Monday, September 29, 2008

Reconsidering Burn After Reading

I found myself thinking about God the other night, and the universe, and the term, “Third Rock from the Sun” (did that term originate from the John Lithgow television series?). Why is it that people have to anthropomorphize the source of creation? The Sun and the collected detritus that naturally found itself in its orbit is an organic product, something that occurred from an unconscious chain reaction, like the way the wind might knock over a pie sitting on a windowsill. The pie falls on the grass outside and over time is descended upon by a colony of insects that feeds off the seemingly unlimited resources of the pie for years. The insects birth larvae and the larvae never know a life of not existing in the toppled berry mush. Not having any conception of how the pie landed where it did, they invent a figure with a personality, who they give a face and a fabricated back-story, and this Being was responsible for creating the pie. Even if a more pragmatic insect concluded that the wind was responsible for toppling the pie, then the insects would want to anthropomorphize the wind and worship it as if was sentient. The Big Bang, or whatever you want to call the series of natural acceleration of energy and matter that set off a chain reaction that produced the cosmos, is not a conscious entity. It is an unconscious natural phenomenon. If you want to call an unconscious natural force God, so be it, but then it is not a thinking, feeling, caring, opinionated, aware Creator. God is science and vice-versa.

It may seem ludicrous for me to preface a reconsidering of the merits of an essentially minor work of the brothers Coen with a convoluted and probably belabored analogy of the difference between a conscious God and an unconscious god, but it helps me to remember that in all of their films, the universe is indifferent. The good suffer, and the bad do as they wish unnoticed, under an unseeing sky. So, it seems foolish of me, knowing the world of the Coen brothers so well, to suddenly be angry with them for continuing their trend of displaying a worldview they have always displayed. Burn After Reading is irony of the bitterest and cruelest sort: think about it: the impetus for everything that goes wrong is the shallow pursuit of maintaining fit bodies, either as a means to a hotter sex life or in Osborne Cox’s case, well I don’t know exactly why he was at the gym when he lost his CIA “shit.” Why he would take his electronic memoirs with him in his gym bag is a question that can be answered by surrendering that it is an implausible contrivance that must happen or else there would no film (or the Coen Brothers would have to exert more effort in finding better circumstances for superficial body-obsessed types to come into contact with the disc; this reconsideration of the film does not strike its slapdash manner from the record). But, surely, caustic commentary on the depressing culture of Youth, Sex, Bodies that has been eroding the priorities of our nation for a couple decades now is needed more caustic than ever? I think so. And perhaps, though he is the sweetest character of the film, Chad’s appalling murder is not so very pointless after all. Whether the Coens have any pity for poor Chad is not too ambiguous, as they don’t seem to have pity for any of the shallow, murderous, or shallow/murderous buffoons preposterously coming into contact with one another. The film’s poster says all you really need to know about Burn After Reading’s evil sense of humor: one person spies on somebody whose lethalness they are ignorant of, and the lethal person being spied upon, being ignorant of the spying ignorant’s innocuousness, shoots him dead. It’s a hideous misunderstanding. Such things do happen. And the universe doesn’t have an opinion.



The original C+ review

5 comments:

Pumpkin Kid said...

I'll start with a quick fact check here: Osborne Cox didn't lose his CIA shit at the gym - it was found in the lady's room, and the lawyer's secretary later says she left her copy at the gym. This would follow in the vein of things happening for no rational reason. But let me add an addendum to your addendum.

Don't be so sure when second guessing yourself - the ability to look at an alternative angle is to glimpse another facet of the truth, but rationalization is the death of reason.

I think people are operating under the assumption that because the movie is so well made, and because they invested their hour and a half in it, there has to be some voice inside it, some explanation; even if the explanation is how foolish it is to want an explanation. But here we enter the wilderness of mirrors the film would have us explore.

To say we're learning something from a movie that patently presents us with a no-real-meaning banner, is to invent comforts, like your ants do with their pie-heaven.

The n-r-m motif is a rocky terrain- you've recently covered one of the best films to ever present it, L'avventura. And both The Coen's and Antonioni's had similar emotional side effects, though one instills excruciating boredom, and the other an aimless sense of hatred and paranoia; and each with a dab of the other. I'm not sure if it's a fair message from a medium that demands the control of so many conscious creators, but would the absence of such films render the rest of film to consonant little escapes for a weary and deaf world?

No, let's not set the god-less passion play out of reach - but in this case, just as in any other, the message does not justify the movie. The poster even less - it's just done in the style of the 60's pink pantheresque credits.

If you ignore the audience - if you refuse them any catharsis or any meaning - and you spite them, then you're just throwing pies out of windows. Nice for the insects, but probably not considerate when you could be feeding someone that matters, someone that understands what you've put into your work.

The film is notable for its attempt to depict a story in a true wilderness of mirrors, but remains - even upon introspection - aimless and mean spirited. Burn After Reading is a tin man; just a machine, and it didn't have a heart all along.

scroggins said...

That's all well and good, but the Coens' scorn (which, here, reaches its pinnacle of malice) is reserved for a group that I agree deserves it, that being those who place physical appearance and fitness (not for health, but rather, "to look good naked" as Lester Burnham once admitted) at the top of their priorities. The Coens, as you know, are dubious about sex. As is Antonioni, as is P.T. Anderson in Boogie Nights and Godard in Contempt. They are disillusioned with it, the manner in which it is reduced when put in the wrong hands. In Fargo Norm and Marge are considered with warm reverence, and she is pregnant,etc. whereas we see Showalter and Grimsrud having vigorous sex with two prostitutes when then abruptly cuts to them, post-coitus, vacantly staring at some banality on the television set.

The irony in Burn After Reading is that Richard Jenkins feels that warm and wholesome sexual/romantic attraction for Mcdormand's character. He, of course, is the one brutally murdered, not her (the one responsible for driving him to the Cox basement). Both Chad and Richard Jenkins, the two innocents, die so a woman can get plastic surgery.

If that's not pertinent social commentary, then I don't know what is.

Just as the innocent ignorant housewife is cruelly murdered in Fargo and the innocent parking garage attendant, and the two innocents driving by the scene of the murder of the police officer, while William H. Macy gets to live and Grimsrud too, this film (which I do not suggest is even a quarter as substantive as Fargo) presents that Coen world where the innocents die because of the selfishness of short-sighted, craven individuals (Jerry Lundegaard, Linda Litzke).

I think there is a method to the madness. In short, a point. The point is that the Coens hate such types of people, and isn't it cruel that such people aren't the ones punished, but rather the innocent instead? My skepticism is why must they present this point as if it were a screwball comedy of errors? I think they mismanaged the juggling of the tones, something Lynch always manages to do correctly (though people like Ebert will persist in failing to register it).

I think the film deserves another visit, and I don't say that because of past debts owed to the Coen Brothers.

Pumpkin Kid said...

Well met, then.

Nervenet-twist said...

"and the term, “Third Rock from the Sun” (did that term originate from the John Lithgow television series?)."

At the very least it dates back to a song on Jimi Hendrix's first album, but probably further than that - somewhere closer to the beginning of heliocentricism, possibly?

scroggins said...

Thanks nerve-net. Now I'm off to look up heliocentricism.