What’s a Coen Brother’s Movie Without a Coen Brother?

“You are not ideological,” the Soviet apparatchik says to the American civilians trying to sell him state secrets, though, in this cloak-and-dagger context, it’s hard to tell if that’s a statement or a question. Political confusion is common in the movies of the Coen brothers, whether it’s the absurdist Gulf War allegory of The Big Lebowski (“This aggression will not stand, man”), the Deep South gubernatorial race in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or the aforementioned Beltway intrigue of Burn After Reading, with its array of thawed-out cold warriors spooked by the sights of their own shadows. With this in mind, any grand, unified theory of Coen-ness would have to go back to the opening monologue of Blood Simple, with its pre-glasnost evocation of US(A) vs. THEM (Russia), and the less-than-comforting idea that whether you’re capitalist, communist, or somewhere in between, “something can always go wrong.”