For Fans of The Big Lebowski

Every few years someone tries to explain what actually happens in The Big Lebowski, and every explanation sounds more absurd than the last. The kidnapping was fake. The nihilists were bluffing. The money was never real. None of that matters. The Coens built a Chandler pastiche whose point is that Chandler's tight, meaningful plots were always a consoling fantasy. What you get instead is a man who simply does not want to engage with the chaos around him, and who turns out to be, arguably, the only sane person in the room. Inherent Vice and The Long Goodbye both work the same lever.

The easiest cross-media recommendation: Disco Elysium gives you a washed-up detective who wakes up with no memory, no authority, and a city full of people who are all wrong about politics, history, and themselves. The game rewards players who lean into failure and weirdness rather than grinding toward a clean solution. The Dude would understand this man completely. Both works take a genre built on competence and replace the competent detective with someone who abides.

Shane Black's 2016 film is set in late-70s Los Angeles and follows a small-time enforcer and an incompetent private eye who stumble into a conspiracy involving the adult film industry and the auto industry's lobbying operations. It is funnier than it has any right to be, affectionately staged in a Los Angeles that is already becoming the Los Angeles of The Big Lebowski, and built around two leads who are each bad at their jobs for different, deeply human reasons. It is the closest any film has come to replicating Lebowski's specific comedic atmosphere.