WTF: 'The Big Lebowski' vs. 'Ready Player One'

Twenty years ago, the Coen Brothers now-classic 'The Big Lebowski" flick tanked at the box office.

Then, in the years that followed, something funny happened: that same movie became, in the words of Rolling Stone, “the most worshipped comedy of its generation.”

Many people, especially Yuppies, just didn’t quite get it when the Dude first walked onto our screens, writing a check for $0.69 cents for a quart of "Half & Half" at the Supermarket. It went against everything we as conspicuous consumers stood for. So why the dramatic shift in popularity? Like so many geniuses, the Dude was simply ahead of his time.

According to Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene, the Dude represents everything that we long for in the post-Y2K world. "Early in Lebowski, the narrator (a cowboy named the Stranger, played by Sam Elliott) intones, “Sometimes there’s a man, who, well, he’s the man for his time ‘n place.” The odd truth is this man — the Dude — may have been a decade ahead of his time.

Today, as technology increasingly handcuffs us to schedules and appointments — in the time it takes you to read this, you’ve missed three e-mails — there’s something comforting about a fortysomething character who will blow an evening lying in the bathtub, getting high and listening to an audiotape of whale songs.

He’s not a 21st-century man… The Dude doesn’t care about a job, a salary, a 401(k), and definitely not an iPhone. The Dude just is, and he’s happy."

Now, cut to the latest non-action hero, a future modern-day dude, who in 'Ready Player One' spends his time playing video games that are nostalgic in the year 2045. According to Wikipedia, "the world has been gripped by an energy crisis from the depletion of fossil fuels and the consequences of global warming, and overpopulation, causing widespread social problems and economic stagnation. To escape the decline their world is facing, people turn to the OASIS, a virtual reality simulator accessible by players using visors and haptic technology such as gloves."

Both of these characters are dealing with escapism from their era and time on Earth. According to the NYTimes, one writer called the book in which the film was based on a “nerdgasm” of a novel — [which] was subjected to an unusual degree of internet pre-hate. That was only to be expected. Spielberg ...[is] likely to stir up a hornet’s nest of defensiveness, disdain and indignant “actually”-ing as the subject of this movie, which is video games.

My take?

Like, while "getting stoned" was always supposed to be about a temporary break from reality, you could say the same thing about video games, a temporary break from the future's reality. Except in both cases, the protagonist's escapism in both films became their reality; their Raison d'etre.

Similar to the initial Slacker-backlash that the Coen Brothers originally faceed, Mr. Spielberg's dystopian view of the world will likewise be accused of taking games and their players too seriously and not seriously enough, of pandering and mocking, of just not getting it and not being able to see beyond it — “it” being the voracious protoplasm that has, over the past three or four decades, swallowed up most of our cultural discourse. Whatever you call it — the revenge of the nerds, the franchising of the universe, the collapse of civilization — it’s a force that is at once emancipatory and authoritarian, innocent and pathological, delightful and corrosive.

The films are opposite in that Lebowski's tale was about looking back at a guy who still uses a "roach clip" and is staged a half-decade earlier, as Jeff Bridges's excellently plays the now anti-hero "Hero Status" LA-based slacker, as compared to the actor Tye Sheridan, who plays Wade Watts, 27 years from now in 2045, a young man who lives in “the stacks,” a vertical pile of trailers where the poorer residents of Columbus, Ohio (Oklahoma City in the book), cling to hope, dignity and their VR gloves.

What is Watts's legacy going to be? It's too early to tell IMHO. 

The same can’t be said by an all-star line-up of critics who are also major gamers, as they ask the question, or brilliantly defend and/or destroy 'Ready Player One' in the latest issue of Slate Podcast, including "Who is this movie for—gamers who are the age of its heroes or older audiences who will appreciate the ’80s pop culture references? 

Here's what we know. Both are indictments to post-modern America, leading up to Lebowski's Y2K (remember that scare) to Ready Player One's view of society in a post "“bandwidth riots” era, whatever the hell that was... which one may need a spleef to conceptualize... in this year of 2018.

Since these films were released just days apart from each other, with 20 years in between them (Lebowski on March 6, 1998 and Ready Player released on March 11, 2018), they both have shock-value among their theater-viewed audiences and are bookends of how we as a society, still "don't" understand - in real time - the counter-culture heroes of our time(s).

However, the positive messages in both is that we are doomed, so enjoy the thrill of the ride!