“Nobody [expletive] with the Jesus!” So said the purple jumpsuited Latino bowler, Eagles fan and sex offender Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski. Save, perhaps, the man playing him.
Last week, news broke that Turturro was resurrecting the character in a remake of the 70s French surreal comedy Les Valseuses. Called Going Places, it’s currently filming in New York.
It has long been Turturro’s ambition to give his scene-stealing turn another airing, and he isn’t alone in thinking the Big Lebowski just wasn’t big enough. Jeff Bridges has expressed a willingness to reprise the Dude; Tara Reid, who played his trophy wife, Bunny, made a painfully unfunny Funny or Die parody trailer for The Big Lebowski 2.
Fans pack the annual Lebowski Fest and there’s even a religion — The Church of the Latter-Day Dude — for those wanting to take Dudeism to the next level. But the Coens themselves have resolutely refused to produce a sequel. “That movie has more of an enduring fascination for other people than it does for us,” said Joel in 2009.
In an interview for Variety in February, Joel pitched the idea for a spin-off film, but it wasn’t for the Dude or Jesus — it was for Barton Fink: “That’s the one movie that we thought deserved a sequel, called Old Fink. But we don’t want to do it until Turturro is quite old. He’s getting there.”
Ethan admitted that no writing had begun, but he added: “There’s a huge groundswell of demand for it.”
Demand for a larger Coen universe stretches beyond their best-loved cult hit. In 2009, Zhang Yimou — the director of Hero and, most recently, The Great Wall starring Matt Damon — remade the Coens’ debut Blood Simple (itself a twist on The Postman Always Rings Twice).
Transporting the tale of a cuckold and a double-crossing murderer to a remote desert province of feudal China, Yimou’s take retained the Coens’ plot, while adding a broader comic touch, more typical of Raising Arizona, as well as his own colourful visual palette.
The most obvious expansion of the Coen-sphere has come from the hit FX TV series Fargo, which has run for two highly acclaimed seasons, with a third on the way. The show is fan fiction at its most sophisticated: although the title and the setting refer to the award-winning 1996 film, screenwriter Noah Hawley trawls the Coen-verse for film references.
Billy Bob Thornton’s silly-haired hit man Lorne Malvo recalls Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men and Oliver Platt’s Stavros dresses like Nathan Arizona; white Russians are advertised in the local bar and the soundtrack is lifted from the older sibling’s mixtape.
Hawley allows his allusions to percolate through the 20 episodes, giving the watchful viewer a chance to pick through them — and maybe make some kind of wallchart.
Hawley’s creation of a parallel universe is inspired by the Coens’ own world-building. Though not as obvious as Quentin Tarantino, with his Vega brothers and Red Apple cigarettes, an identifiable Coen country has been mapped. The many in-jokes, cross-references and repeated use of actors — Frances McDormand appears in seven films, eight if you include the Coen-scripted Crimewave, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi in six each, Jon Polito in five, and Turturro in four — gives the Coen-verse coherence and consistency, despite dramatic shifts in genre and tone.
A detective’s VW Beetle from Blood Simple returns in The Big Lebowski. Barton Fink and Hail, Caesar! chart the progress of the fictional Hollywood studio Capitol Pictures. Gabriel Byrne stays at the Barton Arms and a newspaper briefly tells of a hotel fire, also referencing the film the Coens wrote while blocked during the making of Miller’s Crossing. Nicolas Cage’s recidivist in Raising Arizona works for Hudsucker Industries which Tim Robbins will later head in The Hudsucker Proxy. John Goodman sells “peace of mind” in Barton Fink and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. George Clooney is tracked via his Dapper Dan hair products, as were Goodman and William Forsythe in Raising Arizona.
The details, themes and visual cues echo throughout a 31-year career spanning 17 feature films, inspiring several online supercuts such as this one by Steven Benedict.
Now the consummate pasticheurs have become the pastiched. So following Fargo and Going Places, what next? Sequels? Miller’s Crossing Revisited? Prequels? No Country for Young Men? An HBO 13-episode noir Blood Complicated?
Some might not like refreshing originality curdling into franchise repetition; some might even fear the resurrection of Jesus Quintana. But, to paraphrase the Dude, “that’s just, like, your opinion, man”.
