The Dude Abides

While doing our reading for the week about Neopaganism and New Age philosophies, I was struck by how much of it I could relate to. I’m from Northern California, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area, and, just to get some extra street cred, I live a few blocks away from the Haight Ashbury. Growing up in this area, I had no idea how steeped I was in New Age ideas/philosophies and in the “Jesus Freaks” concept. Reading both sections of the texts felt like I was reading a training manual given to every adult and authority figure I’ve ever dealt with in this part of the country. 

Specifically though, I wanted to join together two sections of the reading that seem both complimentary and yet very exclusive to one another: The Buddhist and Eastern religious influence on popular culture, and the Jesus Freaks reinterpretation of the Bible. To put more of an interesting spin on it, I’ll relate a good chunk of it to one of my favorite movies, The Big Lebowski.

From highsnobiety.com

The Big Lebowksi is a hard to movie to analyze, but one of the consistent themes explored throughout the film is the portrayal of “The Dude.” He’s a burn-out, a hippie, a “slacker” if we were to use 90s terminology, but I couldn’t help but compare him to the Jesus Freaks in the Haight Ashbury and other hippie centers throughout America during the counterculture revolution. The Dude lives and dresses simply, has little money and seems to have little interest in sexual encounters (many times throughout the movie he responds to sexual advances with a disinterested observation about his surroundings), and much of his speech is influenced by the world around him. For intents and purposes, it seems as if The Dude is living a fairly ascetic Christian-style life, and especially with the “hip” ways the Jesus Freaks seemed to attract people with, The Dude seems to be their stereotypical "spiritual man in Christ." However, his day to day philosophy seems to be influenced by Buddhism and Taoism, keeping an even demeanor throughout much of the film’s “interesting” exploits. In the movie, the little backstory we get on The Dude is that he was a college revolutionary and helped write and form various radical groups; otherwise, he is a blank slate for the audience to put their perceptions upon.

Compare this with the treatment that Hunter S. Thompson gives himself and his friend in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In that book, he seems to mourn the passing of this counterculture's momentum, which he describes as a “great wave” that ultimately failed, a momentum that you could pinpoint where it finally had  its "high-water mark, where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” As a quick aside, it’s a wonderfully beautiful book that I believe is overshadowed by people’s focus on its drug use, ignoring the whys of the drug use and what it means to that group of people locked in that mindset. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson is in the thick of the dying of the counterculture movement, and he rarely ever explicitly mentions the various religious philosophies of the time, but he does remark often about this “vibration” and “wave” that seems to have infused the culture with some New Age sounding rhetoric.

Misunderstood... from Fanpop.com

Compared with The Big Lebowski, there is quite a time difference with the approach to The Dude’s character and with it, more time to reflect upon which parts of that movement’s influences and effects seemed to have lasted in the modern world. The Dude is a perfect representation of that era’s philosophy, and it is a philosophy that I felt, quite surprisingly, at home with and intrigued me to academically study it further.