Saturday 12 September 2015

A Day or a Lifetime - Bare Runied Choirs and Foreshadowing


For this entry, I'm going right to the beginning of Barton Fink, to where we initially find Barton, watching a performance of his play Bare Ruined Choirs from backstage at a Broadway theatre (note: the title Bare Ruined Choirs is both a direct reference to Shakespeare's Sonnet LXXIII and a sly nod to Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets, the playwright-turned-screenwriter who served as the primary inspiration for Barton's character - see previous entry: Some notes on context).  A more conventional opening might have focused upon the on-stage action, but here the emphasis is entirely upon Barton, to the extent that the cast and stage are not actually seen until the curtain call.  He watches intently, he mouths the dialogue, he appears agitated when a stagehand temporarily obstructs his view, and, most revealingly, the protagonist can be overheard speaking with his own voice - a strategy which immediately calls into question where the objectivity of this scene ends and subjectivity begins, a problem that will remain persistent throughout the entirety of the film.  Barton is apparently projecting himself out into the centre of the stage, and for good reason - the play is really about him.  Where he has come from, where he is now, and where he will soon be headed.

Consider the dialogue overheard from the ending to Bare Ruined Choirs:

 "I'm blowin' out of here, I'm blowin' out for good.  I'm kissin' it all goodbye, these four stinkin' walls, the six flights up, the El that roars by at three a.m. like a cast-iron wind.  Kiss 'em goodbye for me, Maury.  I'll miss 'em - like hell I will."

"Dreamin' again!"

"Not this time, Lil!  I'm awake now, awake for the first time in years!  Uncle Dave said it - daylight is a dream if you live with your eyes closed.  Well, my eyes are open now.  I see the choir and I know they're dressed in rags, but we're part of that choir, yeah, both of us.  You, Maury and Uncle Dave too."

"The sun's comin' up, kid.  They'll be hawking the fish down on Fulton Street."

"Let 'em hawk, let 'em sing their hearts out."

"That's it, kid.  Take that ruined choir.  Make it sing."

"So long, Maury."

"So long. (Pause) We'll hear from that kid.  And I don't mean a postcard."

"Fish! Fresh Fish!"

"Let's spit on our hands and get to work.  It's late, Maury."

"Not any more, Lil.  It's early."

From the little we can discern, the hero of Bare Ruined Choirs is a naive youngster who, much like Barton himself, is about to leave behind his established life (in the hero's case, among fishmongers) in pursuit of some lofty ambition.  Ironically, when we are introduced to Barton we find him at the very peak of his success, and he will shortly be headed for something altogether more squalid and desolate, not unlike the environs described by his play's protagonist - in fact, there is a striking amount of foreshadowing within this snippet of overheard dialogue.  The "four stinkin' walls" foreshadow the sickly, decrepit condition of the walls awaiting him in Room 621, which also happens to be located upon the sixth floor.  There, it is a mosquito and not an El that Barton has to contend with in the early hours of the morning, but its presence proves to be no less intrusive.  He even throws in a "hell" for good measure, one of Charlie's favourite words next to "head", and a popular interpretation for the possible symbolism of the Earle.  This is the world that Barton's protagonist claims to be leaving but that Barton himself will soon be consigned to - although, by the end of the film, Barton too will find release from the Earle (if not from Hollywood as a whole), prompting the question as to whether the film can be interpreted as having a kind of cyclical narrative structure.

Sharp-eared viewers may also pick up on the fact that other characters in the play are named Lil and Maury, and that they reside on Fulton Street.  This is significant as, later on in the film, Barton will impart to Charlie that these are also the names of his own family members (his mother is named Lillian, and his uncle Maury) and that they can be found on Fulton Street, Brooklyn.  Although we learn very little about the content of Bare Ruined Choirs beyond the overheard closing dialogue and the brief synopsis given in the review read aloud by Derek, this small but crucial piece of information provides us with insight into Barton's mind-set as a writer - namely, that he has put himself at the centre, and that the play, purportedly a celebration of the life of the common man, has been filtered through his own perspective.  Barton is effectively trapped within his own head, and, as his subsequent interactions with Charlie will demonstrate, not entirely unwillingly on his part.  This proves to be the source of much of his woe in Hollywood - Barton struggles to write a formula wrestling picture for Wallace Beery because neither Hollywood films or the act of wrestling are subjects in which he has sufficient interest or experience.  Geisler and Mayhew do little to help Barton in this regard (Geisler's solution, to have Barton watch the dailies from Devil On The Canvas, merely deepens his confusion), but when Charlie, a self-proclaimed former wrestler and fan of Beery, offers to broaden his horizon, Barton declines, stating that he isn't interested.

One interpretation of the Earle is that it actually is Barton's head, and that all of the scenes therein are a representation of the life of the mind (or his mind at any rate). On the one hand, Barton feels the isolation and frustrations that come with his entrapment and desperately wants to escape, but at the same time he is much too fixated with himself, and with his own perceived potential for greatness to be truly capable of doing so.  The postcard line from Bare Ruined Choirs is echoed at the climax of the film, where Barton finds Mastrionatti and Deutsch reading his newly-written script for The Burlyman.  We learn even less about the precise content of The Burlyman than we do about Bare Ruined Choirs, but the inclusion of pointedly similar closing dialogue implies that Barton has effectively re-written the play, modified slightly for his new subject matter - in this sense, he has made his perspective the formula.  Following the final confrontation with Charlie, Barton's departure from the Earle similarly modifies the departure of his Bare Ruined Choirs counterpart from their accommodations (already hinted to be a modification of Barton's own departure from his family home), here in a dramatic fashion more befitting of a Hollywood film, with emphasis on spectacle as the Earle goes up in flames.  Barton, captive to his own solipsism, is thus trapped within a loop that he is doomed to keep on repeating - a cycle of confinement and apparent escape that merely leads him right back to where he started.  Having finally fled the Earle, he finds that his continuing entrapment merely assumes a new guise through his contract with Capitol Pictures, and the film leaves him once again transfixed with the image of a sea-gazing beauty, now apparently in the flesh (or perhaps Barton is merely retreating into another escapist fantasy).

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