The information is deleted in order to destroy the evidence, and the information is restored as evidence. This incident itself has a strong black humor effect, which makes people want to laugh, but it makes people shudder. In the expansive information age, preserving privacy is almost a luxury.
But "Burn After Reading" provides a different way of thinking. The information seems to be more transparent, but in reality it is like a mirrored flower. There is only one truth, and the people in it all embrace desire or panic. They devote their efforts to pull the information to the side that is beneficial to them, and finally pull the information into a vague and difficult thing, and eventually go beyond everyone's expectations. .
In "Burn after Reading", the Coen brothers play with the multi-headed narrative as always, picking up seemingly irrelevant threads, and ultimately leading to the same switch that subverts everyone's destiny. A CIA agent who was fired due to alcoholism wrote some memoirs of his life, but was re-engraved on the CD as financial information by his wife who wanted to divorce. In fact, this was nothing at all. The agent was only responsible for Level 3 secrets, and no one was interested at all. After the disc was lost, it was picked up by a pair of men and women in the gym, and mistakenly thought it was highly confidential. A somewhat stupid blackmail became the fuse that made the incident complicated. The series of events that followed seemed quite accidental, but they were full of inevitability. The final fate of each character was determined at the beginning, which means that character determines fate.
A simple memoir, in the hands of people with ghosts, can be fermented into a shocking conspiracy that almost affects international relations. In the end, even the CIA director can only use Jesus Fucking Christ to summarize it. It is indeed absurd. The audience as a cold-eyed bystander certainly understands what is going on, but if you are also in it, can you be so calm? Or you will try to make a fortune like Linda and Chad, or you will be involved in suspicious things like Harry. The best you can do is to hide behind the door like a gym shopkeeper, so as not to get angry, but you don’t want to. The angry shopkeeper died the worst. Once something is related to oneself, one will inevitably look at or think about it from one's own point of view, or be happy, longing, or fearful. The essence of things is still the same, but the appearance has been distorted in the eyes of people. It is the Buddha that can abandon inner desires and get to the essence of things, and the realm of emptiness and emptiness cannot be reached by ordinary people.
Since people are susceptible to temptation to distort their views on things, it is difficult to say what we see is the truth at such a huge amount of information. A simple piece of news, just like the memoirs of an agent, is plain and unremarkable. If it is processed a little bit, it will lead the public opinion in a completely different direction, making you more and more confused. A few days ago, a piece of news broke on the Internet, "Wang X is Li XX's godfather". This news is too moist. The keywords "Wang X", "Li XX" and "Godfather" "They are all hot words nowadays. People with a discerning eye know that they are fabricated for the click rate of blogs, but they can't stand the attention of everyone to such hot words, and countless people still believe it.
In fact, while predicting the unreliability of information in this age of network expansion, the Coen brothers also provided a solution to this problem, but this approach seems to be just a foolish joke today-Burn After Reading, as the title, Burn after reading. If the agent did not leave any electronic manuscripts in the film at the beginning, the wife would not be able to copy it. Or after Linda and Chad picked up the CD, they destroyed it after reading it, and there was no such trouble as later. Thinking back to the era of letters, if a secret report was wax-marked and burned after reading it, if you didn't want to be peeped by others, you would basically be able to guarantee that the information would rot in your heart. People don't go online, at most they read the newspapers, and the people in the countryside can also read the notices, but they may not be able to understand them. There is a single channel of information dissemination, so there is no need to worry about information dissimilation and privacy leakage. From today's point of view, it was a pure and beautiful era. Burning after reading, it can be seen as the infinite nostalgia of the Coen brothers for the era of single information.
Fei Mo once said in "Mobile": Ancient scholars went out to rush for exams. After going there for a few years, they came back and said that everything was valid. This kind of nostalgia for the era of single information is similar to "Burn after Reading". But there is no era when information is completely pure, whether it is complex or singular, it all carries people's desires and fears. Information will definitely be alienated in the process of dissemination. For example, the current confusing but lively Prism Gate incident, everyone is paying attention to Snowden's whereabouts and the reaction of the country involved, but what is the truth of the incident, who knows?
Having said that, how many people really care about the truth?
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