Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
It's
a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
(Burn After Reading, 9/22/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
In
the last few weeks, the nation's attention has slalomed between the
following: a series of devastating hurricanes—lipstick on pit-bulls—the
Bush Doctrine—lipstick on pigs—an epochal fiscal meltdown
on Wall Street. If the 24-minute news cycle has accomplished anything,
it has put us in a place where the momentous and the trivial, the urgent
and the meaningless follow each other with the speed of protons spinning
through that new particle accelerator in Switzerland. No wonder many
of us can't tell the difference between them anymore.
Nobody knows how to fix the situation,
but at least we have the perfect movie to reflect it. Sure, the Coen
Brothers' Burn After Reading seems like a pitch-black farce with
a heart as hard as the best satire must. But it's better to discard
those old categories: in a universe where the most trusted political
analysis is delivered by Jon Stewart, the movie might as well be seen
as some kind of documentary.
The story—such as it is—concerns
a bunch of lost, frustrated characters spiraling like chaff around the
power centers of Washington DC. Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is a CIA
analyst whom, after being fired for obscure reasons, swears vengeance
against the bureaucrats and political hacks who have wronged him. Linda
Litzke (Frances McDormand) is an employee at a city health club who
somehow gets hold of a computer disk full of Cox's professional secrets.
With the help of her dim-witted partner (Brad Pitt), she stumbles and
bumbles her way into a plot to extort money from Cox, hoping to use
the money for a lengthy list of cosmetic surgeries. Meanwhile, the lovelorn
Linda is dating Harry (George Clooney), a womanizing Treasury agent
who also happens to be sleeping with Cox's estranged wife (Tilda Swinton).
Implicated together in a tight, incidental knot of events, most of these
mediocrities end up getting exactly who's coming to them.
Confused? Never mind, because the
point of Burn After Reading isn't to make sense. The Coens' world
is barren of control or purpose, but unlike in the existential dramas
of the 20th century, their characters don't just sit around waiting
for Godot. Instead, they indulge their vanities and petty appetites,
swarming and tumbling like bugs on a microscope slide. (Fittingly, the
Coens drive home the metaphor by opening and closing from a God's-eye
vantage in outer space.)
What seems so perfectly in tune
with now is the sense of comic wonderment at this predicament.
Who hasn't marveled at the skill of certain fools in wrecking the careful
plans of better minds? Is it really possible not only to be asleep at
the switch, but to lose the switch completely? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde,
it would take a heart of stone to look at the world we're about to bequeath
our kids, and not laugh. The Coens' embody this wonderment in the CIA
chief (J.K. Simmons, in a pitch-perfect homage to Spencer Tracy's baffled
police chief in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World), who gamely tries
to understand what's going on, but wisely gives up. "Just keep
an eye on things," he tells his agents, "and come back when
something makes sense."
With the exception of Swinton (whose
charms have long eluded me), all the cast-members do brilliant variations
on the same performance: a long, groaning wail of incomprehension, epitomized
by the movie's signature line, "What the fuck?!" Surveying
a landscape of endless war, flooded cities, and the patrimony of a nation
mortgaged to China, we have to agree. What the fuck, indeed.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog