My father, Robert Lee Blust, died just before Christmas 1995.
In a few days, I will be the same age he was when he died. And not too long from now, I will have lived more of my life without him than I did with him.
When I meet new people, I often feel sad that they will never get to know him. Because he was an extraordinary human being.
One strange way of getting to know him, even just a little, is to watch “The Big Lebowski.”
This cult-favorite starring Jeff Bridges as Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (or “Duder,” or “El Duderino” if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) has always been one of my favorite movies. It’s a surreal noir comedy that pretty much defies categorization, even though I just tried to do it.
And while it’s an utterly fantastic movie in its own right, the reason it occupies a special place in my heart is that when I watch The Dude, I feel like I’m seeing my father.
So many things about The Dude echo Bob: the way he walks; his laid-back zen attitude about everything; his slow, deliberate manner; his large belly, barely covered; and most pointedly, how he sits splayed out, crotch forward on every chair and couch he occupies. That was my father.
The Dude is so like Dad that when I first showed the movie to my mother, and the scene comes on where The Dude meets his landlord at the door sporting a White Russian mustache, my mother audibly gasped. For her, it was like seeing a ghost.
The very first scene of the movie, where The Dude wanders through a Ralph’s grocery store in his ratty bathrobe, testing half-and-half before writing a check for 69 cents in his angular script — that’s my father in caught amber.
Although my father took countless photos, slides and Super 8 movies of us growing up, he was almost always behind the camera. So there’s very little photographic evidence of him that remains, and nothing that I know of that has his voice on it. I made a whole website dedicated to images of him and his art, but there’s not a lot of it.
So when I watch Jeff Bridges lumbering around in his increasingly-abused Ford Torino, I can feel the universe bringing a little bit of my dad back to me, for a couple of hours at least.
That’s a gift.
I don’t need a movie to remember my father. But movies — the best ones, at least — have more than a little magic in them. And I can use that magic right now when I’m missing him so much.
I’ve watched “The Big Lebowski” countless times over the years, and I own it on literally every recording medium released since the movie came out. But it’s the kind of picture that always holds surprises. Every frame is fascinating.
Watching it again recently, I was struck by how Jeff Bridges’ performance was not the only thing that reminds me of my father. The spectacular production design, creating an early 90s L.A. filled with oranges and reds and pops of neon, fits with my father’s collage visual design sense perfectly.
And the humor is so sideways like his was. My absolute favorite moment of this is when Dude and Walter go to the home of Walter’s idol, “Branded” scribe Arthur Digby Sellers, and find him in an iron lung in the living room.
“Does he still write?” Walter says to the housekeeper in a hopeful tone.
“Oh no,” she says. “He has health problems.”
Also, there are surrealistic elements — like The Dude’s musical fantasies and Maude’s splatter art — that I think my father would have loved. After all, he’s the guy who brought a fish oven mitt to a Sears Portrait Studio.
“The Big Lebowski” came out in 1998, so another regret I have is that I didn’t have the chance to watch the movie with him. How fun would that have been? But I wonder if I had, would I have the same connection to it? Would it speak so powerfully to me?
Of course, the sudden death of the endlessly put-upon Donnie (Steve Buscemi) makes me think of the death of both my parents. And it injects such a beautiful note of sweetness and sadness to the proceedings.
And with that, another connection.
When Dude and Walter are picking up Donnie’s ashes, they balk at paying for an expensive “receptacle” to hold the ashes, because they are going to scatter them anyway. Walter says to the funeral director, “You got a Ralph’s around here?”
The next time we see the guys, they are on a bluff overlooking the ocean, holding a Folger’s coffee can from which Walter pours out Donnie’s ashes — into the wind, right into The Dude’s face. Their awkward hug after Walter’s Vietnam-infused eulogy is one of the sweetest moments in movies.
Which leads to this: when my father died, we gathered at the Wisconsin River near Spring Green to scatter his ashes.
Years later, when we scattered my mother’s ashes at the same spot, I stopped at the grocery store on the way there to find a Folger’s can to put her ashes in before the gathering. I couldn’t find an old-style metal ridged one, only a plastic jug.
But still, I think The Dude, and my mother, would approve.