BARTON FINK
A film review by Dave Cowen
Copyright 1996 Dave Cowen
Somebody's never read Joyce.
Every year, somebody posts the "Barton Fink makes absolutely no sense and never will" post. Believe it or not, while the Coen boys had a wonderful time throwing curve balls at the audience, most of the more absurd elements of Barton Fink _do_ fit together. Quite nicely, mostly something approximating a very clever symbolic joke. So, I feel compelled to post my standard spoiler warning:
DON'T READ FARTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM BARTON FINK!
and trudge on with interpreting some of the more obscure elements of Barton Fink, including the wallpaper, the picture, orphans and dames.
One of the most obvious thematic elements in Barton Fink is the conflict between "high art" and "low art". Barton's a Jewish pseudointellectual, a New York playwright who likes to think that his uninspired, highfalutin work is actually "about and for the common man". Because he avoids themes about royalty or other themes commonly found in the more pretentious work of otherwise dull artists, one senses a sort of smugness in Barton, as if he feels he's doing some sort of great service to the common man by writing about him. In the plot of the film, however, he is forced to come to terms with the fact that he is a poseur: when faced with making the kind of "low art" that will truly appeal to the "common man" of Barton's story, a wrestling picture, Barton is stymied, and suffers writer's block. This conflict is what drives many of the surreal happenings that occur in the Hotel Earle.
I GUESS THE HEAT'S SWEATING OFF THE WALLPAPER.
Throughout Barton's stay at the Earle, the wallpaper oozes down the wall, dripping "goopus" as it goes. This is, for all intensive purposes, a symbolic joke.
The Coens, throughout the film, involve Barton and Charlie in what is typically some of the most common and pretentious symbolism found in "high" art: the fire/water dichotomy. The first time we catch wind of this (pun intended), Barton is entering the Hotel Earle. We see a shot of waves crashing against a large rock...and the water dissolving into the floor of the Hotel Earle, as though the brown carpeting were sand. Throughout the film, Barton turns for solace to the picture of the girl sitting by the water, as the sounds of crashing waves come up in the soundtrack. Barton is tormented, in his room, by a mosquito... depite the fact that Ben Geisler assures Barton that "there are no mosquitos in Los Angeles. Mosquitos breed in swamps. This is a desert!" Finally, Barton ends up at the shoreline at the end of film. No question about it, the symbol of water seems to be following Barton around.
I don't have to convince you about the link between Charlie Meadows and fire. As Charlie's temper heightens, so does the temperature. At the high point of his anger, flames literally erupt behind him, setting the hallway of the Earle ablaze. The man sweats -- it's HOT...water is purged from his body in the form of sweat.
What many don't catch is the reference to the pipes behind the walls of Barton's room. This is one of the most important threads in the film -- early on, when Charlie is talking about hearing the couple engaging in intercourse in the room next doorthat Barton hears earlier, Barton leaves the room. Charlie cringes in sadness, and says "Seem like I hear everything in this dump. Must be the pipes or something." When Barton comes back in, Charlie quickly hides his anger, his anger stemming from having to be subjected to the sounds of lovemaking being carried in the pipes.
Later, Charlie hears lovemaking again. Barton starts yelling about W.P. Mayhew when Audrey comes over to "help with his script" -- which would have had to wake up Charlie.in the next room. When Audrey and Barton roll onto the bed (with a hilarious reference to the Hayes code rule that in a lovemaking scene, a man had to have at least one of his feet on the floor), the camera pans over and enters the bathroom. The sounds of Barton and Audrey are echoed as the camera heads into the pipe...the sounds being carried over into the Charlie's room.
When cold _water_ is carried through pipes in _hot_ weather, condensation forms on pipes -- we all know that. If the pipe is directly behind wallpaper, the sweaty condensation gets through the wall into the wallpaper's glue, loosens the glue, and the wallpaper peels.
What a dump. The Coens manage to take some very highfalutin, pretentious symbolism, and turn it into a basic, common, everyday problem in the film.
A FALLEN ORPHAN
It doesn't take much symbolic interpretation to realize that the Hotel Earle is hell. Chet, the servant, comes up from the underworld to greet Barton. The first three letters out of the elevator operator's mouth happen to be sixes. "A day or a lifetime," reads the stationary. Take note that the pencil which Barton moves from the stationary has no lead. Not a good omen for a writer.
Charlie Meadows is the hotel's resident fallen angel. And I don't just use "fallen angel" in a sense of referring to the big horny red guy himself, Charlie is truly is a fallen angel in all senses. Charlie genuinely wants to help people, wants to keep people out of the hell that he's in, to keep them from the ways he feels. Note that Charlie trys to sell FIRE and casualty insurance. And hell yeah, he believes in it. Unfortunately, some people just don't listen... and in the end, the people who don't buy insurance tend to get burned.
Many of the early scenes of the film are spent with Charlie trying to help Barton. Despite being annoyed at Barton's noise complaint, Barton's fake sympathy ("I thought you might be...in distress.") gives Charlie the impression that Barton might be an OK guy, that Barton could help fill some of the loneliness in his life, provides him with some empathy. So, Charlie pines to be Barton's muse. "I could tell ya some stories!" he bellows, attempting desperately to be Barton's inspiration for his impending wrestling picture.
But the kind of empathy that Charlie desires never arrives. When Lipnick, the head of Capitol Pictures, asks Barton which it'll be, "Orphan, or Dame", Barton responds "Both, maybe"... but we all know that that's not the way the story will pan out.
Barton tends to ignore Charlie, instead ranting about modern theatre, interrupting Charlie at any point when Charlie trys to interject something important. It seems that nobody listens to Charlie. "Opportunities galore," he says, talking about his sexual exploits -- but you know this isn't true. The same housewives he talks about there are found murdered by the end of the film. Any sort of emotional contact is blocked by his weight ("that's my cross to bear"), despite the fact that he has an interesting, lively personality. When he hears the "lovebirds" down the hall, this brings out a crushing pain in him about what he'll never have.
In the end, Barton chooses the Dame. Instead of calling to Charlie when he needs help writing the script, he calls Audrey -- and Audrey comes by to gie "Bah-ton" that special sort of "undahstahndin'" which Charlie has never experienced.
When Barton asks him why he killed Audrey, Charlie erupts "Because YOU DON'T LISTEN!" and the pus oozes out of his ear. This, for all intents and purposes, appears to be a sexual release for Charlie's pent-up aggressions. Very likely, the wallpaper glue also probably represents sexual fluids.
Finally, at the end of the film, after Barton and Charlie's confrontation, Charlie mentions the Finks and Uncle Maury, whose address Barton had given Charlie earlier in the film. Barton's frantic telephone call at the end of the film indicates that the worst has happened: the orphan, to pay back Barton for choosing the dame, has orphaned Barton.
If any figures in recent history have been seen as literal devils, creating a hell on earth, it is without doubt the Nazi regime. Charlie, before pulling the trigger, hails the fuhrer. His real name is "Mundt," an obviously German name. Even more evidence of the link between Nazi symbolism and the film comes with Charlie's presentation of the box that Barton carries with him for the end of the film. The wrapping paper looks remarkably like dried human flesh. This angel has fallen hard. Perhaps Barton's "common man" wasn't so common after all... or was he?
ARE YOU IN PICTURES? DON'T BE SILLY.
"While co-writing the script for their 1990 gangster hit, the brutally beautiful _Miller's Crossing_, the found themselves overpowered by writer's block. To jolt themselves back into action, they wrote the first draft of what would later become BARTON FINK..."
The above is from the laserdisc jacket of Barton Fink. It's fairly common knowledge that the Coen's wrote Fink during a bout of writer's block... so it's fair game to point out the autobiographical elements. The Coens just happen to be a couple of Jewish scriptwriters whose films play to the art house crowds but feature more "common" characters. Miller's Crossing was a genre film, which ends up being more about Tom and Leo's fight for Verna than about gangsterism, a fruity movie that ended up playing to the critics and not to the common man. When Barton is writing "The Burlyman", one of the instructions he writes into the script is "A young hussy opens the door"... an instruction from the opening scenes of Miller's Crossing. I don't think that there's any question that the film Barton Fink is art imitating life.
Where the film shines in irony is in its final scene. All through the film, Barton stares into a representation of possibly the lowest form of art: a hotel painting. In the end, he finds himself a part of that picture: Barton's life imitating the lowest form of art. The Coens turn one of the most pretentious and self-serving forms of art, the autobiography, on its head by showing the exact opposite happen. Finally, as for Joyce, the final scenes of Barton Fink at the beach, link in beautifully with the final scenes of James Joyce's autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which paints a very similar scenario. It's a very apt, circular, reference.
All of this is in my humble opinion, of course -- I wouldn't be pretentious enough to try and speak for whatever it is rattling around inside the Coen's collective heads. However, in response to the original comment, I would hope the above interpretations would be considered strong enough to dispel the notion that the symbolism in Barton Fink is "meaningless", when it's really a very intricately structured story.
Anyway, I've spouted off enough tonight. I'll shut up now.
esch@fische.com (Eschatfische.) --------------------------------- http://www.fische.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews