‘The Big Lebowski’ is an unmistakable classic, which works precisely because it knows how to invert – subvert, even – the genre of the private eye detective that it understands so well. Like Robert Altman’s ‘The Long Goodbye’ in 1973, we have a detective estranged from his environment, trying to effect some kind of good but being totally out of his depth and actually even culpable of exacerbating the problem he thinks he is solving.

This is a Coen Brothers phenomenon with a quite audacious presentation of a laidback dopehead protagonist, The Dude (Jeff Bridges), who smokes weed and spends his time bowling, qualities which don’t exactly make him qualified to solve a case involving kidnapping, extortion, double-crossing and mistaken identity – especially when all that the Dude wants is for someone to compensate him for the rug in his apartment having been urinated upon.

A religious movement has been created around ‘The Big Lebowski’ known as Dudeism, or the official Church of the Latter-Day Dude, the central philosophical teaching of which is a sort of secularized version of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes in its counsel that life is something of an enigma in which good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people, and that our fate is the same as that of animals where we all ultimately die. We are from the dust, and to dust we will turn again. So maybe the best way of dealing with it is to do nothing and make the most of what life throws our way.

The lesson is not to search for some deeper existential (or eschatological) meaning. The Dude is far too lazy for anything like that, but to accept that life does have its positives – in this case, it is hanging out at the neighbourhood bowling alley, and so not dwell on our imminent deaths. The Dude certainly practices what he preaches, though his demeanour is the polar opposite of what a religious saviour should be like, and this is why the Coens have tapped into something of the zeitgeist of the 90s with its slacker sensibility.

The Dude has a clear moral centre, even if his penchant for drugs seems to have dulled his senses. He wants to mind his own business and not interfere or judge, though he is forced to act and he becomes an unwitting pawn in a kidnapping and extortion case, and he is capable of rising to the occasion, even if his motives are far from selfless. Sam Elliott’s over the top, hilarious voiceover – delivered in person and straight to camera – even uses the language of how the Dude is ‘takin’ her easy for all us sinners’.

The Dude is perhaps closer to the precepts of Zen Buddhism than to Christian theology, but The Dude is no mirror or duplication of what the spiritual universe already offers. It goes its own way, giving us a man for our times (well, those of the 90s, anyway) in which kindness and the dispensation of grace and goodwill can be found in some of the strangest of places.