The Dude and the Zen Master (5 page)

4.

YEAH, WELL, YA KNOW, THAT’S JUST LIKE, UH, YOUR OPINION, MAN

J
EFF
: I dig the Dude; he’s very authentic. He can be angry and upset, but he’s comfortable in his skin. And in his inimitable way, he has grace. He exudes it in every relationship: an unexpected kindness, unmerited good will, giving someone a break when he doesn’t deserve it, showing up even when he has a bad attitude just because it means so much to the rest of the team. Hugging it out instead of slugging it out. You know what a
Lebowski
fan told me once? He thought that Donny was a figment of Walter’s imagination, an old army buddy of his who may have been killed in Vietnam. And the Dude was going along with the fantasy, participating in the three-way conversation even though he knew Donny didn’t exist. I talked to Ethan and Joel Coen about it and they hadn’t intended any of that. Either way, it says a lot about the Dude; he can just go with the flow.

B
ERNIE
: You might call him a Lamed-Vavnik. In Jewish mysticism, there are thirty-six righteous people, the Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim. They’re simple and unassuming, and they are so good that on account of them God lets the world continue instead of destroying it. But no one knows who they are because their lives are so humble. They can be the pizza delivery boy, the cashier in a Chinese takeout, the window-washer, or the woman selling you stamps in the post office.

J
EFF
: You also like the word
mensch
, which is German and Yiddish for a real human being. It takes a lot to be a mensch, but the real mensch doesn’t know that she’s a mensch; she’s just living her life.

And what does that mean? My life isn’t only my life; everything has brought me to this point: my parents, their parents, everyone before them, and everything else in life, too.

B
ERNIE
: Eons of karma, trillions of years of DNA, the flow of the entire universe—all lead up to this moment. So what do you do? You just do. I think the mensch is not caught up with how to do things or even what to do.

J
EFF
: And
The Dude abides
. According to Merriam-Webster’s official definition, to abide means to wait patiently for something, or to endure without yielding, accept without objection. That is no easy feat, especially in a culture that is success-driven, instant-gratification-oriented, and impatient, like ours. True abiding is a spiritual gift that requires great mastery. The moral of the story, for me, is: be kind. Treat others as you want to be treated. You never know when the stranger you meet on the road may be an angel—or the Dude—in disguise.
I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me.
*
Whether the Dude is a Lamed-Vavnik—

B
ERNIE
: —or Lamed-Lovnik—

J
EFF
: —an angel in disguise, or merely a kindhearted loser, we should treat him as he treats us, with respect and compassion. We should all treat everyone we encounter as a righteous soul on account of whom the world abides. That’s very Dude.

B
ERNIE
: At the same time, the Dude’s a lot like us. Stuff upsets him, like when someone pees on his rug. He has thoughts, frustrations, and everything that we all have, but he doesn’t work from them. He works from where he is.

J
EFF
: He does his thing, he’s very authentic, but the chaos of life throws him off time after time. He’s rowing his boat merrily, but new things always happen and he has to make an adjustment.

B
ERNIE
: Because there’s no perfect place anywhere. One of the Buddha’s first teachings was that life is suffering. He didn’t just mean heartrending, painful, traumatic suffering, but something more basic than that. It doesn’t matter how good we have it or how basically happy we are, things arise every day that leave us feeling discontented or disappointed.

So the movie opens up with a bit of suffering for the Dude because somebody peed on his rug, the rug that ties the room together. Till now he was just rowing his boat merrily down the stream, taking his baths, drinking his White Russians, listening to whales, and bowling. But now something happened, so he makes an adjustment, goes out to meet the wealthy Mr. Lebowski, and the movie goes on from there. At exactly the point when the rug doesn’t bother him anymore, something else comes up. And when he’s no longer upset about that, there’s something else. Things keep happening and the suffering gets deeper. Why? Because the Dude expects that nothing else is going to go wrong. He’s like everyone else, thinking that around the corner is some perfect place where everything will be okay; all he has to do is round that corner. Then something else comes up, and something else.

But the Dude abides, so it doesn’t take him too long to be at ease with the new situation. Not so his bowling buddy Walter. Walter plays the Dude’s great foil:
This won’t stand, man.
He’s like all the rest of us. Someone just found out that he has cancer, or that his wife left him for someone else, or that he lost his job. Unexpected things keep happening, which is what the Buddha referred to when he talked of suffering. And what do we say?
This won’t stand, man
. But that’s what life is, constant change, ups and downs. And like the Dude, we have to abide. Walter, on the other hand, can’t accept that life is this way, so he keeps on suffering.

J
EFF
: I love the scene when the Dude is freaking out at Walter: “Will you just take it easy?”

And Walter says, “Calmer than you.”

“Walter, take—will you take it—”

“Calmer than you.”

People think the Dude is so unflappable and calm, but in that scene he’s really uptight. In fact, the whole movie is about this loose, relaxed guy who gets all upset by life. But he’s not embarrassed about it, he’s not trying to live up to some persona, he’s always the Dude.

I relate to that because I really dig comfort. And part of being comfortable is living up to others’ expectations of you. For instance, many people think I have this persona, that I’m the Dude. But that’s not who I am. I got some Dude in me, but I’m more and other than that. I can get tight and nervous, and unlike the Dude, I’m not always comfortable showing people those cracks in my persona.

I’ll give you an example. Thomas Nellen has done my hair and makeup for several movies. He’s a wonderful Swiss guy, very meticulous, a great artist, and we like to talk and share ideas when I’m getting made up. One of his jobs is to provide continuity and consistency in how I look for the movie. For example, my hair always has to look right for each scene, so if it’s cut a certain way for my character and the character ages, the hair also has to age. If the character doesn’t age in the movie, the hair has to look the same even if the filming takes months. And don’t forget, you’re shooting out of sequence all the time, so the hair has to be right for whatever scene you’re filming that day. It’s Thomas’s job to pay attention to all these little details. Making movies is all about the tiny details. It’s like doing a magic trick. When you create an illusion, the audience doesn’t want to see how it’s done. If a guy has a fake nose, you don’t want to see the lines between the real thing and the fake, you want it all to look real, and for that there has to be consistency. If it’s a little off, the audience loses the spell and gets out of the story.

So at the end of an especially stressful day Thomas wants to cut my hair a little. That’s his job, right? And he’s very respectful. “When do you want to have your hair cut, Jeff? It’s getting longer and longer.”

But I have this thing going on with my hair that dates back to the time when I was a kid, when having my hair cut and getting the clippings in my shirt drove me crazy. I could never get the hair out. It also feels a little like Samson: you cut your hair and you lose your power. Or it’s like the superstitions in sports, when somebody says, “Hey, don’t you want to wash those socks?”

And you say, “No, these are my lucky socks, don’t touch them.”

“Awww, come on, wash your socks. What’s the difference?”

“Don’t touch my socks, man!”

All these things are going on, I’m feeling irritable and I want to get home, so I keep putting him off: “If you cut my hair now you’ll have to cut it again later, and I want my hair to be as long as I can have it for the next movie.” Thomas would also be working on that one.

And he says, “Yes, Jeff, but you’ve now gone three weeks without a cut.”

And I say, “Thomas, my hair has to be long for the part anyway. If I was supposed to be bald and hadn’t shaved my head in three weeks, you’d notice. But with this much hair, nobody’s going to see any difference.”

The argument goes on, and finally I give up: “Okay, just cut my fucking hair. You’re the makeup guy, you’re the expert, go on, do it.”

So he’s cutting my hair while I sit there trying to meditate, right? I do an angry meditation for a half-hour, all that time feeling and hearing every little snip. Finally he’s done and I say, “Thank you, I appreciate your conscientiousness.” But I am pissed.

So now I go home and I’ve got two days off. For those next two days I can’t sleep because this hair thing keeps coming up. I’m thinking,
What are you doing? Why are you obsessing about this? It’s ridiculous.
But I’m just churning it over and thinking about it all day and all night. At the same time I’m reading about the Tibetan Lojong practices, which are basically slogans all about leaning into these uncomfortable situations and opening up to them as if they’re gifts. One in particular strikes me:
Always maintain a joyful mind
. Appreciate the struggles as opportunities to wake up.

After two days I get back to work: “Thomas, how you doing, man?”

He goes, “I’m fine.”

I say, “Well, I was fucked. For the last three nights I haven’t slept at all, I keep on thinking about this ridiculous hair thing.”

And Thomas says, “To tell you the truth, I felt shitty the whole weekend, too.”

And finally the whole thing shifted. It started looking like a segment from
30 Rock
or
The Office
, you know? We laughed about it and I told him what I’d gone through. I mean, we’re talking about a quarter inch of hair and look at all the stuff that came up! That’s what I mean by wanting to live up to expectations. I’m supposed to be so cool, and look at how upset I’m getting about almost nothing.

I said, “This has a lot of juice for us, man. This can be our hair koan.”

Thomas said, “What do you mean?”

So I suggested we do something that my wife and I do sometimes. We sit opposite each other. One person expresses what’s on his or her mind and the other person just listens and receives, till the first person has no more to say, and then we switch. We keep on doing that till both of us feel like we’re done. Sometimes the shift happens, sometimes it doesn’t; it’s a jam. So Thomas and I did this and we found a lot of humor and intimacy in it. It was uncomfortable for both of us, but it also deepened our relationship because all these little bumps and discomforts are actually opportunities to explore and keep the curiosity going:
Oh, this is interesting, what’s this about? Why did I get so upset?
That’s what I mean by leaning into things. And here was an opportunity for Thomas to see this:
Hey, you think I’m a calm, cool, easygoing guy. Truth is, I can be tight and pissed and as dumb as the next guy.
There’s embarrassment there, you know? It’s like the Dude freaking out and Walter keeps saying, “Calmer than you. Calmer than you.”

People think I’m laid-back and that nothing gets to me, and it’s embarrassing to show them a whole other side. But if I acknowledge it rather than deny it, it also can be the path to healing instead of obsessing about it at home:
That goddamn Thomas has no idea. Doesn’t he understand that it’s not about simply matching the hair, that there’s an inner life to the actor that he shouldn’t interfere with?
You can pump it up and defend yourself all you want, but you’re just suppressing the self-consciousness and the embarrassment, you know? With Thomas I worked it out by just being who I am without living up to something.

But the Dude isn’t uncomfortable with his discomfort. He’s authentic, and he and Walter jam with each other. He can get pissed at Walter but he loves him at the same time. I love that scene where they hug in the end, with Donny’s ashes all over the Dude, coating his shades.

B
ERNIE
: The other thing I like about the Dude is that he doesn’t corner a rat. Do you know that expression? If people do things we don’t like, we sometimes set them up in order to show them how wrong or bad they are. It’s like trapping a rat. If you force a rat into a corner where there’s no way out, it’s going to attack. You don’t see the Dude doing that. He’s opinionated, but he leaves the other person a way out. Walter constantly tries to trap the rat, pushing people into a place where they’re now going to fight back.

J
EFF
: You have to leave a way out. In Zen, don’t they tell you to kill yourself? I don’t mean literally, but to kill your ego, kill your identity. Isn’t that the way out in Zen?

B
ERNIE
: A lot of old Zen masters talked like that. They said that in order to get enlightened, in order to experience the oneness of life, you had to drop body and mind. But there’s an easier way out than that, and that’s to realize,
Oh, that’s just your opinion
, which is what the Dude says in the movie: “That’s your opinion, man.” When you say that, there’s always a way out. If we take certain things to be
the
truth, we’re going to fight and kill for them, but it’s hard to battle over an opinion.