Film Noir is a genre with distinct and unique characteristics. Especially important in the 1940s and 1950s, the genre rarely deviated from the skeletal plot that all Film Noir pictures follow. The most famous of these films is The Big Sleep (1946) directed by Howard Hawks. This film is the benchmark for all clichés of the genre. This cinematic formula is so well known and so deeply understood that it is often the target of satire. This is what the Coen brothers did with The Big Lebowski in 1998. This film follows to the letter what Film Noir represents. The Big Lebowski is a stoner comedy about a middle-aged hippie who likes to go bowling. The main action of the plot begins when two thugs break into the apartment of Jeffery Lebowski (aka "The Dude") and try to shake him down for the debts incurred by his wife. After some physical violence, a lot of screaming and a brutal urination incident, the guy is able to convince them that they have the wrong man. The thugs went to the wrong house of Jeffery Lebowski. There's another man with the same name with a "nympho" wife named Bunny and a lot more money. At the instigation of his bowling buddies, the violent Vietnam veteran Walter and the gentle, rarely heard Donnie, he takes his soiled rug to the "Big Lebowski" mansion to demand a replacement. He eventually leaves, after removing a replacement rug from the big Lebowski's floor. This strange incident leads to his involvement in Bunny's complicated kidnapping. Although he insists that the woman simply went on vacation without bothering to tell her much older husband, the Dude finds himself inextricably embroiled in a conspiracy involving a pornographer, nihilists and some sort of love story with Maude, the daughter of the great Lebowski. Finally the...... middle of paper......, an all-powerful character who serves as a catalyst. It represents money. It is also present in Roman Polanski's Chinatown. He is the man who helped build the city. He symbolizes the old order and, in the end, he discovers that it is all a sham... The Big Lebowski, in his wheelchair, recalls General Sternwood, also paralyzed, while his wife Bunny and his daughter Maude recalls Sternwood's two daughters, Viviane and Carmen” (Bergan 201). These two women also bring this very important aspect of the femme fatale. Bunny is an impulsive, sexualized woman who acts without thinking and lives off the charity of her elderly husband who simply cannot say no to her. Maude is a dark, intelligent and manipulative woman. She works in the background, accomplishing what she wants, only telling others what they need to hear so she gets what she wants..