Premium Episode 44: Burn After Reading feat Molly Jong-Fast (Sample)
Stupidity, self-serving politics, senseless intelligence gathering and cartoonish vanity. The Coen brothers' 2008 film, Burn After Reading, couldn't be more apropos. We examine it in light of the military intelligence LARP known as QAnon, as well as Never Trumpers, Reagan Era CIA operatives and the MAGA intelligentsia. Our guest is Molly Jong-Fast, author and political columnist.
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Follow Molly on twitter: twitter.com/MollyJongFast
You have had a profound influence on these three lives.
Welcome, listeners, to the 44th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Burn After Reading episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
In 2008, the Coen brothers released Burn After Reading, a tragicomedy about citizen researchers LARPing as spies and the very real consequences of their interactions with the vicious and incompetent United States intelligence apparatus.
Eleven years later, the movie has proven to be a blueprint for the stupidest conflicts of our era.
The battle between the QAnon military intelligence LARPers and their highly selective version of the Deep State.
Orange Man Bad versus the All-American Good Guys of the FBI.
And, of course, this podcast versus your tenuous hold on reality.
As such, we felt it necessary to examine the movie in the context of our current nightmare.
And to this effect, we're joined by repeat guest Molly Jongfast, writer and political columnist.
Welcome back to the show, Molly.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Yeah, thanks for being on.
It's a real pleasure.
So yeah, we're discussing Burn After Reading.
It's a hugely star-studded cast, right off the top Here we've got George Clooney, Francis McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Marvel, David Rash, J.K.
Simmons and Alec Krupa.
And honestly, I think all of them put in pretty stellar performances.
Yeah.
And they're all detestable.
But it's it's the tone is definitely a little cartoonish.
Everyone's like overplaying their roles a little bit.
Yeah, we open with John Malkovich, who plays Osborne Cox, who is a CIA operative, being fired.
And this is very tragic for him and for lots of other people.
This sets off a stream of events that ends in lots of death and tragedy.
The inciting incident in this case is the fact that Osborne Cox's wife has copied files from his home computer, which include his kind of memoir that he's attempting to write because of, you know, his career falling apart.
Right.
And then she leaves them in the gym locker room on a CD-ROM.
And then Chad Feldheimer, played by Brad Pitt, who's kind of this hapless, energetic personal coach.
Yeah, like personal trainer at the gym.
At this gym called Hard Bodies.
He finds it and he shows it to his colleagues.
So we're going to play that clip now for you.
Hey, can I talk to you about our Mickey Mouse HMO?
Hang on.
This is some heavy shit.
Is that my date list?
No, fuck.
You know, I'm trying to reinvent myself and these procedures which are so incredibly not cheap, what is that?
I can't believe this.
This is like intelligent shit.
I'm not comfortable with this.
This is like, like, I can't believe this shit I'm seeing.
Manolo found it.
On the floor there.
Yeah, Manolo found it like this CD just lying in a locker.
Locker floor, ladies locker.
Just lying there.
I'm like, what, someone's music or what?
And I come in here and it's these files, man.
I'm not comfortable with this.
Talking about SIGINT and signals and Shit, and signals means code, you know.
I was just lying there.
Talking here about department heads and their names and shit.
And then there's these other files that are just like numbers, arrayed.
Numbers and dates and numbers and numbers and dates and numbers and... I think that's the shit, man.
Raw intelligence.
Yeah.
What's great about the scene is that we already know that they're being all paranoid and weird over a disc that contains like the start of some memoirs and some household finances.
It's literally nothing consequential.
Yeah.
Brad Pitt is like so QAnon.
He is 100% in this scene.
He would be a QAnon baker.
But God, he is so fucking handsome and so cool.
Even just the stupid way he's like chewing his gum is like, oh, he's so cool.
This is funny because You know, he's definitely the Jake of this world, so Jake loves him.
I immediately identified with this character, minus the frosted tips.
I never had that.
I wanted it, didn't have it.
Tried sun in once, turned my hair orange, got made fun of.
Molly, you also cover a lot of kind of like LARPers, maybe in like a more official capacity, but do you think like that the kind of rise of like military intelligence and spy LARPing was something the Coen brothers, you know, kind of saw coming?
Yeah, they definitely called it.
Well, also, even in Fargo, there's weird sort of that kind of weird people playing policemen.
I think the rise of conspiracy theories on both the left and the right is some kind of weird phenomenon.
And I don't quite understand what has driven it, except for that people are just so freaked out by the government.
But we have it on both sides.
I mean, we have QAnon and then we have like, I mean, the truth is, like, Trump is incredibly corrupt and he is doing a lot of really sketchy stuff with Russia.
But like, you know, is Steve Bannon getting the death penalty?
No, he's not.
You know what I mean?
And as much as I mean, as much as I would love to see Donald Trump end up in jail, I have a lot of trouble imagining.
I mean, we're just not a country that puts our presidents in jail.
No matter what you do.
I mean, Nixon, you know, if Nixon wasn't going into jail, then I think we're probably, you know, like, I don't think there's a scenario where we have a President Pelosi ever.
I think there's a scenario where Trump, you know, gets in trouble and they put someone else in SVP or something.
But so I don't know.
It's definitely a thing.
It's very weird.
But I think one thing that the movie seems prescient about is that, yes, like, we have our Louise Menches, right?
People who are in the upper class and are paranoid and have a lot of power and they kind of, you know, slip into this weird mental zone.
Even Jerome Forsey, like, went to a big school and then became this weird, kind of like, like, like sundowning aristocrat, like, conspiracy theorist.
Yeah, Jerome Corsi's really nuts.
Yeah, go on.
But it seems like what this movie really predicted was the citizen researcher, the kind of person with absolutely no political cachet, no money, no power.
No training, no experience.
Yeah, no training, and they think that they're onto something.
That's very QAnon, and that's also people who were following the Mueller stuff and posting online.
There's a lot of, I think, housewives and IT technicians in America who now think that they're on to something because they have access to the internet.
It's also very American, you know?
It's like, we go to the movies, we see all of this espionage and intelligence, this kind of stuff sort of romanticized, and so of course people feel like they've seen a couple movies, they look at a document, they don't know what it is, and they go, That's raw intelligence.
I mean, Brad Pitt... I mean, the writing here is totally on point.
I mean, this is exactly what these people are experiencing behind their computers, discovering 4chan for the first time, and going through the drops, you know?
Yeah, and even, like, using kill boxes and, like, sequences of numbers and letters, that's so Q. Q is essentially, like, if an AI tried to write what Brad Pitt considers raw intelligence.
I mean, yeah, Brad Pitt is basically baking these crumbs, and it's just meaningless nonsense, but he thinks it's incredibly profound, which is 100% QAnon baker shit.
Yeah, I also think that the reason that it's prevailing on both sides is because we have media sources, and I'm not talking even just about the big guys, but we've got all of these independent media sources, all of these online sites now that are feeding the fire.
So if you believe that Donald Trump is going to do a perp walk along with Pence, and they're in orange jumpsuits and chain gangs, You will find a guy with, you know, almost a million followers on Twitter who is telling you exactly how and why and when that's going to happen.
Right.
No, I agree.
I mean, you don't get as bad on the left as you do on the right.
Like, the right has places like the Gateway Pundit and Am Greatness and the Twitchy and, and, and, where they are really like saying stuff that's completely insane.
I mean, Gateway Pundit, the stuff they run is like not even, you know, so I would say The left doesn't quite have the same level of, like, they don't quite have the same.
But, you know, I'm sure they'll get there.
Yeah, the left, I think, like, traditionally has, like, more respect for the listener and reader.
But I think that is going to shit.
So I think we can expect it to get better in that area.
And the funny thing, I just thought about this, but like the Coen brothers, the one thing where they didn't really connect the dots is they had to use this device about the CD-ROM being found in the gym locker.
Meanwhile, they also have her doing online dating.
But if they had been truly prescient, those two could have been combined into the same device in that she's looking for information online, Brad Pitt and her are trying to do dating, but it's just reaching out to the internet for a connection, for some understanding.
And that's where they find the information from, you know, whatever, citizen researchers.
But instead they had to use this very physical device of someone leaving the information at a gym.
Yes, it was actually the lawyer's assistant who had made a copy of the files for the upcoming divorce proceedings.
And of course, she had left it at the gym.
That's how it got to the gym floor.
What year is that from?
This is 2008.
Right.
It feels like it's, you know, sort of the Old Testament.
It feels so old.
But yeah, I mean, I was watching it.
He definitely called it, I mean, 2008 was like such a different world.
It was, yeah, Obama, exactly.
And I think that there was still, I mean, what I do like about it is that they have very little respect for intelligence.
They don't think intelligence is great.
And honestly, I think that was the general take on the left that now has profoundly changed because of the need for Mueller to restore order.
Suddenly, we're looking at the generals and the intelligence agencies and going, can't someone do something about this?
Please save us.
Please save us, these organizations we know nothing about.
Mueller really didn't kill it, did he? I mean, that was talk about how did he not indict junior?
I mean, yeah, junior's direct messaging with Julian Assange.
And that's OK. Yeah.
I mean, we're discussing Hunter Biden and Trump has an office for his daughter in the White House.
So I mean, you know, like the idea of nepotism mattering at this point, it's all just weaponized.
And I think that is one thing that they don't really kind of touch on in this movie.
It's almost like they pretend in this movie that there is no Uh, which I think was the feeling in 2008 that these are actual independent, um, you know, non-ideological organizations, that, that people working there are able to really separate their politics from what they do, uh, during the day.
Right.
Mueller is like, you know, a 1985 guy, and these guys all think, you know, the reality is the politics here have been so...
Everyone in American politics has been so, like, we've been so soft in a certain way.
And they all thought, and Trump came along and just did every scummy thing.
And people weren't, the people in the government who were already there were not prepared for it.
So Mueller was like, we're going to do Watergate.
And Trump is doing something totally, you know, like, there's no decency.
There's no there, there.
I mean, even Nixon, who was a total Sleazy, scummy crook is still significantly more decent than Trump will ever be.
Well, it's interesting because Malkovich does say, you know, maybe it's the Cold War ending.
Now it's all bureaucracy and no mission.
He's saying this to his dying father, who's completely mute.
And he's essentially Reagan, basically like sundowning.
And this guy openly worships Kennan, who's a Cold War containment diplomat and worked on stuff that developed into the Marshall Plan.
But then he went on to become a writer for an institute founded by the guy who created Macy's and then sold it for tons of money.
So it does kind of follow this post-Cold War lack of meaning, but all this consolidated power that was designed to fight the Russians, and now there's nowhere to go with that shit.
And then also, I love how Malkovich, very early on when he gets fired, he goes, this is a crucifixion.
Yeah.
Right.
Which is like that is a that's a fucking prescient thing about how Trump would react and be like,
this is a witch hunt. I'm being crucified up here because you're like you said, Nixon,
even Nixon wasn't like saying shit that extreme about what people were doing to him.
Right, right.
But I will say one thing, the people who have, if you want to know, the people who are the
most destroyed by Trumpism besides like the people who are just horrified, who are on the,
there are people on the right who are really destroyed by Trumpism,
like the never Trumpers, the people who, I mean, they are, he is killing them.
Their whole life was these beliefs that I think are very silly.
You know, trickle down economic stuff that's really, I think, ultimately very corrupt.
But fundamentally, they believed they were doing the right thing.
Like, they thought they were good actors.
And their entire party, their whole life has been hijacked by this guy who's just a kleptocrat.
So I do think that those people are really, I mean, I know for a fact that some of these, like, I know a bunch of Republicans who are not in office anymore who are like, this is, this was their legacy.
You know, this was everything they did everything for, and now their legacy, the Republican Party, is this.
Yeah, the assumption was that people weren't so factional.
They weren't, like, so tribal that they would at least keep in mind that the Russians are the enemy.
And that is, like, one of the first things that defines the Trump presidency, is he's like, actually, I'm better friends with Putin than I am with the Democrats.
Fuck the Democrats.
They're the traitors, and Putin, not so bad, actually.
Not such a bad guy.
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