The Big Lebowski; or, Abiding with Sisyphus

Abstract

This essay on Joel and Ethan Coen’s cult film, The Big Lebowski (1998), proposes that one way of accounting for its narrative, stylistic, and tonal characteristics is to see the filmmakers’ perspective as determined, above all, by the sense of the absurd as elaborated by Albert Camus. This relation is explored, among other things, by considering the Coen brothers’ play with the genres of film noir and the Western in The Big Lebowski; although I also indicate how such a reading requires that Camus’s seminal concept to some extent be qualified with reference to Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘making do’.