(The first in what is hopefully an ongoing series of reflections of the best films of the 90s–a decade that began twenty years ago and perhaps hasn’t yet ended.)

The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel Cohen (1998)

Bowling involves a straight shot down a smooth wooden lane. It’s a mechanized ritual; mediated by the apparatus that replaces the pins (perfectly), the chute that returns your ball. Nothing confused about it. The Dude (Jeff Bridges), Lebowski, a California tumbleweed leftover from an era when your opinion, man, was respected; Walter (John Goodman), Vietnam vet who, though the haze of his profanities, is obviously haunted by the ineffectiveness of his sacrifice; and the peripheral Donnie (Steve Buscemi), transparently born to die as a narrative cop-out—but who wasn’t? Together they form a bowling triumvirate: straight shots, the three of them, focused on rolling a heavy ball down a lacquered runway from which they never take off.

The Dude has a picture of Richard Nixon bowling over his home bar: it’s a suggestion, an intelligent, provocative suggestion, to be sure, but only that. Everything that comes together to form The Big Lebowski is powerful because it avoids direct, positive, hollow political statements, preferring to embed them as themes in the film’s masterfully confused narrative, using the Dude as a prism through which the landscape of the early ‘90s is visible with all its complicated political and historical baggage.

The Dude, we know, has his rug pissed on and wants due compensation. The rug-pissers got the wrong Lebowski: they were after the big Lebowski—wealthy, self-made, wheelchair-bound, the big Lebowski is a Dick Cheney lookalike who spurts Republican catchphrases against “free handouts”  and announces, at every turn, that the Dude’s revolution has failed. He helps kids in Watts—that “bitter pocket of reality,” according to Thomas Pynchon—go to college.  Watts, the place where the big Lebowski’s vision of L.A. can’t support itself—and now he’s taking hold of even that.

In a crystalline narrative turn, the big Lebowski hires the Dude to find his kidnapped wife—shades of General Sternberg in The Big Sleep–and the plot becomes dense and unintelligible, featuring luminaries of the L.A. art scene, nihilist pornographers including Ben Gazzara, false handoffs, and child conception. Just as Bogie was a holdover of depression-era decency in an America rich with wartime industry and dizzy with atomic bombs, the Dude’s chunky plastic sunglasses signal the relativism of an optimistic ‘60s lefty eclipsed by Reaganite yuppiedom and Gulf War righteousness.  As a detective, the Dude is suitably carefree, relying on hunches and suspicions. Epiphanies are few and far-between, but the Dude seems to make sense of it all in a fragmentary, half-baked in a way not so unlike Bogie, either. The Dude stitches it all together himself, and he has to. The Big Lebowski is proficient in denying any redemptive revelation. The mystery, in a sense, is never solved: there’s no way to make sense of it all. Pynchon comes to mind, again: always the 49^th day, the Vineland dream overrun by highway patrolmen. Lines aren’t drawn in the sand, there’s no shallow paean to Altamont: just perpetual circles of confusion, the unwavering power of history—even in L.A.—and through it all, the Dude abiding always.