“That’s just, like, your opinion, man”: Irony, Abiding, Achievement, and Lebowski

 
The terms in which the reception of The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies played out in the comments to Dave Itzkoff’s New York Times review in December of 2010 rehearsed a number of the familiar questions that have long plagued academic studies of popular culture: What would it mean to take mass culture seriously? What would be left after refusing the fan’s or the cult’s uncritical enthusiasm and the elite’s dismissal? Or, to put it rather differently, who is the audience for a collection like this? While many fans applauded the editors’ and contributors’ desire to engage with everything Dude, there were as many or more who substantially resented someone taking their fun seriously (thought apparently being the enemy of pleasure). And on the still more reactionary side, this volume’s very existence was cited, variously, as evidence of the decline of the university as an institution, of the death yet again of the canon of seemingly self-evidently great works, and as evidence of the silliness if not sheer irrelevance of the academic study of popular culture. This last seems particularly germane, in so far as the Times itself regularly offers its own confidently commonsensical, ideology-free perspective by noting the daft pursuits of the humanities professoriate. The review, while guardedly sympathetic, continues that tendency toward condescension perhaps most egregiously manifested in Jonathan Kandell’s shameful obituary of Jacques Derrida in 2004.
 
These sorts of reception suggest some of the potential pitfalls the editors of any collection about a cult object must navigate: a great deal of fan culture depends upon iterability, repetition and citation, and thus opposes academic analysis; and certain conservative ideas of what constitutes the “proper” object of academic study exclude the mass cultural object by fiat.¹ Commendably, The Year’s Work stakes out a variety of other possible positions, and, at its best, imagines a necessary rapprochement between academics—who are also always already fans—and a portion of the cult audience who look to deepen their pleasure. For the latter, The Year’s Work seems to fit neatly alongside the seemingly endless “Philosophy and –” collections that constitute the bulk of the philosophy section at my big box bookstore, collections whose ubiquity suggests to me that someone needs to write a Philosophy and “Philosophy and” book. For the former, however, the Coen brothers’ film presents a challenge that calls for the most delicate judgment: as both fans and scholars, academics here are forced to countenance the conflicting allegiances of immersion and distance. Some scholars here, seeking to respond to the Dude on his own terms, try to overcome this conflict with the ambivalent aid of irony, while others prefer the detachment of a more traditional academic perspective. Indeed, the volume’s own title signals the extent to which irony is here a privileged form of address.
 
Ultimately, to take The Big Lebowski seriously would be to refuse or go beyond the fan’s pleasures of citation in favor of elaborating a different context, moreover one that might, very explicitly, threaten to subsume the film itself. In order to deal with this deadlock, the editors have chosen, in an eloquent and spirited introduction, to cast academics as over-achievers, which is to say as a special case and fraction of the Achievers, the Lebowski cult’s preferred self-nomination. Such a term neatly signals both identity and difference, the academic’s fannishness and her intellectual “excess.”² There will be, then, a third term to make a constellation of the binaries of “to achieve” and “to abide”: to over-achieve, to reach too far, to try too hard, to do too much. But as the introduction proceeds, it spells out another image of what it might mean to “work” on Lebowski, now in terms of the joint:
 

 

The film demands to be seen with bleary eyes, and this Year’s Work is offered in this vein—laid-back, easy-going, comfortably dead-beat, slack.… Yes, the experience of the film—the experience of our work—focuses not on codes, on the cracking of themes and allusions, but on the process of ideation itself, on an imaginative openness that never ceases to fail to focus into form.
 

(6-7)

 

To study the Dude, then, one must imitate the Dude; but this mimetic strategy parallels and extends the stance of the cult fan, as academic labor here risks relaxing into stoned riffing, its Promethean overachieving relaxing into the aleatory creation and dissipation of ideas, which dissolve into blue smoke. Such a spirit also implies a dangerous—but very Dude-like—wager, and one, unfortunately, that some are fated to lose: namely, that the loser wins (pace the Big Lebowski‘s claim that “The bums will always lose!” as the Dude leaves with a rug). This wager also implies that a mimesis of the film’s logic-which-is-not-one can better serve our encounter than more traditional academic discourse. In a proper and laudably utopian fashion, evocative of Adorno’s gloss on mimesis, the wager implies that a toke from the Dude’s joint might limber up and break down ossified scholarly postures, the reification of academic subject and cultural object, and the gulf between ivory tower dweller and mass cultural fan.

 
But to imitate the Dude seems also to risk merely repeating him, quoting him, and citing him—that is, merely reaffirming the logic of postmodern pastiche (inarguably structural to the film), whose worrying political ambivalences and instabilities have been extensively detailed by Jameson, Hutcheon, and many others. An imitation of the Dude might produce new ideas about the film and about mass culture as such, or it might just end up uncritically reaffirming and reifying the commodity culture of which the film is at once an expression, a symptom, and a critique.
 
The modesty of many of the claims made in this anthology and the explicit and implicit allegiance demonstrated by many of the authors—and by the editors—to the film’s fan base and/or cult status authorize us to ask about the implicit—and occasionally, explicit—valuation of intellectual labor and characterization of the intellectual himself. The most successful contributions here thematize this dilemma to a certain degree; but just as many either ignore it as a problem, or more troublingly reject scholarly protocols outright, and proffer instead something much more stoned, ironic, and/or fannish. There is relatively little evidence here of the attitude that characterized postcolonial studies or even cultural studies in their early days, namely the agonizing self-consciousness of the intellectual’s position in relation to his object. These fields demonstrated a rigorous and deeply felt sense of conflict between one’s various group allegiances and one’s subjectivity, a well-nigh Sartrean agon that refused to allow the collapse of tensions constituted by an intellectual distance, on the one hand, and class, ethnic, group, and/or gender allegiances, on the other hand. I would argue that such a tension is evidence of a crucial awareness of history—history of the discipline, of the medium, and also of the mode of production itself. Without this tension, without an explicit awareness of the necessary distance that obtains in the academic’s relation to culture, the resulting efforts here risk collapsing into so many gestures of resignation—or worse, of a self-loathing anti-intellectualism. In such a scenario, populism, itself an intellectual and ideological construct, affords academics an opportunity to recite the lines they love—”Nice marmot” or “I can get you a toe!”—and wear jellies while drinking White Russians, but do so ironically. The text persists only as culinary and as a commodity, and intellectual labor becomes indistinguishable from consumption.
 
Against this problematic and pervasive irony, it might be worth considering another rhetorical mode whose very substance is also constituted by oppositions and contradictions of all sorts—that is, dialectics. Adorno writes that “the very opposition between knowledge which penetrates from without and that which bores from within becomes suspect to the dialectical method, which sees in it a symptom of precisely that reification which the dialectic is obliged to accuse” (209). From this perspective, the opposition between fan and scholar itself must be submitted to scrutiny, rather than merely being ironically affirmed and rehearsed. Perhaps the contributions the volume makes to this particular problem are its most valuable, and the ones with the greatest implications for the study of popular culture and the humanities: at its best, The Year’s Work values the fan’s immanent, molecular knowledge of the film and of its attendant culture as well as the academic’s more molar perspective, at the same time that it reveals the limits of both the fan’s fetishism and the scholar’s mandarinism. What resolves itself fitfully here, in glimpses and beyond irony, is a view of culture as a totality—not the alienating totality of global capital and the commodity, but a totality in which the intellectual and the affective, modernism and mass culture, or, if you prefer, achieving and abiding are no longer irredeemably opposed.
 
To respond to The Big Lebowski ironically, then, may in a sense to be true to it—but it would also leave intact and unquestioned the troublesome opposition between fan and scholar, an opposition that the best of these contributions complicate. The most valuable and provocative contributions here are more dialectical than ironic—which is not to say humorless. With more than twenty contributions, the volume cannot be considered in its entirety here, so I single out a number of its exemplary essays.
 
David Martin-Jones offers one of the most challenging, and, in a very un-Dude-like manner, articulate explorations of the film. His “No Literal Connection: Images of Mass Commodification, U.S. Militarism and the Oil Industry in The Big Lebowski” soberingly presents the film as a work of “national cinema,” focusing on “the way that U.S. foreign policy is determined by Fordism, the automobile, and the need for oil, as it is represented in the film” (204). The political subtext of the film, Martin-Jones persuasively argues, has been submitted to a kind of dream-work, re-figured under a range of well-documented generic citations and allusions that have too often been dismissed as mere postmodern play. Put another way, there is “no literal connection” between the official narrative of the film and the political subtext Martin-Jones unearths—but rather a figural one that underwrites the comedy, and proves to be its condition of possibility. He begins by examining the confluence, in the opening sequence of the film, of national expansion towards the frontier—an expansion that reaches its terminus in Los Angeles—and American intervention in the Persian Gulf: the latter extends the former, and not just its vector, but its imbrication with a conception of mobile people and capital that is realized in the automobile—which needs oil. Thus the film’s striking image of Saddam Hussein standing before a near-infinite tower of bowling shoes becomes a condensation of American foreign policy and the demands of Fordist production, which can tolerate no limits and constantly requires new markets. Even architectural style and bowling itself then come to speak of an economy determined by automobility, mass production, and the commodification of leisure, all of which depend upon and are guaranteed by American foreign policy. But then, keeping the introduction and spirit of the Dude in mind, are we being too serious? Over-achievers? It’s a risk I’ll take in order to appreciate Martin-Jones’s fine essay, even though he betrays slackness, pastiche, repetition and citation–or rather precisely because he does: because this essay explicitly recognizes how leisure, play, entertainment, film, fun, fans, and cults absolutely depend upon material and economic structures and upon networks of circulation and exchange; and because this essay implicitly remains faithful to a notion of critical intellectual labor as both taking place at an impossible distance from and absolutely entangled within the culture and the problematics it inherits.
 
In contrast, the editor Edward Comentale’s modestly titled “‘I’ll Keep Rolling Along’: Some Notes on Singing Cowboys and Bowling Alleys in The Big Lebowski,” ambles along in an appropriately tumbleweed-like fashion, modestly concealing its argument beneath an easy style. Beginning as a meditation on the Western and its generic function in the film, Comentale’s essay moves to a fascinating discussion of Gene Autry and the commodification of the cowboy as style. Both moves serve to develop a strong argument regarding the film’s deployment of gesture: “for if cinema has proven capable of responding to modernity, and particularly to the loss of coherent experience that accompanied the closing of the frontier, it responds most significantly through its emphatic use of gesture” (229). This is a potent and provocative claim, asserting not simply the ways in which the film points back to the directors’ hand, but the extent to which the film and even the Coens’ oeuvre presents us with a virtual anthology of gesture. Here, gesture is no longer construed as expressive, but is instead mute, frustrated, excessive, and hermetic. As such, “in Lebowski, while many gestures arise out of communicative failure, they also—following Agamben—expose communicability in its purest form” (245). Bowling, therefore, while testifying to the exhaustion and emptiness of the public sphere, also includes, inevitably, this gestural surplus: “Here, gesticulating gracefully on the last frontier, the film loses its voice and makes us feel something more than alienation, something other than violence” (250).
 
The value of such a claim seems more than a little belied by Comentale’s slacker title, which needlessly ironizes his essay’s rich content. The title also indicates the extent to which, after careful and rewarding elaboration, the essay demurs from expanding upon what this excess that inhabits or characterizes the gesture actually is: does it have a politics? an erotics? Is it a form or a content? The implication here would seem to be that this gestural excess that persists after the impoverishment of various other communicative regimes and after the dissolution of an authentic public sphere might retain some critical or even utopian dimension itself, but the essay’s self-description as “some notes” seems to preclude prospective conclusions. It’s hard not to feel some frustration here, and to wonder if too strict a fidelity to the Dude’s own ethos or to the film’s self-ironizing strategies might be responsible.
 
Surprisingly, at one juncture where the reader might expect the collection to be at its most ironic—that is, in Joshua Kates’s “The Big Lebowski and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism”—irony, even “hyperirony,” is everywhere evoked and thematized, but nowhere embodied. This strikes the reader as oddly exceptional, given the film’s own ironic tendencies, the directors’ much-discussed love of the ironic mode, and the essay’s own consideration of irony in de Man’s thought and style. But for Kates, this is the effect of history, or rather the way in which irony troubles certain construals of history and announces what we have come to call the postmodern, which is “a pause or gap in the comprehension of history not simply explicable through the workings of history itself” (172). The central ironies, then, that the essay details devolve from de Man’s legacy, which emerges and is embraced at a historical point at which the various utopian agents and agendas in the 60s are eclipsed—it lives on past its moment and as a response to its moment, like the Dude. I wonder, though, if the notion of periodization and the linear conception of history, both of which make up part of Kates’s target here, are, ironically, also well past their “best before” date—does anyone believe in them anymore? Even or except ironically?
 
Perhaps the collection’s best realization of its untraditional mode and aims is to be found in Judith Roof’s “Size Matters,” which investigates—and enacts—the film’s fluid economies of gender and exchange:
 

The Big Lebowski is governed by an economy of fluid exchange or the exchange of fluids, which in the end is no exchange at all. This fluid economy moves in all directions simultaneously, producing layerings, erosions, vacuums, dissolutions, and flows that render structure and unidirectional cause/effect irrelevant, or, in contrast with marked efforts at organization (such as genre), at least shows their futility.
 

(412-13)

 

Genre, exchange, causality, and conception—all exemplary of an unsustainable and phallic regime of “bigness”—are raised as possibilities in the film only to be thwarted, according to Roof’s stunning gloss, in favor of a liquid and matrixial femininity that is embodied in Maude (but also in White Russians). And as the film plays, so too does Roof’s thought and prose, not in imitation of the film’s style, but, pointedly, in imitation of its spirit. Can I say that the Dude would dig her style? Precisely because it is not a replica of his own?

 
The problems of irony, quotation, and play also arise in Thomas Byers’s contribution, “Found Document: The Stranger’s Commentary, and a Note on His Method,” but in contrast to Roof’s entry, Byers aims to push the film’s logic of pastiche as far as it might go. While the substance of the essay offers some valuable considerations of Jeff Bridges’s role, and locates his performance on a continuum with the Cary Grant of screwball comedy (but of Hitchcock too), the opening pages, with their arch disavowal and simultaneous defense of pastiche, both set the stage for and render redundant what is to follow. Byers writes:
 

The Other Stranger’s discourse may be a form of what I would call “disseminated” parody, in which there is no single target, and the satiric and comic effects arise at any given moment from the juxtaposition of two equally appreciated and equally critiqued discourses. Thus, when the Other Stranger “does” a version of academic cultural studies in his Hollywood Western voice, the reader may smile both at the expense of and in appreciation of both discourses.
 

(190)

 

Here’s an example: “Now, that may seem as obvious as a heifer in a sheep-herd, but here’s the thing; we might think we’re thinkin’ about the sixties, or the forties, or the seventies, but most likely when we do, we’re thinkin’ about the picture shows at all them times” (200). Byers channels the Stranger channeling Fredric Jameson; and while the point is properly Jamesonian, reminding us of how history always comes to us in a framed and mediated form, it occurs to me that this might not be the unity of theory and practice—or the theory as practice—for which Jameson strives. Indeed, “disseminated parody” seems indistinguishable from irony, which would seem to preclude the kinds of appreciation Byers seeks to produce. Or if we agree it is parody, then far from being “disseminating,” it risks trivializing Jameson and condescending to the Stranger, who enjoys a privileged relationship to the film’s narrative, being both outside and inside of it. It undermines the very Jamesonian ideas that Byers might well want to preserve, by abstracting them from Jameson’s rigorous and necessarily dialectical prose and inserting them into this new context, a context that parodies the same style that birthed the ideas to begin with. Byers’s parody makes the experience a zero-sum game, one which negates more than it complicates the ideas and discourses it mobilizes, and one that threatens to reaffirm the profound ambiguity that informs many parts of this collection: can the logic and style of irony, parody, and pastiche, a logic and style so prevalent in the film and in its reception, return scholarly dividends?

 
Perhaps one of the best object-lessons in this regard comes from the collection’s other editor, Aaron Jaffe, whose essay “Brunswick = Fluxus” “considers the cultural meaning of ‘wood’ in The Big Lebowski” (427). While the modesty of such a thesis initially suggests “underachiever,” Jaffe has some instructive and valuable surprises in store for the reader: far from being a mere catalog of representations, Jaffe’s playful contribution works from the outset to estrange rather than ironize the oppositions of nature and culture, self and other, the living and the dead, interior and exterior, concrete and plastic and, finally, Brunswick and Fluxus, which stand for commodity culture and the avant-garde, respectively. Spiritually akin to Roof’s fluid contribution, Jaffe’s undoes the solidity of wood, revealing it as part of the structural support of a “masculinist, genealogical substrate implicit in the prevailing conceptions of time and space” (439). Wood, whether thought of as bowling surface or result of Logjammin’, comes to attest to its own plasticity, which then entails, through Jaffe’s careful elaboration, the uprooting of dead wood: debt, exchange, patrimony and patronymics. Jaffe’s own thought displays an enviable plasticity, in the best sense of the term.
 
More essays in this collection deserve attention. But I end with the penultimate contribution, Jonathan Elmer’s persuasively Heideggerian “Enduring and Abiding.” Elmer argues that the film is essentially underdetermined, offering itself up to a vast and contradictory variety of modes of consumption, interpretation, and enjoyment. The Dude, in his slackness, his paunchiness, and his lack of ambition, embodies this sheer potential, as glossed in Agamben’s “Bartleby” essay: Elmer writes, “The Dude embodies potentia, he is always employable because he is never employed—merely abiding” (454). “The Dude abides,” the Stranger tells us in the film’s final moments, adding, “I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners.” In this context, perhaps the lesson of not only Elmer’s elegant essay but of the collection’s varied offerings is that we are the sinners because we cannot simply abide and we cannot let this film abide. For the Dude, abiding is an achievement—as it is not for all us sinners who see abiding and achieving as opposed, who must achieve to abide, and who, finally, must achieve to overcome the contradiction between achieving and abiding. Those contributions that work at overcoming the conflict between work and play, rather than ironizing it, are the ones, finally, that most keep faith with the Dude.