Burn After Reading: a reading

I'm surprised that so many reviews I've seen of Burn After Reading mistake it for, in the normally quite discerning words of Manohla Dargis, "a shaggy sendup of ...the espionage flick." I find it to be a rigorous, and hilarious, examination of heterosexual men's sexuality. It isn't just that I've been reading a lot of Freud lately, right? George Clooney's character constructs a dildo machine for his wife, for Christ's sake! And yet the closest I've seen a critic come to this is in saying the film is a meditation on the loneliness of being single and growing old.
For me, though, this is a film about being paranoid about your penis and the masculine sexual demands that heteronormative culture says it implies. This demand is twofold and a cliche: 1) fulfill your partner, 2) don't let this fulfillment sap your potency. One could see it as almost as a rehashing of Freud's "On the Most Universal Form of Degradation in Erotic Life." But in a way the film deals with the fact that this demand is, precisely, getting a bit old. Ergo paranoia: what do you do when your only scheme for dealing with your masculinity, of making sense of it, is verging on rejecting reality?
And this cliche, this getting old of the thing, is caused of course simply by the existence of women--women who, from the men's perspective, "know" it, who are getting tired of it, who are playing off of it. Thus the men feel the demand not only of the demand, but the need to get over the demand to actually deal with the women, who know. In reality, the women perhaps simply have desires of their own. But this desire itself is figured by the men as knowledge of their crisis, a knowledge that makes them paranoid and unable to see that this desire could be satisfied quite simply--perhaps (!) in a way that is actually unrelated to their crisis. This is the genius of Frances McDormand's acting, which appears narcissistic only because it expresses the simplicity of the goal--to have a desire of their own, even if it is superficial and aimed towards being attractive to men--a simplicity that men, wrapped up with their dicks, can't recognize. In this respect, it's shocking that Dargis would be so blind to (or, rater, identified with) the male gaze of the film, and verge on misogyny in describing McDormand's character as "a cruelly unflattering character whose narcissism is matched only by her witlessness."
Perhaps this is due to the way we perceive--now--anything dealing with U.S. national security: pretty much asexually. We can see the difference if we look at the old (or even new) Bond flims, which we wouldn't describe as movies about "intelligence" (though the extremely boring seriousness of their sex--from the point of view of its heterosexual male gaze, since, lord knows, Daniel Craig provides other possibilities for many people--is also, I think, an indication that anything even coming close to national security is viewed less sexually). Intelligence in combat is for us lacking in libido: it still doesn't make sense for us--though perhaps it should, and perhaps it's beginning to be possible--to say that a terrorist attack is brought about because of a (sexual) desire. But here is where, I think, the film comes in most interestingly. The film sees the intelligence community itself as men's solution to this problem of woman's desire. That is, the bureaucracy acts not unlike Harry's (Clooney's character, which I think is just a Zizek-impression) dildo machine for his wife: a way of dealing with women, a way of getting them to finally just shut up about their desires. It isn't surprising that the film ends with McDormand's character taking money (for cosmetic surgery) from the bureaucracy, in return for a promise to "sit on it"--i.e. not disclose any of the intelligence communities' blunders that her desire has created. We have to hear this old phrase differently after seeing the machine. All in all one could say that the film is a blistering critique of people clinging to the last vestiges of heteronormativity--which I think includes many of these critics who want to pass it off as a spy-spoof! For it also isn't a mistake that the film ends with this precise non-knowledge about what it's own activity is about: the J.K. Simmons' character, a CIA superior, closes the file reflecting on "what we've learned." His answer is not surprising once we know who this "we" is: "nothing." The positive structure produced out of this paranoia over women's desires, the CIA itself, doesn't in the end know what Frances McDormand's character wants, except to, when offered the right money, "sit on" what she knows. Nothing, he says, therefore, but adds something else: "nothing, except not to do it [which for us now means, heteronormativity] again."
One final note on Brad Pitt's brilliant, hilarious, and infinitely charming performance: one reason we love him is that he is the only person to escape all these dynamics. Ironically--and therefore--he is one of the most confidently (not paranoid) male characters there (John Malkovich's character comes close to this at times, but I won't get into that). But--not to give away too much--there are prices to be paid for this: we can't really say he escapes anything, in the end. However, it is interesting to note that basically he retains the same disposition as McDormand's character, and yet we heap upon her--not him, who is probably equally guilty of them--the charges of narcissism and witlessness, and interpret what happens to him as the crucifixion or sacrifice of a hero instead of the justice appropriately meted out to a co-conspirator. To me, this seems the most concrete confirmation that this is a film about men's heterosexual desire, and more generally about sexuality, which can only be misrecognized if you see it as a spy-spoof.