Guest Blogger: From A Real Coen's Super Fan: A Take On "Burn"

My semi-frequent guest blogger Musick Hund is back with some words on the underrated Spy spoof Burn After Reading.

Burn after Reading is an underrated Coens film, as I believe The Lady Killers is also, and probably for about the same reasons. Both Burn and Killers can appear, on a superficial view, to be nothing more than pretexts for the Coens' particular brand of dark zaniness. But I would argue that this view, though perfectly true as far as it goes, need  not be disappointing if one can perceive that what looks like mere grim slapstick is also a kind of "existential formalism." Let me explain what I mean by this. In speaking of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, the film critic Richard Schickel has said that, although that film is pretty simple by Kubrick's standards, it is "an existential movie" insofar as it suggests that no amount of human reason can prevent human beings from being brought up short, either by unforeseen circumstances or incorrect assumptions, or both. In a sense, this is what all of Kubrick's films are about at their heart (John Landis registers his understanding of this fact by constantly alluding to the line "See you next Wednesday" in 2001); and I think the same can be said of the Coens' movies as well. The difference is perhaps that Joel and Ethan arrive at the core of what I'm calling existential formalism (mostly) through the process of writing, while Kubrick's pictures tend to be formalistic in (what one is tempted to call) a "purely cinematic" sense. In assessing what might be disappointing about those films that reveal the Coens naked narrative frameworks (all of their pictures for those that don't like them), it might be helpful to consider how Kubrick avoids this feeling of mere play in his movies: he grounds them pith and marrow in familiar genre tropes; the Coens tend to want to leave visible (as much as they can get away with) the tendency of their art to cut and paste cinematic tropes before their movies are so much as story-boarded. The Coens films that "fail" to drape this existential formalism in the trappings of genre, fail to be anything "more" than Coen brothers movies. Burn After Reading is the most glaring example of this because it is about the failure to see, and hence have, a higher purpose in roughly the same way that Beckett's Endgame is about the failure to mean anything by one's words.