westerns (that is films of the modern West) as potential sites where such a “politics” might be traced, back into the past and forward to the future, functioning in between such poles and yet responsible to both, interested in, as yet unformed, peoples and communities. However, speaking with ghosts is something scholars find hard to practice, preferring instead to work on the solid ground of oppositions: “what is present and what is not” (ibid.:12), as Derrida puts it. Yet, “beyond this opposition” he argues, exists “theatrical fiction, literature and speculation”, including film; the very imagined fields often sidelined by western historians, but which, if taken seriously, might “unlock the possibility of such an address [with ghosts]”, producing something “more actual than what is so blithely called a living presence”, something that through our active engagement with it, has the power to move us, affect us intellectually and emotionally, to think differently and better. (ibid.:13) It is within this imagined space of becoming that post-Westerns exist. -2- The Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998) represents “theatrical fiction, literature and speculation” “mad enough” to embody many of the attributes of the post-Western. Whilst emphasising the visual and aural iconography of the Western’s traditional regionalist form, the film becomes simultaneously a conduit into another, less contained or settled cinematic experience. For example, The Sons of the Pioneers’ “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” on the soundtrack accompanies the visual trope of tumbleweed blowing across a western desert scene at night, providing a reassuring cliché of “west-ness” as the narrator, Sam Elliott (The Stranger) in his best western drawl, tells us that “way out West, there was this feller, feller I want to tell you about, feller by the name of Jeff Lebowski”. The Stranger is, as one critic put it, “a sort of Ghost of Cowboys Past”, carrying traces of the mythic West into the everyday of an LA bowling alley, focusing the audience upon the spectral relations of past and present. (Merkin 1998:98) Based on this opening sequence, as Tyree and Walters write in their BFI book on the film, “Plainly, this is a Western” (2002:38). As we literally follow the tumbleweed’s reassuring and familiar path across the desert sand it takes us suddenly beyond our expectations, up and over a ridge, and into a less familiar western landscape, looking down onto Los Angeles’ neon sprawl, requiring the audience to reconsider the iconic familiarity of Western tropes now undone by the garishly unexpected modern urban West: the “Grand Old Fashion Car Hand Wash” juxtaposed with Benito’s Taco Shop, the iconic Pacific beach with Ralph’s Supermarket. Thus the mythic tumbleweed and desert dialogically engages with an everyday urban, commodified, ethnically diverse culture that like the unfolding tale is, in The Stranger’s word, “stupefying”. This is the deterritorializing, uncanny, and jarring effect of so many post-Westerns: from Bad Day at Black Rock’s reluctant one-armed hero uncovering the brutal racism of the Far West, to Lonely are the Brave’s collision of horse and sanitary-ware truck on the highway, to The Misfits’ overwhelming confrontation of disappointment and affect, to John Sayles’ incest theme in Lone Star, to Down in the Valley’s schizoid cowboy fantasies in the San Fernando Valley. As a microcosm of the post-Western effect, this opening scene projects its audience from roots in the familiar landscape of historical “pastness” and its position, in Susan Kollin’s words, as a “pre-lapsarian, pre-social, and pre-modern space of … established forms”, along new routes of a present and future still bound up with images and values of the mythic and real past both embraced and eschewed (Kollin 2007:xiii). As we watch, The Big Lebowski (as in so many post-Westerns) one text folds into another, deframing its iconographies, being both of the Western whilst also more than; engaging in Derrida’s sense of genre as “participation without belonging”, a ghosting where forms haunt one another. So, as Tyree and Walters return (as the uncanny effect demands we do) to their statement about The Big Lebowski: “Plainly, this is a Western”, they are forced to concede: Hmm. Not a Western, then. Yet we’re still following that tumbleweed, along a bridge over a freeway, down a street, past a burrito stand and onto the beach itself. Tumbleweed on a beach? What kind of a movie is this anyway? (2002:38) Their dilemma is crucial, expressing the inherent strange familiarity of post-Westerns, jarring the reader into a disruptive space of reflection, a critical dialogue with formal expectations, ideologies, and histories. The Stranger’s words offer a lucid commentary on this post-Western process: wherein the promised land of the “City of Angels”, for example, is critically tempered by “I didn’t find it to be that exactly”, and furthermore, this is a movie with no traditional action “hero”, since “what is a hero?”, and all it does have is “a man for his time and place”. This “lazy man”, dishevelled and yet in tune with time and place is the Dude (Jeff Lebowski), who says to The Stranger later in the film, “Well, I dig your style too, man. Got a whole cowboy thing goin’.” The “cowboy thing”, the film’s inherent “west-ness”, is ever-present although always also “post” in the sense of coming after and going beyond the traditional Western whilst engaging with and commenting on its deeply haunting assumptions and values. Indeed, as so often, as Richard Slotkin’s work (amongst others) demonstrates, Westerns reflect beyond themselves to more contemporary themes and issues – just as with The Big Lebowski, since “this here story I’m about to unfold”, says The Stranger, “took place in the early ‘90s – just about the time of our conflict with Sad’m and the Eye-raqis.” And this global iteration is amplified as the Dude pays for his milk at the supermarket checkout whilst on TV President George Bush Snr repeats “This will not stand” about the invasion of Kuwait. Even as the Stranger attempts to “unfold” the story of the Dude and his world (this word is used twice in the sequence recalling both Derrida’s discussion of folded genre and Deleuze’s work), he admits “there was a lot about the Dude that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And a lot about where he lived, likewise”. In grappling with this “senselessness”, however, the narrative thread is broken, interrupted by The Stranger’s very attempt to articulate it: “Well, I lost my train of thought here. But … aw, hell. I’ve done introduced it enough.” The Stranger, as narrator, cannot reduce the “stupefying” tale to a linear form or to a set of simple meanings, instead all he has is what the Dude and his “time and place” [LA, the 1990s, the West] represent: mystery, ambiguity, contingency, and layered complexity. But through its representation, through the need to tell the story in some form, The Stranger perhaps speaks for us all who attempt to comprehend the modern West: “But then again”, he says “maybe that’s why I found the place so darned interestin’.” -3- So where do these two sections take us? For me it begins to explain an important element of the post-Western’s “pre-history” – as minor cinema – and in turn its usefulness to an expanded critical regionalism. The Coen Brothers’ film represents a good example of “minor cinema”, a concept derived from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari in their 1975 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1988). The Big Lebowski takes the major voice of mainstream US film and speaks it differently, deframing identities, geography, and ideologies “to destabilise … normal conventions” not through direct opposition, but rather “to inhabit the system and change it from within”. (Sutton & Martin-Jones 52; 53) As “unity of language is fundamentally political” to make a major language speak in a minor way would be to make it stutter, stammer or wail and in so doing to, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “draw from it cries, shouts, pitches, durations, timbres, accents, intensities” and thus use “the minor language to send the major language racing”. (D&G, TP, 104, 98) This “minoring” process, I would argue, characterises the post-Western emerging after WWII, or what Deleuze calls in Cinema 2 (1985) “modern political cinema”. One of its key characteristics being an emergent identity for the future, or, as he puts it “a people to come”; emergent, unformed, becoming. Previously, the classic Western, with its focus on the “action-image”, reinforced certain ideological structures associated with what Deleuze terms the “American Dream” and its constructions of national identity; of a given “people”; “a unanimist community or … nation-milieu, melting-pot and fusion of all minorities …” with “the idea of a leader … a man of this nation who knows how to respond to these challenges of the milieu as to the difficulties of a situation” (C1,148). John Ford’s “organic representation” of community and its need for hero-leadership stands as one example. In the post 1945 world, Deleuze stresses that “The great genres of this cinema, the psycho-social film, the film noir, the Western, the American comedy, collapse and yet maintain their empty frame” (215 – italics added). This opposition of “collapse/maintain” illuminates the condition of the Western to be explored here, caught between its weighty past and the “new situations” of a changing post-war “New West” where old mythic stabilities and frames of ideological certainty (gender, class, race, and power), defined and driven by action and individual, heroic agency, were less tenable in the face of economic, social, and cultural shifts in a postmodern, post-Western America. Modern political or minor cinema in the American western context is uncertain of identity, unwilling to assume a “people” already exist as fixed or homogeneous and thus is engaged in problematising and challenging such conceptions. Clare Colebrook explains “minor” as that which “has the power, not to represent the world or located subjects, but to imagine, create and vary affects that are not already given” (Colebrook 2002:103 – emphasis added). Thus art of this minor kind is productive, creative, “becoming” or immanent (to use Deleuzian concepts) refusing to re-present established and accepted models or to sustain tradition; rather it “produces what is not already recognisable … disrupts and dislocates the tradition” with the “unthought” (Colebrook, 103). “To be a foreigner”, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “but in one’s own tongue … To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same language … To be a bastard, a half-breed …”. (D&G, 98) Thus as Deleuze puts it, the certainty and fixity of “milieu” is displaced in minor cinema by this potential hybridity, as in The Big Lebowski’s opening sequence, and any sense of “a West” (singular) [or major] is challenged by “Wests … totalities … of locations, men and manners which ‘change and are eliminated’ in the same film” (C1172). As evidence, I have in mind earlier examples of the post-Western, such as Nicholas Ray’s 1952 film The Lusty Men with its striking contrasts between action and slowness, the glamour of the rodeo and domestic routine, John Sturges’ 1955 Bad Day at Black Rock’s extraordinary use of unsettling characterisation, theatricality and claustrophobic framing, or David Miller’s 1962 Lonely Are the Brave’s fenced-in landscape and encroaching urban sprawl. Rather than seeing cinema as a way of representing the accepted, clichéd world back to us (in its already given forms) Deleuze believes it should transform the world, “thinking the differences from which it is composed” (Col, 36), making new worlds on screen full of intellectual challenge and surprise – not recycling reassuring myths and images or even “correcting” existent ones, but rather intensifying our senses and varying our views through affect and percept. This post-war shift away from linearity, predictability, and desiring “all things in One” (191) moved the Western toward a more irresolute, diverse form with a greater complexity, in Deleuze’s words “like a knotted rope, twisting itself at each take, at each action, at each event” (172). Thus the functions of minor cinema relate closely to the emergent post-Western and finally allow us to see it as crucial to an expanded critical regionalism. Initially, however, Deleuze and Guattari saw such open, critical and processive ideas to be “(the opposite of regionalism)” (ATP,105), since for them regionalism signified standardisation, constancy, and closedness; a type of inward, territorialized notion that has to be “varied” by the “potential becoming” inherent in the minor with its deviation from the established models or “standard measure”. (ibid.) As they continue to argue, “It is certainly not by … regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes revolutionary”. (106) Key to my argument, however, is that they overlook the potential for regionalism to be critical seeing the multiple relations of local and global. In considering the post-Western as minor cinema one might argue for its critical regionalizing functioning within both genre and region – not to confirm old stories, clichés or structures, but to rather make them stutter and stammer in dialogic relations with wider, “outernational” forces and ideas. It is in Cinema 2 that Deleuze hints at a more radical sense of regionalism, discussing alternative ways time might be “imaged” in film so that it is not subordinated to movement and the action of the hero but instead expressed in more complex ways making visible “the hidden ground of time” constituted by “flows” mixing pasts and presents (98). In doing this, Deleuze employs the term “regions” to articulate a sense of time which is more dynamic and less fixed, operating simultaneously in space, where “all the circles of the past constituting so many stretched or shrunken regions, strata, or sheets: each region with its own characteristics, its ‘tones’, its ‘aspects’, its ‘singularities’ …” and these regions all in turn made up of durations: “childhood …adolescence … adult life …”, of many pasts and presents, which now “coexist” spatially (99). Deleuze and Guattari’s tentative analysis suggests a version of region closer to that I see emerging in post-Western minor cinema; with a layered and folded sense of the local and global, time and place, memory and event, history and story, affect and percept from which emerges an expanded or reframed critical regionalism, always already inflected by the past, haunted by memories, myths, and everyday realities. Something as stupefying as The Big Lebowski’s post-Western palimpsest and as vital as Jacques Derrida’s “politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations”.
END [This was a paper given at the Western Literature Association, Prescott Arizona October, 2010]
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