Mapping The Dude’s L.A. in The Big Lebowski

 “He lives in North Hollywood on Radford, near the In-N-Out Burger,” Walter (John Goodman) tells The Dude (Jeff Bridges). The three central characters of The Big Lebowski are watching a pantomime performance by The Dude’s landlord and are preparing to travel to the San Fernando Valley to brace juvenile delinquent Larry Sellers (Jesse Flanagan), who is believed to have stolen The Dude’s 1973 Ford Torino and a briefcase filled with $1 million in ransom money. “The In-N-Out Burger is on Camrose,” the Dude responds. “Near the In-N-Out Burger,” Walter corrects the Dude. The North Hollywood In-N-Out Burger, at the time of this writing, is actually on Lankershim Boulevard, such as it was in 1991 when the film takes place. Additionally, the Coen Brothers used a home near Culver City as the Sellers’ residence (5998 Pickford Street). As The Dude, Donny (Steve Buscemi), and Walter arrive at the Sellers’ home, discovering that Larry may or may not have purchased a red corvette with the ransom money, their arrival is shown through a crane shot that reveals no distinguishing features of a North Hollywood neighborhood, nor any commanding views of the general area. The viewer familiar with L.A. geography is provided with no indication that Coens are faithfully representing the city. At first glance, the L.A. of the film is just another anywhere space, much as it is in countless other L.A. films. Still, the film, according to J.N. Tyree and Ben Walters, is “unusually naturalistic in terms of its geography, offering up neighborhoods and locations rarely showcased by the industry that practices on their doorstep.”[1] While not literalist in its L.A. geography, The Big Lebowski engages with the cultural legacy of Los Angeles ecologies in a way that brings into relief their social and political assemblage.

Arguing that film is “embodied psycho-geometry” that constantly reinvents space, Giuliana Bruno observes that movement in film has been, since its inception, linked to street walking and modern architecture, fueling an “electric chemistry” between cities and motion picture.[2]  Bruno argues for films being read as virtual worlds, a quality derived from pre-cinema visual culture forms, such as painted panorama spectacles. Adding to this, Tom Conley argues that the way that a film “maps a city” through its formal elements results in a “globalizing of the city,” a location simultaneously cast as being apart from other places and the same as other places.[3] The background of a film, according to Conley, is “less immobile than what the narrative suggests,” and life teams outside the edges of the frame.[4] The Big Lebowski continues Los Angeles cinema’s long tradition of what both Bruno and Conley describe as cartographic cinema: a term describing how a film’s formal elements map out a physical terrain in the imagination of the spectator. L.A. films set their physical spectacles in spaces that are “comprised constantly of moving centers,” and their visuals and narrative strategies “locate and pattern the imagination” of a spectator who mentally maps out the cinematic landscape.[5] Slapstick comedies of the 1910s and 1920s provide exceptional examples of this, as these films set their physical spectacles in spaces that were familiar to audiences through mass-marketed two-dimensional images. By the 1940s and 1950s, film noir set in Los Angeles provided exceptional case studies of cartographic cinema, as the city’s automobile culture and sprawling layout often played a significant role in these stories. As an L.A. noir-comedy, The Big Lebowski refashions Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe character into Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, who takes the viewer on a stoned odyssey through L.A.’s varied environments in a “rust-colored” vehicle. This article will explore the ways that The Big Lebowski performs its own cinematic cartography, revealing patterns of L.A. life through architectural critic Reyner Banham’s “four ecologies of L.A.”: 1) the foothills, 2) the flatlands, 3) the beaches, and 4) autotopia, the freeway system that entangles the L.A. landscape like concrete ribbons.

In his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Banham identifies four L.A. environments that are essential to reading the city and surrounding region. The first ecology is the “surfburbia” (or “the beaches”), cities along the edge of the Pacific Ocean stretching from Malibu in the north to the port of Long Beach in the south. The beaches, according to Banham, “are what other metropolises should envy in Los Angeles, more than any other aspect of the city,” and that “the culture of the beach is in many ways a symbolic rejection of the values of the consumer society.”[6] The second are the foothills, residential neighborhoods built into the metropolitan area’s varied hillside territories, notably the Hollywood Hills, the Santa Monica Mountains, Verdugo Hills, and San Gabriel Mountains. These are affluent corners of Los Angeles characterized not only by a mingling of architectural styles but also by “an overwhelming sense of déjà vu [that] mingles with” a familiarity of these places from motion pictures and popular culture.[7] The third ecology is the flatlands (or the “Plains of Id”), which is, for Banham, the world’s image of Los Angeles: an “endless plain endlessly griddled with endless streets, peppered endlessly with ticky tacky houses clustered in indistinguishable neighborhoods, slashed across by endless freeways that have destroyed any community spirit that may have existed, and so on…endlessly.”[8] Lastly, the fourth ecology is autotopia, the freeway system and other transportation routes that have historically defined much of the city’s character. This ecology, according to Banham, is more than just simply a place – it is also a “state of mind” where the “automobile as a work of art is almost as specific to the Los Angeles freeways as the surfboard to the Los Angeles beaches.”[9] Banham’s ecologies provide a useful framework for reading Los Angeles-set films and, through them, retrieving layers of L.A. cultural history like teasing to the surface the whitewashed pages of a medieval palimpsest. Understanding how films cinematically render these ecologies is key to for moving Los Angeles filmed space from their being an anywhere space, a quality for which Los Angeles films have long been known for, and repositioning these places as real, with clearly defined pasts, presents, and futures.

The Big Lebowski exists somewhere in between a real Los Angeles and a Los Angeles-as-anywhere-space: specific places are mentioned (Malibu, North Hollywood, Hollywood, Van Nuys, Pasadena, the 405 freeway, and Leo Carrillo Beach) but very few of the filming locations correspond with the location they depict. There are no major landmarks (Griffith Park, the Downtown L.A. skyline, the Hollywood sign, the Santa Monica Pier, Watts Tower, etc.), and panoramic vistas are shown only during the opening scene and the “flying carpet dream scene,” with no visual cues as to where the viewer is positioned geographically. Yet, each of Banham’s ecologies are represented in The Big Lebowski in a way that reveals each to be more than just a physical space. First, I will look at how Los Angeles’s enduring status as a city-at-the-edge-of-the-frontier sets the stage for how Banham’s ecologies will be treated in the film. Next, I will explore the film’s treatment of each of the four ecologies with respect to how the film performs its own unique form of cinematic cartography of these environments, starting with the foothills, then progressing to the flatlands, the beaches, and finally autotopia. This article will conclude with the absence of Downtown Los Angeles in the film, a common filming location of other popular movies largely because of how it cinematically resembles other cities.

“Lonely but free I’ll be found, drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds”

“Way out west there was this fella, a fella I want to tell you about. A fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski,” so begins The Stranger (the film’s narrator portrayed by iconic Western star Sam Elliot). Accompanying this opening dialogue, the camera moves the viewer through the chaparral brush to a panoramic vista of the city at night, an image of Los Angeles celebrated throughout cinema. Our starting point is Pearblossom in Antelope Valley, in the desert north of Los Angeles, and although the view of the city is actually an optically added shot of Simi Valley, the image registers as L.A. in the mind of the viewer due to the way that Los Angeles’s status as city-of-night-lights configures into a broader cultural image of the city, or what Norman Klein describes as “social imaginary”: “a collective memory of an event or place…built [in the imagination]” through cultural forms, “mental cameos” that await us whenever we hear certain words or phrases.[10] From here, a tumble weed takes the viewer through the empty streets of L.A., undisturbed by pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and out onto the beach near Santa Monica. From the outset, the viewer is informed that the film will be cinematically remapping L.A. and acknowledging the city’s edge-of-the-frontier status.

The West was no longer “wild” by the dawn of the twentieth century. In the movies, however, the Wild West continued through Los Angeles, a city that cinema depicted as the “last manifestation of the Western movement” and the “end of the frontier.”[11] In Los Angeles, the concepts of “wild” and “urban” are viewed as “variable qualities and processes,” the metropolitan area “now bordered primarily by mountains and desert rather than farmland” with the longest “wild edge” of any major non-tropical city. In cities like Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, the growth of the “urban” has traditionally been seen to decrease the “wild,” whereas the growth of L.A. as an urban space has paradoxically increased the wildness of the region.[12] Starting with the hallmarks of the western genre, The Big Lebowski immediately positions Los Angeles as the place where the Wild West dissolves into a space of “material reality” and folklore.[13] This opening also recalls Tina Olson Lent’s observation that the western and L.A. noir fiction emerged at a time when Los Angeles was a relatively new city situated on the edge of what had previously been viewed as the American frontier, symbolizing the American promise in 1920 and its failure during the Great Depression of the 1930s.[14] As the tumbleweed maps Los Angeles at ground level, the Coen Brothers acknowledge this connection between the western and L.A. noir’s reaction against prevailing optimism (or in the case of this film, the optimism of the emerging post-Cold War world of 1991). Later, themes of migration and rugged masculinity are played for ridicule in The Big Lebowski, and even wildlife as a plot device of nature vs civilization is played for laughs (“Also, let’s not forget…that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic…that ain’t legal either.”). The Big Lebowski, as Keith Phipps notes, “erases any distance between the free-ranging movie cowboy hero of old and The Dude’s own late twentieth century brand of layabout free spiritedness.”[15]

The time frame of the film is crucial through this framework: “the early 90s, just about the time of our conflict with Sad’m and the Eye-raqis.” This was a decade, according to J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters, where “popular culture became even more knowing and even more infantile,” and The Big Lebowski capitalizes on this aspect of the 90s in performing its cinematic remapping of Los Angeles; the city is not only remapped in terms of space but time as well. As the film pushes forward from its frontier opening and into Banham’s L.A. ecologies, this moment in history makes the film’s cinematic retrieval of both the real, physical Los Angeles and the imagined Los Angeles more pronounced. The Big Lebowski points towards the 1990s as a time when L.A. was self-consciously aware of its “continued reconstruction of the city as a movie set” and the shadows of cinematic L.A. that are constantly teased to the surface in the European villa style mansions and mid-century modern homes of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and the Hollywood Hills. [16]  Here, I turn to the foothills ecology to explore how The Big Lebowski places the viewer in dialogue with Edward Soja and Henry Lefebvre’s concept of the city as a “third-space”: a physical location where real (first space) and imagined (second space) narratives overlap…and disrupt binary and linear historical understandings of [a] place and its people.”[17]

“It’s quite a pad you’ve got here, man.”

Banham observes that the elevation of residential Los Angeles corresponds to “the distribution of average incomes,” carving both “financial and topographical contours” into the city.[18] The foothill ecology is about “the fat life…well known around the world…of Hollywood’s classic years.”[19] In The Big Lebowski, the foothills are represented through two distinct architectural forms that denote L.A. power: the historical revival mansion (in this instance, a Tudor Revival) and the mid-century modern. Starting with the Lebowski mansion, the Coens used two separate locations, one for interiors and one for exteriors (neither in Pasadena, the location identified in the film). The exterior (10231 Charing Cross, Holmby Hills, near UCLA and across from the Playboy Mansion) is an example of 1920s Los Angeles architecture where “fantasy lords over function” in the form of “symbolic packaging.”[20] The interior, the Greystone Mansion (905 Loma Vista Drive), featured in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), uses baroque interiors that recall moments from Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) and Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). The scene in front of the fireplace as the ransom note is read also frames the millionaire Lebowski (David Huddleston) as a character akin to Howard Hughes or General Sternwood from The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), also bound to a wheelchair with a plaid blanket draped over his lower half. Both filming locations draw on a familiarity with noir conventions and, broadly speaking, other L.A. films to map the foothills as the historic province of the turn-of-the-century power brokers.

Identifying a Tudor mansion as a Pasadena location suggests a connection between the millionaire Lebowski and what Mike Davis describes as the booster class who sold California as an American Eden through a myth-making industry from the 1890s to through the 1920s.[21] Largely operating out of the Pasadena area, these promoters of California life (or the “Arroyo Set”, named after the Arroyo Seco dry riverbed that runs through Pasadena) constructed a “comprehensive fiction of Southern California” through popular magazines, poetry, painting, and stage plays.[22] Los Angeles was a city built through this industry of visualization spearheaded by the Arroyo Set, and by 1915, Los Angeles was the most populous city on the West Coast, up from 187th largest nation-wide in 1880.[23] Stereoscopic photo albums from companies like HT Payne or Griffith & Griffith, with titles such as Semi-Tropical California (1876) and Southern California Scenery (1880), were popular items for middle-class parlor rooms on the East Coast throughout the 1880s, visual mapping an emerging city at ground level. Health tourism was stimulated through magazines such as Land of Sunshine (1894 – 1902) and Out West (1902 – 1923), which regularly featured photographs and sketch illustrations made in partnership with the Southern Pacific Railroad. An impressionist painting movement took hold in Southern California between roughly 1890 and 1920 – breathing new life into a form that was fading from Europe and popularizing a Southern California look-and-feel. By 1917, motion picture superseded other visuals forms as the chief booster of Southern California life, and by the 1920s, the eclectic architecture by which Los Angeles was known for internationally was modeled largely on motion picture production design and marketed using an increasingly wide-spread familiarity with cinema’s visual language.[24]

“One of the glories of Los Angeles is its modernist residential architecture,” notes Thom Andersen in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004), “but Hollywood movies have almost systematically denigrated this heritage by casting many of these houses as the residences of movie villains.”[25] John Lautner, a protegee of Frank Lloyd Wright and the architect that “Hollywood most loves to hate,” is represented in The Big Lebowski through Jackie Treehorn’s mansion (10104 Angelo Drive – The Sheats-Goldstein residence). Originally built for Helen and Paul Sheats in 1963, the home fell into disrepair until later purchased by businessman James Goldstein and restored under Lautner’s supervision. Today, the residence has been known to open its doors for the annual Lebowski fest.[26] As with the Lebowski mansion, Treehorn’s home is identified as a different location, the affluent beach city of Malibu (again, Beverly Crest provides the shooting location), and yet it nevertheless uses an audience familiarity with L.A. modernism to remap L.A. in the mind of the spectator. As part of a broader Southern California visual culture, modern architecture had a paradoxical relationship with L.A. power elites. The style embraces a call for natural living with its attempts to blend seamlessly built environments and nature. Added to this, “sunshine modernism” places an emphasis on spatial relations in a region that was marketed to the rest of the country as location of vastness, where the lines between nature and domesticity were often porous. The Lautner House exemplifies Reyner Banham’s observation that modernism flourished in Los Angeles by taking advantage of the fact that there is little distinction between indoor and outdoor living, with a fireplace and pool in the same space to reinforce this idea. Modern architecture also sought to assert itself in Southern California in stark contrast to period revival architecture, with modernists seeing their task as popularizing a radically different philosophy of living. Modernism’s iconography was initially associated with progressivism, embracing values that may have been out of step with the booster class. The goal for Lautner, Neutra, Koenig, and other modernists was to move away from “evocations of the past” and towards Le Corbusier’s notions of a “non-elitist art,” all the more relevant to the Southern California context when Los Angeles was sold as a city that “departs from civilized living.”[27] Filled with contradictions, the modern style on film is, to paraphrase Jackie Treehorn, “the way of the future.” It is where the contradictions of the 1990s, as the film suggests, would become more apparent.

“Let’s go bowling.”

Banham and scholars like Vincent Brook have used the palimpsest as the master metaphor for the cover-up and the “bleeding through” of Los Angeles history. Literally from the Greek and Latin meaning “scraped clean and used again,” palimpsests were ancient and medieval manuscripts designed to be written on, erased (washed over in white paint), and written over again.[28] Scholarship on Los Angeles on film can be seen as performing a recovery of these palimpsest layers, rewriting the city from an anywhere space (or an “non-space”) to a recontextualized space belonging to both its visible and marginalized people. In The Big Lebowski, the flatlands are shown as the prime ecology of this palimpsestlayering and re-repurposing of the city’s history, owning largely to their vast nature and the way neighborhoods blend seamlessly into other neighborhoods. For Banham, the flatlands are where the “crudest urban lusts” and most “fundamental aspirations are created, manipulated, and, with luck, satisfied.”[29] It is on these “plains of id” that he and the Coens find the true heartland of Los Angeles, its sheer size daunting and so distinctly Angeleno. Most of The Big Lebowski’s locations are in the flatlands: Larry Sellers’ house (Culver City doubling for North Hollywood), Johnnie’s Coffee Shop at 6101 Wilshire Blvd (“forget about the fucking toe!”), North Hollywood auto circus (“Hey man, do you have any, like, promising leads?”), the corner of Jefferson Blvd and Duquesne Ave in Culver City (The Dude ejected from a taxi for hating The Eagles), Ralphs (1745 Garfield Ave in South Pasadena), the dumpster where The Dude crashes his car (6319 La Miranda Ave in Hollywood), and the Hollywood neighborhood where Jesus Quintana (John Turturro) does his post-Chino walk-of-shame (shot in East Hollywood, east of the 101 freeway near Little Armenia). For this ecology, however, I will be focusing on the Bowling Alley, which the Coen Brothers use as a micro embodiment of L.A. at large. 

The location of the bowling alley is never actually identified in the film. Hollywood Star Lanes was built in 1960 and was demolished in 2003, though the starburst light fixtures, created specifically for The Big Lebowski, were transported to Lucky Strike Lanes in Downtown Los Angeles. In the film, Star Lanes becomes a point of constant return to L.A.’s edge-of-the-frontier status, established in the film’s opening, with the bowling alley being the location of The Stranger two on-screen appearance. The Star Lanes also serves as an echo chamber for L.A. as an anywhere space on film – a city built on a reputation for place-substation and simulacra. For example, the altercation between Walter and Smokey (country singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore), as Todd A. Comer observes, is a restaging of the Persian Gulf conflict: a border incursion (“over the line”) being met with brute force.[30] Yet, a curious feature about the Star Lanes, one that connects strongly to the film’s cinematic recovery of L.A.’s historical and cultural traces are the Googie symbols and iconography that adorn the interior and exterior of the Star Lanes. Writing about the Googie’s presence throughout the film, Jenny Jones describe Googie, also known as “Coffee Shop Modern” architecture, as a prominent feature of “post-World War II American design, in particular 1940s and 1950s coffee shops and bowling alleys,” with Los Angeles being a central hub of the movement.[31] First appearing during the opening credit sequence as neon stars, Googie in The Big Lebowski points towards an L.A. that was once the “city of the future,” with the style’s “bold and ultramodern diagonal lines, bright signs, boomerangs, and cantilevered extensions.”[32] As crucial aspect of the Star Lane’s design, Googie in the film is part of the remains of a forgotten L.A. teased to the surface. With this symbol of futurism embedded into a popular culture pastime, the film invites the cult viewer to retrieve this L.A. palimpsest layer (and others) to the surface through the Star Lanes as an embodiment of the flatlands and the other flatland locations traversed by the Dude and his companions. 

“…to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, which you loved so well.”

For the beaches ecology, the Dude’s bungalow and the city of Malibu affirm, in different ways, Banham’s view that Los Angeles is not a “seaside city in the classic mold”; the “sun, sand, and surf” are “deeply ingrained…in the psychology of Southern California [,] …held to be ultimate and transcendental values.”[33] The interiors were shot on a soundstage, while the exteriors were shot at a six-unit bungalow court constructed in 1928, located at 609 Venezia Ave in Venice Beach. First appearing in the Los Angeles area in the 1920s, garden apartments were initially modeled on Mediterranean-style homes like the Big Lebowski's and were well-suited to the burgeoning LA population. As noted by Kevin Starr: "patios and courtyards allowed for a reconsolidation of personal and family identity in a social and cultural environment frequently deprived of the normal reference points of more developed cities."[34] Advertised as the “Lebowski complex” on realty websites, the decision have a bungalow as the Dude’s residence adds a California-ness to his personality. There is a carefree attitude to the Dude when he is at the bungalow location, which, along with the bowling alley, is the most-used location in the film. Here he is not distracted by trivial things, and he maintains “a strict drug regiment to keep his mind limber.” The Dude makes white Russians for himself from a miniature tiki bar in his bungalow, evoking the wave of “Tiki kitscht” popular in Los Angeles during the 1950s, what Sven Kirsten describes as “island life escapism” from the “Puritan work ethic.”[35] The location serves as a reminder that the beaches, as Banham observes, are a site of a counter-cultural rejection of the values embodied by the foothills, while at the same time serving as a repository for L.A’s cultural aspirations.

Jackie Treehorn is introduced through a beach party in Malibu that maps this L.A. environment as the site of Dionysian celebrations. A topless woman is shown blanket-tossed in slow motion to Peruvian-American singer Yma Sumac’s “Ataypura (High Andes).” Jackie Treehorn introduces himself to the audience by a slow-motion shot that turns into a regular speed shot that ends with a direct address to spectator. The use of Malibu’s Point Dume for this scene is significant because of the cinematic legacy wedded to the location: the site of the Statue of Liberty scene from Planet of the Apes (1968), episodes of I Dream of Jeannie (1965 – 1970), and the Coens’ Barton Fink (1991), for example. Yet, as a city is situated to the north of L.A.’s main urban sprawl and home to the rich and famous, Malibu puts The Dude “out of his element.” Though the atmosphere of Treehorn’s beach party may resemble a counterculture that the Dude might have been able to identify with at one point, Malibu in the film challenges Banham’s belief that “there is a sense in which the beach is the only place in Los Angeles where all [people] are equal and on common ground,” compounded further by the beating The Dude later takes from a “reactionary” Malibu police officer.[36]

The scene that ties the beach ecologies together in The Big Lebowski is Donny’s funeral, filmed at Point Fermin Park in San Pedro but not identified as a location in the film itself. Before Walter goes off on a tangent about American G.I.’s killed in Vietnam (a nod to real-life figure of John Milius who provided the character’s inspiration), he names the local beaches that afforded Donny with the Southern California surf lifestyle so ingrained in the cultural image Los Angeles projects. Gesturing with his hands to the south and the north, Walter names “the beaches of Southern California, from La Jolla to Leo Carrillo…and…up to Pismo.” With a quick reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Donny’s ashes emerge from a Folger’s can not into the Pacific Ocean but rather onto Walter and The Dude. In this sense, the beaches becomes the location where, as Comer observes, the specter of the Vietnam War is put to rest, in a space separate from the other ecologies that constantly restage the past for the characters and L.A.’s other inhabitants.[37] If the life of the city teams at the edges of the frames in cinema, as Tom Conley suggests, then the Coens have chosen, as the film’s penultimate scene, a secluded place where the L.A. promise of reinvention (promised by the visual boosterism of the Arroyo Set) can actually be realized. 

“Well, they finally did it. They killed my fucking car.”

Returning to the palimpsest metaphor for the erasure and retrieval of Los Angeles’s past, Banham describes autotopia as the a “transportation palimpsest”: “parking lots, freeways, drive-ins, and other facilities have not wrecked the city-form…due largely to the fact that Los Angeles has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense.”[38] Here, Banham suggests that these transportation environments are layers built over earlier methods of movement, from defunct public transportation system to the railroads that aided in the construction of the city during the late 19th century and early 20th century (alongside the aforementioned industry of visual boosterism). In this sense, autotopia acts as the glue for all the three other L.A. ecologies in The Big Lebowski, in that its history is intertwined with cinematic cartography’s origins. While the Tudor Revival mansions of Beverly Crest were being constructed, cinema was mapping at ground-level a city familiar to the rest of the nation through photography, travel writings, and other forms of Southern California visual culture. Early L.A. films, silent slapstick especially, set their physical spectacles in spaces that were familiar to audiences through mass-marketed two-dimensional images. With the camera mounted to a moving car and traveling at high speeds through Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Los Feliz, early L.A. films are an early example of cartographic cinema, re-envisioning the city through the moving image created a three-dimensional space within the minds of the spectator that beckoned to be navigated through. Fast and mobile slapstick films would soon give rise to city symphonies throughout the 1920s – day-in-the-life films that celebrated the splendor of modernity and city life. The ensuing decades would see the rise of L.A. film noirs as a form of anti-city-symphony, in which L.A.’s automobile culture and urban sprawl played a significant role in crafting the narrative strategies for these films. [ii] As Greg Hise notes, this quality of Los Angeles allowed for the city to set the tone for the development of other major American cities (and indeed other global cities) throughout the twentieth century: multi-centered, dispersed, and less concerned with “city” and more concerned with “region.”[39]

Autotopia appears in The Big Lebowski in ways that simultaneously affirms Banham’s view of this ecology as a transportation palimpsest and places the film in dialogue with past noir conventions. The Dude is tailed by the private investigator (brother shamus) DeFino throughout the film, with one scene resulting in The Dude losing control of his car and crashing into a dumpster; the cartography of these car-tailing scenes performed through POV shots, allowing the spectator to identify with the Dude, and set to a soundtrack of Credence Clearwater Revival, bringing this L.A. into a dialogue with its 1960s counterculture past. The strip mall parking lot of Sobchak Security (on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood) is both part of Autotopia and a signifier of the amorphous nature of the flatlands. Walter and The Dude travel up the 405 freeway to the drop off location in Simi Valley, receiving instructions on a portable phone from the “kidnappers” to take the Simi Valley Road exit (the one location in the film clearly identified via a sign). The Dude emerges from a hallucinatory dream (Gutterballs) on PCH, and then later when he is ejected from a taxi onto Culver City, the viewer’s perspective shifts to Bunny Lebowski driving a corvette (the only point in the film where the focus of the narrative is not with The Dude). Taxis and limos are the only forms of public transportations taken in the film, a subtle 90s commentary on the demise of public transportation and public space chronicled in works such as Mike Davis’ City of Quartz (1992) and films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988). Significantly, the Dude walks home from the bowling alley (with no clear indication of how far the walk actually is) after his car is stolen, and when his car is finally destroyed by the nihilists, both incidents affirm Thom Andersen’s observation in Los Angeles Plays Itselfthat the loss of one’s car in L.A. films is presented as tantamount to a form of symbolic castration.[40] 

A crucial cartography of L.A. by autotopia occurs not on the ground but in the air. The magic carpet dream sequence with the Dude flying over L.A. in pursuit of Maude Lebowski riding his newly acquired rug taps into a familiarity with moments from other L.A. films, such as the flying car finale of Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984) and helicopter views from films like Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995), and Independence Day (Roland Emerich, 1996). What the scene also shows is a link between cinematic city cartography and a history of aerial surveillance and telemetry, explored extensively by Bruno, Conley, and Paul Virilio: cinema and aviation “formed a single moment” during the early twentieth century, and the legacy of this overlap continued throughout the rest of the century.[41] From these heights, The Big Lebowski retrieves another transportation palimpsest layer rooted in the history of the city’s early twentieth century visualization: panoramic photography provided by photographer Robert Earl Spence (credited as “Spence Airplane”) during the 1920s was used routinely in non-fiction cinema and booster publications like Southern California Through the Camera, produced in 1929 by the All Year Round Club of California;[42] films taken from Roy Knabenshue’s airship during the 1900s and 1910s, some of the first films to document Los Angeles, provided viewers from around the world with a sense of L.A.’s vastness that would later be encoded into Southern California look-and-feel provided by cinema.[43] In this scene L.A. is the most expansive, and yet the viewer still does not have a sense of orientation. There is still no center of gravity to the city, and the recognizable skyscrapers of Downtown L.A. are nowhere to be seen. Through this aerial autotopia, the Coens simultaneously globalize Los Angeles and present it as something uniquely apart from other cinematic cities.

Looking for Downtown L.A. in The Big Lebowski

Concluding with Downtown Los Angeles, an L.A. environment conspicuously absent from The Big Lebowski, Banham dismissively provides a “note on downtown, because that is all Downtown Los Angeles deserves.”[44] A downtown district providing a city with a center of gravity is for other cities, and to do this to L.A. would make the city – a polynucleated megalopolis – categorically not L.A. in Banham’s eyes. The only instance of Downtown L.A. in The Big Lebowski is seen through the window Maude Lebowski’s art studio, shot in Downtown L.A. at 630 Broadway. As Maude shows the Dude a clip from the Treehorn-produced porn film Logjammin’, the Los Angeles Theater, one of the relic theaters in Downtown with a history rooted in silent era Hollywood and Mexican-American revista theater, is visible from the window. This peek at Downtown from Maude’s studio can be seen as a subtle peeling back of the palimpsest layering of Downtown’s cinematic legacy. The noir films of the 1940s and 1950s that The Big Lebowski draws upon, for example, were informed largely by what the downtown area had come to embody: “the problems of other major American cities… [and] structured in the form a classic American city in contrast to the rest of the city’s sprawl.”[45] From the 1960s to the end of the century, Downtown L.A.’s reputation had been buried by transformations to L.A.’s cultural landscape, but, by ironic contrast, kept alive through countless works of L.A. cinema. The twenty-first century has seen a resurgence and growth of Downtown L.A., popularly known as “the Downtown Renaissance,” which can now be read as a post-script to the 1991 Los Angeles of The Big Lebowski.

References

[1] Tyree and Walters 2007, pg. 18

[2] Bruno 2002, pg. 23

[3] Conley 2007, pg. 28

[4] Pg. 38

[5] Bruno 2002, pg. 178

[6] Banham 2009, pg. 19-20

[7] Pg. 83.

[8] Pg. 143.

[9] Pg. 203.

[10] Klein 2008, 10

[11] Lent 1987, pg. 337

[12] Pg. 205

[13] Stanley 2021

[1] Lent 1987, 329

[14] Phipps 2018

[15] James 2004, pg. 9

[16] Brook 2012, pg. 12

[17] Banham 2009, pg. 79

[18] Pg. 83

[19] Banham 2009, 93-95

[20] For further reading, see Davis 1992

[21] Davis 1992, 20

[22] Davis 1992, pg. 25

[23] For further reading, see Ovnick 2008

[24] Andersen 2004

[25] Cowan 2018

[26] Banham 2009, pg. 42

[27] Brook 2012, 11

[28] Pg. 143

[29] Comer 2005, pg. 100

[30] Jones 2012, Pg. 69

[31] Ibid.

[32] Banham 2009, pg. 20

[33] Starr 1986, 215

[34] Kirsten 2003, 8

[35] Banham 2009, pg. 21

[36] Comer 2005, pg. 100

[37] Pg. 57

[38] Latis 2018, pg. 205   

[39] Hise 1997, pg. 9

[40] Andersen 2004

[41] Virilio 1989, pg 17

[42] Organization founded in 1921 by real estate mogul and general manager of the Los Angeles Times Harry Chandler and managed by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, aimed at promoting tourism in the region. The organization was renamed “The Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau.” 

[43] Clark 1976, pg. 17

[44] Banham 2009, pg. 183

[45] Lent 1987, 329