“This Aggression Will Not Stand”: Myth, War, and Ethics in The Big Lebowski

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski, The Stranger’s opening voiceover poses the following question: In a world controlled by “I’s,” by states intent upon realizing an extreme freedom through violence, how should the singular person respond? The “eye” is linked to what Donna Haraway describes as the “cyclopean self-satiated eye of the master subject” (192). As such it is the I/eye of the Cartesian subject for whom sight is always a violent affair. This juxtaposition of conflict and heroism in The Stranger’s comments then frames the entire film. The Stranger implies that confronting the “I’s” demands as a traditional “hero” then reproduces an exclusionary and violent subject. Indeed, it is fair to say that the traditional hero exemplifies subjectivity in the way that narratives coalesce around such archetypes. While The Stranger doesn’t want to argue that “the Dude” (Jeff Lebowski) is a hero, he indicates that the Dude is “heroic” and somehow a response to the tyranny of the “I.” Yet The Stranger readily admits that he is “stupef[ied]” by the Dude and his story (Coen screenplay, 3). On a narrative level, this undermines the “story” that The Stranger is preparing to relate. A hero-less, “stupefying” story is hardly a story at all. All of this is doubly strange when we consider that The Stranger is played by a famous western actor, Sam Elliott, whose narrative consequently ought even more rigorously to fulfill the requirements of traditional narrative structure. Who, we wonder, will provide coherence and closure to his narrative?