The Big Lebowski Goes To The Polish Wedding

The Big Lebowski Goes To The Polish Wedding:
Polish Americans – Hollywood Style

By John J. Bukowczyk

[Reprinted from The Polish Review, Vol. 47, No. 2, ©2002 The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America]

 

Whereas there is a distinguished Polish cinema which boasts names like Kieslowski, Zanussi and Wajda, a native Polish-American cinema still eludes members of the Polish American community. Polish Americans have written, directed, and produced videos, films, and documentaries,[1] and a few of these have featured Polish-American (or Polish) content, characters, or themes;[2] but, taken together, this disparate, largely unnoticed, and perhaps mostly non­professional work has not approached the volume, visibility, or importance of Jewish American, Italian American, or African American cinema. Accordingly, Polish Americans to this day are left to view Polish American cinematic representations authored largely by hostile, critical, or merely ill-informed others. Even when such work has been very good, it still has placed Polish Americans in the anomalous and paradoxical position of outsiders looking upon cinematic portrayals of themselves.[3]

Polish immigrants and ethnics generally have fared poorly in filmic representations of themselves. Historian Caroline Golab noted the recurrence of images of the Slav as "poor, dumb, easily duped peasant" in Yiddish theatrical productions of the early twentieth century.[4] Filmic representations of working-class Polish and Slavic Americans later incorporated some of the same elements;[5] and these celluloid stereotypes became a commonplace in American film after the 1970s.[6] Prime-time television programs during the period depicted Polish Americans in a similar fashion.[7] To be sure, some of the characters and situations portrayed in both media were more complicated and multi-dimensional than critics from among the Polish-American community have credited, but on balance the images delivered spanned a range from unflattering to downright negative and even racist. In recent years, to these has been added the trope of "Polish anti-Semitism." It now verges on becoming a new stereotype in media treatments of Poles and their homeland (one that has received insufficient serious critical examination by both Polish-American and Jewish American scholars).[8]

No research yet has established whether media treatment of Poles and Poland has affected Polish American media representations. In fact, apart from the above, portrayals of Polish Americans per se seem in general to have meliorated in both frequency and intensity in the past decade. This has been no mean achievement. Whereas many of the elements of the stereotypic Italian American (passionate, violent, dangerous, involved in organized crime) seem to have been revalued – and glamorized – in contemporary American mass culture,[9] thus lifting but not changing the Italian American image, this has not been so with Polish-American peasant-cum-working-class stereotypes ("dumb," that is, stupid, crude, brutish, laughably awkward). Such characterizations may have fallen or be falling away (owing to a variety of influences including, for example, changing tastes in humor and the effects of multiculturalism), but {Forrest Gump notwithstanding) they simply are less easily revalued as positive or desirable features than those of Italian-Americans.

Because of their immutability, any such shift in the valuation of existing Polish American filmic stereotypes accordingly would be a noteworthy cultural phenomenon. As two recent examples of such representations, the 1998 cinema comedies, The Big Lebowski and Polish Wedding, thus merit serious scholarly analysis precisely because they can be seen as a construction site for the making of a new and possibly improved twenty-first century Hollywood Polish American.

Set in the early 1990s, during the Gulf War between the United States and Iraq, The Big Lebowski by the Coen brothers (who also made Fargo) tells the tale of Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), a lazy, aging hippy loser mistaken for Los Angeles millionaire Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), also known as The Big Lebowski. After, by mistake, two hired thugs ruin a carpet in The Dude’s home in order to coerce repayment of a debt actually run up by The Big Lebowski’s young trophy wife (and porno-movie star) Bunny (Tara Reid), who has disappeared, The Dude enlists the aid of his bowling buddy, gun-crazy, bigoted, Vietnam War veteran Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) to demand compensation from The Big Lebowski. Thereafter The Dude, Walter, and another bowling chum (Steve Buscemi) pass the balance of the film, with its twisting and turning sub-plots, alternately preparing for a big bowling match against champion bowler-cum-child sex offender Jesus Quintana (John Turturro), philosophizing and swearing profusely (and, in the case of The Dude, also swilling White Russians), and, sometimes in league with The Big Lebowski, sometimes with The Big Lebowski’s stepdaughter (and nude feminist painter) Maude (Julianne Moore), attempting to ransom Bunny from her alleged kidnappers.

If The Big Lebowski falls between film noir and comedy of the absurd, the Fox Searchlight production Polish Wedding, written and directed by Theresa Connelly, is part romance, part farce. Set in heavily Polish Hamtramck, Michigan, Connelly’s girlhood home, presumably sometime between the 1950s and 1970s,[10] the film focuses on the women of a big working-class Polish immigrant family, the Pzoniaks: daughter Hala (Claire Danes), whose life seems to revolve around sneaking out a basement window of her home for nighttime sexual liaisons with her policeman beau (AdamTrese), and beautiful matriarch and cleaning lady Jadzia (Lena Olin) who, pertly dressed in the uniform of her Polish Ladies Auxiliary League (which displays a Polish eagle emblem), makes similar forays in order to rendezvous with Roman (Rade Serbedzija), her cultured paramour and employer. Meanwhile, baker husband and father Bolek (Gabriel Byme) is powerless to influence the nocturnal comings and goings of his unhappy womenfolk. The sexual escapades of thetwo women build up to a cinematic climax at the church celebration, the Festival of the Virgin, where Hala has the honor of crowning a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By the end of the film, like mother like daughter, Hala has become pregnant, her condition causing a public scandal at the festival, with the girl, after a physical row initiated by the pastor, ending up crowning herself. Meanwhile Jadzia, having broken off with her lover, has reconciled with the philosophical Bolek. The film concludes with a family tableau of mother, daughter, son-in-law, and new baby girl, a continuation of the cycle.

Because of the differences between the two films, The Big Lebowski and Polish Wedding do not lend themselves easily to comparative discussion. The Big Lebowski takes place in a deracinated California setting; Polish Wedding, in an aging Michigan ethnic enclave. The Big Lebowski features American-born characters only whose names are seemingly Polish; Polish Wedding is an immigrant story dripping with ethnic detail. Finally, The Big Lebowski was made by two of Hollywood’s highly acclaimed independent filmmakers; Polish Wedding is the low-budget first film of an urbane though working-class Hamtramck born writer-director, part Polish and, by her own account, still with sentimental ties to the film’s setting despite having lived abroad for many years.[11] Nonetheless, both of these films present images of Polish-American ethnicity; and since they appeared in theaters at virtually the same time (Polish Wedding opened less than two months after The Big Lebowski closed)[12] during a period when no other new movies offered much competition as filmic representations of Polish Americans, a comparative examination of the two is warranted and perhaps instructive.

At first glance, the Coen brothers seem to have constructed The Big Lebowski around a giant Polish-American stereotype. In fact, the character of The Dude was based upon a non-Polish Coen acquaintance, Jeff Dowd, an independent movie producer and distributor, whom film critic Roger Ebert describes as "tall, large, shaggy and aboil with enthusiasm … a creature of the moment";[13] and in selecting a rather Polish-sounding surname for the film’s hero (or anti-hero), the Coens tap a tropic identification associating working-class Polish Americans with bowling and bowling with working-class Polish Americans. For the Coens, however, bowling appears as a metaphor for timelessness, identity, and quest, and the bowling alley is where The Dude again and again encounters the film’s philosophical narrator, "The Stranger" (Sam Elliott), who mystically appears in a guise resembling that of Texas marshal or lonesome cowpoke. The invocation of bowling as ethnic stereotype consequently implies no malice and delivers no sting. Meanwhile, theCoens’s two central characters themselves are not stereotypes as much as parodies of stereotypes: The Dude, like All in the Family’s Michael Stivic, only twenty years later and without the stabilizing influence of wife Gloria and father-in-law Archie Bunker; Walter Sobchak, an anti-Robert De Niro figure who, twenty-five years after The Deer Hunter, seems to have metamorphosed into a semi-psychotic version of Archie Bunker. But, as noted, except for the surnames of these two characters (and their tropic pastime), The Big Lebowski is devoid of Polish-American ethnic content, perhaps an accurate if inadvertent commentary on the fate of ethnic culture among many a third- and fourth-generation Polish American. Also noteworthy are the two other ostensibly Polish American characters in the film, millionaire Jeffrey Lebowski and daughter Maude, who fit no ethnic stereotype at all and, except for their surnames, are, ethnically speaking, completely unmarked.

It is curious that The Big Lebowski seems to have attracted no notice by ethnic organizations, the ethnic press, or ethnic filmgoers. Is it possible that many Polish American male baby-boomers actually might have recognized— or even identified—with such robust, ribald, irreverent, offbeat—and largely de-ethnicized—characters as Walter and The Dude?[14] By contrast, writer-director Theresa Connelly’s film, Polish Wedding, touched off a firestorm of criticism within Polonia involving its motives, mistakes, and intentions.

In the first instance, it is fair to say that Polish Wedding is a clumsy first film (whose direction one ethnic reviewer aptly characterized as "hamfisted");[15] and many of the criticisms of it can be attributed, directly or indirectly, to its artistic inadequacies (though it is difficult to parse which of these resulted from ill-considered artistic choices or mistakes by the writer and director and which from the film’s modest production budget). Reviewer Richard von Busack called the story line "alternately mawkish and hard to swallow."[16] One filmgoer thought the characters "flat andun-dynamic."[17] Other comments mocked the unauthentic accents of the characters. In particular, Lena Olin, playing Jadzia, was derided as "Transylvanian-accented"[18] or "doing a bad Natasha Fatale accent"[19] or having "the worst accent in the history of film."[20] The soundtrack was criticized as sounding "Balkan or klezmer"[21] or "Russian."[22] It was, however, the ethnic, class, and religious representation and implicit commentary in the film that provoked the most intense and integrated critique of the film by ethnic Polish viewers and leaders alike.[23]

A statement by the Anti-Bigotry Committee of the Polish American Congress summarizes much of both the popular and institutional criticism of the film, which implicated the film’s storyline as well as individual artistic details: "No wedding takes place. It’s nothing but a contrived series of silly sexual escapades by a cheating wife and her promiscuous daughter shown as members of a crude and low-class family that Fox Films decided to give a Polish Catholic identity."[24] Because of Polish Wedding’s flaws as a film, it requires considerable exertion to understand and to appreciate it. The value of these labors probably would not justify the effort but for the importance the film has acquired, more as artifact than as art, owing both to the claims made by its director for the film’s ethnic authenticity and the strong, occasionally vitriolic reaction the film called forth from organized Polonia as well as from individual Polish American moviegoers. While some critics took offense at the film’s ethnic and religious irreverence, some either misunderstood its artistic intentions or merely expressed distaste for the film’s genre. In fact, it is not intended as an ethnography, as many Polish American filmgoers and critics apparently would have preferred, but an ethnic-American version of a French bedroom comedy with minor pretentions to being cinematic art.[25] From the standpoint of ethnic criticism, both Polish Wedding and The Big Lebowski seem to try to break away from reductive Polish American filmic stereotypes at the same time that they try to use and manipulate them.[26]

Perhaps the most controversial and politically charged aspect of Polish Wedding involves its seemingly gratuitous introduction of a Polish/Jewish relationship, historically complex and ofttimes troubled, as a sub-theme of the film. Jadzia’s first sexual encounter with her businessman-lover Roman takes place on the tiled floor of an office lavatory that she is scrubbing. This particular contrived encounter in this decidedly crude setting seems designed to evoke both revulsion at the Polish cleaning lady Jadzia and perhaps disgust at the businessman Roman. Later in the film, when Jadzia playfully calls the "dark" Roman a "Gypsy" and he rejoins that he is not a Gypsy but a Jew, the previous scene also becomes ethnically charged, as if Connelly had intended to invite an anti-Semitic response as well. The point made by one Polish-American commentator, that "[t]he scene where the wife is having an affair with a wealthy sophisticated Jewish man was a gratuitous cheap shot,"[27] is well taken, but the Polish/Jewish element in the film deserves closer scrutiny. Except for the absence of religious iconography in Roman’s living quarters (and perhaps Roman’s beard, which could be read as an ethnic marker), no evidence other than Roman’s rejoinder to Jadzia substantiates Roman’s assertion of ethnic identity; and the film thus leaves open the possibility that Roman’s response to her was, paralleling her comment, ironic. This might render the exchange no less gratuitous, but irony clearly would complicate its reading.

Interestingly, The Big Lebowski also introduces a Polish/Jewish dimension in one of the film’s minor plot twists. When a crucial match of the bowling tournament is scheduled for a Saturday, Walter tells The Dude that the match needs to be rescheduled because "Saturday … is shabbas, the Jewish day of rest." The Dude replies, "You’re not even f—–g Jewish, man. .. . Man, you’re f—–g Polish Catholic." Apparently, Walter had converted to Judaism when he married his Jewish ex-wife, but Walter responds by asking The Dude: "So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?"[28] The Coens, who themselves are Jewish,[29] seem to play a joke on both Polish and Jewish filmgoers, since things here, as throughout the film, are not what they appear to be. In an article applauding the appearance of "observant American Jews portrayed in novels and films," one Jewish writer, quoting ShimonWincelberg "who has worked in Hollywood since the early 1950s," noted about Walter, "[E]ven characters that some may find offensive represent a certain maturity in Jewish portrayals. In the old days, you could never portray a sleazy character as a Jew. Nowadays, anything goes."[30] For that matter, since the actors who play The Dude and The Big Lebowski evince no identifiably or stereotypically Polish ethnic markers[31] (unlike, for example, African-American actors now typically cast to play African American roles who typically display race and often ethnic markers like, respectively, skin color or accent),[32] no internal evidence in the film establishes that either Jeff (The Dude) Lebowski or Jeffrey (The Big) Lebowski is, like Walter, "Polish Catholic."[33]

A second highly controversial element of Polish Wedding centers around what some critics considered its blasphemous handling of Roman Catholicism. Satire and criticism of the Roman Catholic Church have been common in both film and television, with a publicist for the Catholic League commenting that "rarely, if ever, is there a positive role for the Church in movie portrayals of Catholicism." Polish Wedding raised Catholic ire, in the words of a League spokesman, because in it the characters’ "Catholic faith is made the object of rank hypocrisy" epitomized by the devout yet adulterous Jadzia, the pregnant "virgin" Hala, and the film’s indecorous, intolerant, unforgiving priest.[34] Meanwhile, Connelly uses a parody of May Marian devotions, so beloved to devout Polish Catholics, as the setting for the climax of the film. One filmgoer found the ensuing conflict between Hala and the priest merely "symbolic of the conflict in the Church today."[35] Alternately, it may be no defense of Connelly to suggest that Hala herself, though taken as a profanation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, seems to have been meant as a Marian figure in her own right, testimony to the fact that the meaning possibly intended is not always the meaning received. Ironically, The Big Lebowski introduces what might have been taken as a similarly blasphemous motif, unremarked perhaps because understated. ‘"Somehow I rest easier, knowing The Dude is out there takin’ er easy for our sins.’ So states the mysterious cowboy narrator . ..," one filmgoer wrote, "thereby elevating Jeff Bridges’s character, The Dude, into the archetypal Christlike anti-hero of our times."[36] Construing two such irreligious figures in, respectively, Marian or Christlike terms seems a broad interpretive stretch, but one might suggest that, in an irreligious modern world, blasphemy itself perhaps becomes a devotional act insofar as it, unlike atheism, at least acknowledges the existence and salience of God, even while defiling or denouncing the sacred. In this construction, one might by further stretch of the imagination construe both movies as belonging to the canon of religious film.

Finally, a third, somewhat more amorphous area in Polish Wedding that engendered viewer and critic complaints involved the domestic portrayal of Polish womanhood in the persons of Hala and Jadzia. Some filmgoers and ethnic critics identified specific "mistakes" in distaff detail: the family’s daily diet of homemade pierogi (dumplings) as too labor-intensive realistically to maintain;[37] "leaving laundry on the clothesline overnight" as "unthinkable for a Polish woman"[38]; the alleged portrayal of Polish food (pierogi, kielbasa, a storage room full of jars of homemade pickles) as "grotesque"[39] the depiction of Jadzia and Hala as "sluts."[40] Implicated in the last is what one commentator characterized as a defense of "feminine Polish honor" by alleged guardians of ethnic patriarchy. [41] Ironically, a 1976 scholarly study by anthropologist Paul Wrobel of a Detroit Polish neighborhood on the outskirts of Hamtramck faced similar criticism for its portrayal of matriarchal working-class Polish American households.[42] While specific criticisms such as these might be debated and possibly rebutted serially,[43] Connelly’s choice of these details makes better sense when set within the totality of the film. Jadzia’s preoccupation with food preparation—making pierogi and canning pickles (which, Bolek notes in a significant scene preceding rapprochement with his wife, he actually "despises")—seems related to the sexual sublimation and personal denial that characterize the Pzoniak household. Of the pickles, Jadzia eventually laments, "All of a sudden, just to look at them fills me with sadness," while Bolek replies, "Maybe we don’t need so many pickles." And, could it be that, by the nocturnally full clothesline which bears witness to Hala’s and Jadzia’s comings and goings, the director (perhaps sophomorically) means to suggest that the family’s dirty linen is aired only at night?

More fundamentally, some of these criticisms misfire because Polish Wedding is a story about family, matriarchy, womanhood, sexuality, and sexual relationships between women and men, however clumsily the film carries it off. Despite superficial appearances, the film destabilizes the stereotype of Slavic women—babushka-clad and shapeless; and several filmgoers applaud this accomplishment. "And at last," one wrote, "an attractive older woman (Olin) who has an affair!"[44] Another commentator remarked, "Polish American women are flesh and blood";[45] while another concedes that Olin and Danes are "gorgeous."[46] Beneath the surface of these racy female portrayals are characters with a visceral feminist consciousness, remarked elsewhere in the scholarly literature.[47] "This is my house," Jadzia says, "these are my sons. This is my husband, my bread, my table, my kitchen, mine." Jadzia is "a fiercely proud and sexual matriarch"[48] and "queen of her castle."[49] Hala is destined to become Jadzia, as will her newborn baby daughter after her. The film is thus non-linear and cyclical in concept, which helps to explain filmgoers’ problems in finding in it a plot. Parenthetically, before such women, the male figure can be weak, nothing. To Roman, Jadzia says, "I’m a queen. I have five children, four of them boys, men, a husband. I have my own house. What do you have?" But a man such as husband Bolek is not weak but rather strong and masculine for wisely recognizing the ageless, immutable, inexorable, primordial power and mystery of womankind. "A woman is bom to be both more and less than a man," Bolek opines. "She must be above him and beneath him." Later in the film, Bolek philosophizes to daughter Hala, who has visited him at night in the bakery, "In the beginning, there was a lump of dough. You and me. Until the Master Breadmaker himself, with his own two hands, gave us shape. First, He made man, and out of man’s body, woman." "After man?" Hala asks, "Why after?" "She was an improvement," Bolek says. "Man was simple, basic, a pumpernickel. But woman was like a light and airy Easter halka."[50] The feminism in this film clearly is an essentialist construct, one that embraces its limits as it revels in its strengths.

The setting for these ruminations accordingly is timeless, rendering the clash between a 1950s plot and a 1990s backdrop irrelevant. Connelly shows a fondness and respect for characters whom she admires for their considerable strengths and despite their infidelities, foibles, paradoxes, and hypocrisies. The film itself may be, as Connelly describes it, "a love-letter to Hamtramck."[51] But it is the ethnic community of memory, "a lovely dreamland," as one commentator described it, "romantic, enveloping, ethereal … a view filled with warmth and affection, even longing."[52] It is a world she has lost. Despite this obvious nostalgia, paradoxically the ethnic community and Polishness are as incidental to Polish Wedding, which is a film about universals, as they are, more evidently, to The Big Lebowski, whose philosophical message might be summed up in one of the film’s lines: "The Dude abides." "Polishness is just a bit of backdrop scenery," one commentator remarked of Polish Wedding, ". . . local culture and little else."[53] In curious parallel to the cyclical ending of Polish Wedding, The Big Lebowski also concludes with "a little Lebowski on the way," conceived in a one-night tryst between The Dude and Maude.

That Connelly had enlisted community cooperation in providing costumes, dancers, ethnic decoration doubtless had raised expectations and therefore intensified popular criticism of the film she eventually delivered.[54] One commentator thought Connelly "has no insight into small ethnic communities."[55] Another quipped, "Why didn’t they just make this a family of Potsylvanians living in Crovenia in some dimly-remembered postwar era, and none of this would have bothered me."[56] Reviewer Roger Ebert ventured, "Polish Wedding is the kind of movie that cries out to be set in a country I know little or nothing about."[57] "[Connelly] should have anticipated how people would react," historian John Radzilowski commented. "Had she attempted to meet with organized—or even unorganized!—Polish Americans, try to explain the film a little, show that she identifies with the community (more than as just a way to deflect unwelcome criticism) and is aware of Polish American concerns, her comments [in defense of the film] might carry more weight."[58] The Big Lebowski, a film that perhaps even more easily could be read as defamatory to Polish Americans, neither raised expectations nor sparked comparable criticism.

In the case of Polish Wedding, it remains a big question how well any amount of community liaison work would have succeeded in diffusing what Polish Americans, through experience, have developed as a patterned defensive response to typically disparaging cinematic representations of themselves. Nonetheless, viewed more generously, both Polish Wedding and The Big Lebowski in hindsight present themselves as notable departures from Hollywood’s stock Polish-American stereotypes. A recent study of Chicano images in Chicano film by Christine List offers heuristic clues to an appreciation of what both of these films actually do in greater or lesser measure. In drawing complicated characters, both films, as with the Cheech and Chong comedies, discard cardboard filmic stereotypes. Characters are shown also to have admirable qualities, despite their foibles and quirks. However unbalanced, The Dude and Walter, for example, do have a sense of right and wrong, of privacy rights, of obeying society’s rules (at least some of them), as well as an egalitarian disrespect for wealth and authority. Jadzia and Bolek, in turn, are intelligent, sensitive, and thoughtful, hardly "dumb Polacks." Meanwhile, a "silliness" (as List calls it) pervades both movies, suggesting that neither is to be taken very seriously.[59] Finally, of the work of Chicano comedic actor/director Cheech Marin, List wrote (more debatably):

When every ethnic group is exposed to . . . equal ridicule, the negative effect of the stereotype in the film is altered … the ethnocentric aggression that stereotyD-"S typically imply is diffused. All ethnic groups are shown to be equal) vulnerable to being typed, equally susceptible to becoming the butt of an ethnic joke. This technique encourages the viewer who recognizes himself or herself as one of the caricatured ethnics in the film to read the Chicano stereotype in the same way he or she would most likely read a stereotype of his or her own ethnic group in the film – as an ethnic caricature with little basis in fact. This type of cinematic dismantling forces viewers to draw comparisons and promotes recognition of the existence of stereotypes across ethnic groups.[60]

Of its treatment of ethnicity in The Big Lebowski, one filmgoer offered, "The movie in a way makes fun of Jews, Italians, Poles, Germans, Swedes, Greeks, Mexicans but not in a vulgar way." [61]

While both films may serve to destabilize ethnic stereotypes, the intent nonetheless might have escaped those who failed to give the film a subtle and sophisticated reading; and this raises issues about the relationship between and among art, artist, and society, as well, about the responsibilities of filmmaker as critic and communicator. "[Polish Wedding] will not itself cause anybody to develop anti-Polish stereotypes," Radzilowski wrote, "but it certainly does reinforce such stereotypes in those who already hold them."[62] Owing to their tangibility and immediacy, however, film and television, more than most media, are powerful shapers of opinion and creators of stereotypes where none exist. An advertisement for Polish Wedding called the Pzoniaks "a loving and lusting right-on-the-edge-of-offensive-stereotype Polish Catholic family."[63] Another filmgoer took an unintended lesson from Polish Wedding: "the characters are great and actually what I think are Polish stereotypes ([I] have no idea of how true that image is, though)."[64] In describing Walter Sobchak of The Big Lebowski, a writer for The Jewish Journal likewise noted, "He was born a Polish Catholic and has the accent and mannerisms of a stereotyped member of the group from, say, Chicago—picture ‘The Blues Brothers’ without the sunglasses."[65] Film critic Rex Reed wrote, "Watching Polish Wedding not only makes you understand and appreciate Polish jokes better, but inspires you to think up a few new ones of your own."[66]

It is difficult to resolve whether films such as these, which are philosophical texts and not ethnographies, thus serve more to subvert stereotypes than collude in reinventing and thereby re-institutionalizing them. Perhaps the stereotypical, if good-natured or sympathetic portrayals of Polish Americans like, respectively, The Dude and Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski or Jadzia and Bolek in Polish Wedding would merit scant comment if there were a Polish American cinema, but, as remarked above, to date that is not the case. Certainly, Polish names now appear among the credits of many Hollywood productions, but they cluster in the technical areas. Even so, there they remain a small minority. Fewer than half a dozen Polish names appeared in the credits of The Big Lebowski, whose cast and crew numbered nearly three hundred persons.[67] More strikingly still, Polish Wedding, filmed in the still heavily Polish Detroit area, credited fewer than ten Polish names among its cast and crew of nearly two hundred.[68]

Since ethnic identity is so much a matter of self-definition, it may be harsh and perhaps unfair that some Polish American critics castigated part-Polish director Theresa Connelly as only "allegedly a Polish American."[69] Nonetheless, even as she has invoked her ethnic background and religion as testimony to the sensibilities that underlay the film she had made,[70] clearly her portrayal of Polonia, as a sole cinematic representation of the community by a Polish American, did not speak to the longings of considerable segments of the Polish-American community who, like African American filmgoers in the days before the rise of African American writers and directors, crave films that might present the Polish American experience in a positive light and in an artistic idiom with which they can relate. While some Polish American institutional opinion-leaders themselves may yet need to acknowledge the diversity of voices and perspectives that constitute the Polish American community and recognize that diversity as legitimate (a difficult concession to make in bygone days when unity within Polonia seemed essential for Poland’s survival, but one that should be much less so now),[71] filmmakers and other creative artists, who in general exist perhaps in Polonia’s cultural vanguard rather than in its mainstream, themselves may need to find ways to reconcile their own decidedly legitimate experimental, edgy, and iconoclastic artistic visions with the no less legitimate popular ethnic sensitivities, sensibilities, and tastes. Regarding the latter, some of the popular responses to Polish Wedding are particularly instructive. "I’m half Polish, from Pennsylvania coal miners," one filmgoer remarked online, "and I never met any Poles like these people."[72] Another meanwhile observed, "The Poles have a rich culture that is worth making a good movie out of."[73]

One film alone does not constitute a Polish American cinema nor does Polish Wedding, that is, this one particular film, make its writer-director a Polish-American filmmaker, that is, a filmmaker for whom Polish American ethnicity forms an integral part of his creative vision and artistic oenvre. While another commentator speculated that, in her future work, Connelly would avoid making another film "in which Polonia figures,"[74] given the ethnic criticisms leveled at the film, it is precisely more focus on Polonia and its people that would reinforce Connelly’s identity as a Polish-American artist and perhaps bring Polonia a step closer to having a cinema that it could call its own. Nonetheless, the negative Polish American institutional and popular response to Connelly’s first work certainly underscores the difficulties of evolving an ethnic cinema that simultaneously merits critical acclaim, is commercially successful (this film was not),[75] and receives approbation from both ethnic opinion-leaders and moviegoers.

In 1980, Caroline Golab concluded:

The Slavic stereotype as portrayed in the film will change only as the Slavs

[as a group], like the Irish before them, move up the social ladder. Those higher up on the ladder need those lower down in order to secure their superior positions.. . . Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Appalachian poor whites may be the Polaks of tomorrow.[76]

While ethnic group economic and social mobility certainly bear on the ways groups and their members are represented in the popular culture, the linear progression from razz to respectability predicted in Golab’s cultural version of the "ethnic succession" model seems mechanistic and thus overly optimistic (if the replacement of one set of ethnic stereotypes for another can be called "optimistic").[77] It ignores the reification of ethnic tropes in the popular and mass culture (as in the case of the "Polish joke") as well as the role that intergroup relations (such as those between Polish Americans and Jewish Americans or African Americans), group political mobilization (such as the political mobilization of African Americans), and foreign affairs (such as events taking place in post-socialist Poland or in the Middle East) play in racial and ethnic representation in the media. Likewise, Golab’s formulation also overlooks the possibility that Polish-American anti-defamation efforts, backed up by perceived Polish-American economic power, might have exerted a positive influence on media representations of Polish Americans.

All of these contentions remain subject to further scholarly investigation. But it no less might be argued that until Polish American filmmakers have established themselves in American feature and documentary film and have confronted and mastered the difficulties in evolving a Polish-American cinema,[78] Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski and Walter Sobchak may continue to be mainstream Hollywood’s mass-market version of a Polish American,[79] "better fictional portrayals of Polonians than … the drunken, abusive Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire,"[80] but also no better than the clownish African American Fred Sanford and George Jefferson.[81]

CONTRIBUTORS

IZABELA KALINOWSKA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of European Languages, Literature, and Cultures at State University of New York -Stony Brook. During the 2001-2002 academic year, she was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Cracow.

ANNA BRZOZOWSKA-KRAJKA is a professor in the Polish Department at Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin. Her scientific interests and publications concern Polish and Slavic magical folklore, theory of folklore, literary and folkloristic comparative studies, and immigrant folklore. She is Chairman of the International Commission of Science and Research of the International Organization of Folk Art affiliated with UNESCO.

W1ESLAW KRAJKA is professor in the English Departments at Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and at the University of Wroclaw. His scientific interests and publications concern mainly eighteenth-twentieth century English literature (especially Joseph Conrad), theory of literature, and comparative literature. He is the general editor of the series "Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives," published by Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and East European Monographs, Boulder, Colorado.

BARBARA TEPA LUPACK has written extensively on Polish and American literature, film, and culture. Her latest book is Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: From Micheaux to Morrison (University of Rochester Press, 2002).

M. B. B. BISKUPSKI is currently Professor of History at St. John Fisher College. In fall, 2002, he will become the Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair of Polish History at Central Connecticut State University. Author and editor of numerous books, including a recent history of Poland, he has been recognized for his work by the Polish government.

JOHN J. BUKOWCZYK is Professor of History at Wayne State University and also general editor of the Ohio State University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. He is the author of And My Children Did Not Know Me.

FOOTNOTES

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[1] See, for example, the work of Paul Glabicki. See <http://www.canyoncinema.
com/G/Glabicki.html>, June 22, 2001.

[2] The most recent among these is the critically acclaimed 2000 World War Two
memoir/retrospective, Burning Questions by Mishael Porembski. Another filmmaker
dealing with Polish and Polish American subjects is Mark Paulton Siska, whose short
film, Circus Life, is set in Cracow and whose new film, Clowns, which was scheduled
to begin shooting in the summer of 1997, reportedly takes as its subject the rise and fall
of communism in Poland. There also is the work of Chicago-based Polish
documentary filmmaker Marian Marzyhski, the PBS Frontline production Welcome to
America (1984) and God Bless America and Poland Too (1990), but Marzynski’s
emigre status perhaps makes these less Polish American productions per se than
hybrids. See Lydia Kordalewski, "Polish Film Reviews," Polish News, <http://www.
polishnews.com/artykuly/war3.shtml>, June 22, 2001; "Festival ’97: American
Cinema," <http://www.eurounderground.org/archive/fall.htm>, June 25, 2001;
<http://www.elbsentertainment.com/ads/ads-directors.htm>, June 22, 2001.

[3] Among contemporary documentary work on Polish Americans are Tom Palazzolo’s short film on a working-class Italian/Polish American backyard wedding shower, Ricky and Rocky (1972); Joan Micklin Silver’s docu-drama, The Immigrant Experience: The Long, Long Journey (1972); Les Blank’s examination of the polka subculture, In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984); Gaylen Ross’s Out of Solidarity: Three Polish Families in America (1987); Marlene Booth’s The Double Burden: Three Generations of Working Mothers (1992), which focuses on a Mexican American family, an African American family, and a Polish American family; the rather saccharine PBS documentary, The Polish Americans (1998); and Sarah Prices’s Caesar’s Park (2000) on a Milwaukee neighborhood. Historian Thaddeus Gromada consulted on Silver’s film and The Polish Americans; historian Thaddeus Radzilowski, on Ross’s. See, respectively, <http://hjem.get2net.dk/jack_stevenson/tompa.htm>, June 22, 2001; <http://www. oriole.umd.edu/~mddlmddl/791/video.html>, June 22, 2001; <http://www.wifilmfest.org/film_details.asp?id=227>; John Radzilowski, <Jradzilow-@aol.com>, "Re: loss of Polish language," September 20, 1996, archived at APAP Archives, <http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/apap/archives/1996/1147.html>; <http://www.newday.com/films/The_Double_Burden.html>; <http://www.pbs.org/pressroom-/1998/summer/releases/polishamericans/html>; <http://www. wifilmfest.org/film_details.asp?id=310>.

[4] Caroline Golab, "Stellaaaaaa…… !!!!!!!!: The Slavic Stereotype in American

Film," in The Kaleidoscopic Lens: How Hollywood Views Ethnic Groups, ed. Randall M. Miller (n.p.: Jerome S. Ozer, Publisher, 1980), p. 140.

[5] Among the early such films v/ereBlack Fury (1935), Anna Lucasta (1949), Call
Northside 777 (1948), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Saturday’s Hero (1951), The
Caine Mutiny (1954), and The Man With the Golden Arm (1956). Representations of
Slavic women appeared in such films as Some Like It Hot (1959) and Let No Man
Write My Epitaph (1960). See Golab, "Stellaaaaaa," pp. 141-145.

[6] Films of the seventies included The Deer Hunter (1978), Blue Collar (1978),
Rabbit Test (1978), and The End (1978). See Golab, "Stellaaaaaa," pp. 144, 149.

[7] Among these were All in the Family, Barney Miller, and Laverne and Shirley.
Anti-Polish jokes, routines, and skits also were a commonplace on the airways during
the period. See John J. Bukowczyk, And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of
the Polish-Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 112; James S.
Pula, "Image, Status, Mobility and Integration in American Society: The Polish
Experience," Journal of American Ethnic History vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 1996): pp. 74-76.
Also see John J. Bukowczyk, "The Image and Self-image of Polish Americans," Polish

American Studies vol. 55, no. 2 (Autumn 1998): pp. 78-79.

[8] The focus on anti-Semitic attitudes among Poles in Alan J. Pakula’s film, Sophie’s Choice (1982); Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, Shoah; and Marian Marzynski’s Shtetl (1996) touched off considerable protest and internal controversy in the Polish American community. Recent controversy over the erection of a cross outside the Auschwitz concentration camp site and the national self-examination sparked by publication of Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), the wartime massacre of Polish Jews by their ethnic Polish neighbors in a Polish village, have both stimulated and complicated the task of critically and candidly examining Polish/Jewish relations. On the Polish American organizational reaction, see "The Poland Outlook: Release Position Paper on Polish-Jewish Relations," August 17, 1998, <http://www.wonet.com.pl/outlook/art003.html>, July 4, 2001; also see Jaroslaw Anders, "Poles Apart," Los Angeles Times, Book Review, October 12, 1997, <http://www.multimedia.calpoly.edu/libarts/mriedlsp/HISTOR~l/Documents/POLAN D~1.HTM>, July 4, 2001; and "A Symposium on Sophie’s Choice," Polish American Studies vol. 40, no. 1 (Spring 1983): pp. 58-87, which treats the William Styron novel on which the Pakula film was based.

[9] Such stereotypic images of Italian Americans, purveyed most recently and visibly in the critically acclaimed HBO series, The Sopranos, nonetheless have sparked considerable protest among the Italian-American community. Both community reactions as well as the possible deleterious impact of these stereotypes on contemporary Italian American self-image, economic mobility, mainstream social status, etc., merit scholarly attention.

[10] One criticism of the film was the disjunctive between its apparent time period and the obviously 1990s urban neighborhoods, language, and other details (like the price of peaches) which Connelly used as the film’s backdrop and medium. If these were not errors in the script and set, perhaps the director intended either nostalgia or timelessness by this discordant juxtaposition, or perhaps the film’s limited production budget, simply could not support a complete transformation of the cityscape to an earlier era.

[11] Terry Lawson, "Hamtramck at heart: Despite criticism, ‘Polish Wedding’
director says her film reflects home," July 15, 1998, <http://www.freep.com/fun/movies/qpolishl5.htm>, June 14, 2001.

[12] "Box Office Data for Polish Wedding," <http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1998/PLSHW.html>, June 10, 2001; "Box Office Data for The Big Lebowski," <http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1998/BGLEB.html>, June 10,2001.

[13] According to writer William Preston Robertson, Dowd reportedly described
himself as the "Pope of Dope." Walter Sobchak also was patterned after two Coen acquaintances, Pete Exline and John Milius, also apparently not Polish American, judging by their surnames. See Roger Ebert, "The Big Lebowski," <http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1998/03/030601.html>, June 11, 2001; William Preston Robertson, The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film. ed. Tricia Cooke (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 39-41.

[14] One online comment suggested that the film, with its sixties-era references, was aimed at baby boomers, but judging by the ratings given the film by different age cohorts of viewers, it seems as though perhaps it was the baby-boomers’ children who most found it entertaining; the film received the highest "user ratings" from males under the age of thirty. See Comment by blanche-2, New York, July 9, 2000, <http://us.imdb. com/CommentsShow?119910>, June 10, 2001; "User Ratings for The Big Lebowski (1998)," <http://us/imdb.com/Ratings?0118715>, June 10, 2001.

[15] John Radzilowski, "Community Bulletin: Questions on ‘Polish Wedding,’" GP
Light 67 (November 1998): p. 4.

[16] Richard von Busack, "Pickled Drama: Breeding counts in ‘Polish Wedding’ – the more babies the better," <http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/08.06.98/
polishwedding-9831.htmi>, June 11, 2001.

[17] Comment by Hanne Nowak, <hnowak@home.com>, Edmonton, Canada, April 15, 1999, <http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow7119910>, June 10, 2001.

[18] Richard von Busack, "Pickled Drama."

[19] A reference to the female-spy cartoon character in The Bullwinkle Show (formerly Rocky and His Friends). See Comment by Brya English, Rock Island, August 6, 1999, <http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow7119910>, 10 June 2001.

[20] Comment by Scoopy, Budapest, March 19, 1999, <http://us.imdb.com/ CommentsShow?119910>, June 10, 2001. Another viewer thought Olin "snorted through the entire movie." See Comment by KarenS, Detroit, Michigan, July 11, 1999, <http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow7119910>, June 10, 2001.

[21] Comment by Jerzy Matysiakiewicz, <jerzym@dom.zabrze.pl>, Zabrze, Poland, 4 December 1999, <http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow7119910>, 10 June 2001.

[22] Comment by cotton-7, USA, April 19, 1999, <http://us.imdb.com/-
CommentsShow?119910>, June 10, 2001.

[23] These are nicely summarized by John Radzilowski, "Polish Wedding."

[24] See "PAC Says: ‘Skip Invitation to This Polish Wedding; Tell Everyone You Know to Stay Home’; Film Mocks Poles, Catholics," Polish American Journal 87:7 (July 1998): p. 8.

[25] Fox Searchlight has been described as "20th Century-Fox’s art house auxiliary."
See Terry Lawson, "Hamtramck at heart."

[26] One reviewer credited it with "a charm, a quirkiness and a subtlety rarely found in American films." See Ines Watson, "A Charming Gem: POLISH WEDDING, now showing in East London," March 15, 1999, <http://www.dispatch.co.za/1999/03/15/entertainment/GEM.HTM>, June 14, 2001.

[27] John Radzilowski, "Polish Wedding."

[28] The dialogue continues: The Dude: "It’s all part of your sick Cynthia thing, man. Taking care of her f g dog. Going to her f—g synagogue. You’re living in the f—g past." Walter Sobchak: "Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax—YOU’RE G_D_M RIGHT I’M LIVING IN THE F–G PAST!" See "Memorable Quotes from The Big Lebowski (1998)," <http://us.imdb.com/Quotes70118715>, June 10, 2001.

[29] Robertson, The Big Lebowski, p. 23.

[30] Peter Ephross, "Observant American Jews Portrayed in Novels and Films," The Jewish Journal 23, no. 7 (November 27-December 10, 1998), archived at The Jewish Journal Archive, <http://www.jewishjoumal.org/Volume23/archive7.htm>, June 11, 2001.

[31] This raises the question whether there are such "Polish" ethnic markers
recognizable to the group but independent from the mass-cultural stereotypes and,
more broadly, how groups construct ethnic markers for themselves.

[32] This, of course, was not always the case in the days of blackface, namely, the
casting of whites in Black roles in the television sit-com, Amos V Andy. On this
general topic, one might also recall the casting of males to play female roles on the
Shakespearean stage.

[33] In the make-believe world of film and television, as in life, things are not
necessarily as they appear to be. Soap-operas, for example, frequently find ways to
bring popular but ostensibly dead characters back from the grave. More specifically
and saliently, one also might recall the episode of the television sit-com, Taxi, in which
the character of cabdriver Jim Ignatowski, a spaced-out, drugged-out ex-hippy, is
identified as the son of a WASP millionaire who simply has adopted the name
Ignatowski, among his various other quirky acts.

[34] ‘"Polish Wedding’ Is Less Than Engaging," <http://catholicleague.com/98press_releases/pr0398.htm>, June 11, 2001.

[35] Cynthia Zavatska, ‘"Polish Wedding’ is poignant," GP Light 66 (October
1988): p. 2.

[36] Kleist, Emmaus, PA, September 29, 1998, <http://us.imdb.com/Comments
Show?118715/240>, June 10, 2001.

[37] Comment by Jerzy Matysiakiewicz.

[38] Comment by KarenS.

[39] John Radzilowski, "Polish Wedding."

[40] Frank Milewski, "Skip invitation to this Polish wedding," GP Light (August
1998): p. 2.

[41] Karen Majewski, <ProfKaren@aol.com>, "Re: Polish Wedding," November 15, 1999, archived at APAP Archives, <http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/apap/archives/1999/802l.html>, June 11, 2001.

[42] Paul Wrobel, Our Way: Family, Parish, and Neighborhood in a Polish-
American Community (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979),
especially pp. 155-172.

[43] For example, after Hala tells her policeman beau that she is pregnant, he angrily vents, "All you got to do is blow in their ear [and they get pregnant], that’s what they say about you Polack girls." Connelly does not endorse this crude remark, which can be read as a believable sexist and racist response from this particular male character.

[44] Comment by freebird-10, New York, NY, January 5, 2000, <http://us.imdb.-
com/CommentsShow?119910>, June 10, 2001.

[45] Karen Majewski, "Re: Polish Wedding."

[46] John Radzilowski, "Question on ‘Polish Wedding,’" GP Light 67 (November
1998): p. 4.

[47] See Mary Erdmans, The Grasinski Girls: The Choice They Had and the Choices
They Made, under contract with Ohio University Press.

[48] Tom Keogh, "An Extraordinary Performance," <http://www.film/film-review/1998/10709/23/default-review.html>, June 11, 2001.

[49] Comment by Donald W. Cameron (dwc2-l), Hamilton, Ontario, May 4, 2001,
<http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?119910>, June 10, 2001.

[50] The correct Polish word should have been babka. In colloquial Polish, halka is
a woman’s petticoat. Perhaps Connelly was punning a diminutive and double intendre of daughter Hala’s name.

[51] Terry Lawson, "Hamtramck at heart."

[52] "Karen Majewski, "Re: Polish Wedding."

[53] John Radzilowski, "Questions on ‘Polish Wedding,’" GP Light 67 (November
1998): p. 4.

[54] Laura Cieslak, "A View from the Inside: Hollywood Comes to Hamtramck,"
Polish American Journal 87, no. 5 (May 1998): p. 19. "PAC Says: ‘Skip Invitation to
This Polish Wedding; Tell Everyone You Know to Stay Home’; Film Mocks Poles,
Catholics," Polish American Journal): p. 8.

[55] "Polish Wedding," <http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/polishwedding.
q.html>, June 14,2001.

[56] Comment by Scoopy, Budapest.

[57] Roger Ebert, "Polish Wedding," <http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_
reviews/1998/08/082802.html>, June 11, 2001.

[58] See John Radzilowski, "Questions on ‘Polish Wedding,’" GP Light 67
(November 1998): p. 4.

[59] Christine List, Chicano Images: Refiguring Ethnicity in Mainstream Film (New
York: Garland, 1996), pp. 47-48.

[60] List, pp. 46-47.

[61] Comment by The Dude, London, July 23, 1999, <http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow? 1187515/160>

[62] See John Radzilowski, "Questions on ‘Polish Wedding.’"

[63] Ray Pride, "Polish Wedding," <http://www.weeklywire.com/filmvault/chicago/p/polishweddingl.html>, June 11, 2001.

[64] Comment by Elisabeth, <elisabeth.k@lovemail.com>, Stockholm, Sweden,
April 9, 2001, <http://www.us.imdb.com/CommentsShow7119910>, June 10, 2001.

[65] Peter Ephross, "Observant American Jews Portrayed in Novels and Films."

[66] "Polish Wedding," <http://www.thestinkers.com/1998_mzreviews.html>, June
11,2001.

[67] "Full Cast and Crew for Big Lebowski, The (1998)," <http://us.imdb.com/
Credits?0118715>, June 10, 2001.

[68] "Full Cast and Crew for Big Lebowski, The (1998)," <http://us.imdb.com/-
Credits?0118715>, June 10, 2001.

[69] John Radzilowski, "Polish Wedding."

[70] Connelly’s ethnic background is part Polish. Her father was an assembly-line
worker at Chrysler; her mother was employed at a Squirt bottling plant. After spending
her youth living in Hamtramck, Connelly moved to the suburbs where she attended
high school in Royal Oak, Michigan. She attended Barnard College for two years,
studied literature at Leningrad State University, and developed Polish Wedding while
attending the Sundance Institute. Married to Brian Marohnic, a teacher and writer, she
presently resides in Vermont with her husband, son Julian, and retired father Roger.
See "Theresa’s ‘Wedding’: A Hamtramck native comes home to honor epic lives in
small places," Detroit News, September 17, 1996, <http://detnews.com/1996/
menu/stories/65393.htm>, June 14, 2001; Terry Lawson, "Hamtramck at heart."

[71] "We’ll financially support those who treat us honestly and fairly," the Anti-
Bigotry Committee of the Polish American Congress observed. "We’ll fight everyone
who exposes himself or herself as a bigot and malcontent." It might be questioned
whether this position, while defending Polish-American interests from racist assault,
also conduces toward the silencing of critical discussion and expression within Polonia.

See "PAC Says: ‘Skip Invitation to This Polish Wedding; Tell Everyone You Know to Stay Home’; Film Mocks Poles, Catholics," p. 8.

[72] Comment by panguro3, March 8, 2001, <http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?119910>, June 10, 2001.

[73] Comment by Brya English, Rock Island, August 6, 1999, <http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?119910>, June 10, 2001.

[74] Karen Majewski, "Re: Polish Wedding."

[75] In fact, one review of comparative grosses for films released in 1998 assigned it
the rating of "Yikes," signifying that the film’s losses defined "the true meaning of
‘disaster films,’" in its production category. Polish Wedding had a budget of under ten
million dollars and a domestic gross of only about half a million dollars. On a budget
of about fifteen million dollars and a domestic gross of about seventeen million dollars,
The Big Lebowski was no great money maker, but at least received generally good
reviews. See Jeffrey Spaulding, "The 24th Annual Grosses Gloss asteroid shower," in
Film Comment (March 1999), http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/ml069/2_
35/54256559/print jhtml>, 2 July 2001; Terry Lawson, "Hamtramck at heart"; Josh
Levine, The Coen Brothers: The Story of Two American Filmmakers (Toronto: ECW
Press, 2000), p. 145.

[76] See Golab, "Stellaaaaaa," pp. 151-152.

[77] This characterization is, of course, a play on words, referencing writer Horatio
Alger’s "rags to riches" and historian Stephan A. Thernstrom’s alternative "rags to
respectability" social mobility models.

[78] On this topic, also see Bukowczyk, "Image and Self-image," pp. 80-83.

[79] Indeed, The Big Lebowski reached a much larger audience than Polish Wedding.
The total U.S. gross reported for Polish Wedding (covering a period of thirty-one days)
was only $563,143, whereas the figure for The Big Lebowski was $17,439,163 (80
days). At its peak, Polish Wedding played at only 59 screens nationally (ranking it
thirty-second among new releases) compared to 1,235 screens for The Big Lebowski,
which topped with a sixth place. It should be noted, though, that peak earnings per
theater for Polish Wedding were almost double the figure for The Big Lebowski
($8,369 to $4,585), suggesting to me that perhaps the former played in top-drawing
suburban theaters, perhaps in heavily Polish American metropolitan areas.
Nonetheless, the audience for The Big Lebowski was small by Hollywood standards.
To set it in some comparative perspective, for example, the domestic gross of the 2001 film, Pearl Harbor, after twenty-two days was $153,000,000. See "Box Office Data for Polish Wedding," <http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1998/PLSHW.html>, June 10, 2001; "Box Office Data for The Big Lebowski," <http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1998/BGLEB.html>, June 10, 2001; Claudia Eller and Richard Natale, "Hit Status Elusive Target for ‘Pearl Harbor,’" June 17, 2001, <http://www.latimes.com/news/front/20010617/t000050402.html>.

[80] One online commentator offered this opinion about Bolek and Jadzia. See
Curtis Umess, <CU333Write@aol.com>, "Re: Movie on HBO tonight . . . ," 15
November 1999, archived at APAP Archives, <http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/apap/archives/ 1999/8012.html>, June 11, 2001.

[81] This, of course, refers to two television sit-coms lampooning African
Americans, Sanford and Son (1972-77) and The Jeffersons (1975-1985). See Tim
Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows,
1946-Present, 5th ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), pp. 449-50, 778.