BARTON FINK
[Spoilers]
A film review by Ed Nilges
Copyright 1991 Ed Nilges
Note: this review may spoil Barton Fink for those of us who go to the movies primarily for the cheap frisson of surprise. This review is therefore best read *after* seeing Barton Fink.
BARTON FINK is a movie I think the French will like; I understand it's already won several awards at Cannes. It is an extremely, surprisingly intelligent movie which at the same time is eminently watchable, despite descriptions of it which make it sound fairly boring. Our expectations of BARTON FINK is somewhat like our expectations of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. It would appear that a movie about a blocked nerd of a writer in a fleabag hotel would be about as boring as, well, spending time with a blocked nerd of a writer in a fleabag hotel. BARTON FINK surprises in somewhat the same way as MY DINNER WITH ANDRE.
Structurally speaking, BARTON FINK has hints of THE DAY OF THE LOCUST and of Dashiell Hammett as East Coast (Barton Fink, a Depression-era writer on the model of Clifford Odets) meets West Coast and confronts an astonishing spiritual wasteland in himself. There is the criminal common man in the form of John Goodman, who has become since Roseanne a sort of King of the Slobs, there is a dame, a corpse, and a pair of lowlife cops (who I predict the French will especially like.)
Fink is a screenwriter, which is a central and crucially self-reflexive fact. The Hollywood screenwriter views himself, perhaps with some justification, as the creator of the entire dream, for of course a script has to be much more than a collection of dialogue: it has hopefully adequate descriptions of camera angles, lighting and a myriad of other details. In some sort of Leninist screenwriter's Land of Cockaigne or Big Rock Candy Mountain, the screenwriter would work poolside, attended by hordes of willing female slaves (for his gender would be unreflectingly male) and doted upon by studio moguls.
This is of course bunkum, and hooey. A movie is a social art, constituted in the labor of thousands of people...actors, extras, and those mysteriously named gaffers and best boys. It is also constituted in the paradoxical but real labor of management as studio executives acquire hardened arteries in marshaling the forces that make the movie. Even more paradoxically it can be argued that, beyond the ushers and ticket collectors (and beyond the video store clerks) the very audience is laboring to produce LA GRANDE ILLUSION as it sits munching popcorn in the darkened multiplex or in its cluttered parlor.
The explicit rejection of Barton's pretensions is defiantly philistine yet necessarily implied by the very content of those pretensions. The ringing cry of 1789 for the rights of man and the radical equality of all our dreams when taken up by women and by non-Europeans gives the lie to Barton's attempt to privilege himself vis a vis insurance salesmen and GIs. 1789 became 1989, with its myriad calls for self-determination and an end to screenwriting and scriptwriting of *all* sorts, including top-down, dirigiste models of economic development, in Russia, in Latvia, and in Ethiopia.
There is more than one marvelous cut to Barton's blocked and painful attempt to write the story of a Hegelian confrontation he knows nothing about ("a grade B wrestling picture with Wallace Beery") to the ease and effortless flow of a secretary's typing. Ordinarily, the "male" struggle of the writer, nonwithstanding that it may use the identical tools as the labor of the secretary, has nothing to do with a secretary's work, although the same brand names may appear on their typewriters or, now, their personal computers. The Barton/secretary cut undermines this distinction. The secretary and Barton, the cut seems to say, are *both* "writers" if all we look at is their behavior of typing (and isn't behavior all there is?). If there is any difference, the secretary is the better, more effortless writer. When it is of course objected that the secretary is merely transcribing another's words whereas Barton is being creative, we might do well to side with the managers in the film, who decry any such pretension on the part of screenwriters and who have decried it ever since the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby Stories. "Creative x," where x has a strong commercial component, has always had a suspicious odor in America (try "creative accounting" for example.) And screenwriters have always been reminded by studio moguls that they are replaceable parts of what is a machine, first and foremost, for making money.
Such is the lowly position of the writer (screenwriter or other- wise) that modern-day productions of Shakespeare, such as Kenneth Branagh's HENRY V, eschew mention of Shakespeare's name anywhere on their publicity posters.
This review is addressed to a computer net which perforce consists not completely but preponderantly of computer programmers, support specialists, and that ilk. These would do well to reflect that the position of programmer in our industry is structurally identical (isomorphic) to that of the Hollywood screenwriter and it inherits the poignance of writing. The old-fashioned programmer viewed him- self as productive of the entire software illusion, only to be continually and consistently reminded both by computer-resistant ordinary people and the moguls of his industry (located also in California) of the social nature of his work.
The secretary's position brings us to that of the character played by John Goodman, who, despite his name, has played such ambivalent roles...a fat common man with a voice like Arthur Godfrey, an attractive bear, who nonetheless is capable in this movie and in movies like THE BIG EASY (in which he played a minor role as a corrupt New Orleans cop) of turning into ursus horribilis at a moment's notice, and then (in this movie) of even more abrupt and dizzying reversals.
BARTON FINK refuses to privilege John Goodman; for to replay Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" at this late date, when it is the common man who has destroyed rain forests and who has marched in Pol Pot's legions, is to repeat Barton's essential mistake: the illusion that *any* unitary voice can speak for "the people" when it is essential that "the people" speak duplicitously and often repeat stories they've heard elsewhere. The movie appears in an era when the very idea of a positive and held-in-common signifier is a cruel mockery in places with names like Zagreb and Addis Ababa.
The burning question is whether people can live with this negation and not restore their Czar (which, along with the restoration of the old name of Leningrad to St. Petersburg, has been a seriously considered possibility in recent weeks) or their old religious illusions. The message of BARTON FINK (if it must have a message) is fairly bleak for those who, Prufrock-like, would wear white flannel trousers and walk along the beach (very likely fouled by Saddam's oil spill). It is as bleak as Marlowe's, in THE JEW OF MALTA:
"...thou has committed fornication, but that was in another country: and besides, the wench is dead."
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