Burn After Reading (2009): A Time for Idiots

Osbourne Cox, played by John Malkovich, at his finest hour in Burn After Reading (2009).

Osbourne Cox – a.k.a. Ozzy – the former CIA low-level analyst with a “drinking problem”, now out of a job and gone rogue, holds a drink in his right hand (a double), recklessly points a pistol with his left, as he walks down the basement of his former house (after breaking in since his cheating wife had changed the locks) and, with merely a robe over wife beater and underwear on, spots a middle-aged "intruder" in the basement, properly dressed as the manager of a local gym (Hard Bodies), attempting to steal from his computer we-know-not-what for we-know-not-why. After realizing he has seen this man before, that this was “the moron" from the gym, allegedly “in league” with that other middle-aged “moronic woman” who tried to extort him out of money in order to pay for cosmetic procedures –– otherwise she’d publish a draft of his memoirs (which somehow ended up in the gym’s locker room)–– realizing this “league of morons”, Ozzy has a moment of clarity of sorts and decides, for once in his life, to “win”. “I’m not here representing Hard Bodies”, says the man, fearsome for his illegal behavior, yet still quick to defend his employers, to which Ozzy replies with the conviction of a man who’s just had a synoptic view of his own life and times:

“I know very well what you represent. You represent the idiocy of today… You’re one of the morons I’ve been fighting my whole life – my whole fucking life. But guess what? Today I win”.

Then he shoots the man – but he’s not a good shot… The gym manager runs to the street and our Ozzy, out of control, attacks and murders the man in broad day light with a tomahawk axe. This scene alone ought to have been enough to earn John Malkovich an Academy Award.

The “idiocy of today”: this is 2009 and we hear already the echoes of decadence, Trumpism and utter disappointment with the American promises for the new century. The “idiocy of today” means many things for Ozzy, beyond the mere disintegration of social life and the old mores: gyms, cosmetic procedures, fitness instructors, over-specified dietary practices ("goat cheese"), bureaucratic culture (“Whose ass didn’t I kiss?”, he yells at his CIA boss after being demoted), corporate incompetency, children's books authors, stuttering careerists, online dating losers, hypochondriacs, divorce lawyers, customer service and its euphemistic language, company men, afternoon TV shows, the overall unseriousness of people, unfaithful demeaning wives, lack of geopolitical purpose, etc. Ozzy is nostalgic for a myth, namely, the heyday of American greatness–– George Kennan and the Cold War goals against a common enemy. He laments what he sees as the indulgence of victory which befell American life and the spiraling decay of its values, whatever those are. We all know the drill since The Sopranos: the party is over for America, it’s not what it used to be anymore, it has passed its prime.

And yet the Coen Brothers are much too clever to engage in simple condemnation of this "decay": they rather revel in its comedic potential and define with this contemporary masterpiece an era of idiocy. (The Coen Brothers themselves speak of Burn After Reading as the third installment in their “idiot” trilogy with George Clooney, the other two being Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). However, these films become too enmeshed either in genre conventions or in actual nostalgia for the American past: Burn After Reading captures contemporary idiocy at its nest –– Washington D.C.)

Ozzy is not some honored, old fashioned agent, but a mediocre CIA analyst who has wasted his years in frustration behind desks (his wife sneers at the idea that anyone would be interested in his memoirs). He’s old, drunk and angry, feels betrayed by his culture, his country, his times: he feels wronged, cheated out of his spoils, as if he deserved more for being superior (which, intellectually, he certainly is, at least vis-à-vis the other idiots in the film). Ozzy thinks he’s too good at his job, too reasonable and knowledgeable and that is why he deserves more, but it’s the opposite: even if it were the case that he is right about this, it would be exactly because of it that he’d deserve less in this world and not more–– idiocy pays off, not talent.

And that is precisely the punch line of Burn After Reading fifteen years later: the idiots were not dumb, but rather lucid. This was (and is) their world, after all, which means they were not idiots but realists, comfortably at home. Fitness instructors, health and dietary specialists, online daters, company clerks, customer services and all the continuing moronic parade we see throughout the film–– their “idiocy” is not cluelessness, but correspondence to the times. In a rather crude positivist sense: they’re correct in their opinions for these match our reality. It’s a recurrent pun in the film the nonsensical decision of the morons (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, who are trying to blackmail Ozzy) to take his memoirs to the Russians since he didn’t play ball. “Why the Russians?”, it’s constantly asked by the “professionals” (CIA and Russian Embassy), since, of course, this kind of intrigue makes no sense anymore, for we are no longer in the Iron Curtain days, and Russia is just another capitalist country with an unimpressive GDP.

And yet fifteen years later, the joke works another way: the morons were ahead of the curve. Specialists were wrong; the idiots, right. It actually did make a lot of sense selling CIA information to the Russians because they were, indeed, as time proved, still the geopolitical foe of a declining American empire. The CIA, Ozzy, the Russians: the supposed professionals did not see it— they thought it moronic and atavistic that such cold war espionage could still be taken seriously by people, for they did not take it seriously anymore. And they were followed by "common sense" in this: diplomats, pundits and experts, who all assumed a new world order, the end of history and whatnot. All wrong— the Russians, it turned out, much like the League of Morons thought, were still the enemy, or: the “axis of evil”, to put it in the hysterical terms of the American establishment. The idiots’ way of life (body fitness and online dating, chiefly) turned out to be the widespread object of desire, market and ideology fifteen years later. The morons in Burn After Reading were morons not insofar as they missed the mark, but precisely because they hit it all too well: the world had turned their way, the idiot wind was blowing already from the Grand Coulee Dam soon to reach the Capitol as a reality show superstar became president. The idiots were right and they won, not Ozzy.