air max 95 shoes The Big Lebowski and Film Noir Fi

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The Sleazeball: Jackie Treehorn/Arthur Gwynn Geiger
The Coen brothers’ 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski is populated by characters from film noir, especially Howard Hawks’s 1946 film The Big Sleep (based on the book by Raymond Chandler). The movie’s humour lies in the way the Coens have updated each cliché for an absurd, postmodernist world.
In The Big Sleep Marlowe visits the mansion of his client, General Sternwood, who, like Mr. Lebowski, is a rich older man confined to a wheelchair. Sternwood isn’t hiring Marlowe as a fall guy the way Lebowski is The Dude, but another Humphrey Bogart character, Sam Spade in 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, falls victim to a similar ploy. Sternwood is dignified and a little menacing; without his money, his authority, or his wheelchair, Mr. Lebowski is merely pathetic.
The Big Sleep’s plot is set in motion by a pornographer named Geiger [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], a shadowy figure we never meet. In contrast, Treehorn is an urbane man in a linen suit who welcomes The Dude expansively to his Malibu estate. There Treehorn serves The Dude a drugged White Russian — another classic noir device: in The Maltese Falcon Spade is slipped a “mickey” by one of the bad guys so they can search his apartment.
The Nymphomaniac: Bunny Lebowski/Carmen Sternwood
The Detective: The Dude/Philip Marlowe
The Femme Fatale: Maude Lebowski/Vivian Rutledge
Carmen is Sternwood’s daughter, not his wife, but like Bunny she’s a wayward nymphomaniac who propositions the hero on their first meeting — as Marlowe puts it, “she tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up”. In true private-eye fashion, Marlowe is wary of Carmen’s feminine wiles. Post–sexual revolution, The Dude shows no such compunctions when Bunny offers him a blow job for $1000.
Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, is the hero of The Big Sleep. As a private detective, he occupies a tenuous place on the fringes of society, not unlike the rent-shirking Dude. DaFino makes the parallel explicit when he mistakenly calls The Dude a “brother shamus”, shamus being slang for detective; Marlowe uses the same word to describe himself in The Big Sleep’s opening scene. The Dude, oblivious to his role, thinks DaFino means “Irish monk”.
Read on
The Big Sleep, A Review
Film Review
The Millionaire: Mr. Lebowski/General Sternwood
Sternwood’s oldest daughter [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Vivian (played by Lauren Bacall), is The Big Sleep’s love interest and femme fatale: seductive but dangerous [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and Marlowe’s cool equal when it comes to trading quips and sexual innuendo. Maude Lebowski has Vivian’s patrician arrogance, but she has traded her innuendo for feminist theory. And while Vivian eventually comes to rely on Marlowe to protect her, Maude has no need for The Dude whatsoever, at least once she’s got his sperm.