Its well-documented that Im an Anglophile. And of course I enjoy PG Wodehouse and the Jeeves and Wooster stories; I was rewatching some of the wonderful Fry/Laurie adaptation this weekend and a thought hit me. Like the Dude, Bertie is a kindhearted chap without much personal ambition. (Okay, so Berties better-off financially, but its worth noting that an early draft of the TBL script revealed that the Dude was living off family money.) Berties path, if not goal, in every story is to get things back to how they were at the beginning, at least for himself. Like the Dude, Bertie doesnt so much cause his own problems as have them visited upon him by friends and by random encounters. Although we only see him with one woman, its enough to tell us that, like Bertie, he goes in for the kind of girl whos all wrong for him. Bertie is too kind to his friends, which gets him in trouble; the Dude is perhaps too tolerant of Walters whims for his own good. (Oh, and lest we forget: At the beginning, the Dude has an unattractive item that hes inordinately fond of. By the end, its gone.) There is something in Wodehouse that calls, no, cries out for the preservation of that idle state in this Edwardian England that may well have never existed. Similarly, The Big Lebowski seems to cast a vote for the Dudes improbable lifestyle. Evelyn Waugh said: Mr. Wodehouses idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in. Well, go to a Lebowski Fest and youll see proof of something kind of like that… The difference, of course, is that the Dude has no Jeeves to get him out of his scrapes. That would have made a far simpler movie…
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 16:32:41 +0000
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