Before we get on to the details of Charlie's third visit, I wanted to backtrack and talk a bit more about the opening scenario of Barton's screenplay for The Burlyman, something that I only vaguely touched upon in my last post on Hotel Earle. I noted there that Barton has a blatant fixation with fishmongers which seems to dominate just about everything we get to see him write (which, admittedly, isn't much, but it does nonetheless provide us with a crucial glimpse into his world view and creative approach). We know that Barton's play, Bare Ruined Choirs, was about a family of fishmongers working at the Fulton Fish Market, and his need to refer to the cries said fishmongers (aka the titular "choir" of his previous work) in his opening set-up for The Burlyman is frequently interpreted as a sign of his limited creativity. Barton himself invites such an interpretation when he confides in Charlie his fear that he only ever had one idea in him, and that once his play was written he was left with nothing else to say. Based on the small snippet of dialogue we hear from his finished script for The Burlyman via Mastrionatti and Deutsch (which distinctly mirrors the closing dialogue of Bare Ruined Choirs) it appears that he could have been onto something all along.
What is certainly curious (and something that I've honestly never seen mentioned in other analyses of the film) is that Barton's fishmonger obsession appears to be precisely what summons Charlie into being in the first place, and thus sets everything else into motion. In the build-up to Charlie's initial visit, when Barton has begun work upon his screenplay, his inclusion of fishmongers in the initial setting is clearly shown to be an afterthought. Barton sets the opening in a tenement building in Manhattan's Lower East Side, which already threatens to take us right back into the world of Bare Ruined Choirs. Barton initially adds a full stop after the specification that "Early morning traffic is audible" but pauses and decides to go back and override that full stop with a comma, so that he can tack on that extra, seemingly arbitrary detail about the fishmongers. It is immediately after this that he suddenly gains an awareness of the sounds coming from the room next door, and finds himself no longer able to focus upon his work. It is not clear whether the noises Charlie is making are the sounds of crying or laughter, but his disturbance can be interpreted as a reaction to Barton's amendment either way - if he is laughing, it is in derision of the naive young writer who has just sealed his fate with his foolishness, and if he is crying, it is in pained anticipation of the horrors to come. Or perhaps the indistinctness of Charlie's reaction indicates that he feels a mixture of both. I would even be so bold as to propose that this ostensibly minor action on Barton's part is one of the key defining moments of the film, and certainly the most important prior to Barton inviting Audrey into the Earle. The moment seems so small and subdued that it is easy to overlook it altogether, but it is here that Barton is essentially setting himself up for failure - his inability to hear past the cries of the fishmongers are what doom him to keep on repeating the cycle of entrapment and self-absorption that prevent him from escaping from himself. They are the filter through which he insists upon seeing the world, and which ensures that he stays firmly locked within his own head. Barton denies himself the opportunity to grow, either as a person or as a writer. He might indeed be correct when he suggests that he may have only ever had one story inside of him, but he unwittingly betrays the source of his limitations in the process - it never occurs to him that other people might have stories that could inform and enrich his own; in fact, Barton seems to be entirely averse to the idea, reflexively cutting off Charlie whenever he attempts to recount any of his own anecdotes.
Barton's increasingly estranged connection to the "real world" (a term I must use very loosely in the context of this film) is reflected in the minor but nevertheless very telling modifications he makes to his initial opening. Later (before Charlie's third visit), we see a revised version in which the setting has now been moved to a tenement hotel on the Lower East Side (better reflecting Barton's current environs), and which states that it is too early for the sounds of traffic to be audible (hinting at the increasing extent of Barton's isolation, while the reference to it being "early" recalls one of the closing statements from Bare Ruined Choirs), although the fishmongers will still not be silenced. The bare ruined choir threatens to haunt Barton for all eternity.
As it turns out, the fishmongers of Barton's world are indeed eternal and have existed since the beginning of time, something later confirmed when, in the post-murder stages of the film, he discovers a Gideons Bible in his hotel desk drawer and flips it open to see that the opening words of his screenplay have replaced the opening verses of Genesis (something else of great significance happens here, but we can save that particular detail for later). This is one of the film's most overtly surreal moments, which many interpret as the ultimate indication of Barton's hubris, although it comes as a nightmarish blow to Barton, arriving as it does during a time of immense shock, fear and desperation. He looks to the Bible, presumably for some form of hope or enlightenment, only to find his own solipsism staring him right in the face. He is essentially being mocked by his own self-absorption in this scene, which speaks volumes about the sense of self-loathing that accompanies his self-obsession. It is also indicative of the true nature of the Hotel Earle - not quite a literal Hell, as is commonly assumed, but representative of the inner workings of Barton's own mind, where everything is murky and univiting, the outside world is heavily shut out, and the Universe literally does begin and end with the distant cries of fishmongers.
No comments:
Post a Comment