Black humor is to make your back cold after laughing.
Burn after reading not only makes my back cold, but also makes me breathe painfully, my limbs numb and my face bloodless. ...
Its black humor is even scarier than The Ghost of the Exorcist!
Bald Berncox is just a "nobody" with a security level of only three in the CIA. Recently, he encountered an unprecedented change in his life: the boss kicked him out of the house on the grounds of alcoholism, and the unfaithful wife occupied the house as a love nest to sympathize with her husband's adultery. He wanted to write a memoir to earn some money, but the CD containing the memoir was stolen by his wife as a financial account. Not to mention, the CD was accidentally left in the gym by his wife's paralegal. The CIA man, a bald man who was completely angered, wore shorts and pajamas and came to the house occupied by his wife with an axe. I didn't expect his wife and lover to be away. At home, he is just a hapless man who breaks into houses. An ignorant CIA man jumped on it, shot at it, and chopped it with an axe. The unlucky head was split in half on the spot. ...
There is more than one shocking scene.
Chad Field Hammer, the fitness instructor in Not Hot Pete, is not a damn villain. He is just an ordinary man without ambition: he likes listening to pop music, loves his "cross star" bike and always drinks sports drinks to supplement his delicate skin. He can even be regarded as a helpful person, but this helpful person died of his self-righteous cleverness: in order to help his paranoid female colleague raise enough money for plastic surgery, he volunteered to "go to Longtan alone", never dreaming that he would meet George Clooney's neurotic "big gun" in the closet and be shot in the head on the spot. ...
Harry Farrell, the financial officer played by George Clooney, is also unlucky. He likes to flirt. He thinks his lies are perfectly woven and everything in his life is under control, but he falls into the divorce trap that his wife has already dug. He likes to show off his "big gun" that he hasn't used for 20 years from time to time as a gimmick to seduce women (when he first met Frances McDormand, he pretended to inadvertently reveal the holster he carried with him), but when he inexplicably shot the strong man in the head with his own baby, he was scared out of his mind by his own behavior. More shit followed: he soon discovered that the girls he had recently hooked up with were a bunch of strong men with their heads cut off, and they were most likely sent by the CIA. Harry Falar looked around as if all the agents in new york were surrounded, and his timid child was almost stunned. After stumbling away from the imaginary "encirclement", he booked a plane ticket to escape Venezuela that night.
The usual comedy is to create a series of freaks who are more stupid than real idiots, and then let the audience gain a sense of inexplicable superiority in comparison, so as to obtain short-term psychological satisfaction. But burn after reading has never been so kind. All the characters in the film are not particularly stupid. They just judge and think according to their own logic, and then come up with a solution to the problem. From everyone's single point of view, they are not out of line, and all their actions can be reasonably explained in the usual sense: people of different identities and occupations do their own things, and the CIA is also conscientious enough. Two lovers whose relationship has broken down are intrigued just to ensure the maximization of their own interests. This motive is beyond reproach and true enough. Frances McDormand's superstition that plastic surgery can bring happiness to female employees in gymnasiums is also well documented in reality. People are always used to starting from their own point of view, but as long as they try to put themselves in the shoes of the characters in the play, they will find that there are not many unreasonable behaviors of these people. Because of this, this cruel setting makes us feel absurd, but at the same time, we unconsciously examine ourselves: in fact, many times, we are not smarter than the characters in the movies, just like Bourne Cox, Chad Field, Hammer and Harry Falar, who failed to find their own stupidity, but we just turned a blind eye to our own stupidity. If God watches our lives like a movie-goer, maybe he will laugh himself out of control-you won't.
The essence of absurdity is the absurdity of life itself. Every single individual in this world is so "normal" and thinks he is full of wisdom, but when combined, he is so crazy! When we laugh at the characters in the movie, we are actually laughing at ourselves.
So at the end of the film, when the leaders of the CIA put this "top secret" on the shelf, we had to ignore such a biggest irony:
Our existence is a joke-or this sentence itself is a joke, whether it is a cold joke or a hot joke, if you take jokes too seriously, life will be unsustainable.