Abide with the Dude with these The Big Lebowski must-haves

Jeff Bridges' most famous role sure knows how to roll...

A big Boxwish congrats to Jeff Bridges on his Oscar nomination for musical drama, Crazy Heart. As Bad Blake, the down on his luck country singer, he’s on top form having already nabbed himself a Golden Globe award and positioned himself as the bookies fave for the big one tonight. And after nearly 40 years of top roles, it’s about time Jeff got his hands on one of those gold statues. He’s been a gracious loser at Hollywood’s glitziest circus four times before (many reckoning his best chance came in 1984 with Starman) and now checking in at 60-years-old (!) it could be his time.

And yet we’ve got to admit it’s not our favourite Jeff Bridges role. Nowhere close. That honour goes to Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski in the Coen brothers’ goofy masterpiece, The Big Lebowski. But please don’t call him Jeffrey or Mr Lebowski; you can call him His Dudeness, Duder or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing. And so with Jeff so in the limelight, both thanks to Crazy Heart and the upcoming Tron Legacy (counting down the days), we’re saluting California’s coolest slacker.

Since being introduced to the world in 1998, The Dude has become one of those iconic cinema characters, almost a seamless fit between the actor and the part. Despite being inspired by two friends of the Coens’, Jeff Dowd and Pete Exline, cult filmmakers Joel and Ethan have revealed that they wrote the part with self-confessed marijuana lover, Jeff Bridges in mind. As such, much of the clothes he wears (those grotty, grungy cardies and scruffy lounge/ pyjama pants) were actually his own including the jellie shoes. Yup, Jeff was meant to be the Dude (he works a very similar stoner schtick in last year’s The Men Who Stare At Goats) and we’ve been happily abiding him with him ever since.

After all, there are so many reasons to love this luckless loser. Firstly, anyone looks like a saint compared to his out of control best mate, Walter (John Goodman), between not rolling on the Shabbas and smashing up a Corvette as “that’s what happens when you f**k a stranger in the ass!”, the Vietnam vet is one huge headache. Secondly, he gets manipulated, bullied, conned and robbed (that poor rug) for no good reason, just a case of mistaken identity and with his love of White Russians and bowling – this guy is cool.

So cool in fact that the movie has spawned two festivals; America’s ‘Lebowski Fest’, which, since it began in 2002, has been bringing together Dude lovers to bowl, dress up as their drifter hero and generally chill out in various US cities, and the British-based ‘The Dude Abides’ which, er pretty much does the same (what else would you expect from folks imitating “quite possibly the laziest [man] in Los Angeles County”?).

He was named the seventh greatest movie character ever by Empire magazine readers and has even (gulp) been given the academic treatment with The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, a collection of essays in which proper professors dissect the Dude. But The Dude doesn’t need to be popular or approved of, he’s happy just being the way he is – bowling with Walter, driving around and having “the occasional acid flashback”. And I don’t know about you but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there.