Michael Lattek

Michael Lattek is a M.A. student of North American Studies, Political Science and History at the Free University of Berlin. He focuses on film studies and political theory. Granted a DAAD stipend for the academic year 2005/2006, he studied at New York University's John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought. Michael Lattek will return to the Free University in the fall of 2006 and will graduate in 2007.

Abduction and Adoption. Tracing the Western in The Big Lebowski

The Coens 1998 film, despite being reviewed by critics as a weaker Coen movie, still has an ongoing appeal to its audience. Scholars working on the Coen brothers nearly unanimously dismissed TBL as an "exercise in postmodern pointlessness" (Barton R. Palmer) and concentrated on the film as homage to Raymond Chandler stories such as The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. This interpretation however seems incapable to explain the film’s cult status and the continuous celebration of its way of life in fan meetings such as the annual Lebowski Fest.

My approach argues that the dominating imagery behind TBL able to explain its ongoing appeal is that of the western. In fact, the plot of TBL resembles that of The Searchers every bit as much as those of Hawks’ and Altman’s films. The presentation will interpret the film as a postmodern western that deploys a story line of abduction, quest and adoption similar to Ford’s classic western. However, it will also provide an analysis of the film’s yet understudied aspects of language and class and give an example of how to interpret TBL’s interest in violence and ethnicity.

Interpreting TBL as a western allows for different results: First, it enables us to understand the film as part of the Coen oeuvre depicting malfunctions of communication and only here these malfunctions seem irreconcilable on the ground of ethnic diversity. Second, one can discuss this stance in connection to the way in which the western imagery of the film functions in depicting otherness as foreign aggression. Thus TBL offers a complex critique of the sharply divided morality of the western. Third, in critiquing the western’s morality and, at the same time, setting TBL during the 1991 Kuwait invasion, the film also comments on the relation between U.S. foreign policy and issues of domestic policy.

held at: Picturing America. Domestic and Global Aspects of US Media Culture, May 19-21, 2005