The Big Lebowski

My favorite part of this week was Sunday evening, when I was watching the film The Big Lebowski and thinking about Bertolt Brecht, a famous playwright we learned about last year in STAC. Brecht liked to make allusions to popular people or things, and I had a lot of fun seeing how I'd progressed and expanded my library as I watched the movie. Last year when I watched the clips from the film, I was entirely lost; Engaged and amused, but totally ignorant of the layers and layers of humor laid into the script.

In one scene, The Dude is in his bathtub smoking a joint using one of those long clippy thingies that hold them up to your mouths. We see a shot of his feet, resting on the other end of the tub and poking out of the water. Coincidentally, on Saturday night I watched another film that was called Frida, which is a biographical piece on the amazing surreal painter Frida Kahlo. I don't know if I'd have recognized the allusion to a painting of Kahlo's called What the Water Gave Me. In another selfportrait she also had one of those long clippy thingies, so there's another allusion to her. As soon as I recognized it, I felt a thousand times more intellectual. It was an incredible feeling of being right there with the Coen brothers, and seeing exactly what they were thinking.






In another scene, while The Dude is (I think) tripping on acid, a strange dance goes on in his mind with these operaish-clad women, in which they wear ridiculous pinhats and perform a series of kaleidoscopic geometric patterns with their bodies, like the choreographer Busby Berkeley, who we've recently learned about in STAC ART.

In short, expand your library. Expand, expand, expand. I'm only now starting to appreciate just how much of a difference it will make for absolutely everything