Barton Fink is a singular work in the Coen brothers canon. It's their most symbolically oriented movie, and the closest they've ever come to offering an artistic manifesto. The story of Barton Fink, earnest young 'playwright of the common man' who goes to Hollywood to write for the pictures and finds himself in a hell of his own making, doubles as a metaphor for the creative process. The Hollywood studio system, in the person of vulgarian studio head Jack Lipnick and broken, dipsomaniacal screenwriter Bill Mayhew, is shown to be the artistically bankrupt shit-factory we all know it to be, but the real revelation is that Fink, for all of his pretensions to Beauty through Truth, is as creatively crippled as any of the hacks churning out wrestling pictures on the studio back lots.Fink is sort of a stand-in for the type of artist who would disdain the Coens' for what Barton himself calls "empty formalism" and their failure to engage the real world. "It's the stuff of life! Why shouldn't it be the stuff of theater!" Fink thunders! But, of course, he's thundering this at the salt-of-the-earth insurance salesman Charlie Meadows. Yet, when Charlie says "I could tell you stories..." Fink cuts him off to expound more about the virtues of the common man, ignoring the common man sitting right in front of him. He also swims with sexual repression that he cannot honestly confront. When Det. Mastrionotti says "you're a sick fuck, Fink," you get the feeling he's on to something. Beyond Fink's individual shortcomings, the Coens suggest that the essential nature of existence precludes the possibility of art that speaks for anyone other than the artist. Regardless of Fink's commitment to looking outward, he spends the majority of the film in his sticky, dingy hotel room, relating to the other occupants only through the sounds leaking through the walls. In a film chock full of symbolism, the hotel room is the most important bit: it's Fink's head, a claustrophobic space that brooks no contact with the outside, nor can it. Charlie, who moonlights as a head-removing serial killer named Karl "Mad Man" Mundt, is Fink's only confidant, and it's not exactly clear is Charlie isn't a figment of Fink's imagination. Either way, it's certainly clear that Fink's attempt to create art on behalf of others is the height of presumption. As Charlie tells him as his hotel room burns, "You think I made your life hell? Take a look around this dump. You're just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. I live here. And you come into my home and complain that I'm making too much noise." Barton Fink is the Coens' rejoinder to all who complain that their films are insular and artificial. All art, for the Coens, is insular and artificial. And why? As Tom Regan said, "nobody know anybody. Not that well."
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2 comments:
Still all I can think of: "We're going to sneak into an R-rated movie!"
BAR-TON FINK! BAR-TON FINK!
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