Tonight the Brattle continues its Sunshine Noir series, a series designed to find the commonality between the noir standards (rain and shadows and New York), and the bright sunshine of L.A. which, contrary to popular opinion, actually occupies many classic noir films (e.g. Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Sleep). For these films, the Brattle has chosen (among others) Inherent Vice, The Big Lebowski, and The Long Goodbye, all movies that contain, as Joel Coen describes The Big Lebowski (and perhaps the genre as a whole,) “hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.” In a world of larger than life, eccentric characters that could only exist in the dreamy, drug-and-fame-induced haze of Lalaland Los Angeles, these films all share a mutual thread of seventies stoner serenity, a world of atomized individuals adrift in their own madness and id, abusing narcissism in a place where fuzzy-headed dreaminess is rewarded (or at least tolerated) in a way unlike anywhere else on Earth. The seventies, or seventies emulating, laconic style of these long, meandering, strung-out slouching movies, in my opinion, might even better serve the noir genre and its improvised forms than the original tobacco and alcohol edged movies that inspired them. If you want to get into an altered state of mind and slip from the forties, to the seventies, to the nineties, to today, and laugh at the nihilistic meaningless of it all, you could do much worse than going to these screenings. Of course, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

–Carmen Prince

The Big Lebowski
1998
dir. Joel & Ethan Coen
117 min.

Part of the ongoing series: Sunshine Noir
Double feature with Inherent Vice