Coen Brothers Retrospective #2: Barton Fink Early Impressions and Critical Musings

            SPOILERS LIE AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.            

 

Every now and then, a film comes along that completely taps into your own musings about the world around you.  For some, Blade Runner completely tapped into their own personal vision of the future – dystopian, cold and hopeless, where the lines of culture have blurred into one. For others, Cloud Atlas tapped into notions of Buddhism and spirituality across the space of 250 years of history, which clearly has resonated with a number of people given the film’s mixed reception. Barton Fink, the subject of this blog, feels like a movie almost tailored to my interests and ideas and I’m bereft to think of why I haven’t watched it sooner (it has been on my shelf for nearly two years now). The film taps into my ideas of the history of Hollywood’s supposed ‘Golden Age’ (tip: it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be), post-modernism, deepening madness and obsession (almost Vertigo-esque), wrapped in a black-comedy style played out by bizarre characters in an almost-dreamlike world. Yeah, I have weird taste in film. The fact that Barton Fink can support my own readings and a multitude of others, such as fascism, religion, high and low brow debates and slavery, is testament to the film’s quality. The Coen Brothers offer multiple readings that can be interpreted by the viewer’s own experiences.  I wonder what Milhouse and Bart’s other friends got out of the film? 

                 

Set in 1941, the film follows Barton (a career defining turn from John Tuturro), a small-town New York playwright, who is offered a contract to come out to L.A. and write screenplays for Hollywood. He is put up in a depressing, dingy hotel (the Hotel Earle) where he soon meets his neighbour Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), who form a mutual friendship based on their loneliness in the city. Chaarlie is a seemingly good-natured insurance salesman who takes great interest in Barton’s work (though this isn’t returned by Barton). Barton struggles to adapt to the rigid structure of Hollywood story-telling (he is given a one-sentence assignment and expect to run with it) wanting to pour his own themes of the ‘Common Man’ into it. The studio is seemingly uninterested in making ‘art’ and would rather produce low-grade B-movies to make a quick buck. He seeks help from writer William Preston (W.P.) "Bill" Mayhew (John Mahoney) and his ailing secretary Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis) but finds he is a violent drunk. Unable to finish his screenplay and plagued the studio execs, Barton begins to spiral out of control as the cruel world of Hollywood and L.A. revolves around him, culminating in the murder of Audrey in his own bed. Barton’s impending madness grows as he attempts to solve this mystery. It is revealed that Charlie is in fact the murderer and has done so multiple times in the past. The only friend he made in L.A. is a psychotic killer who proceeds to burn down the hotel. In the final scene, an emotional traumatised Barton hands in his finished script, who is lambasted by the head of the studio (who is leaving to join the army reserve), completely rejected for portraying too much of Barton’s own ideology. Barton remains under-contract but is doomed to write scripts that will never be produced to be lambasted as a loser in the studio. Barton retreats to the beach and spies a young woman posing in a similar fashion to a picture that was hanging on his hotel room wall. Symbolising the crushed sense of Barton’s notions of reality and fantasy, the film abruptly cuts to black. 

                 Hollywood’s Golden Age is the subject of much adoration amongst older film critics but has been brought into light by historians and other critics. Douglas Gomery writes that “Hollywood is first of all an industry, a collection of profit-maximizing corporations operated from studio headquarters in the United States”.[1] This notion is most definitely reflected in the keys players of Capital Pictures. The boss, Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) seems to take little interest in the artistic integrity of film. He sees only profit and producing as many low-grade pictures as possible. Thomas Schatz points out that “while the ‘creative-control’ and administrative authority of studio film-making in the 1930s steadily dispersed throughout the producers’ ranks, the industry remained as market-driven and commercially motivated as ever”.[2] The almost flippant way in which Barton is assigned the ‘wrestling’ picture is laughable. The various workers around the studio offer Barton tips on how to write the film, which boils down to basic Hollywood screenwriting 101: villain, love-interest, obstacle etc. Barton does not want to adhere to formula just as much as the studio has no interest in presenting the actual real-life account of the wrestler they are basing their film on. For Hollywood, reality becomes fantasy. This would appear to put Barton in good stead, with his belief in the ‘common man’. Only it really doesn’t. Leaning towards his high-brow tensions, Barton makes it his mission to note the plight of the ‘common man’ but never really grows to understand them. At the end of the film, Charlie lambasts Barton for never really listening to him, serving merely as a vessel for Barton’s own thoughts on the nature of reality. While Barton believes he is writing for the ‘common man’, he is merely creating his own fantasy, just as Hollywood does so. 

With this Hollywood setting and their (as well as Barton’s) attitudes to reality, notions of ‘post-modernism’ can be introduced to the film. This is, of course, a huge complex subject, that I will attempt to simplify (I do not in any way completely understand these theories!!). In particular, Barton Fink produces an interesting look at the post-modern theory of hyperreality. Gary Aylesworth describes hyperreality “as a copy or image without reference to an original. In postmodernism, hyperreality is the philosophical result of the technological mediation of experience, where what passes for reality is a network of images and signs without an external referent, such that what is represented is representation itself”.[3] Fundamentally, this debate begins with Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976). In it, Baudrillard uses previous notions of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real to develop the concepts discussed above, while attacking the orthodoxies of the political Left – he argues that their assumed reality of power, production, desire, society and political legitimacy have become simulations, signs without any referent, because the real and the imaginary have been absorbed into the symbolic.[4] For an example, The Simpsons can be viewed as post-modern show. With its numerous references to pop-culture, many of the viewer’s first experiences with a product or piece of art could be through The Simpsons, with no reference to the original text. Heck, that’s how I first heard the name Barton Fink. Many of the iconic moments of cinema, such as the opening of Citizen Kane and the type-writer scene of The Shining, I first experienced through The Simpsons, again with no (initial) references to the original text. TV, the internet, film, comics, radio and so on have created a world of hyperreality, where reality and fiction are seamlessly blended together leaving no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.  

Clearly, Barton Fink can fit into this kind of reading. As previously discussed, both Barton and Hollywood are attempting to make their fantasy versions of reality appear on the big screen. The original experiences of the wrestler, on which the film is going to be based, are lost to the machinations of these two entities. Neither side directly experienced the life of this particular wrestler but attempt to create their own versions of it. Barton, in fact, takes little interest in the world of wrestling. This can also be extended to Barton’s pretensions of writing about the ‘common man’ when he can’t really express this (he even admits that maybe his first, and only, play was a fluke). M. Keith Booker claims that Charlie torments because of his obliviousness to the common people, whom he claims to so passionately care about – while the film does look at the sleazy dealings of Hollywood execs, its principal censure is aimed at Barton, who is portrayed as an intellectual completely cut off from the lives of the common people.[5] However, despite this lack of direct experience, Barton believes he can make socially relevant comments. Booker suggests that the Coens, “although they do not suggest a preferable alternative within the film, …. Clearly indicate that the kind of socially engaged cinema Fink hopes to create is pretentious and silly”.[6] On the other hand, R. Barton Palmer suggests that the film, and the Coen’s (then current) work represents the artist in a postmodern situation: either produce high-culture art which could distance himself from an increasingly commercialising culture or formula production for the mass culture meaning he would be complicit in it.[7] Conform or be cast out. Either one of these readings can be used to feed into the film’s ultimate conclusion. 

This forming of hyperrealities in Barton Fink can be viewed from the impending madness of the titular character. Fantasy and reality are slowly beginning to blend together. This is ultimately represented by a key symbolic device used in the film, a portrait hung on Barton’s wall. When Barton arrives at the beach, he finds a girl in a position exactly the same as the picture. He asks if she is movies and claims “Don’t be silly”. Is this a final sign of his madness? Have reality and fantasy completely clashed together? Booker opinions that the ending is a “final enigmatic comment on representation and the relationship between art and reality in general”. [8] Further, he sees it as a comment on the genuinely ‘weird’ nature of if art were to reflect reality in such as accurate way.[9] Palmer reflects that the conclusion represents the artist in a crisis – having experienced inauthentic fantasy and cruel reality, does he then channel this into his art or does he feel he has gone as far as he can?[10] Breaking hyperreality can reveal the true nature of reality. To round off, Booker claims that the Coens did not intend to make a factual representation of 1941 Hollywood, but rather “representing [it] as a collection of art deco images derived not from reality but from films, magazine covers, and other visual art of the period”.[11] Hyperreality is an embedded part of this post-modern take on Hollywood. The ending suggests that artists are stuck in this world, surrounded by a hyperreality formed from a lack of direct experience. Again, in the words of Rush, “Conform or be cast out”. 

The best thing about Barton Fink is that that is just one avenue of thought brought on by the setting. There is so much more to say that other writers have more eloquently put than myself. Due to this myriad of ideas, theories and readings Barton Fink is a film I will most definitely be revisiting soon. It has an enigmatic quality, powered by excellent performances, darkly funny script and brilliant direction. Its look at a postmodern world inspired by the forming of hyperrealities presents a dark conundrum for artists of any generation. It works on so many different levels that multiple viewings will most likely offer different ideas and perspectives. Like I said in the beginning, it offers so many interesting critical ideas to myself (such as the representation of history, madness, postmodernism) I was overwhelmed by it, both as a film (story, character, technique) and on a critical level. There is so much to say, so much to explore, Barton Fink is a truly excellent film.

RATING: 10/10

“I’ll write blogs about 500-800 words for each film in the Coens retrospective” …. 2000 words later.

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[1] Douglas Gomery, ‘Hollywood as industry’ in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds) The Oxford guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 245.

[2] Thomas Schatz, ‘Hollywood: The Triumph of the Studio System’ in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.) The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 225.

[3] Gary Aylesworth, ‘Postmodernisn’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/#6 (accessed 11/08/2013 22:54)

[4] Ibid.

[5] M. Keith Booker, Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and why is Makes Us Feel so Strange (Westport CT ; London : Praeger, 2007), p. 143.

[6] Ibid.

[7] R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen: Contemporary Film Directors (Urbana and Chicago : University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 114.

[8] Booker, p. 144.

[9] Ibid, p. 145.

[10] Palmer, p. 128.

[11] Booker., p.144.