So I saw the Cohen Brothers’ Burn After Reading last night after chillin at rapper Talib Kwali's after-party--another new adventure! After seeing it, I felt like I enjoyed a film that I didn’t completely grasp. My experience with The Big Lebowski had a similarly lagged start but blossomed into an all-time favorite of mine. The “Cohen aesthetic” twinkled throughout Burn, highlighting their mastery of conveying character-feeling. You'll see this at work when the camera focuses for a blatantly longer time on a character's idiosyncrasies, making for a slight uncomfortableness for the viewer.
I think the film comments on human insincerity and the decline of an individual ethic when in relationship. It highlighted a rampant materialism draining personal goodness and virtue. It hints of the transient nature of life and one’s ability to shape it into new, sometimes dangerous, mosaics. All this, of course, when we’re not randomly stumbling into things. The movie seemed to alert me to the reality that adults may be as lost and superficial as they were in bygone periods. At least the majority seems may be.
Are ethical individuals going extinct then? Is there renewed interest in living a life of systematic ethic—a kind of focused commitment to a general way of living that colors one’s total life? Vegetarianism, green living, Christian anarchism, organic food, etc. tell us that people are definitely interested. The ethics of human relationships fascinate me, as I believe them important for my time and place here in America (as well as my own and others' life). I believe all humans ultimately, and fundamentally, want deep security and fulfillment—to love and be loved—and so an ethics of relationship, especially romantic ones, seems to be a practice vital to our times of individualism, materialism, and technological industrialism and development. As an aside, the polyglot-Pope John Paul II seems to be similarly interested in this field as seen in his writings like Love and Responsibility. I’m sure most of you have observed the depersonalizing of human interaction that the texting and Facebook phenomenon has brought along with its fun benefits. Do many people, then, suffer because of a lack of sincerity, sensitivity, and true commitment to deep love? I think so.
Consider, then that it's an exciting time in our evolution and a tuning of our ethical structures, especially our ethic of relationship (and relationship is also seen in earth-human, animal-human, etc), may not be a bad idea at all...
