Censorship Watch: Burn After Reading DVD

For their followup to the acclaimed western No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen went to Washington, DC, for Burn After Reading, a black comedy about two screwball gym employees (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) who stumble on a disc full of secrets from a fired CIA agent named Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich). The bumbling pair then try their hands at blackmail.

While Burn After Reading is satire of the atmosphere of rampant paranoia in the US Capital's intelligence community, it's also a stark, cynical look at marriage, affairs and Internet dating.

To paraphrase one character: everybody is [having sex] with everybody.

George Clooney also stars. He plays a federal marshal who's having several affairs, but he's still looking for ways to please his wife.

To that end, he builds a secret device in his basement -- a device that is shockingly and hilariously revealed in the uncensored print of the film, which I saw in a cinema in the United States during my trip there last November.

It's one of those moments of bawdy humor that the Coens are usually more subtle about.

The recently released Thai DVD omits that shocking reveal, which I suppose makes the device ever more mysterious.

Rules are rules, I guess, and things that are illegal to possess and use for your own personal pleasure in Thailand can't even be seen on your TV screen at home, apparently. And it doesn't matter if there are countless examples of such things, rendered in wood and sometimes stone, coming in various sizes and displayed proudly on keychains and necklaces and sold alongside amulets in the traditional markets.

The Thai DVD, released by Pacific Marketing, is also light on special features, containing only a rough "b-roll" of behind-the-scenes footage that has no commentary. The US-released disc has a few more extras than that. But for around 200 baht, the Thai DVD looked like a good deal, until I got it home and found that it had been monkeyed with by the jerk-off censors.

At least they didn't mess with the salty language that the Coens are infamous for.

I felt obliged to join in as Malkovich's character Osbourne Cox uttered a string of expletives. Of course, I was in the privacy of my own home, and I bothered no one by uttering such words.

The movie was rated R in the US (restricted from viewers under 17) for "pervasive language, some sexual content and violence". But even under Thailand's forthcoming ratings system, viewers 20 and over still won't get a look at what it was that Frances McDormand thought was so fantastic.