Burn After Reading - Retrospective

I may have never actually understood a Coen Brothers film.

True, I wrote a ten page essay on why The Big Lebowski considered the Gulf War to be social pornography. Being a giant English nerd, I adored the cheerful manipulation of Homer in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I left No Country for Old Men satisfied with its conflicted and open-ended style.

But…what on Earth do you make of Burn After Reading? And—once you make something out of it—how do you link that with their oeuvre.

Can we all just move past Brad Pitt’s performance in this film? He’s the funniest character, and—frankly—this shouldn’t be a surprise. Reviewers constantly underestimate Brad Pitt for the same reason they underestimate many talented actresses: he’s pretty. He’s a talented, hilarious actor, and we shouldn’t really expect any less.

Pretty things can be funny. Let’s move on to the plot and themes.

The movie is typical Coen Bros. humor: take relentlessly stupid people and allow them to crash into one another in blissfully silly conflicts for approximately two hours. But there’s a slight change here. Whereas films like Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski cherished these characters and promised us, the viewers, that nothing too terrible would befall these characters, Burn After Reading makes no such promises.

These are incredibly stupid people playing in a surprisingly real world. It’s almost as if the Coens took characters from previous films and thought, “What if someone actually did this shit in the real world?” People die, lives are broken, and—in the end—we find that it’s all been for nothing.

Well, not exactly for nothing. There are two main themes played with in Burn: physical beauty and the power of knowledge. We can separate these into a simplistic dichotomy of the physical versus the intellect. (Look out, Platonic thought follows!) Our Western society tells us that the intellect reigns above and controls the physical, as the intellect is superior to the physical.

This…is not the case in Burn.

The characters have no actual knowledge with which to work. George Clooney’s secret device is a sex-toy; Frances McDormand has an atrociously dull memoir rather than international secrets. The characters inflate these useless, impotent bits of information with intellectual power.

In many ways, the people of Burn have committed the essential sin of rational creatures; they’ve used reason to create falsehoods rather than perceive the truth. In a comedy, this is rarely punished. The Coen Bros. typically delight in the round-about way that fiction (or delusion) can eventually lead the misinformed to the truth (or at least back to where they innocently began).

Such is not the case here. Here, the physical world reacts violently to the derangement imposed upon it by intellectualism.

Everyone in Burn is obsessed with exercise and physical beauty. Frances McDormand wants plastic surgery (which is another form of imposing reason to reinterpret physical reality into something it is not), Clooney needs to run after sex (sex itself being a physical obsession with beauty), and half the movie takes place at a gym. Why the preoccupation?

These characters have no intellectual merit. They are purely physical beings—animals puffed up with undeserved, intellectual pride. Chad (Pitt) playing with information is like a child playing with a handgun. It should come as no surprise that with Chad’s death the film barrels ahead to a bloody and dark end in which the physical world punishes these ignorant characters for trying to redefine it and themselves. They aren’t meant to wield intellectual power.

They’re meant to exercise and fuck.

Dark? Yes. Darker than usual? Perhaps.

My main problem, however, lies with the final bits of the film. The ending joke—and JK Simmons’s role as the viewer-surrogate—is so funny that the movie almost feels like two hours of set-up for one punch line. And the punch line is vicious, inhumane, and superior.

The Coens don’t normally cruelly mock their comic characters or allow us to feel better than them. They’re silly. We enjoy how silly they are. But in Burn we know that their idiocy has extended beyond silliness and merits harsh punishment.

At the close of the film McDormand gets her surgery, but nothing is learned. When we’re told not to do it again, what do they mean? Watch the movie? Assault reality by crafting it into what we want it to be? Elect ignorant people into places of political power? Is this all just a Bush metaphor?

In place of the Coen Bros. usual chaotic glee, I felt cynically satisfied. Did they twist after No Country, or was this tone always underneath their films?

Again, I may have never actually understood a Coen Brothers film.

+Hobbes

(Image from www.collider.com)