A Case for Super Powers

A Spy, a Treasury Agent, and a Trainer Walk Into a Bar...

If you heard the title of this blog entry spoken out loud, would you expect anything afterwards to make any logical sense?

If you said yes, congratulations! You may be one of the many people who criticize Burn After Reading.

I hate to be one of those people who say that if you didn't like a movie it means you didn't "get it", but the fact is, in this case, you probably didn't get it.

See, Burn After Reading, like most Coen brothers' comedies, can best be described as a very long joke. And if a person takes the premise of a joke too seriously, too literally, they will likely respond by saying "I don't get it".

In the case of Burn After Reading, however, it's probably best to think about it from the perspective of its genre...or presumed genre. It sets itself up as a satire of a spy thriller, and it is that, but it's more than just that. It's a satire of spy thrillers in the same sense that The Big Lebowski is a satire of film noirs. In most spy thrillers, there is something of great importance that everybody wants their hands on--what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin--and everybody is killing everybody else to get it. But in Burn After Reading, the supposed MacGuffin--a CD containing the memoirs of an ousted CIA analyst--is of no importance whatsoever, and only two people really care about it. It's a spy movie without anything for spies to go after, just like The Big Lebowski is a crime noir without a crime. It's a genre movie without the defining feature of the genre. Essentially, it's like telling a story that has no reason to be told, except because it's funny. And a large part of why it's funny is because there is no reason why any of the events should ever have occurred. So many absurd things happen that are completely unnecessary, and only happened because some people were stupid. The absurdity of the situations are funny simply because they are absurd, but then comes the punchline: it was all arbitrary and unnecessary...that makes all those things even more absurd. Ergo, laughter. Now you laugh at the characters out of pure schadenfreude, "so in the end, you didn't even need to go to all that trouble? You dumb bastard."

It's kind of like one of those things where you get a decoder ring and a secret coded message, and you spend an hour decoding the message, only to find out that it says..."go outside and play".

So that's where the humor lies in Burn After Reading. Of course, if I have to explain why a joke is funny, then you obviously didn't get it, and my explanation won't make any difference. Which means this whole entry was pointless and a waste of my time.

Get it?