The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies, Edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, Endnote by William Preston Robertson. Indiana UP '09 paperback, $24.95, 491 pages, ISBN #0253221366. Index, contributors, works cited, b&w images sprinkled through text.
Filmmakers can only pray their latest release develops into cult status, that people flock to theaters, a la Monty Phyton, dressed in evocative garb, to gin up yet more box office revenue. But a special status is reserved for films so thought-provoking that they yield an entire volume of essays on multiple facets of the movie's message.
One such is The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies, a collection of weigh-ins from 21 fans and scholars, writing about a myriad of influences of the 1998 movie, The Big Lebowski, among them "westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus -- and its historical connections to the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and of course bowling."
Editor Edward P. Comentale is associate professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. Editor Aaron Jaffe is associate professor of English at the University of Louisville.
