In an interview with the New York Times to coincide with
the release of their new film, Burn After Reading, Joel
and Ethan Coen demonstrated their high spirits for the benefit of
the delighted interviewer, Bruce Headlam, who ends his piece with
a context-less ejaculation: “‘Hey,’ Joel said, his voice
brightening, ‘didn’t Karl Popper go after Wittgenstein with a
poker?’” This is a revealing error. It wasn’t Popper who went
after Wittgenstein with a poker. There are so many conflicting
accounts of what happened at King’s College, Cambridge, that
night in 1946 that a
whole book has been written about the incident, but everyone
agrees that if anyone had a poker it was Wittgenstein, who waved
it about as he argued volubly with Popper about whether there was
any such thing as a moral rule which a philosopher had a duty to
respect. According to Popper’s account, when Wittgenstein
demanded that he give an example of a moral rule, he responded,
“Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers,” and caused
Wittgenstein to walk out angrily.
Somehow it seems appropriate that Joel Coen should have
transformed in imagination a philosophical defense of moral order
into an innocent philosopher’s wild and unexplained act of
aggression with a poker. For the Coens themselves have abandoned
the respect for moral order that they still displayed as recently
as Fargo (1996) — and perhaps any belief in morality
itself. Burn After Reading delights in presenting us
with a dummy plot as a way of denying any moral significance to
their own narrative. There are a number of events that have to do
with one another through coincidence but without any chain of
causation between them of the sort that would expect if the movie
were to make sense as a whole. In fact, it is in a way a movie
about coincidence, but coincidence without meaning or
significance. The result is an exercise in mere absurdism.
Accused by a Mormon associate of having a drinking problem, Old
Princetonian Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) angrily resigns from
the CIA to write his memoirs. Unbeknownst to him, his wife, Katie
(Tilda Swinton), is having an affair with the easy-going
exercise-obsessed sex-addict Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney)
while, unbeknownst to her, Harry is heavily into Internet dating.
Katie thinks that Harry is going to leave his wife, the
long-suffering Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel) when she divorces
Osborne, but he just wants to stay married to Sandy while having
fun on the side. Meanwhile, one of Harry’s Internet dating
partners, personal trainer Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) —
who also has a date with Osborne Cox’s Mormon accuser —
accidentally comes into possession of an electronic copy of Cox’s
memoir and tries to use it, through fair means or foul to raise
money for the cosmetic surgery she thinks she needs to attract
men. “If I’m going to reinvent myself, I need these surgeries,”
she says. She imposes on Chad (Brad Pitt), her brainless but
good-natured colleague at the Hardbodies gym, to help in her
schemes of blackmail and treason while remaining oblivious to the
shy romantic interest in her displayed by her Hardbodies boss,
Ted (Richard Jenkins).
That’s the set-up for a highly complicated plot which is never
really set in motion. It could easily be a movie about strong
women and weak men, or a traditionally sentimental paean to the
old Hollywood trope of finding the object of your heart’s desire
right under your nose. Or about the comeuppance of Osborne’s
intellectual arrogance which seems to regard the whole world,
apart from himself, as “morons.” But it turns out to be none of
these things. Especially not the last. Instead, the Coen boys
show themselves to be Osborne’s equal in intellectual arrogance.
For each of the actions implied by the situation they have so
painstakingly set up — Katie’s divorce of Osborne and Linda and
Chad’s attempt to blackmail him, Harry’s realization that his
mistress is the same “cold, stuck-up bitch” that she calls his
wife and the wife’s discovery of his infidelities, poor Ted’s
attempts to ingratiate himself with Linda, his object of secret
worship — all these things remain essentially unconnected but
lead to separate disasters for everyone except Linda, who by
sheer luck gets her cosmetic surgeries paid for by the CIA.
It’s like the ending of an Evelyn Waugh novel only without the
carefully prepared narrative leading up to it which creates a
sense of meaning in spite of itself. Here, nothing means
anything. Not for the first time, the Coens appear to be adopting
a point of view like that with which the film begins and ends —
that is the god-like perspective of a satellite photograph from
space — and crying, simply, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
There is something fundamentally unattractive about such
arrogance, something cold and cruel and terminally detached from
human striving and suffering, like that of the gods of Homer. But
Homer only observes the actions of the gods; he doesn’t think
he’s a god himself. I’m not so sure about the large-brained but
show-offy Coens.
IT HASN’T ALWAYS been so. At this distance of time, I find that
what I remember best about Fargo are the final words of
Miss McDormand’s Marge Gunderson to the surviving bad guy, played
by Peter Stormare: “So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in
there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper.
And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little
bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know.
Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day.
Well. I just don’t understand it.” In their context, there is
something almost heartbreakingly lovely about these words,
something that puts the whole film into a satisfyingly moral
perspective. They are the heart and the soul of it and what makes
it a great movie. The comparable quotation from Burn After
Reading, are these words from the unnamed CIA chief played
by J.K. Simmons: “So we don’t really know what anyone is
after?…Well, report back to me when — I don’t know. When it
makes sense.”
But of course the point of it is that it never does make sense.
Tiny bits of the action do, at least to the people involved in
them, but there is no sense to be made of the thing as a whole.
And that’s the point. As in their previous film, the
Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, the Coens have
gone all in for chaos theory. The sense of their movie is not
only that it makes no sense but that there is no sense to be made
of anything. Like No Country, it seems to delight in
chaos and the lack of any moral order to the universe. At the
time some critics took Fargo to task for laughing up its
sleeve at the good burghers of Brainerd, Minnesota, including
Marge the pregnant police chief, and her duck-painting husband,
Norm (John Carroll Lynch). I thought that, beneath their
sophisticated urban humor at the expense of these country folk,
the Coens respected the basic decency of Marge and Norm and all
that they stood for and, in fact, had made such a point of it
precisely because the film needs that goodness to stand against
the evil deeds they are representing in the main action of the
film. Now I’m not so sure.
For Burn After Reading is the culmination of a pattern
of celebrating amorality and meaninglessness. In their more
recent films, the brothers have cut themselves loose from
morality altogether. Even a mock morality like “The Dude abides,”
from The Big Lebowski (1998) would have been something
with which to make sense of the world, but they don’t do that
kind of thing anymore. Now they’re into merely absurdist humor,
only without the political edge to it that the Theatre of the
Absurd had back in the olden days. Instead, we have the same CIA
guy summing up: “What have we learned? Not to do it again, I
guess. But what did we do?”
Actually, there is a political edge, but it’s tacked on at the
end as Tuli Kupferberg’s “CIA Man” is sung (if that’s the right
word) by the Fugs over the closing credits — as if the moral
chaos we have just witnessed could be construed, at a pinch, as a
1970s style radical statement against the American
fascist-imperialist state. The idea is so ridiculous that the
thing merely counts as yet another absurdist touch. And the point
of all the absurdity is only to affirm that our world offers no
hope to those who, like Karl Popper and most of the rest of us,
try to imagine that it has some sort of moral order to it. It may
be that it doesn’t, of course. Doubtless the Coens sincerely
believe that it doesn’t. But at least we might have expected from
the authors of Fargo a recognition of the tragic nature
of this moral apocalypse. There’s something inhuman about showing
it only to laugh at it.
