I’m just having a little trouble getting started
Barton Fink (1991)
Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller’s Crossing.
Halfway through writing the script for Miller’s Crossing, Joel and Ethan got stuck. By their own account, their typical timeframe was four months to produce a first draft followed by two months of polishing. But after setting up Miller’s Crossing’s intricate scenario they found themselves somewhat at a loss for how to bring all those threads together for a satisfying conclusion. The process dragged on and on and the brothers needed to think about something else. Facing writer’s block—or something close to it—for the first time in their careers, they channeled that frustration into Barton Fink, a movie about a playwright going to Hollywood and suffering in increasingly surreal ways as he battles his own writer’s block.
“It was just going really slowly,” Ethan told Jim Emerson in 1991. “I guess because the plot was so involved; we just got sick of it at a certain point. And we decided to take a vacation from it in the form writing something else.” Joel continued: “We were about halfway through and… it’s not exactly writer’s block, but sometimes you hit a wall in terms of thinking about the plot or something and it just becomes easier, when we’d get together to write, to think about something else. That’s how Barton Fink happened. And it actually got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s strange but some movies present themselves almost entirely formed in your head,” Joel told their regular interviewers at Positif. “You know how they’ll be visually and without perhaps knowing the end exactly, you have an intuition of the kind of emotion that’ll manifest itself.” “Barton Fink is more the development of an idea, rather than all the narrative intricacies that made up Miller’s Crossing,” added Ethan.
There are two points there we need to grab onto and ultimately bring together: the visual style of the film and it being the development of an idea. That latter admission marks a watershed moment for the Coen brothers—it had started to feel rather ironic that I, a guy so wedded to “meaning,” and “themes,” and “philosophical content,” had latched onto a body of work that they repeatedly denied should be plumbed for any sort of depth. Their mantra for three movies has been it’s just entertainment, it’s just plot, what is there to get? Finally they admit there might be ideas at play.
The plot, briefly. The year is 1941. Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a New York playwright just off a smash success for a play about poor fishmongers. Following the urging of his manager he goes to Hollywood under contract to write for the pictures. He lodges at the Hotel Earle, a once-majestic now crumbling place whose slogan is “A day or a lifetime.” Upstairs, his room is plain, nothing on the walls save a picture of a woman on the beach, the window looking out at a brick wall. The window opens just a crack—not enough to refresh the stale air but enough to let mosquitos in at night. Above the bed there are gashes on the ceiling that look disconcertingly like torn flesh.
The studio boss Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) assigns him to a wrestling picture despite Fink’s ignorance of the genre. He meets his hotel room neighbor Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), an affable insurance salesman who invites himself into Barton’s room and pours him a drink. Barton steamrolls their conversation to wax philosophical about the theater of the common man, ignoring Charlie’s repeated prompt of “I could tell you some stories.” Slabs of wallpaper begin peeling off to reveal the horrid, organic-looking wall beneath. Barton tries to press it closed again and a clear, viscous fluid oozes out.
He has lunch with producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub, startling as a square-jawed anti-Monk), who dismisses his writing trouble: “Wallace Beery. Wrestling picture. Whatta you need, a roadmap?” and tells him to get some pointers from another writer. As luck would have it, right there puking in the bathroom is Bill Mayhew (John Mahoney!!!), a loose parody of William Faulkner who drinks constantly and skates by on his curdled Southern charm. Fink stops by Mayhew’s apartment later to find him in an incoherent drunken rage and tended to by Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), his “personal secretary” and lover.
Barton’s writer’s block persists. He drinks with Charlie in his room again and has lunch with Audrey and Mayhew. Eventually he owes Lipnick a meeting to discuss his script. In a panic the night before the meeting he calls Audrey. She comes over and tells him a few things, that the movies are simple morality tales, “really just a formula, you don’t have to tie up your soul into it,” and that all he needs probably is a little understanding, by which she means he needs to have sex.
Barton wakes up the next morning and Audrey is dead in his bed. Charlie disposes of the body. Barton still can’t write. The LAPD show up to question Barton not about Audrey’s disappearance but about Charlie, who’s actually a serial killer named Karl “Madman” Mundt. Charlie gives Barton a mysterious, head-sized package to hold onto. Barton puts it behind his typewriter and suddenly he can write. He writes all night, finishing a script he thinks is the best thing he’s ever written. He goes out to celebrate and comes back to find the police detectives in his room. As they talk Charlie returns. He steps off the elevator and runs down the hall with a shotgun screaming “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” as he guns down the cops and the corridor bursts into flames.
Barton asks Charlie why he’s done all this to him. Charlie says, “Come on, Barton. You think you know pain? You think I made your life hell? Take a look around this dump. You’re just a tourist with a typewriter. I live here, don’t you understand that?” As Barton collects his things to escape the inferno Charlie pulls out his keys and steps into his room, heedless of the flames.
He meets with Lipnick about his script. He hates it. It’s arrogant, fruity garbage in his opinion. Lipnick is feeling vindictive. He thought of firing Fink as he has Geisler but he decides, “No, that’d be too easy. You’re under contract, you’re gonna stay that way. Anything you write is going to be the property of Capitol Pictures, and Capitol Pictures is not going to produce anything you write, not until you grow up a little. You ain’t no writer, Fink, you’re a goddamn write-off.” And there we leave him, his “brief tenure” now extended indefinitely, his work not his own, now blocked by corporate mandate rather than creative struggle.
Barton Fink is quite a difficult film to write about because a simple recitation of the plot doesn’t remotely capture the feeling of watching it. This is a movie whose chief fixation is on spaces and how they impose their presence on our minds. It’s more textural than textual. At the risk of that old cliche, the Hotel Earle is as much a character as Audrey or Lipnick, maybe more so. Not coincidentally, the brothers cited the desire to set a story in “a huge neglected old hotel” as their chief inspiration for the film. Joel told Positif, “Ethan always described the hotel as a ghost ship set adrift, where you get indications of the presence of other passengers without ever seeing them. The only clue would be the shoes in the corridors. You can imagine it peopled with traveling salesmen who’ve had no success, with their sad sex lives, crying alone in their rooms.”
This emphasis on place and presence returns us to the comment up top that they began with a complete sense of the visual style of the film. Barton Fink is very important in the Coens’ overall trajectory for being their first collaboration with cinematographer Roger Deakins. Their first three features were photographed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who did great work and was becoming unavailable as he graduated to directing in his own right. But Deakins is just on a different level entirely. I don’t really have the vocabulary to go into any detailed analysis of his techniques so suffice it to say that seeing is believing. To set the majority of a movie in a dingy hotel room is to risk extreme visual monotony; every one of Deakins’ compositions masterfully presents multiple elements in the frame and highlights the subtle forces working on Fink’s psychology. There’s a sequence where the camera swings back and forth between Barton and Charlie as they move toward and away the door; it is, objectively speaking, nothing to write home about but Deakins brings some impossible to locate sense of assurance and deliberateness to even these basic camera moves that gives the sequence a weight and satisfaction totally out of proportion to what’s required.
Directly above Fink’s desk is the picture of a woman sitting on the beach with her arm raised to shield her eyes as she looks at the sea. This picture has a strange power. Wherever we are in the room, however the camera is oriented, our eye is drawn back to it; Deakins’ camera constantly drifts just a little to let it pop into the corner of the frame. Fink only acknowledges it directly a couple times throughout the movie but we feel it imposing itself on him constantly. Barton Fink is a movie about isolation, about having nowhere to go and no one to turn to and this picture somehow mocks and exacerbates that feeling. Fink crossed the country to be within spitting distance of the mighty Pacific but instead his window faces a brick wall. The picture doesn’t even really show the ocean, it shows a woman looking at the ocean. Even this false representation can’t be accessed directly but is mediated through another.
This picture seems to me to be a main source of Fink’s writer’s block. He is fixated on his ideals for the “creation of a new living theater of and about the common man” while the picture stares down at him as a constant reminder of the artificial and formulaic nature of the industry he’s signed himself over to. But not only does it call attention Hollywood’s essentially fraudulent nature, it calls attention to his own as well. Fink seems to have no authentic connection with the common man and indeed the few words we hear of his play don’t sound like common speech elevated to the level of art (i.e. Gaddis) but rather stereotypically overwrought theater dialogue put in the mouths of poor people. When Fink finds the detectives in his room one is finishing up reading his screenplay aloud; it sounds remarkably similar to the play. Fink insists to Charlie that there’s no roadmap for the mental territory he’s tasked with exploring but he seems to have returned to the same trail in the end.
“We wanted the only opening onto the external world to be that image,” Joel said. “It seemed important to create a feeling of isolation. We needed to establish from the start a feeling of dislocation in the main character.” “The image of the beach had to inspire a feeling of comfort,” said Ethan. “I don’t know exactly why we struck on that detail, but it served to create even more oppression within the room itself.”
In Blood Simple, Frances McDormand’s character dreams a visit from her dead husband. In Raising Arizona, Nicolas Cage’s character dreams twice, once a vision of vengeance incarnate and once a vision of a happy future. In Miller’s Crossing, Gabriel Byrne’s character narrates his dream about his hat blowing away. Barton Fink repeatedly creates the impression you’re watching a dream sequence only to startlingly reassert that what you’re watching is the film’s reality. When Fink awakens after sleeping with Audrey, it’s pure dream logic. She’s lying facing away from him; you can’t tell anything’s wrong. He smacks a mosquito that’s landed on her back and suddenly blood gushes out from underneath her. At this moment you expect him to jerk awake but instead the scene just continues. The harsh light of day creeps in. This is real. Similarly, after he finishes his script we hard-cut to him dancing his ass off at a USO event. Fink has been so tightly wound we can’t believe he could ever cut loose like this. But again, it’s real. In fact, he’s having such a good time that he refuses to let a sailor cut in for a dance with his girl, leading to a punch in the face and an all-out brawl on the dance floor.
That these two moments of dream/reality uncertainty both coincide with moments of sexuality and physical expression points to a buried libidinal aspect of the film. When Fink is trying to tack his disgusting gooey wallpaper back up he hears a couple having sex on the other side of the wall. He presses his ear close to listen, heedless of the dripping fluid. The Hotel Earle feels organic; as much as it’s a space imposing itself on him it’s reflecting his inner state back out. The presentable exterior is falling apart, as an underlying base physicality asserts its presence. Charlie at one point asks Fink if he has a girlfriend, to which he says no, he gets so worked up over his work he has no attention left over for women.
So again, the picture. Not only does this image confront him with all the contradictions of his art and his career but it personifies them within a desirable body. This adds another layer to the implicit taunt, another layer of frustration. With his writing blocked, this other urge is surfacing which he also has no outlet for, being totally alone in this foreign city. All of the meanings the picture contains converge in the film’s final moments. Barton walks along the beach holding Charlie’s ominous package. Coming the other way is beautiful woman. Barton asks if she’s “in pictures.” She tells him not to be silly. Then she sits facing the ocean and raises her arm to shield her eyes from the sun.
Stray Observations/Unused Quotes
At one point Fink watches dailies from another wrestling picture being directed by a Victor Soderbergh and you see the clapper boy over and over again. He’s played by Max Grodénchik, aka Quark’s brother Rom from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I watched the finale of DS9 two nights ago so this feels very important right now.
Ethan’s disappointment on learning that wrestling pictures were a real thing and that Wallace Beery really had starred in one called Flesh from 1932, directed by John Ford: “We thought it was like a joke. It kind of goes past people: ‘Oh yeah, wrestling picture.’ We were sort of disappointed that there actually was such a thing. It make it a little more pedestrian that it exists.”
The Positif interviewers say the film evokes Kafka. Joel: “Several critics have also mentioned Kafka and that surprises me, because, to tell the truth, I haven’t read him since my university days when I devoured The Metamorphosis. Some of them have alluded to The Castle and In the Penal Colony, but I’ve never read them.” Ethan: “With so many journalists wanting us to be inspired by The Castle, I’ve got a newfound desire to discover it for myself.”