“So, should we Lebowski, or should we not Lebowski?” I asked my friend Alex as we finished our pizza and wine on a recent evening.
I felt like I was asking her if she wanted to make out. The Big Lebowski—the 1998 Coen-brothers movie about bowling, pot, and mistaken identity—is one of my favorites, and I was nervous about introducing it to her. I like to use Lebowski quotes as a way to assert myself while, like Jeff Bridges’s character, “the Dude,” not taking things too seriously. There’s a Lebowski-ism for virtually every tricky situation: Asked to work on a Saturday? “I don’t roll on Shabbas.” Someone does something outrageous? “This is not ’Nam … There are rules!” Disagree about something? “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Whenever life has been especially difficult, I’ve returned to the movie and found solace in its “whatever, man” ethos. When I was addled by postpartum depression and my baby would cry nonstop, I would watch Lebowski clips on YouTube and savor a rare laugh.
But it’s a strange movie, and I have known Alex for only a couple of years. I was worried that she would dislike it so much that she would kind of dislike me too, through osmosis. Or that I would realize that we have completely different senses of humor, and that perhaps we aren’t very close after all. In Lebowski terms, would our friendship abide? Or would we be out of our element?
Jitters such as these are rather common. “If something really matters to you,” Beverley Fehr, a University of Winnipeg psychologist, told me, “there’s a vulnerability in sharing it with someone else.” When we declare a favorite book, movie, or album and introduce it to others, Jeffrey Hall, a communications-studies professor at the University of Kansas, told me, “what we’re doing is saying, ‘This is an aspect of my identity that I’m willingly putting out there in order for other people to know me. And if you reject this thing, you reject me.’” Tom Vanderbilt, the author of You May Also Like, said that recommending something to someone can be like giving a gift, in that “it says something about you, but you’re also trying to anticipate what they might like.”
Often, our friends will like what we like: Several researchers told me that most people’s friends are extremely similar to them in terms of age, education level, political attitudes, and leisure pursuits. These similarities tend to include cultural tastes. Researchers who have shown groups of people clips of, say, Food, Inc. and America’s Funniest Home Videos have found that people whose brains responded similarly were more likely to become and stay friends. We tend to like people who like the same things as us because they validate our view of the world: “I must be right because there’s this other person who sees it exactly the same way” is how Fehr explained this (largely subconscious) line of thinking to me. And then, once people become friends, they tend to conform to each other’s tastes and preferences. If they like it, we must like it, too—after all, we’re so similar!
The trouble is, Fehr told me, we usually want our friends to be even more similar to us than they actually are. “When we’re presenting something to a friend and we don’t know if the friend will see it the same way we do,” she said, “one of the fears is that we’re going to realize that we aren’t as similar as we thought we were.” Fehr once had a group of friends over to watch Nebraska, a movie she loved, and remembers “not getting too much of a reaction to it.” This kind of letdown can be a threat to your perception of the friendship: Do you not know them as well as you thought you did? Fehr remembers feeling a little hurt, before eventually letting it go. But she hasn’t planned another movie night with that friend group since.
If a friend doesn’t love our favorite cultural artifact, we might try to resolve the resulting discomfort in a few ways. We might change our own minds about it, telling ourselves Nebraska’s not that great after all; we might try changing their minds about it; or, potentially, we might change the way we think about the friendship, Angela Bahns, a psychologist at Wellesley College, told me.
Whether a disagreement over a beloved book or movie sparks friction in the friendship, Bahns said, depends on how well you know the friend; what else you have in common; and how important that particular book, movie, or show is to you. Sometimes, this kind of difference can cause an unexpected level of tension: When Lidia Wiens, a 39-year-old in Seattle, invited her friend Julia over to watch her favorite movie, Sleepless in Seattle, she thought Julia, an agreeable woman with whom she shared similar taste, would love it. But to her dismay, she noticed that Julia was looking at her phone a lot, and occasionally, Julia would make negative comments about the characters. Wiens felt awkward, and the two had a bit of a fight about it. They both ultimately apologized, but Wiens thinks that in the future, she won’t put so much emotional stock in sharing her favorite books and movies with other people. “I don’t know why it became so personal,” Wiens told me. She felt like she wanted her friend’s genuine response to the movie, but she also wanted the genuine response to be a positive one.
As for me, good news: Alex agreed to Lebowski! But I didn’t get any less nervous as the movie staggered through its plot, such as it is. At the time of Lebowski’s release, The Guardian called the film “a bunch of ideas shoveled into a bag and allowed to spill out at random,” and I was finding it hard to refute that assessment. In the movie, a burnout named Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski is hired by a millionaire with the same name to rescue his kidnapped wife. Hijinks ensue when the Dude’s best friend hatches a plan to keep the wealthier Lebowski’s ransom money for the Dude and himself. It also features a group of nihilists, a porn kingpin, a bowling competition, and a storyline about the millionaire’s adult daughter’s quest to get pregnant. Actually, I wondered as Alex and I shared a bag of popcorn, why are there so many characters? Is this even a good movie? I grew irritated by its gratuitousness, as exemplified by a scene in which a topless woman bounces on a trampoline outside the porn kingpin’s house. I wasn’t sure how to wordlessly impart to Alex that this isn’t the kind of thing that I, a nice suburban mom, would condone.
Alex didn’t seem to laugh much, and I paused the movie several times to reassure her that we didn’t have to finish it if she didn’t want to. When it ended, I quickly noted how tired I was, and that she must be, too, giving her a chance to make a quick exit without a lot of commentary. Which she did. Lebowski’s not for everyone, and that’s okay, I tried to reassure myself as I padded upstairs to bed.
But my worries about whether she at least mildly appreciated my weird little comfort watch were resolved a few days later. I brought in the mail to find that she had sent me a onesie for my son, emblazoned with the words little Lebowski urban achievers. We did abide, after all.
