Burn After Reading: The Reinvention of Blood Simple In the first couple of films the Coen brothers made, it was hard to determine where they would stand in the cinematic world in terms of auteurship, especially since they themselves claimed to not really focus on having a particular style (Palmer 51). Their films still range widely in terms of genre and topic, but by the time they made Burn After Reading, it was quite obvious that the film displayed many characteristic elements of a Coen brothers’ film, namely in the treatment of the characters. By creating incompetent, self-important characters that lack the ability to genuinely communicate with each other, resulting in their subsequent isolation, the Coens set up Burn After Reading as a satire that challenges genre conventions surrounding CIA and spy thriller films. Burn After Reading reacquaints audiences with the message delivered in the Coens’ first film Blood Simple, that something is always bound to go wrong, but the Coens also use Burn After Reading to further critique the American response to this by “paying up” to make problems…show more content… As the titles are rolling, the film slowly zooms in from a view of the surface of the earth from outer space all the way down to the greater Washington, DC area. When the titles appear on the screen, they are written in fonts and accompanied by sounds typically associated with that of spy films and CIA correspondences from those movies. Finally, as we zoom into a building, we see at the bottom left corner of the screen that the first scene indeed takes place at the CIA headquarters in Virginia. The overall muted color cinematography present in this film reinforces the tone of a spy film, since spy films typically have muted colors, as do many dramas in general. This is because most spy thriller films revolve around somber, serious topics involving government secrets that could have detrimental effects if
