Don't Try To "Tie It All Together"

Rating: 10/10 (3 August 2012)

Its two separate subplots. Biggest mistake people make is trying to "tie it all together" with one single, rug-like theme.
Plot 1. As the Coen's have often admitted, they were using Chandler's Big Sleep as their first model. A meaningless, complex, twisty, noir mystery as the main plot, while adding other subtle little messages. Here, its like a copy of Lynch's Blue Velvet, which shows that the simplicity and innocence of small towns (like Fargo) or 50's America (i.e. the Bowling Alley) are long gone, and if you poke your innocent nose into the mystery of the hidden underbelly of society (organized greed, deception, violence, etc), you are going to get hurt by it (which the Dude was). Lessons: just let it go. Curiosity killed the cat. Revenge isn't worth it. Stay above all the dirty behaviors that run modern society. The Age of Innocence is over.
Plot 2. LBJ's famous 1965 quote to the Canadian prime minister who criticized American policy in Vietnam ("you came into my living room and p*ssed on my rug") is the starting point here. Like Walter (John Goodman), a group of Vietnam-era grudge-holders (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, others) waited 30 years to find some clueless, stoned, knuckle-headed 'dude' (Bush Jr) they could manipulate into "redeeming" the honor of the US by not allowing our nation to be pushed around on the world stage ("this aggression will not stand"). Bush Jr, working on a whole other agenda, was seeking more personal, rug-like revenge for his "dad" who was supposedly humiliated by not destroying Saddam and Iraq in Gulf War I. Walter and Dude also had totally different agendas here, but toward the same outcome. Lessons: pride will get you in trouble. The past is the past. Revenge isn't worth it. Vietnam is over-let it go, or risk crippling the US economy by focusing so much on global p*ssing contests while everyone else is making stuff. Blissful, post-war 50's America is all gone now, but maybe some of us can just go back to bowling and live a simple life.
Lots of other little interesting comments in here about Nixon's love of bowling, religion, nihilism, etc., are just that: symbolic commentary about the world. There is no bigger meaning there.
Young people ask: How did this all happen? President Dwight Eisenhower warned us: if we don't pay attention, the military-industrial-congress complex (what we now call global corporations) would get too much power and wreck the country with their greed and arrogance. We didn't listen. Next time around, abide the warning.