Seriously: Dude

As tough as it was to forgo making the subject of this post the sucker-born-every-minute revelation that the Teabaggers of 2009 spent most of their political donations supporting -- what else but -- the very astroturfing, Dick Armey-led GOP organization that created them (and it appears to be a legal racket!), and as much as I wanted to tout, to my doubting friends on the left, that President Obama is moving to curb the very federal secrets policy that the secrecy-fetishizing Cheney (Bush) Administration overly strengthened, there's one story that just rises...or, shall I say, floats above the rest.

Per The New York Times, there's a new collection of erudite essays out called, I kid you not, The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies, all about, you guessed it, the Coen Brothers' cult film apex, The Big Lebowski.

Not much of a success when first released, this movie has grown in stature over the years, mainly due to how it increases in funniness over repeated viewings. (And as we know, most comedies do the reverse, disposable.) As a little background on the cult, from Wikipedia:

Steve Palopoli wrote about the film's emerging cult status in July 2002.^[57] He first realized that the film had a cult following when he attended a midnight screening in 2000 at the New Beverly Cinema in L.A. Palopoli and witnessed people quoting dialogue from the film to each other.^[58] Soon after the article appeared, the programmer for local midnight film series in Santa Cruz decided to screen The Big Lebowski and on the first weekend they had to turn away several hundred people. The theater held the film over for six weeks which had never happened before.^[59]

An annual festival, the Lebowski Fest, began in Louisville, Kentucky, United States in 2002 with 150 fans showing up, and has since expanded to several other cities.^[60] The Festival's main event each year is a night of unlimited bowling with various contests including costume, trivia, hardest- and farthest-traveled contests. Held over a weekend, events typically include a pre-fest party with bands the night before the bowling event as well as a day-long outdoor party with bands, vendor booths and games. Various celebrities from the film have even attended some of the events, including Jeff Bridges who attended the Los Angeles event.^[60] The British equivalent, inspired by Lebowski Fest, is known as The Dude Abides and is held in London.^[61]

Dudeism, an online religion devoted largely to spreading the philosophy and lifestyle of the movie's main character was founded in 2005. Also known as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude, the organization has ordained over 50,000^[62] "Dudeist Priests" all over the world via its website.

Info on the creation of this fine new scholarly tome:

Most of the essays in “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies” began as papers presented at the 2006 Lebowski Fest in Louisville. Working at an unhurried, Dude-like crawl, it took the editors three years to wrap these papers up and usher them into print.

“When we first put out a call for papers, we received about 200 proposals,” said Mr. Comentale, an associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, whose previous books include “Modernism, Cultural Production and the British Avant-Garde” and “T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism.”

The essays sound pretty great, both fun and illuminating, and the influence of Jeff Bridges' "Dude" are growing with the college students of today:

In another of this book’s essays, “Professor Dude: An Inquiry Into the Appeal of His Dudeness for Contemporary College Students,” a bearded, longhaired and rather Dude-like associate professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., named Richard Gaughran asks this question about his students: “What is it that they see in the Dude that they find so desirable?”

One of Mr. Gaughran’s students came up with this summary, and it’s somehow appropriate for an end-of-the-year reckoning: “He doesn’t stand for what everybody thinks he should stand for, but he has his values. He just does it. He lives in a very disjointed society, but he’s gonna take things as they come, he’s gonna care about his friends, he’s gonna go to somebody’s recital, and that’s it. That’s how you respond.”

I've always said that the strongest thing in the world is a philosophy, and in the post-Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe world, that pretty much means a code. It's not about governments or ideologies, it's how you see the big picture and apply it to the small. Maybe that's best represented by an academic collection. Or maybe by a 2010 wall calendar.

In any case, when they hand Jeff Bridges the statuette for Best Actor at this next Oscars ceremony, it may say it's for Crazy Heart but we'll know the truth. Sure, there's a lifetime achievement aspect. And sure, it looks like a potentially career-best performance for this new movie, but in our heart-of-hearts, for all of us rooting everso hard for him out here in Lebowskiland, it'll be The Dude that we'll be cheering for.

For as well all know, when all is said and done, the Dude abides.

As The Stranger says, it's good knowin' he's out there.