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Write a song for the left hand only
I am hardly ever on Facebook anymore, but this evening I was tagged and asked what I thought of this article: "'The Big Lebowski', Wittgenstein, and the Garbage Pile That Is Online Discourse." My answer went on for a while, so I am replicating the text with minor edits here. It's not the most intelligent thing I have ever written about Wittgenstein, but it's what happened:
Oh, wow. That's an interesting argument and I can see how it might have occurred to the author, especially with the knowledge that one of the Coens did some academic work on Wittgenstein, but I have a lot of difficulty buying it, especially when he tries to extend parallels between Wittgenstein's life and the characters and actions of the movie. I'm not saying that The Big Lebowski is not full of language games. I'm just skeptical that they are a deliberate Wittgensteinian homage—especially a Wittgensteinian critique of early internet culture—as opposed to a thing that happens in dialogue when a bunch of linguistically clever people write a script whose characters couldn't have a functional conversation if their lives depended on it. I have also always thought of the movie as a deadpan parody of film noir, and I believe the Coens have referenced Chandler explicitly when discussing it. I'd need evidence of authorial intent to consider any other origins seriously. The original Slate article is much more convincing to me.
The attempts at biographical inference are where the Splitsider piece really loses me. There's not a lot of debate about Wittgenstein's sexuality. Most of his relationships were with men. It's well-documented. Considering that he left Austria for the last time in 1929, however, I am unclear how this could have gotten him into trouble with the Nazis. It happens to be true that Wittgenstein and Hitler briefly attended the same school, but that is irrelevant to the difficulties his family later experienced as Austrian Jews—in the racial sense; Ludwig and his siblings had three Jewish grandparents, but the non-Jewish one was the maternal grandmother, short-circuiting the inheritance of Judaism according to Jewish custom.* Wittgenstein personally seems to have thought of himself as Jewish, Catholic baptism and complicated relationship with Christianity notwithstanding. As to the Wittgensteins' status after the Anschluss, it gets batshit: initially classified as Volljuden, the siblings were upgraded to the more survivable category of Mischlinge after essentially forfeiting their entire family assets to the Nazi government. Millions changed hands. If it's not in the Guinness Book of World Records for bribes, it should be. None of that strikes me as equivalent to the Dude's commission to deliver a ransom for someone else's kidnapped wife.
In short, I'd have been fine with the author claiming that The Big Lebowski is a splendid demonstration of Wittgenstein's language games in action; to say that it was consciously applying them to the problems of digital discourse strikes me as reaching too far.
* Currently, in the U.S., Reform Judaism recognizes bilineal descent, as does Reconstructionist Judaism. Orthodox and Conservative Judaism recognize matrilineal descent only. This is not a denominational distinction that would have been relevant to the Wittgensteins, especially not at the time of the Nuremberg Laws.
. . . Having copied this all out, I am now wondering if I completely overthought the subject and if the article is not meant seriously at all. I'd never heard of the site. They seem to be mostly reportage. Are they also known for their comedy writing? I can't tell if I'm reading half-baked internet intellectualism or a sendup of it. Maybe it's some kind of self-referential Sprachspiel. If the whole point is the meaningless nature of internet communication, how would I know? This is a very pleasant pineapple.
Incidentally, Wittgenstein never did succeed in quitting philosophy altogether. He kept trying. Then he kept thinking of things. It's one of the reasons I feel deeply affectionate toward him.
P.S. I have found a Wittgenstein song that isn't about Ludwig! The subject of Neil Halstead's "Wittgenstein's Arm" is his brother Paul, the one-armed pianist; the brothers mentioned in the lyrics are Kurt and Rudi, two of the family's three suicides. Spoiler warning: it's not a cheerful song.
Oh, wow. That's an interesting argument and I can see how it might have occurred to the author, especially with the knowledge that one of the Coens did some academic work on Wittgenstein, but I have a lot of difficulty buying it, especially when he tries to extend parallels between Wittgenstein's life and the characters and actions of the movie. I'm not saying that The Big Lebowski is not full of language games. I'm just skeptical that they are a deliberate Wittgensteinian homage—especially a Wittgensteinian critique of early internet culture—as opposed to a thing that happens in dialogue when a bunch of linguistically clever people write a script whose characters couldn't have a functional conversation if their lives depended on it. I have also always thought of the movie as a deadpan parody of film noir, and I believe the Coens have referenced Chandler explicitly when discussing it. I'd need evidence of authorial intent to consider any other origins seriously. The original Slate article is much more convincing to me.
The attempts at biographical inference are where the Splitsider piece really loses me. There's not a lot of debate about Wittgenstein's sexuality. Most of his relationships were with men. It's well-documented. Considering that he left Austria for the last time in 1929, however, I am unclear how this could have gotten him into trouble with the Nazis. It happens to be true that Wittgenstein and Hitler briefly attended the same school, but that is irrelevant to the difficulties his family later experienced as Austrian Jews—in the racial sense; Ludwig and his siblings had three Jewish grandparents, but the non-Jewish one was the maternal grandmother, short-circuiting the inheritance of Judaism according to Jewish custom.* Wittgenstein personally seems to have thought of himself as Jewish, Catholic baptism and complicated relationship with Christianity notwithstanding. As to the Wittgensteins' status after the Anschluss, it gets batshit: initially classified as Volljuden, the siblings were upgraded to the more survivable category of Mischlinge after essentially forfeiting their entire family assets to the Nazi government. Millions changed hands. If it's not in the Guinness Book of World Records for bribes, it should be. None of that strikes me as equivalent to the Dude's commission to deliver a ransom for someone else's kidnapped wife.
In short, I'd have been fine with the author claiming that The Big Lebowski is a splendid demonstration of Wittgenstein's language games in action; to say that it was consciously applying them to the problems of digital discourse strikes me as reaching too far.
* Currently, in the U.S., Reform Judaism recognizes bilineal descent, as does Reconstructionist Judaism. Orthodox and Conservative Judaism recognize matrilineal descent only. This is not a denominational distinction that would have been relevant to the Wittgensteins, especially not at the time of the Nuremberg Laws.
. . . Having copied this all out, I am now wondering if I completely overthought the subject and if the article is not meant seriously at all. I'd never heard of the site. They seem to be mostly reportage. Are they also known for their comedy writing? I can't tell if I'm reading half-baked internet intellectualism or a sendup of it. Maybe it's some kind of self-referential Sprachspiel. If the whole point is the meaningless nature of internet communication, how would I know? This is a very pleasant pineapple.
Incidentally, Wittgenstein never did succeed in quitting philosophy altogether. He kept trying. Then he kept thinking of things. It's one of the reasons I feel deeply affectionate toward him.
P.S. I have found a Wittgenstein song that isn't about Ludwig! The subject of Neil Halstead's "Wittgenstein's Arm" is his brother Paul, the one-armed pianist; the brothers mentioned in the lyrics are Kurt and Rudi, two of the family's three suicides. Spoiler warning: it's not a cheerful song.
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A more cynical person would wonder how much splitsider.com pays per word.
The Coens don't do straight-up adaptations nor do they even veer near one; they love little pastiches and components and elements and they do not play fair. The advertising for Fargo claimed it was based on a true story which it's not. I've heard several claims made about O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the Coens' knowledge or lack thereof about The Odyssey but regardless the film isn't an adaptation or a full retelling, there's just elements to it that the Coens picked up and used.
They play around with the source material liberally. It begins by evoking a muse. A man named Ulysses long separated from his family undertakes an arduous journey home with some companions, only to discover his kids think he's dead and his estranged wife is entertaining a new suitor. There's a one-eyed monster of a guy who eventually gets his by a sharp stick through his (good) eye. There's some real sexy ladies by the water who sing to the men, love them up and possibly, like Circe, transmogrify 'em. There's a blind seer who is kinda like Tiresias and a guy named Homer and a guy with the middle name Menelaus. The film ends discussing the "heroic task" of having to find a ring at the bottom of a huge body of water (which happened to Theseus, not Odysseus). The Coens take what they want, slyly allude to what they wish, and dare you to see more into it.
Once you start identifying parallels, much like the perceived synchronicity in the Pink Floyd/Oz Dark Side of the Rainbow mashup, you tend to see more and more. Escaping from a chain gang is kinda like escaping from the underworld (or perhaps into it). Ulysses and his "crew" cross a large sea of waving wheat. There's a blind man in charge of making music. But then there's the legend of Robert Johnson and his crossroads deal with the devil.
From this you can see quite a lot into the Coens' work, but I agree that the life of Wittgenstein isn't quiiiite encoded into The Big Lebowski. Again, the film is shrouded in all kinds of source myths; it's supposed to be a version of The Big Sleep but only retains certain story elements (blackmail, old money weirdo, a made-up story about a runaway wild child) and full-on makes up the rest, which is a Chandler noir pastiche with some Nihilists thrown in for good measure. I suppose you can see whatever you'd like in the rest, but fer cryin out loud don't stretch yourself too hard.
Serious pomo exploration of a cult film or a pisstake of the kind? Not sure, but it's just caused a lot of words to tumble out of some smart people so I guess it's doing one of the jobs it was meant to do.
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