Prankenstein's Monster

Rating: Null/10 (29 August 2010)

"Nothing makes much sense. So you might as well make whatever kind of movies you want and hope for the best." - Ethan Coen
"Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate." – Albert Camus
Few filmmakers encapsulate the tenets of postmodernism as purely as the Coen brothers. Postmodernists vehemently deny any such thing as absolute truth, revel in nihilism, sarcasm and irony, reject objectivity (which mirrors everything "new" in the science community, from Chaos Theory to Quantum Decoherence to The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to Godel's Incompleteness Theorems to Turing's Halting Problem etc), maintain a posture of "mock, ironic distance" and adhere to French philosopher's Jacques Derrida's understanding of language, in which words and images have no meaning and are viciously self-limited, all systems of signs only referring to other signs, all language a web of references.
As postmodernism is associated with relativism (anything goes, the era of "whatever"), such artists believe that no meaning can be derived from text other than whatever subjective meaning the interpreter assigns to it. Since there are no absolutes, the very linguistic symbols used by the author to communicate are undermined. With symbols undermined, surface re-arrangement becomes the artist's primary tool. Enter the age of "that's so random", of incessant pastiche and mock sampling (taken to the extreme, see the random cutaway joke inserts of "Family Guy"). Gradually postmodernist art evolves to the point at which it starts to mirrors the universe it believes in: total randomness and utter nihilism. The universe of noir.
"Burn After Reading" is another in a long line of Coen brothers film noirs. Noir is by definition a conspiratorial and largely indeterministic universe, and the one genre that aligns itself perfectly to the Coens' world-view (all Coen films are either noirs, screwballs or hybrids of the two, noir being screwball without the comedy). From the bowling pins and tumbleweeds of "The Big Lebowski", to the car crashes, murders and tornadoes of "A Serious Man" and "No Country For Old Men", the Coen's have now started to bring the subtext of their earlier films to the forefront. Their films are now exclusively about the world being "about" nothing other than mechanical, cosmic causality.
This is the problem with being too intelligent for your own good. Everything either becomes a tongue-in-cheek homage, or you wallow in the dead end of intellectual limits, finding new and clever ways to soliloquise over the vacuity of existence. Woody Allen, like the Coens, has made a career out of doing just this. In fact, the Coens are Woody Allen with visual style, both the Brothers and Allen oscillating between "serious" films about nothingness and "funny" formalist games about nothingness. Early Coen films, like "Where art Thou?" and "Barton Fink", even went so far as to deride socially conscious artists altogether. "Fck it, dude," is the Coen motto, as a title card in the Coens' "A Serious Man" essentially states.
It's not that there isn't truth to such conclusions – everything is, after all, a bit meaningless – but one should question the productivity of not taking the next step and asking, "So what now?" If the pointlessness of life exists only to be talked about and converted into art, then that talking and that art are just as pointless as life. Better, perhaps, to break through the brick wall of meaning(lessness) and choose a fork in the road: create some meaning or find some that has evaded you thus far. Which is why the mantra of cinema's late modernists was always "nothing matters, so everything does".
And so "Reading" is another Coen Brothers film populated by confused and stupid people living in a wholly absurd, indeterministic universe. The difference here is that all the characters are motivated by sex (usually in the Coen universe it's greed and revenge). We have Linda, a woman who is obsessed with plastic surgery and finding a man, Harry, a marshal who is making a sex machine to please women in his basement and who hops from one sexual relationship with a woman to the next (symbollically, his holstered gun/penis has "never been really used"; he's been put out to pasture and is caught in a mid-life crisis of sorts). Then there are various wives and minor characters, all of whom are looking for love or trying to improve their body images. The only characters who escape these hang ups are Osbourne, an intelligence analyst who drinks because everyone around him is a complete buffoon, and Brad Pitt, in another wonderfully funny role as a good natured man-kid.
Government apathy and American obsessions with sex and physical perfection - the moronic nature of the entire modern age – are the targets, but its handled as low scrutiny satire, the Coen's not interested in examining or empathising with the hang ups of these characters, but highlighting how useless these hang ups are in the face of a universe that is wholly uncaring. In other words, we're all raving, needy, thoughtless airheads, who should wake up to the fact that we're just bouncing around like pin-balls.
The film is wrong to portray the CIA and intelligence community as a bunch of clueless numskulls (they masterfully play ignorant populaces like pawns), but the film nevertheless ends with two great scenes. One in which our intelligence analyst bemoans the fact that everyone is an idiot, whilst failing to realise that the man he is about to kill is a well meaning, compassionate and caring ex-priest. The other great scene occurs immediately afterwards, and involves a CIA agent summarising the film we just witnessed, leaving the audience with a resounding sensation that nothing has been solved, and even more embarrassingly, that there was really no problem at all.
7.9/10 – Filled with freakish nuances that make it more rewarding to re-watch than the directors' more celebrated fare.