
Believe it or not, I'd never seen this movie until a few days ago. It's nonsensical, hilarious and wonderful. I think this movie might have done as much as Tarantino's Pulp Fiction in terms of rewriting the rulebook on how to write dialogue: It's all in the way conversations hardly seem able to start, let alone finish, the use of expressions that seem slightly above the paygrade of the characters (i.e. "You have no frame of reference here, Donny!", "in the parlance of our times," etc.), and the now-ubiquitous catchphrases ("That's just like, your opinion, man").
I'm not sure that there's any particular meaning to the film, other than its observation that the world will always resist our attempts to find meaning in it. Every character except the Dude himself thinks they understand far more than they actually do, and few of them actually accomplish any of their goals. Even nihilism itself as a personal philosophy turns out to be fruitless. The Dude abides, indeed.