Life is hard.
I know. Wise words, right?
Ofttimes life has the capacity not only to drag you down, put you to shame, give you a wedgie, stuff you into a toilet head first and flush (the dreaded swirly), but also cram you into that old lady in the Black Forest’s oven, where you’ll be proverbially torched like Hell-meat and served up as a smorgasboard for someone with a candy house.
Shoulda known..
Burnt Umber champions that lifestyle!
Burnt Umber is the color of our flag. We march into battle, equipped with our potent weaponry (minus the firing pins), led by clowns who have never read anything longer than a Dr. Pepper label, at the behest of a white male with a swimming pool and a dissatisfied wife at home (the latter needs the heat the former most certainly has), for the good of ?, and fall like the ships in my old Space Armada game for the Intell ‘O’ Vision.
What are we doing here? How many warnings must go unheeded before someone says, “Hey! Let’s march under a flag of a different color! Let’s march to the beat of different drum!” And everyone will break down into individual discussion groups to decide that it’s best not to stir the pot. Or do any other clichés.
It is the color of Salieri’s mediocre Army in ”Amadeus.” It is the color of failure. The hue of the rust eating away at the floorboards of the car my father picked my mother up in for their very first date-yes, she could see the ground through the holes between her feet and no, she was not impressed.
Burnt Umber is the smell that follows us into our dreams. Burnt Umber graced the skin of our last president. Burnt Umber is the color of our Heart Attack Submarines at Subway, the buns of our Fatburghers at Burgher Thing, and all of our doughnaughts.
Burnt Umber is the film covering the memory of the time we were abused. Burnt Umber is the chorus to our elegy, played by a Burnt Umber zombie, sung in the Burnt Umber Church, under the watchful eye of our shepherd, the good Reverend Burnt Umber.
Nothing depicts any of these ideas better than Jerry Lundegaard, protagonist of ”Fargo” (1996). Strapped for cash, he pays a couple of backwards-ass jailbirds to kidnap his wife, intent on collecting the ransom money from his well-off father-in-law.
Shockingly, the plan works to perfection, unless one counts the endless dead people that “happen” during its execution (haha!). The money is buried in a field in the middle of nowhere, and, fun fact, a woman really froze to death looking for it. The Coen Brothers may be a little at fault here, since the movie began with the words “This is a true story.*”
Anyway, near the beginning of the movie Jerry, a car salesman, takes a car from the lot and transports it to the other middle of nowhere to where the two jailbirds are waiting-it will be the car they use during the crime.
The car, a tan Oldsmobile Sierra, is not called as such by our hero Jerry.
It is a Burnt Umber Sierra.
Onward Christian Soldiers!
*-Perhaps the woman should have stayed till the end, where it was explained that everything in the movie was fictional (yes both things can be true).