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