Comparison · 3 shared techniques

Bananas vs The Big Lebowski

Bananas (1971) and The Big Lebowski (1998) share 3 techniques. Here is how each film uses them.

Bananas (1971) poster

Bananas

Woody Allen · 1971

The Big Lebowski (1998) poster

The Big Lebowski

Joel Coen, Ethan Coen · 1998

Shared

Same technique, two films

Fish-Out-of-Water Comedy

Dropping a character into a world whose social rules they don't understand. The comedy, and some insight too, comes from the constant mismatch between them and everyone around them.

Bananas

Mellish is a neurotic, blue-collar New Yorker dropped into a revolution he does not understand. He learns to fight clumsily, and the comedy comes from how little he fits in. His reason for being there is to impress a girlfriend, which makes the mismatch funnier.

The Big Lebowski

The Dude is completely unequipped for the world of wealth, crime and nihilism that he wanders into. The comedy comes from his refusal to get equipped. In every setting, he responds by being exactly himself. He is a fish that declines to admit it is out of water.

Deadpan Absurdism

Showing extreme, violent or surreal events while the characters react as if nothing unusual is happening. That mismatch is funny and unsettling at the same time.

Bananas

The trial fills the court with absurd witnesses, and the room treats each one as a normal part of the case. The straight face makes the nonsense funnier.

The Big Lebowski

The Coens treat kidnapping, extortion, murder and nihilism in the same tone as bowling league disputes and White Russian recipes. The Dude reacts to every disaster as if it were a mild inconvenience. That deadpan gap between the event and the reaction is pretty much all of the film's comedy and philosophy.

Callback Editing

Bringing back an earlier image, line, location or piece of staging later in the film, often with the situation reversed. You enjoy recognizing it, and the comparison adds meaning.

Bananas

Cosell returns at the end to narrate Fielding and Nancy's wedding night in the same sports tone he used for the assassination. The repeat turns both events into the same kind of game, and the wedding night is over faster than Nancy expected.

The Big Lebowski

The rug, the White Russians, the bowling alley and Walter's Vietnam are each set up and then brought back, and they mean more each time. The film moves in circles, and these callbacks do more than move the plot along. That is, they are how the Coens show that the Dude's world is self-contained, complete and always returning to itself.

Different

Where they split