The Coen Brothers won a heap of Oscars earlier this year, their new movie is due in theaters tomorrow, and yet it’s still pretty much all Lebowski, all the time. The movie has just been released on DVD for the third time. (I’ve got the original bare bones edition purchased by those happy few of us who were in on the ground floor of this thing, but that’s since been supplanted by the 2005 “collector’s edition” and the new 10th anniversary version, which also comes in a specially packaged bowling ball edition.) Lebowski Fest, the celebration of bowling, White Russians and what-have-you that began in Louisville, Kentucky in 2002 has now expanded to multiple locations: the San Francisco edition took place earlier this month and the New York version is set for November.

Since this is an election year, we even have some pontification on the politics of The Big Lebowski. According to this Slate piece, the “Is this your homework, Larry?” sequence “if filmed today, would almost certainly be taken as an allegory about the younger Bush's war. The police have recovered the car, and the Dude has found, wedged between the seats, a page of homework belonging to one Larry Sellers. Walter figures out Larry's address and arrives at his house, the Dude in tow, the homework in a plastic bag… When Larry says nothing, Walter proceeds to Plan B: destroying the new Corvette parked outside—purchased, he assumes, using the money left in the car—with a crowbar. Actually, though, the Corvette belongs to a neighbor. Neocons everywhere can sympathize.”

Rolling Stone attempts to get to the bottom of Lebowski-mania with a cornucopia of 10th anniversary articles and interviews. “Today, as technology increasingly handcuffs us to schedules and appointments — in the time it takes you to read this, you've missed three e-mails — there's something comforting about a fortysomething character who will blow an evening lying in the bathtub, getting high and listening to an audiotape of whale songs. He's not a 21st-century man. Nor is he Iron Man — and he's certainly not Batman. The Dude doesn't care about a job, a salary, a 401(k), and definitely not an iPhone. The Dude just is, and he's happy.” Or as John Milius, one model for Walter Sobchak puts it, “The Dude is like Dirty Harry…Dirty Harry became a movement. And the Dude became a movement. It's symbolic of a whole way of life.” Well, at least it’s an ethos.

And remember, this is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps:



Related:
The Dude Abides: Ten Years of "Lebowski"
"Almost an Evening" with Ethan Coen