A Day or a Lifetime - Mosquito Encounter #3 (and another man's shoes)

Barton's been grappling with the opening to his wrestling picture screenplay for long enough now and the pressure is beginning to intensify.  Since his last meeting with Charlie he's had the opportunity to become better acquainted with Mayhew and Audrey, and witnessed first-hand the extent of the former's alcoholism and what a sorry, washed-up wreck his experiences in Hollywood have made of him.  Audrey hints that Barton's unwillingness to put himself in another individual's shoes may be his shortcoming, a suggestion which only serves to deepen Barton's confusion.

Right before Charlie calls on Barton for the third time (and the last before it all really goes to hell for Barton) he is visited by another of his old acquaintances at the Earle - the mosquito, who disturbs Barton as he lies, apparently sleeping, on his hotel bed.  Once again, we close in upon Barton from the mosquito's perspective, reinforcing the sensation that Barton is not only being watched but also being stalked by some unseen predatory presence.  With the camera nearly upon him, Barton wakes with a sudden start and reflexively slaps himself in the face, only to find that the phantom ectoparasite has vanished mysteriously into thin air.  Worth noting is that this is the first point in the film in which we actually see Barton sleeping - at most, previously, we had seen him lying motionless on his bed during his first night at the Earle, visibly unsettled by the disembodied whines of the mosquito.  As we've acknowledged multiple times, there are numerous interpretations of Barton Fink which have it that not all of Barton's Hollywood experiences are objectively "real" within the context of the film, and that he spends at least a portion of the film deep in troubled fantasy (a reading potentially supported by the film's opening sequence, in which the protagonist of Bare Ruined Choirs insists that he's awake for the first time in years), but distinguishing exactly where the dreaming ends and reality begins is a tricky business.  Barton's literal awakening in this scene might prompt speculation that the scene which immediately preceded it - the unpleasant picnic with Mayhew and Audrey - was merely a dream, although this immediately raises the question as to whereabouts in the film we're expected to interpret Barton as having fallen asleep in the first place.

Once again, I'm compelled to view the Earle and its Hollywood exterior as two oppositional spaces, each as feverish and as surreal as the other, as opposed to one representing "reality" and the other pure fantasy.  The picture of the sun-bathing beauty that hangs above Barton's desk is the obvious anomaly within the environs of the Earle, as it provides a window into a another world altogether (albeit a false one).  As I've discussed previously, Charlie appears to have a (one-sided?) rivalry with this picture, so much so that whenever Barton becomes particularly transfixed with the image, the rest of the Earle (which seems to have an uncanny connection with Charlie) reacts in protest.  But what of Audrey, the more corporeal object of Barton's desires?  Is it that the mosquito, in waking Barton, has forcibly removed him from Audrey's domain and dragged him back safely into the barren walls of the Earle, where he can longer look upon her?  Such a reading would suggest that the mosquito is allied with Charlie (much as the peeling wallpaper and the hotel pipes seem to be), and certainly, its bloodsucking tendencies could be interpreted as mirroring Charlie's own predatory habits, although a case could equally be made for the mosquito having a connection to Audrey (when Barton finally sees the mosquito in its physical form, it follows on from his successful sexual seduction of Audrey, and his vanquishing of the creature once and for all comes just before the revelation that Audrey has been brutally murdered).  Mostly, the mosquito seems to be a threatening force all of its own - something that, according to Geisler, should not exist in this world and yet has found its way in regardless.  The mosquito is an indication that something is deeply amiss in this world, an intrusion into Barton's psyche that persistently haunts him but that he is unable to pinpoint and expel.

Unsettled by the mosquito, Barton decides to take another stab at getting his wrestling scenario off the ground.  The screenplay has barely progressed beyond his description of the initial setting, although it has been altered slightly - whereas Barton originally opened the film in a "tenement building in Manhattan's Lower East Side", where early morning traffic and the cry of fishmongers are both audible, it now takes place in a "tenement hotel on the Lower East Side".  Those fishmongers can still be heard (Barton will forever have fishmongers, the ultimate signing of his own solipsism, on the brain), although the traffic has notably been silenced, an indication of Barton's deepening isolation.  A sudden spark of inspiration appears to strike, for Barton begins to type and, as he does so, the camera pans downwards to show his feet sliding into the shoes beneath the desk - as it turns out, he has somehow ended up with Charlie's shoes (due to an accidental mix-up on Chet's part, or part of Charlie's scheme all along?), which are several sizes too big for him.

Some, such as Eddie Robson in the Virgin Film publication Coen Brothers, argue that Barton's feet being too small for Charlie's shoes is an illustration of how severely out of his depth he is in the world of the Common Man.  Others might point to the obvious metaphor of putting oneself in someone else's shoes and interpret the scene as an indication of just how alien and confusing the whole process is to Barton, particularly in light of Audrey's earlier statement about the nature of empathy.  Nevertheless, John Turturro's performance (the quizzical, uneasy smile) suggests that the experience, while clearly overwhelming for Barton, is not an altogether unpleasant one.  He moves his feet back and forth through Charlie's shoes as if finally having the opportunity to survey another individual's personal space is of genuine, if somewhat inexplicable fascination to him.  Putting his feet into Charlie's shoes is, both literally and figuratively, a liberating experience for Barton, who savours the additional foot-room.  We may have garnered from the closing dialogue to Bare Ruined Choirs that Barton, above all, yearns for an escape, being as constrained by his own ego as he is enamoured and reassured by it.  If Barton put himself and his own perspective at the centre when he was writing Bare Ruined Choirs, it is through his unconscious fascination with Charlie that he begins to find a window into the world of The Burlyman - we see that he has finally had enough of a breakthrough to have introduced his protagonist as "a large man in tights".  To make the connection totally complete, the phrase itself appears to summon Charlie into the room, for he immediately appears at Barton's door with the correct pair of shoes in hand.