A Day or a Lifetime - Welcome to the Hotel Earle

Note: for the purposes of this commentary (and all subsequent entries in this particular series) I’m going to assume that the reader is already familiar with the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink.  This spares me from having to write out any particularly detailed synopsis, or having to provide much expository detail upon whom each of the characters are.  I’ll also be divulging spoilers frequently and without warning – beginning from the very first paragraph, in fact, so if you haven’t seen the film and wish for the various plot twists and intricacies to remain unspoiled, then you are advised not to read any further.

After watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1991 offering Barton Fink, viewers tend to come away with two lingering questions, both of which are explicitly posed through character dialogue in the film’s final sequence – namely, “What’s in the box?” and, all the more pressingly, “Are you in pictures?”  What are the contents of the mysterious box that Barton (John Turturro) retains, albeit with some uncertainty, as the credits start to roll (actually, we do get a pretty good inkling about the literal contents of the box, but the significance of this will always be open to question) and what, precisely, is the deal with the woman (Isabelle Townsend) whom he encounters on the beach in the closing moments?  Is she the same woman depicted in the kitschy picture that has been hanging above his workspace at the Hotel Earle, momentarily mesmerising Barton during his tortuous slog as a Hollywood screenwriter and, if so, what are we expected to take from that?  By ending the film with an obvious call-back to this recurring image, the Coens appear to be hinting that the picture holds the key to solving the entire mystery, although it’s just one of many curious and unsettling little details scattered throughout.

Myself, I don’t think that I really started to consider the contents of the box (or, more accurately, the significance of those contents) or the woman who may or may not be in pictures until around my second or third viewing.  Both registered, but neither immediately struck me as being the strangest or most troubling aspect of the film overall.  No, the question most prevalent on my mind after my initial viewing had to do with John Goodman’s character, Charlie Meadows (or should that be Karl Mundt?) - namely “just what was going on with that man and was I supposed to see that late character revelation coming?”  After all, when Charlie chastises Barton at the film’s climax, it’s with the heated accusation that he does not listen.  It’s a mistake that has cost Barton dearly, with the implication that Charlie has not only brought him his fair share of hell within Hollywood, but may even have snuffed out the life that Barton had left behind in New York.  Were there clues for the truly attentive viewer all along?  On my second viewing I was sure to pay particularly close attention to Charlie’s dialogue – I noted that he did betray a disturbing (with hindsight) fixation with heads in his speech patterns, and that he certainly cracked a knowing smile while Barton was supposing that one is inevitably stuck with the head they have, but there was nothing more obvious than that which appeared to hint toward his secret activities.  The odd and disturbing nature of Charlie’s character arc continued to trouble me, and I found myself going back to the film time and time again, ever eager to uncover further pieces of the puzzle.  After a time, I resigned myself to the likelihood that this puzzle likely had no definitive solution (if it does, then it’s known only to the Coens), but it didn’t quell my fascination with the film, nor my appetite for sniffing out and pondering its most minute details.

I realised that the real allure of the film, to me, lay in the film’s principal setting, the Hotel Earle, the grotesqueness of which I thought was wonderfully constructed.  Thematic parallels are frequently drawn between Barton Fink and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), both of which explore the effects of writer’s block upon a would-be author who has willingly isolated himself within the walls of a hotel that appears to have intentions all of its own, none of them savoury.  Unlike The Shining, however, Barton Fink does not establish this through overt spookhouse horrors, but through more mundane forms of everyday discomfort that could make any excursion or business trip take on a nightmarish quality.  The severity of Barton’s situation escalates once he convinces Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis) to spend the night there with him, but for the first half of the film it’s an assortment of tiny irritations that add up to make his experience at the Earle an overwhelmingly uncomfortable one.  These include the sweltering heat, the nightly whines of a mosquito that, according to producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub), should not be present in Los Angeles at all, the peeling wallpaper, and the occasional overheard noises from elsewhere in the hotel (some of which comes from Charlie, but there’s apparently also a couple making love at one point).  The picture of the bikini-clad sunbather gazing out to sea offers Barton a sparse form of escapism in all of this – prior to Audrey’s arrival, it’s just about the only aspect of his accommodation that’s in any way pleasing to the senses, as low-grade a decorative item as it might be.

More than just a setting, the Earle functions as one of the film’s dominant characters.  It has a presence which extends beyond merely providing a cheap-rate room for the tranz or the rez.  It lives, it breathes, it perspires (or oozes some form of secretion from its walls, which accounts for the inability of the wallpaper to remain in place).  There is a decidedly sinister aura to how it operates as a hotel, offering entrapment dimly disguised as comfort (the hotel’s slogan, as printed on the stationary that Barton finds in his room, is “A Day or a Lifetime”).  One of the supposed perks of staying at the Earle, the complimentary shoe shine, seems absurd when you take into account that none of the pairs of shoes we see lined up outside the doors apparently get any usage – aside from Charlie and the love-making couple, there is precious little evidence that the Earle is anywhere near as populated as those pairs of shoes seem to want to let on.  If there are guests at all in those rooms, then they do not appear to ever leave, rendering shoes, shiny shoes at that, something of a pointless commodity.  Most uncannily of all, the Earle appears to channel its energy through Charlie, to the extent that the two become indistinguishable as characters.  They seem similarly diseased – the Earle with its sickly dripping walls, and Charlie with his chronic ear infection that causes him to ooze unpleasant secretions of his own.  They also share a common fury - when, at the end of the film, Charlie reveals his hidden depths, the Earle obligingly goes up in flames in order to underscore his unleashed rage.  What truly sets the Earle apart from the Overlook, aside from its ostensible mundaneness, is the real sense of vulnerability that exists alongside the destructiveness.  The Earle may be a dangerous beast, but it’s also a sick and intensely pained one.

Having watched Barton Fink a number of times, I became eager to see what other people had taken away from it.  The very first analysis of the film that I read came from the "Pocket Essential Guide" to the Coens by Ellen Cheshire and John Ashbrook.  I no longer have a copy of this book to hand, but I recall their reading being fairly confident that the Hotel Earle was a representation of Hell.  There are certainly allusions that point toward Barton’s experience being something of a hellish one - the intense heat inside the Earle manifests as an actual fire toward the end of the film, Charlie appears to relish the words “hell” and “damn” as much as he does the word “head” (he loves a good "Jesus" too), and Barton and Pete the elevator attendant (Harry Bugin) can quite plainly be heard uttering three sixes between them at one stage.  In addition, the film’s promotional tagline was “Between Heaven and Hell there’s always Hollywood.”  Nonetheless, I never really interpreted Barton as having wandered into any kind of literal hell – such a reading always struck me as a bit facile, not to mention incidental to the wider story about Barton’s efforts to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood.  Barton supposedly remains at the Earle because he sees it as contrary to kind of Hollywood glamour that he is looking to avoid during his stay there (not that he would get himself invited to any venue in Hollywood with even the slightest hint of glamour anyway), so are we to assume that he was simply unlucky enough to have ended up in a literal Hell that just so happens to exist inside Hollywood?  What are we to make of the external trouble and chaos that seems to pervade the non-Earle areas of Hollywood that Barton has access to, including those which have transformed the once respectable W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney) into a drunken and abusive wreck?  Would Barton have fared much better, at least from a professional standpoint, if he’d been stationed at the Writer’s Building like Mayhew?  Is that another wing of the very same Hell?  There’s definite satire to be had in Barton Fink upon the nature of Hollywood and its regard (or lack of) for individual creativity, although this is complicated by Barton’s own character and the demons that he’s already brought along with him, fresh from his success in Broadway.

As for Charlie, interpretations of his character range from him being the Devil (which fits in with the Hell allusion, but likewise doesn’t really satisfy from a literal standpoint) to a figment of Barton’s imagination, perhaps even the personification of his writer’s block.  It’s certainly noteworthy that Charlie has a tendency to wander into Barton’s room just as the latter is about to knuckle down and type, and it’s during Charlie’s period of absence from the Earle that Barton is finally able to progress with his screenplay.  That said, it’s not so much the lack of Charlie that enables Barton to write as it is the unopened box that Charlie has left in his possession (or, more accurately, Barton’s realisation as to the probable contents of the box).  As previously indicated, I’m more inclined to view Charlie as a personification of the Earle itself, the human face and voice of a hotel that subsists in a permanent state of isolation and decrepitude within one of the most reputedly glamorous locations in the world (although one of the things I love about Barton Fink is that we never actually see any evidence of that side of Hollywood), even if the exact nature of the Earle remains a total enigma to me.

Whatever the Earle actually embodies, it’s Barton’s attempts to impose himself upon it that land him into trouble.  For all of Charlie’s seeming attempts to extend a hand of friendship to Barton, it’s clear at the end that he has never forgiven him for the initial overstepping of bounds that led to the two characters meeting in the first place – that is, Barton telephoning the front desk to complain about Charlie’s wailing.  It’s possible that Charlie has merely been sizing Barton up since then, looking for opportunities to exact his retribution, but then again he does seem genuinely stung by Barton’s subsequent refusal to allow him to be anything more than a sounding board for his own egotistical ramblings.  Furthermore, Charlie insists that he is motivated by empathy and a desire to help others out, something which he himself never receives in return (he is not the only character to put empathy at the centre of interaction - it is the code upon which the more gentle-natured Audrey insists).  Charlie has been reaching out to Barton, and his repeated offence, as Charlie informs him, has been not to listen.  The implication that Charlie might have killed Barton’s parents and Uncle Maury during his visit to New York feels particularly chilling in that regard, as telling Charlie whereabouts to find them arose from the only gesture of genuine kindness that Barton ever bestows upon Charlie.

In the end, Barton’s relationship with the Earle is as ill-fated as every other relationship that he forges in Hollywood.  Whereas Jack Torrance found himself right at home amid the murderously violent history that echoed around the halls of the Overlook (he’s always been the caretaker there, after all), the Earle chews upon Barton before ultimately opting to spit him out.  During their final confrontation, Charlie allows Barton to leave the hotel, but not without having already dismissed him as a tourist with a typewriter.  Barton is out of his depth within the ailing world of the Earle, incapable of understanding or making any useful contributions his own, and is better off permitted to quietly slip outside the door.  If only Hollywood as a whole could be so gracious toward him.