Mark Peters, a language columnist for Good and Visual Thesaurus, as well as the blogger behind The Pancake Proverbs, The Rosa Parks of Blogs, and Wordlustitude is our guest blogger this week. In this post, he looks at language and the love of The Big Lebowski.
I don’t do cults.
I never joined a doomsday cult, even for the free tote bag. I tried starting my own cult, based on voodoo and pancakes, but the ranks are thin. Despite my admiration for Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, I never drank enough Tribble-ade to qualify for Trekkie status. I’m just a non-cult-y guy.
But if there’s one cult that could secure my lifetime membership, immortal soul, and adorable firstborn, it would be the following dedicated to The Big Lebowski—the 1998 Coen brothers film, starring Jeff Bridges and John Goodman, that I seem able to watch on any given day, at any particular time, no matter how many previous viewings have taken place that week. The overall weapons-grade awesomeness of this movie has spawned Lebowski Fests, academic books, and plenty of what-have-you, but I love The Big Lebowski mainly because of the language, which is juicy, quotable, and frequently used as a dog whistle to identify other fans.
My mind isn’t limber enough to summarize this brain-humper of a movie, except to say it is, as J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters write in their Film Classics book, “a struggle between the harmless idiots and the harmful idiots of this world”. The harmless folks are led by Jeffrey Lebowski (much better known as “the Dude”) and Walter Sobchak—two bowling enthusiasts and sixties holdovers from opposite ends of the spectrum. The harmful group includes Jeffrey “The Big” Lebowski, a quartet of nihilists, and some non-house-trained, non-rug-respecting goons. No one achieves much of anything, which makes the word Achiever—the Lebowski-lover’s equivalent of Trekkie, Deadhead, or Twihard—all the more amusing.
“Achiever” is mega-prominent in the movie, usually as a contrast to the Dude’s non-achieving ways, as the wall of the older Lebowski has pictures and plaques celebrating The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Business Achiever Award. In a memorable image, the Dude gapes into a mirror with the Time logo and “Man of the Year” emblazoned on top, plus the words, “Are you a Lebowski achiever?” on the side. Later, the plaque-collecting Lebowski speaks of his wife’s kidnappers as “Men who are unable to achieve on a level field of play” and accuses the Dude of failing “…to achieve, even in the modest task that was your charge…” With all this talk of achievement, it’s no wonder the Achievers adopted the name.
Though the words of just about any cult fave will get parroted—TV and movies spread terms like KFC-phobia in a chicken coop—Achievers who ape Lebowski lingo are more in tune with their source material than most. In the film, phrases such as “In the parlance of our times,” “Nothing is fucked,” and “It really tied the room together” (a reference to the Dude’s rug) flit from one character to another. Quotat