We live in the world of 'Burn After Reading'

How Coen brothers' comedy about a D.C. blackmailing scheme gone wrong has become the political film of the moment.

“Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” — Deep Throat, All the President’s Men

“You’re in league with that moronic woman. You’re part of a league of morons.” — Osborne Cox, Burn After Reading

The Watergate break-in was a bad idea, poorly executed, that brought about Richard Nixon’s resignation two years later, when his administration could no longer deny its involvement in the burglary. We’re still living with the aftershocks of Watergate decades later, as trust in the government continues to erode and “deep state” paranoia grips citizens from across the political spectrum, usually depending on who’s in power. The diligence of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein helped uncover these connections between the burglars and the many-tentacled arms of an administration engaged in political spying, sabotage, and a massive cover-up. Though the whole scandal did not unravel quickly, in the end there was some accountability for this lawless abuse of power, which is a credit to journalism and perhaps to the resilience of democracy itself. 

Not even three months into Donald Trump’s second term as president, that line from Deep Throat in All the President’s Men has been circulating quite a bit on social media, as various initiatives from the “not very bright guys” in his administration are getting out of hand on countless fronts simultaneously. Trump is like a DDos attack on the body politic, flooding the zone with so many outrages at once that it shuts down the system, though it’s up for debate whether that’s a deliberate strategy or merely the result of prolific abuse. Yet we flatter ourselves in believing that we’re still in the era of “these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand” anymore, in part because the accountability piece doesn’t exist. Scandals happen out in the open and get reported upon, and the not very bright guys continue to operate. 

Sorry, but All the President’s Men is too quaint for 21st century America. The defining political film of our time is actually Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen’s transcendently silly black comedy about the destructive shenanigans of vain, greedy, witless, duplicitous morons. Released in 2008 to mild acclaim and surprisingly robust box office, the film takes the form of a sleek Hollywood spy thriller while doing a variation on the premise the Coens have done since the days of Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Fargo, all comedies about the criminal misadventures of bungling amateurs. Yet as the relative stability of the Obama years has been tea-partied off the map, Burn After Reading has felt more in step with our political reality. There are specific plot points here that would come into play a decade later, like a salacious cloak-and-dagger scheme involving the Russians, but more broadly, the film is about the stultifying pointlessness that currently engulfs the system. Events are not merely tragic. They’re inexplicable. 

Two people are killed in Burn After Reading. A third is shot and left comatose, likely without brain function—an ironic fate for the only major character who seems to have much brain function in the movie. (Though he’s a ridiculous figure, too.) All of this bloody mayhem stems from the worthless contents of a CD-ROM that a janitor picked up on the floor of a gym locker room. The meaning that’s assigned to the contents of this CD-ROM—a random collection of musings and dates from an ex-CIA analyst who’s intending to write an unreadable memoir—is entirely imagined, like a hunk of fool’s gold some dope found on the beach with his metal detector. Or cryptocurrency. 

The laughs in Burn After Reading start at the surface, which is a dead-on parody of Hollywood movies like Enemy of the State that present themselves as jacked-up political thrillers, but are often studiously apolitical. The Coens open with a satellite image of the earth from outer space before descending into the surveilled terrain of Washington D.C., where important things are surely happening. The score, by their longtime composer Carter Burwell, goes heavy on thundering percussion while the titles are unfurled from encrypted text, like state secrets about to be revealed to us. Then, once the camera gets to CIA headquarters, the emphasis is on the clap of dress shoes as an agent moves purposefully through the lacquered hallways, en route to an urgent piece of business. 

That business turns out to be relatively mundane: Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a veteran analyst, learns that he has been demoted from the Balkans desk and removed from signals intelligence entirely, which leads him to quit in a huff. (Malkovich gives maybe the funniest performance in the film, as an expert whose quick-trigger belligerence is constantly stoked by the people around him.) His troubles are not limited to work, either, because his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), the rare pediatrician without bedside manner, has been having an affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a Treasury nitwit who’s primarily concerned with “getting a run in” after sex. Now without work or a pension, Ozzie dabbles with the idea of writing a memoir and dictates a sentence or two before staring slack-jawed at an episode of Family Feud. But those lines are part of bric-a-brac that make it onto the CD-ROM that leads inexorably to needless, stupid violence and loss. 

Meanwhile, at the Hardbodies fitness center, two trainers make what they believe to be a lucrative discovery. To Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), a pair that lives down to their doltish surnames, the disc Manolo (Raul Arañas) the janitor found on the floor seems like their ticket to riches, wholly because they don’t understand its contents. “That’s the shit, man,” raves Chad. “The raw intelligence.” It does not speak well to Ozzie’s memoir pitch that his notes are incomprehensible, but Linda needs $50,000 for a series of cosmetic surgeries uncovered by the gym’s HMO and Chad has the unearned gym-rat confidence to push a blackmail scheme forward. And so we get a scene where Chad calls Ozzie in the middle of the night, does his best Deep Throat impression (which is quite bad), and says, “I thought you might be worried… about the security of your shit.”

Now, it’s possible that Burn After Reading could have stopped right there. Ozzie knows that the contents of that disc have no value and he might have just hung up the phone. But he’s furious about imbeciles who have cost him his post at the CIA and he’s decided to go to war to put these other imbeciles in their place, so he takes the meeting to do exactly that. And it goes well initially for Ozzie, too, because he gets to witness the spectacle of Chad biking to the rendezvous in his ridiculous getup and then he gets to punch Chad in the nose for trying to blackmail him under threat of committing a massive felony. What Ozzie doesn’t appreciate, however, is the depth of his adversaries’ imbecility: The moment he rejects the offer, Chad and Linda give chase in their car, smash the back of his Mercedes, and beeline to the Russian embassy, where they can sell the information to another bidder. 

This little detour is a hilarious wrinkle in the story for several reasons, like the fact that Ozzie’s work had nothing to do with the Russians (he worked on the Balkans desk) or the other fact that embassies are not spy operations. The man Linda talks to introduces himself as a “cultural attache” named Krapotkin (Olek Krupa), who is initially confused by her request and then double confused when he learns what’s on the disc. Yet it’s here that the politics of Burn After Reading also sync up beautifully with the present day: Linda and Chad have absolutely no qualms about selling potentially damaging classified material to an American adversary. For all they know, it could be a list of CIA operatives doing spy work in Moscow or a list of planned targets, times, and weaponry for an attack on Houthis in Yemen. Patriotism doesn’t matter when you can make a quick buck off state secrets. 

In the moral universe of the Coen brothers, there are always consequences to greed and fecklessness, and the needless carnage that they can create. While there’s a lightness to Burn After Reading—the reveal of Harry’s secret project is a delightfully sophomoric end to what seemed like a serious endeavor—the body count brings it back to McDormand’s Marge Gunderson in Fargo, scolding a dolt in her squad car for doing all this damage for “a little bit of money.” But the crime in Fargo at least involves something of value, a human being abducted from her home by goons as part of a kidnapping scheme. The particular satirical genius of Burn After Reading is that the scheme is pure vapor: a comparable amount of loss over nothing of value. The one funny irony is that the government does pick up the tab on Linda’s surgeries, because they just want to close this confusing case. 

The audience’s true surrogate for all this business is J.K. Simmons, a higher-up at the CIA who’s overseeing a case that only seems to have national security implications, but is in fact a mess that has landed on his lap. The first time his subordinate Palmer (David Rasche) brings him the file, he says, “Report back to me when it makes sense.” The second and last time, still nothing makes sense, but at least it appears to be over. Simmons’ character expresses the driving sentiments of our times: What’s going on? Why is this necessary? And, finally: 

“What did we learn, Palmer?” 
“I don’t know, sir.” 
“I don’t fuckin’ know, either. I guess we learned not to do it again.” 

To quote a future Coen brothers movie: “Would that it were so simple.” We’re not done making the same mistakes. We just can’t fathom how much dumber and meaner they’re going to get.