The Big Lebowski and Philosophy

May 9, 2014November 17, 2023 Rilaly1 Comment

Throw the [Damned] Ball

Throw the [damned] Ball is the title of the first chapter of Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman’s collection of philosophical anecdotes: The Dude and The Zen Master. This particular chapter details the deliberations that The Honeymooners character, Ed Norton, would go through when preparing to do things that the character Ralph Kramden would instruct him to do. When Kramden would instruct Norton to sign a document, for example, Norton would flail his arms out a number of times, and go through a number of other, hilarious deliberations in a presumed search for that perfect, inner place he had designed for signing a document that Kramden informed him was important. The joke was that it was just the signing of a document, but that the Norton character believed that it warranted a degree of importance he had a difficult time finding. These deliberations would carry on for an extended amount of time that the Ralph Kramden character found so exhausting that he would end up exploding with a “Just sign the thing!” comment.

Bridges brought this scenario to a bowling coach who was hired to inform the cast of The Big Lebowski on the mechanics of bowling in a manner that would appease most bowling aficionados that happened to see the film. The deliberations that the bowling coach went through –pausing to include the necessary notes on the intricacies involved– carried out in a manner that Bridges found reminiscent of Norton’s deliberations, until Bridges said:

“Anyone ever tell you to just throw the [damn] ball?!”

The bowling coach’s friends found that response hilarious. The bowling coach, being a bowling guy and a philosophy freak, had, at one point in his life, tried to find the perfect harmony between mind and body before throwing the ball down the lane. This search, he confessed, could take as long as five minutes, until his friends shouted: “Just throw the [damn] ball!”

The import of the tale is that some of the times, we can get so locked up in our search for perfection that we end up forgetting to just do whatever it is we’re trying to do. And, it could be added, the repetition of doing whatever it is we’re trying to do can prove to be far more instrumental to learning than thinking about it can.

We all fall prey to trying to perfect what we do by doing something different or something more this time out to rectify, or improve upon, what we did in the past. Our antidote is to do more, less, or less and more. When we write out a resume, we seek more information, but we know that headhunters want less, or more information in a more concise manner. When we write a report for our current employer, we try to stick to the less is more principle, but we often have to add more for clarity. When writing an informal email to a friend, or an internet article, we know we’ll lose them with too much information, but we can’t help adding that extra paragraph of complete nonsense that drags on too long. It’s funny though, interesting and educational. All right, educational is a bit of a stretch, but … what if we, flipped this whole thing around and added a little here and there, and we know we don’t need that exposition, because it’s… “Just throw the [damn] ball?!”

There is this desire, in all of us, to add the perfect cherry atop the pie, or if that particular cherry isn’t perfect enough, we may try adding another cherry, and another cherry, until the pie is so perfect that it now has so many cherries, that it’s a cherry pie, and that’s not what we intended. Plus, all those other cherries have cost the cherry atop the pie its unique, special, and tantalizing quality.

“There is always more information out there,” Bernie Glassman said.

Writers often have to fight this urge to add more, when they’re editing an essay, a short story, or a novel. All original drafts are incomplete in some way, but the question every writer struggles with is the idea of whether that incompleteness is as a result of quantity or quality? Most writers want their pieces to be more: more persuasive, more provocative, and more relatable, but as we all know more is not always more.

More characterization can feel necessary when a fiction writer is attempting to make their character more relatable, and it may be in some cases, but in other cases it can be redundant, counterproductive, and superfluous information that ruins the flow of the material. More is not always more. Some of the times, it’s too much.

This brings us to the fundamental question of when do we reach a point where completion can be considered established? I’ve often found a unique harmony in three. One piece of information, or one example of a pro or con, doesn’t feel like enough to establish a relationship with the reader; two feels incomplete in ways that are difficult to explain, but you know it when you see it; and four feels like it’s too much more. Three, in most cases, has a harmony that rounds a point out. I’m sure if I discussed this predilection with a therapist, they would inform me that most of the fairy tales my mom read me contained the magical power of three. I don’t know if that’s the answer, but I do think there is some form of subconscious power in three.

“We’re all looking for perfection,” Bridges says to conclude the Just throw the [damn] ball chapter, “but perfection is often a past and future tense that we’re not going to achieve in the present.”

Bridges speaks about the difference between reading movie scripts in rehearsal and reading lines before the camera. He says that when he reads a chunk of dialogue in rehearsal, he might walk away thinking that he nailed it. If that happens, he might spend the time between rehearsal, and going before the camera trying to memorize the pitch, the rhythm, and the pauses he used when he nailed it.

“Once that camera clicks on,” he says, “it’s almost impossible to nail-it in the exact same manner you did in rehearsal, because the conditions have all changed, and until you can learn to adapt to the current conditions before you, you’ll never be able to repeat the lines with any proficiency. I nailed it in rehearsal, why can’t I find that same place?

“Because,” he continues, “That place may have never existed, or it may not have existed in the manner you thought it did. A person can go through all of the deliberations of trying to find that exact same, perfect place again, and they can go crazy with the thought that they never will. Some of the times it’s better to just throw the [damn] ball.”

Be the man they want you to be

Bridges talks about a fan detailing for Bridges the idea that The Dude’s characteristics, are nothing more than a manifestation of another of The Big Lebowski’s character’s needs. The fan said that at one point in The Dude’s life (a theoretical point that preceded the time span of The Dude’s life documented in the movie), the Dude became the Dude in all the ways that this Donald character needed a Dude character in his life. The Dude liked those characteristics so much that he may have incorporated them into his personae. The fan’s suggestion was that we’re all becoming different people at various points in our lives, based on interactions, events, and time. Some of the times, we don’t like those characteristics, and we discard them soon after we’ve fulfilled someone else’s short term needs, but at other times they fit us like a glove, and we incorporate them into our spectrum of characteristics.

When a momentous occurrence happens in one’s life, such as becoming a parent, few can move forward without that event affecting their character in some manner. If this momentous moment doesn’t affect a 180 degree change on us, it changes us in a gradual way that an infrequent visitor of our life may recognize, but those around us do not. We may have had parental characteristics in us before, but they were never tapped, until someone (the child) needed them.

After becoming a parent, a good husband, a responsible homeowner, and a quality employee, we might want to revert back to that character that our beer drinking buddies knew on a Saturday night, but in the aftermath of tapping into all those other characteristics, the beer drinking buddy characteristics feel false. You may want to become that fella that all of your drinking buddies knew, at least for one night, but you have changed in ways that make that character irretrievable. You may not know how much effort you’re putting into this, but your drinking buddies pick up on it.

There are also characteristics that we display for the expressed purpose of impressing others. The popular parlance for this is an ‘A’ game. Our ‘A’ game may be something we reserve for our grandmother, prospective employers, or that incredible blonde that walks by our cubicle every day. Some may say that displaying an ‘A’ game, if we reserve it for these temporary moments, is the very definition of phony, but what is phony about it? I had a friend who engaged in lecherous behavior with the hot blonde. She enjoyed it, and they developed a relationship based on that character. He was very different with me, and he was a respectful, young gentleman around his grandmother. We might follow the latter two examples with an ‘of course’ reaction, but anyone who witnessed the exaggerations between the way he acted around the blonde and the grandmother might confuse them with being phony. I know I did, until I realized that he was able to tap into those characteristics for the benefit of all parties involved. His grandmother enjoyed it when he modified his character around her, because she considered it a sign of respect. He enjoyed it too, because he could be a young kid again in her presence, and in some ways, he could be the person he always wanted to be. The blonde obviously didn’t want him to act that way around her. If she did, she would’ve either corrected him or simply walked away. Instead, she engaged in a level of competitive banter that ushered him onward and inward to capitalize on whatever crude characteristics he had.

What if, in the course of this temporary display, we find some nuggets of our personality that appeal to us, and everyone around us, so much that we incorporate them into our spectrum of characteristics in the way the fan suggested the dude did to please Donald.

We’re all changing, in other words, and we’re all affected by conditions, circumstances, and the people we run across, that we all achieve some sort of compilation of reactions to the people around us that informs our personality.

That’s just your opinion

The goal of any writer should be to write a book that causes one to think in ways they would not have if they never picked their book up. If this was the goal of the authors of The Dude and The Zen Master, then I say mission accomplished. One glaring example is the That’s just your opinion section. We hear this often in our culture, when another disagrees with our opinion. My reply has always been, “Of course that’s my opinion. Where do you think I got it?” Glassman’s twist on this trope is that some of the times a person needs to say this to themselves. If that person has failed to the point that they’re devastated by it, it could be said that the characterization of that failure is just one person’s opinion, theirs. Others may see our failures, and they might form an opinion of us based on that failure, but people move on. When the smoke of that opinion clears, there is only one opinion that matters and survives, our opinion of ourselves. That opinion, Bernie Glassman says, is still just an opinion, one person’s opinion. If the subject of that opinion can convince themselves that it’s not a fact that they’re a failure, but an opinion, it might help them move on. While this may sound like a bunch of gobbeldy gook to some of us, if it could be used in a productive manner to lead more people to just throw the [damned] ball again without all of the complications of previous failures involved.

The Epic Battle of Ayn Rand vs. Larry David

March 6, 2014August 19, 2020 RilalyLeave a comment

“Who would win in a fight Godzilla or King Kong?” was a question that was asked by just about every kid I knew growing up. “What about Batman versus Superman, or how about The Six-Million Dollar Man and Big Foot?” With that mindset forever entrenched in my skull, I was intrigued when I learned that one of our society’s most popular satirists would be taking on one of our most popular philosophers.

Larry David’s Clear History is a satirical comedy, not a philosophical treatise, so the movie should be given some artistic license when it attempts to deconstruct, refute, or simply poke fun at one of Ayn Rand’s most famous books The Fountainhead. The question that every viewer should ask themselves is where does that artistic license end, and the requirement of factual refutation begin? As it has often been said, a satirist can be humorous when poking fun at various institutions, but he can be hilarious if he adds an element of truth to his satire. In this vein, Clear History is not hilarious.

Some would say that those who are so bothered by the content of a movie that they can’t enjoy something as simple as a simple comedy without analyzing it to death, need to relax, get out more, or have more relations with the opposite sex. It’s a fair point, but isn’t it also a fair point that if these movie makers are going to attempt to satirically refute one of the most famous books of all-time (Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead) that the material might be more effective if they did so in a more accurate manner? Why even mention the book, much less make it an ongoing theme of your movie, if that wasn’t their goal? If the screenwriters simply wanted to provide light humor, why didn’t they just invent a book, and that book’s writer, for Will Haney character’s inspiration? They could then more easily refute any claims of inaccuracy by those who believe that they didn’t properly represent the book in question.

Even if the writers wanted to avoid the heavy handed task of providing exact refutation, and their work of light humor was only going to trim the edges of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, for the purpose of providing their audience a base from which light humor and sight gags would spring, we should require those satirists to get the subtext of her philosophy correct, for proper, albeit humorous refutation. If that satire’s main character is going to portray an anti-Rand character (Nathan Fromm), shouldn’t we require his adversary (Will Haney) to properly represent the Rand character, if for no other reason than to have a proper adversarial relationship … Even if it’s for no other reason than to have humorous exchanges, or to have a subtext that hints at those philosophical differences?

There are moments in the movie where it appears as though the writers purposely avoided representing the Ayn Rand philosophy accurately, that they don’t understand the greater import of her message, or that they simply wanted to provide their “impossible to grasp” interpretation of it. One of the few direct interpretations of The Fountainhead’s main character, Howard Roark, involves a swear word that characterizes Roark as one of the meanest characters in the history of literature.

Teenagers use this swear word, in this manner, to provide their listeners with an all-encompassing dismissal of the chosen object of their scorn, and that’s all other teens need to follow a fellow teen’s dismissal of their subject. Adults often need more. Adults may allow the speaker to dismiss a person with a swear word, especially for the sake of humor, but they often require more if they are going to join the speaker in their attempts to dismiss a person, or an idea. Even if said adults aren’t willing to join the speaker in the condemnation of a subject, they usually enjoy the blows delivered in an epic battle, but even then, even for the purpose of satirical refutation, most adults prefer to have an element of truth added for added amusement.

When I learned that a mighty satirist would be taking on a mighty philosopher, I thought of all of those speculative epic battles that we talk about in our youth. When I saw my satiric hero had another character in the movie deliver a blow below the belt, characterizing Ayn Rand’s character Howard Roark with a swear word that was supposed to define him as one of the meanest characters in the history of literature, I knew this wouldn’t be a fair fight. Even though I knew that the protagonist’s adversary (Ayn Rand) in this epic battle was no longer alive to counter punch, I knew the fight would be called early.

It strikes me that when we create a satirical piece, we have one shot. We have to combine a substantive take with clever inserts of humor. It’s a juggling act that allows some room for error, as long as the premise is true. Doing otherwise leaves the audience thinking, “Ok, you don’t like Ayn Rand, or the Fountainhead. We got it. Now tell us why we shouldn’t.”

Then, when I realized that this below the belt punch was going to be the best blow in the arsenal of one my favorite satirists, watching the rest of Clear History proved to be as sad, and as depressing, as watching Muhammad Ali battle Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson battle Lennox Lewis at the end of their careers. This isn’t to say that I think Clear History spells the end of Larry David’s career, or that he’s in any way past his prime, but that he had one awful match in which he proved to be out of his weight class.

Broken Bells: After the Disco: A Review

February 2, 2014September 21, 2024 Rilaly1 Comment

Neither of the Broken Bells releases will cause you to question authority, reevaluate your identity, or question the role pop music can have in shaping geopolitics. Neither of the releases takes a nuanced, meteoric direction in music from which there is no going back. For a path down those roads, one may want to consider purchasing one of Bryan Burton’s (AKA Danger Mouse) other, more complex projects, or, to a lesser extent, one of James Mercer’s albums with The Shins. Neither Broken Bells albums will make it to a Music Appreciation course in a university, nor will they remind one of the simplistic brilliance found on any of the albums of The Beatles, but that isn’t what Broken Bells is about. They’re more about a study in the simplistic brilliance of pop music.

If we could all conquer the simplistic brilliance of pop music, we would. Instead, George, John, and Paul… and sometimes Ringo, are held up as superhuman beings that once graced our planet with their combined talents. The simplistic brilliance they displayed on their early albums, taught the world that while we all know that brilliance can be defined by doing something more, it can also be achieved by dialing it back a couple notches to those simple artistic statements, that can achieve something tectonic for the world to ooh and awe at for generations to come.

As a person that is just north of the casual listener, and not quite a Beatlemaniac, I have to imagine that the members of The Beatles wanted to add something more to the songs on their early albums. I have to imagine that their desire to write the magnum opus every time out was only contained by their desire to conquer the world with music, and that each song contained their brilliance, as often as it contained their brilliance. I have to imagine that there was some interplay between the members, and producer George Martin, that encouraged each member to push the boundaries of their era’s definition of pop music, but that those voices that called for some restraint were just as prominent.

The early Beatles albums, in particular, were composed of simplistic pop tunes that would prove to be so catchy that they could not be ignored. It would lead a generation of young minds to think, “I can do that.” Their influence became so profound, that someone once said that “Not everyone saw The Beatles performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but most of those that did —that were of a certain, influential age group— started a band.”

John Lennon, in particular, was known to have an unquenchable desire to write more complex, more experimental, message music. He apparently, wanted personal music that delved into his personal complexities, and he later came to despise a number of the more simplistic pop songs that he, and Paul, wrote to conquer the world.

Creating pop music, it could be said, can be the equivalent of telling a joke, in that some people prefer their jokes to be cute, simple and funny. The old joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?” has a myriad of answers that say as much about the diversity of the base of that joke as it does the diversity of the joke tellers. Some of the punch lines, to this age old joke, are cute and simple. Those punch lines may make us smile but little more, but there is a certain satisfaction that cute joke tellers gain by making us smile. Others may prefer a clever twist on that age old joke, and they may repeat it to get us all giggling, and sharing it on Facebook. These people gain a certain satisfaction from their friends telling other friends that they heard it from them first. “Where did you hear that?” “I saw it on Jenny’s Facebook page.” Even though that clever twist of a punch line wasn’t ours, or we didn’t think of it, we own that joke among those people that heard it from us first. Others go for hilarious punch lines. These punch lines may reference prominent politicians, a reference to some popular starlet’s drug problems, or a reference to an historical figure. Hilarious, and poignant jokes of this type are not going to be received well by all, but the hilarious joke teller knows this is the price to pay for telling a complex and hilarious joke. It may provide some confusion, and it may be so far off the nose that those without a complex understanding of the issue at the heart of the punch line just don’t understand why it’s supposed to be funny, but to the joke teller this is worth it to avoid the universality of the cute and funny punch lines that evoke grins.

Why some people go for the hilarious, as opposed to the cute and silly, may have something to do with their psychological complexity, that they’ve just heard so many jokes, for so many years, that they have to go beyond simplicity and silliness to get to some greater, and more complex definition of their identity? Or, it may have something to do with the fact that they don’t have the talent to execute simplicity in the manner some do, so they go beyond the norm to prove that they are more complex than those simple minded folks to avoid anyone asking the question if they have the basic talent to execute simplicity.

Bryan Burton, aka Danger Mouse, and James Mercer, of the Shins, have proven throughout their careers that they can produce some of the more difficult, complex, and challenging music available on the market. With these bona fides behind them, their current music challenges the notion that artistic brilliance doesn’t always have to be defined by doing something more, but in the restraint and simplicity. While very few would compare either Broken Bells albums with any of The Beatles albums, the first Broken Bells album was a monument to the simplicity of pop music, a statement against the definition for more, bigger and better complexity, and the artistic thirst for the grand artistic statement that is complex and grand. Their second album, After the Disco is not nearly as earth shattering as the first, self-titled album Broken Bells album was, and it’s not as great as Bryan Burton’s album with Daniel Luppi simply called Rome, but it does continue with the theme that artistic brilliance can be pronounced through simplicity and restraint.

The first, self-titled album of Broken Bells asks the artistic equivalent of the age old joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?” with the simplistic, artistic answer: “To get to the other side”. Some of us prefer the complexity, and we love to listen to those albums that challenge us to twenty to thirty rotations before we can fully grasp its artistic intentions, but even we admit that there’s nothing better than a brilliantly executed pop album that is short, and sweet, and composed with restraint in mind. Broken Bells and After the Disco may never cause you to slap a knee with appreciation, but their simplicity will definitely stick in your head in the manner most brilliantly composed simplicity does.