The Big Lebowski

Since its release nearly ten years ago, "The Big Lebowski "has become a cult classic with a worldwide following. One of the high-water marks of 1990s genre recycling and pastiche, "The Big Lebowski "is littered with playful and subversive references to film history and jokes that become funnier with repetition. Yet underneath the film's breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed characters is a surprisingly humane account of what fools we mortals be. In this study, "The Big Lebowski "is set into the context of 1990s Hollywood cinema, anatomized for its witty relationship with the classics it satirizes, and discussed in terms of its key theme: the hopeless flailing of ridiculously unmanly men in the world of discombobulated, mixed-up, or put-on identities that is Los Angeles.