A Comprehensive Analysis of Literary Protagonists - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Bunny Lebowski - “The Big Lebowski” by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

Let’s just get something out of the way: Bunny Lebowski is not your feminist hero. She’s not the broken doll who needs rescuing. She’s not even a femme fatale, not really, even though the genre wants her to wear the dress. Bunny is something messier, funnier, infinitely tackier—and somehow more honest than the whole metaphysical pinball machine that is The Big Lebowski. And honestly? I think that’s why she makes people so nervous.

It’s easy to laugh at her. You're supposed to. She’s introduced like a punchline: tanning in a bikini, painted toenails pointed at the Dude like an invitation and a dare. She offers to suck his dick for a thousand bucks, deadpan, gum-chewing, every inch the porno parody of a trophy wife. And the thing is—she knows it. She wants you to see it. That’s Bunny’s whole ecosystem: perform the role so aggressively, so unapologetically, that you can't tell if it’s a con or a collapse.

Spoiler: it's both.

There’s a specific anxiety Bunny Lebowski activates in audiences (especially men, sorry but not sorry), and it sounds like this: She’s faking it. The tan, the squeaky voice, the fingernails that look like candy-coated razor blades. She’s too much. She’s probably lying. She’s probably dangerous.

But here’s my thing—what if Bunny knows she’s fake and just doesn’t care? What if she’s faking with more integrity than the men around her, who pretend they’re not pretending?

Let’s be clear: The Big Lebowski is a noir wrapped in bathrobe vibes. Everyone’s scamming everyone, but doing it with vibes. Nihilists are screaming in German about meaninglessness while brandishing swords from the mall. Maude is explaining vaginas like she’s hosting an NPR segment on fertility and vengeance. Even the Dude, our stoned-out moral compass, is a kind of performance: the anti-performer, the guy who insists he’s “not into this whole...you know, scene” while being dragged through it like a muppet in flip-flops.

Bunny, though? She never lies about what she’s doing. Not really. She's not deeper than she looks—but that's the trick. She's exactly what she looks like. And if you hate her for that, it’s probably because you hate the parts of yourself that want to stop pretending, too.

Every time I rewatch The Big Lebowski—and let's be honest, it’s one of those movies you rewatch more like a liturgy than a pastime—I get stuck on Bunny’s absence. She’s the missing piece, the plot device, the McMuffin that everyone projects their theories onto. Is she kidnapped? Dead? A scammer? A damsel? Is her real name Bunny, or is that something she picked up between blowjobs and B-movies?

The Coens don’t care. Or they do, but only to the extent that it proves the point: everyone wants something from Bunny, but nobody wants her.

That’s the heartbreak. And the genius.

The millionaire husband (not really a millionaire), the feminist artist half-sister, the nihilists (who are about as nihilist as an Instagram aesthetic), the private detectives, the Dude—all of them invent different Bunnies in their heads. The real Bunny? She’s in Vegas, probably, or watching Baywatch reruns with a frozen margarita. She’s not missing. She’s not murdered. She’s just...off-camera. Which, if you think about it, is the best revenge a woman like Bunny could get.

Let’s talk about sex, though. Because Bunny’s entire vibe is what happens when female sexuality is treated like a glitch in the system rather than a feature. She’s loud about it. She weaponizes it. But it’s not empowering in the clean, social-media-sanctioned way we’re used to. Bunny isn’t Lana Del Rey’s tragic nymphet or Megan Fox’s righteous demon girl. She’s not curated. She’s chaotic. Sloppy. And it drives people insane.

When she offers to suck the Dude's dick, there’s no mystery. There’s no seduction. It’s a line she’s probably said before, maybe meant, maybe not, maybe it doesn’t matter. And the Dude just blinks at her, slack-jawed, like a kid seeing a strip club for the first time and realizing the lights are fluorescent, not red.

The thing is—Bunny isn’t even trying to be sexy. She’s just trying to be functional. Money in, favor out. That’s the arrangement, right? That's what her world has taught her. That's what she survives on. And her survival, unlike Maude’s ironic detachment or the Dude’s oozing chill, feels brutally American. As in: give the people what they want before they ask for it, and bill them later.

There’s something almost punk rock about Bunny’s refusal to evolve. She doesn’t arc. She doesn’t learn. She doesn’t try. Which—if you’re used to watching character development as morality play—is deeply frustrating. But I think there’s power in that, too.

We’re living in an era obsessed with character redemption. Everyone wants an arc. Redemption stories are the currency of the content economy. We want our villains traumatized, our heroes conflicted, and our side characters secretly geniuses. Bunny? She just...is. She doesn’t have a sob story, doesn’t “grow” by the third act, doesn’t flash a hidden talent for chess or vintage car repair. She’s not secretly writing a memoir. She’s not "misunderstood." She’s just playing her part so hard you can’t tell if she wrote the script or burned it.

And isn’t that kind of...liberating?

There’s this moment, tiny but unforgettable, when the nihilists are howling about Bunny’s toe. It’s supposed to be hers, chopped off, held hostage. But of course it’s not hers—it’s from some rando, some plot-layer designed to fake us all out. And there’s something obscene about how easily the men accept this grotesque token as proof of her vulnerability, her violation. Because that's what they want to believe. Bunny, punished. Bunny, a victim. Bunny, finally made real.

But Bunny isn’t interested in being real. She’s interested in being Bunny. And in this universe, where everything is theater—what could be more authentic than that?

Here’s where I confess something: I used to hate her.

I thought she was the worst part of the movie. Shallow, dumb, filler. A meme of a woman. I was wrong, obviously. What I was actually reacting to wasn’t Bunny—it was my own discomfort with women who don’t try to explain themselves. Bunny is not “relatable.” She doesn’t try to make herself small. She isn’t ashamed of the parts of her that glitter or beg or demand. She is the human embodiment of that line from Jenny Holzer: “You are so complex, you don’t respond to danger.”

Or maybe: You are so fake, you looped back into real again.

And I guess that’s what makes her stick. She’s not the emotional core of the film. She’s not even on screen that much. But like all good icons, she creates a shadow big enough to destabilize everything else. She’s the glitch that reveals the whole game. A hot pink ghost floating through a world of beige moralism, tie-dye detachment, and woolly masculinity that’s too high to notice its own fragility.

So yes, Bunny Lebowski is a liar. But she’s also the only one in the film who doesn’t pretend otherwise. And that, in this post-post-ironic, content-addled, trauma-pilled moment we’re all stumbling through? Feels like a kind of truth I can live with.

Or at least meme about.