Barton Fink

from The Blood Poets, Vol 2, by Jake Horsley

 

I’ll show you the life of the mind!

—Charlie Meadows, Barton Fink

 

Barton Fink (1991) is a genuine freak of cinema, which sounds like a good thing but isn’t. By all rights, it should never have been born at all. The fact that it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes (the year after the equally execrable Wild at Heart won) only goes to show that weirdness and bad taste is often enough these days to pass for genius.[1] Barton Fink, like Wild at Heart, is a travesty—all but unwatchable; and if one does make it, it’s probably mostly out of a sick kind of fascination and a determination just to find out if it’s really as bad as it appears to be. In fact, it’s worse. Wild at Heart starts appallingly and just maintains the same level of obscenity throughout; Barton Fink actually gets worse as it goes along, and by the end of the film, you may be in a state of awe at the sheer artistic conceit and imbecility which it displays, proudly, for artistry.

The last words of the film (delivered by a bathing beauty to the protagonist) are: “Don’t be silly!” If the Coens had only followed this advice at the start, the film would never have got past the drawing board, because there’s nothing to this movie except self-indulgent, pseudo-gothic silliness. Raising Arizona was silly, too, but it was charming and inspired at the same time; Barton Fink is nasty and brutal, and although I suppose it might be classed as a comedy, it’s really too grotesque for that. It’s all too apparent that what the Coens are aspiring to here is a kind of sub-Polanski, quasi-Lynchian, surreal psycho-drama about (and I quote) “the life of the mind.”                          Briefly, the story involves Barton Fink, a successful, socially conscious playwright (spokesman for the common man, based loosly on Clifford Odets) who succumbs to temptation and accepts a large paycheck to work in Hollywood. He’s set up in a hotel room and commissioned to write a wrestling B-movie for the studio. But the moment he sets to work, he gets writer’s block. The wallpaper of the hotel room is peeling off in the heat, there’s a mosquito that won’t let him alone, eerie sounds of sex, and other secret pastimes, seem to surround him; and to top it off, his neighbor—a boorish fellow by the name of Charlie Meadows (John Goodman)—takes a perverse interest in him (after Fink complains that the noise of Charlie’s laughter is distracting him from working). Despite this shaky start, the two men strike up a friendship, of sorts: Fink considers Charlie to embody the common man he’s writing for, and Charlie teaches Fink the basic wrestling moves... Meantime, Fink’s writer’s block drives him in despair to recruit the aid of Audrey Taylor (Julie Davis), the secretary of W.P Mayhew (John Mahoney) a once-famous novelist, now-alcoholic scriptwriter, based on William Faulkner. Fink and Audrey sleep together, and in the morning he finds her dead body beside him—she’s been viciously murdered in the night by persons unknown. Charlie helps Fink dispose of the body, then goes off on a trip, leaving Fink with a wrapped up box of his “belongings.” Fink meanwhile gets back to work and writes what he considers to be his best work; the studio, of course, hates it. The police eventually come around and inform Fink that Charlie is in fact a German serial killer by the name of Karl Mundt (perhaps based on the infamous Dusseldorf killer, who inspired Fritz Lang’s film M) who has a nasty habit of beheading his victims after he’s killed them (this last one included, the body of Audrey having been found thus). And so the question arises: what’s in the box? (The police don’t bother asking).                                                   I don’t know if this can be called a plot, exactly, but that’s what we get; it’s more like a random series of ideas which has been strung together into an all-too “thematic” pastiche, a glaringly inept homage to the gothic/avant-guarde school of filmmaking. The Coens admit an admiration for Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (Polanski incidentally was head of the board of judges at Cannes the year that Barton Fink took the prize), and they seem above all here to be interested in creating a cinema of mood. The events, the story (never mind the plot) are all secondary to this “mood.” But even here the film fails, and Barton Fink is devoid of any of the atmopshere of menace and creeping, irrational dread that made The Tenant such an unforgettable experience. The film is stark in all the wrong ways—there are no layers of meaning, and there’s no intricacy or mystery to the images, or to the sounds either. All the “weird” and “creepy” touches are so blatantly contrived to be weird and creepy (the peeling wallpaper, for example) that they just come off as ridiculous (there’s one shot in the film which successfullly evokes Polanski’s film—that of the hotel corridor with all the shoes placed outside the doors for cleaning; until then we’d had the strong sense the hotel was almost empty). The whole movie appears ridiculous too, because it’s excruciatingly obvious about its intentions, and the lack of logic in the plot is fatally apparent throughout. So when the film tries to descend into Surrealist, infernal logic, it merely descends; in fact, it collapses completely, and becomes a tawdry, hysterical, utterly empty display of fireworks and intellectual bombast.

There’s an especially obscene (and typical) moment when Mundt/Meadows improbably outguns the two police detectives, then walks over to finish off the job; he places a shotgun to the survivor’s head, says “Heil Hitler,” and fires. It’s an utterly gratuitous moment, the only possible rationale for which being that Mundt is German. Beyond that, what’s it doing here? Is it meant to be funny, or is it meant to be horrific? Or both? It’s horrible, alright, but hardly in the way the Coens can have intended. What it shows is their complete lack of either good taste or sound judgment—about as deadly a combination for a horror comedy about “the life of the mind” as one can imagine (Barton Fink gives us the death of the Coens’ imagination). Yet there is an idea here for something—if not a great movie, then a great short film, or essay, or poem, or something. But that’s all it is, an idea, because the Coens haven’t bothered to develop it, they’ve just stuck it in there, surrounded by a lumbering fiasco of a movie which is finally about nothing at all, “just a fancy metaphyscial splatter movie.”[2]

This idea, if I’ve read the film right, concerns the dangers of creativity, specifically of writing (which many great writers agree is an extremely “dangerous” practice). The obvious danger is that what a writer creates he must then confront, if not in life then within himself (which is the same difference to most writers). And the worlds he spins to life in his imagination, he must then inhabit, in order to know them. Hence we get the Promethean potential—the power and respo nsibility (the gift and the curse) of art. When Charlie comes into Fink’s life (on a deliberate but covert revenge mission—he’s indignant that Fink dared to complain about his laughing too loud), he comes to show Fink something specific—he comes to give him “Hell.” He is meant, I suppose, to represent Fink’s repressed and denied Muse, which has, accordingly, become the Furies. Although Charlie is personally driven by rage and resentment, he does actually like Fink (he spares his life); he seems (though perhaps like the tracker in Raising Arizona, he is unaware of his true function) to be intent on waking up Fink’s creative potential. He scorns Fink for knowing nothing at all about true hell: “You’re just a tourist with a typewriter. I live here!” (This is a great line, but it hangs in a void, nothing else in the film does any justice to it.) At which point he delivers the film’s thesis/declaration of intent (“I’ll show you..” etc.), which is apparently (as with Cape Fear) one with the monster. And what Charlie shows Fink is hellfire, and blood and thunder, and brimstone, etc., etc. But there’s nothing in the script to suggest that Fink has any such explosive potential inside him (like everyone else in the film, he’s represented as a chump and/or a fraud), and we never get the sense that Fink and Charlie are really bound, or even connected, by a common spirit. They’re just two neighbors in a hotel, one of whom is a writer, the other a murderer. Again there’s the kernel for a terrific movie in there, but only once you strip all this garbage away.

Everything in the film is pointless and arbitrary, and its few lines about hell and creativity seem to have been put in merely as an afterthought; it’s as if the Coens had realized that their film was completely devoid of any substance, quickly stuck a handy message in, and hoped for the best. Apparently, it paid off: Barton Fink was hailed as “the most chilling Hollywood comedy since Sunset Boulevard... a tale that encompasses betrayal, murder, genocide, world war, and figures as diverse as L.B Mayer and Adolf Hitler”; and, “a comic nightmare that will stir your imagination like no film in years”![3]

It may be that things have deteriorated so profoundly in American movies that even an attempt—however wrong-headed—at artistry is being hailed as a roaring success. Or it may be that critics and “judges” (at Cannes, etc.) are so lacking in critical judgment—so bereft of personal taste or good sense—that they pick the most audacious, brazen and noisy works, those most full of themselves and with all the sound and fury needed to cover up their own emptiness, and hail them as masterworks; then they hold their breath, hoping no one will laugh. Wild at Heart and Barton Fink are both brash, arrogant movies by previously acclaimed auteurs, full of their own emptiness; and it may be that audiences, as much as critics, are ready to be overwhelmed by just such pretentious bluster. Maybe they’re so passive that they let the movie steamroll then into submission, and aquiesce to all its pretentions—in a word, they mistake shamelessness for greatness. Barton Fink is the kind of movie so dumb and tasteless that no one dared to argue with it: it nominated itself, and the rest of the world went meekly along. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a self-righteous zealot whose stupidity and zeal are one and the same—of course he wins every argument he gets into; who wants to argue with him? Better to just let the damn fool have his say, and wait ’til he goes away again. There may be no point in telling people that films they adore are really steaming piles of horse manure. The only thing to do may be just to ignore them—both the films and thier admirers—and hope they go away. History will eventually sort it all out.

                                                                                      *

 


[1]. Gary Arnold quipped—in The Washingtom Times, August 21, 1991—“Barton Fink is the third consecutive decadent oddity from the US to win the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s difficult to know whether this streak—it began with sex, lies and videotape and continued with Wild at Heart— is getting to be a national embarrassment or an inspired running gag.”

[2]. Terrence Rafferty writes that the film’s “inventions are essentially pointless and diversionary—doodles in the margin of a page with no text” and calls the film “just a fancy metaphysical splatter movie... unsatisfying in every way. There’s nothing at stake in the filmmakers’ systematic dismantling of their hero and all he stands for—except perhaps, their desire to demonstrate their superiority to the ethics and aesthetics of an earlier time.” The Thing Happens, pg. 326-7.

[3]. Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, August 22, 1991.