At one point around 2010 I was researching and writing a book while working full time as a gossip blogger at a very fast-paced website. I was basically working both weekdays (on the blog) and weekends (on the book) and as the stress built I coped by making elaborate fatty foods, shaking increasingly esoteric cocktails, and watching the Big Lebowski, which had been something of a touchstone since I saw it as a fifth year senior at Berkeley.

The cocktails and the fatty food paired well with the Lebowski, and the newly invented iPad allowed me to combine these activities in bed, until my laughing and spilling woke up my wife one too many times and my little Lebwoski parties were banished to the couch.

Anyway the book was successfully published and the blogging job gave way to a slightly slower paced magazine/website job. After a breather I released some audio transcription software I had written during the book project. But I never got around to releasing a video I had made in the same period about the Big Lebowski. Until today.

It’s truly the work of a disturbed mind. While watching the movie literally dozens of times I was able to notice, despite the whisky sours and daiquiris and martinis and yes White Russians, that the filmmakers (Coen Brothers) repeated certain phrases and speech patterns a lot, seemingly strategically. This is, it turns out, a known tick of theirs, but I was curious the meaning, and threw myself into compiling examples of the repetition and reading books about the movie.

After I compiled enough examples in a text file I decided to begin splicing copies of those examples out of a digital copy of the film and smushed them together into a sort of rough “supercut” compilation. Then I spent months (very occasionally) obsessively editing and adding new clips to these supercuts. Then I would forget about the project for months or years, watch the last supercut, and make a new, better, version.

Anyway it looks like the last version I made, version 24, was done in January 2019, and the one before that was made in 2015. And it looks pretty good! If you really like the movie maybe give this compilation of repetition a watch, I think it builds and builds and toward the end you may find some examples you had not noticed before. Only 1 minute 48 seconds and pretty fast paced. Enjoy.