Back in 2001, the religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel published an interesting little book called The Gospel According to the Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World's Most Animated Family. Pinsky noticed that a number of episodes of the yellow-skinned bug-eyed residents of Springfield seemed to feature spiritual themes. He got together with a pastor friend and even produced a Bible study that developed the ideas in his book, using different Simpsons episodes.
But the success of Pinsky's book didn't go unnoticed by publishers, who subsequently bought and churned out approximately six million "The Gospel According to..." titles, ranging from Chris Seay's The Gospel According to Tony Soprano (Render unto Caesar...or else) to Stephen Skelton's The Gospel According to the World's Greatest Superhero (Warner Bros. won't let us say "Superman" on the cover). Some writers have made a specialty out of this kind of faith/pop culture intersection work, notably Seay. He's also got The Gospel According to Lost and The Gospel Reloaded to his credit.
Most of these books are as shallow as the printed page itself. They have a magazine article or short essay's worth of thought air-puffed into book length with lots of repeated examples, lots of white space and, when necessary, pull-quotes that eat up line after line of type.
The books that offer some meat usually take meaty subject matter as their starting points, like Tolkien. Which is one of the reasons that Cathleen Falsani's The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers is so disappointing. Several of Joel and Ethan Coen's films have been deep, thought-provoking explorations and meditations on life and the various folks who live it. Falsani was an award-winning religion writer at the Chicago Sun-Times. In The Dude Abides, taken from what Jeff Bridges' character in The Big Lebowski says about himself, Falsani makes out as if to offer some serious study of the spiritual content of the Coens' movies.
Instead, she offers two different synopses of each film (one long and one short) and then a drive-by reflection that's little more than a sermon illustration. Part of the problem is that she decided to explore each Coen film so far released, meaning she has to waste a chapter looking for spiritual meaning in the dismissable Burn After Reading instead of digging deeper into Fargo or No Country for Old Men. Each of those, in addition to O Brother Where Art Thou or even Blood Simple, might be worth a book's length of investigation in themselves, and they're sure worth the pages wasted on Burn or Barton Fink.
Another problem comes from Falsani's habit of breezy, surface-oriented writing. There are plenty of places where modern popular culture can interact with question of faith, but Falsani's explorations here and elsewhere tend to skate across the top rather than dig into anything. Most newspaper features only offer enough space to touch on some subjects and then move on, and Falsani hasn't been able to rid herself of the habit.
Watching some Coen movies and thinking about spiritual issues they may raise is a worthwhile exercise for people who want to think about those kinds of things. Falsani's book doesn't offer much help in that area, and it would probably be more productive to just start watching the movies and seeing what questions they might raise. The Dude may yet abide, but The Dude Abides isn't likely to abet anyone in figuring out why.
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