Read Ethan Coen’s darkly hilarious New York Times… | Little White Lies

Read Ethan Coen’s dark­ly hilar­i­ous New York Times editorial

13 Nov 2016

Words by David Jenkins

Elderly man in a suit holding a document in an office with a US flag in the background.
Elderly man in a suit holding a document in an office with a US flag in the background.
One half of America’s great­est film­mak­ing fam­i­ly unit takes aim at the Trump enablers.

Any­one who thought the Coen broth­ers’ 2008 fea­ture, Burn After Read­ing, was a satire of dizzy-eyed Amer­i­can incom­pe­tence may want to take a sec­ond look. After an exco­ri­at­ing edi­to­r­i­al in the New York Times fol­low­ing the sur­prise elec­tion of You Know Who, it seems that Ethan Coen is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take it any more, and Burn After Read­ing was in fact a piece of melan­cholic social realism.

In cus­tom­ar­i­ly acer­bic style, Coen frames his com­ic jere­mi­ad as a list of thank yous’ to those he sees as instru­men­tal in forg­ing a path for what many com­men­ta­tors are refer­ring to as the end of days. Third par­ty politi­cians are first in line, par­tic­u­lar­ly Green Par­ty can­di­date Dr Jill Stein who, in leach­ing votes from Hillary Clin­ton, has now allowed an entire army of cli­mate change deniers to skip down the halls of power.

Per­haps his harsh­est words are reserved for repel­lant prank monkey/​goombah Jim­my Fal­lon, a host on the Amer­i­can late night talk show cir­cuit. In his lust for rat­ings mana, he opt­ed to invite Trump on to the show for a infor­mal chat and, at one key moment, even deign­ing to ruf­fle his guest’s hair to show the world that this mon­ster has a fluffy kit­ten light side. Aww… Coen goes on to offer Fal­lon some sug­ges­tions for future guests, but the way things are going in the world right now, it’s not a sure thing that some of the wouldn’t even­tu­al­ly find them­selves sashay­ing across his shiny floors.

Read the full New York Times piece here.

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