The Dude’s basic malleability is a running (or rolling) joke throughout The Big Lebowski, which is constructed more or less as an obstacle course for a character who can barely be motivated to get out of bed in the morning. He is happy to follow the tumbleweed’s lead and just roll with the flow. In The Dude’s hallucinations, he’s cruising on a flying carpet or floating facedown along the polished length of a ten-pin bowling lane. When Norville Barnes drifts off to sleep at his desk, he imagines himself trapped in a tango with a beautiful woman who keeps gracefully eluding his grasp. It’s a fantasy of upward mobility versus a daydream of horizontal stasis. The difference between the films lies in the divergent attitudes of their protagonists, one who embodies skyscraping ambition and one whose aspirations have long since atrophied. Where The Hudsucker Proxy’s grandiosity arguably smacks of showing off-a feeling consistent with it being the brothers’ first foray into studio-subsidized filmmaking- Lebowski’s virtuosity serves a sense of modesty. The film it most closely resembles in the first part of the Coens’ career, however, is The Hudsucker Proxy, with which it shares several key elements, including a good-hearted simpleton protagonist (The Dude, aka Jeff Lebowski, played by Jeff Bridges, for whom the role was written) a folksy narrator (The Stranger, played by Sam Elliott, whose name was similarly invoked by the Coens in their early screenplay drafts) a general sense of good cheer more indebted to the screwball optimism of Raising Arizona than the icy detachment of Blood Simple or Miller’s Crossing and an overall embrace of wild stylization (in terms of camera movement, set and costume design, and soundtrack curation) in place of Fargo’s bloody simplicity. It was originally written in the early nineties, around the same time as Barton Fink, which accounts for similarities between the characters played in both films by John Goodman (who was not available to shoot closer to the completion of the script because of his commitments on ABC’s sitcom Roseanne). The Big Lebowski was released in 1998, after the success of Fargo had rerouted the Coens’ career.
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