\n<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, should we Lebowski<\/em>, or should we not Lebowski<\/em>?\u201d I asked my friend Alex as we finished our pizza and wine on a recent evening.<\/p>\n I felt like I was asking her if she wanted to make out. The Big Lebowski<\/em>\u2014the 1998 Coen-brothers movie about bowling, pot, and mistaken identity\u2014is one of my favorites, and I was nervous about introducing it to her. I like to use Lebowski<\/em> quotes as a way to assert myself while, like Jeff Bridges\u2019s character, \u201cthe Dude,\u201d not taking things too seriously. There\u2019s a Lebowski<\/em>-ism for virtually every tricky situation: Asked to work on a Saturday? \u201cI don\u2019t roll on Shabbas.\u201d Someone does something outrageous? \u201cThis is not \u2019Nam \u2026 There are rules!\u201d Disagree about something? \u201cThat\u2019s just, like, your opinion, man.\u201d Whenever life has been especially difficult, I\u2019ve returned to the movie and found solace in its \u201cwhatever, man\u201d 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.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s 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<\/em> too, through osmosis. Or that I would realize that we have completely different senses of humor, and that perhaps we aren\u2019t very close after all. In Lebowski terms, would our friendship abide? Or would we be out of our element?<\/p>\n Jitters such as these are rather common. \u201cIf something really matters to you,\u201d Beverley Fehr, a University of Winnipeg psychologist, told me, \u201cthere\u2019s a vulnerability in sharing it with someone else.\u201d 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, \u201cwhat we\u2019re doing is saying, \u2018This is an aspect of my identity that I\u2019m willingly putting out there in order for other people to know me. And if you reject this thing, you reject me.\u2019\u201d Tom Vanderbilt, the author of You May Also Like<\/em>, said that recommending something to someone can be like giving a gift, in that \u201cit says something about you, but you\u2019re also trying to anticipate what they might like.\u201d<\/p>\n Often, our friends will like what we like: Several researchers told me that most people\u2019s 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.<\/em> and America\u2019s Funniest Home Videos<\/em> 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: \u201cI must be right because there\u2019s this other person who sees it exactly the same way<\/em>\u201d 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\u2019s tastes and preferences. If they like it, we must like it, too\u2014after all, we\u2019re so similar! <\/em><\/p>\n The trouble is, Fehr told me, we usually want our friends to be even more similar<\/em> to us than they actually are. \u201cWhen we\u2019re presenting something to a friend and we don\u2019t know if the friend will see it the same way we do,\u201d she said, \u201cone of the fears is that we\u2019re going to realize that we aren\u2019t as similar as we thought we were.\u201d Fehr once had a group of friends over to watch Nebraska<\/em>, a movie she loved, and remembers \u201cnot getting too much of a reaction to it.\u201d 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\u2019t planned another movie night with that friend group since.<\/p>\n If a friend doesn\u2019t 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\u2019<\/em>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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, 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\u2019t put so much emotional stock in sharing her favorite books and movies with other people. \u201cI don\u2019t know why it became so personal,\u201d Wiens told me. She felt like she wanted her friend\u2019s genuine response to the movie, but she also wanted the genuine response to be a positive one.<\/p>\n As for me, good news: Alex agreed to Lebowski<\/em>! But I didn\u2019t get any less nervous as the movie staggered through its plot, such as it is. At the time of Lebowski\u2019s release, The Guardian<\/em> called the film \u201ca bunch of ideas shoveled into a bag and allowed to spill out at random,\u201d and I was finding it hard to refute that assessment. In the movie, a burnout named Jeffrey \u201cthe Dude\u201d Lebowski is hired by a millionaire with the same name to rescue his kidnapped wife. Hijinks ensue when the Dude\u2019s best friend hatches a plan to keep the wealthier Lebowski\u2019s 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\u2019s adult daughter\u2019s 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?<\/em> I grew irritated by its gratuitousness, as exemplified by a scene in which a topless woman bounces on a trampoline outside the porn kingpin\u2019s house. I wasn\u2019t sure how to wordlessly impart to Alex that this isn\u2019t the kind of thing that I, a nice suburban mom, would condone.<\/p>\n Alex didn\u2019t seem to laugh much, and I paused the movie several times to reassure her that we didn\u2019t have to finish it if she didn\u2019t 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\u2019s not for everyone, and that\u2019s okay<\/em>, I tried to reassure myself as I padded upstairs to bed.<\/p>\n 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<\/span>. We did abide, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cSo, should we Lebowski, or should we not Lebowski?\u201d 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\u2014the 1998 Coen-brothers movie about bowling, pot, and mistaken identity\u2014is one of my favorites, and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1285,4244,11411,76],"class_list":{"0":"post-18668","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-big","9":"tag-friendship","10":"tag-lebowski","11":"tag-test"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}