The following scene was excised from the final cut of Barton Fink but can be found among the deleted scenes included as bonus content in some home media releases of film. It follows on from Barton's second meeting with Charlie, revealing what happens in the immediate aftermath once Charlie has left the room.
Barton, still recovering from the head-banging he endured during Charlie's wrestling demonstration, starts gazing up at the picture of the sunbathing woman when he is suddenly interrupted by the sound of dripping coming from the bathroom. He goes to investigate, and finds the taps in his sink running and the bowl overflowing. Barton puts his hand into the water and pulls out the source of the obstruction - a small wad of cotton wool which he eventually recognises as being the same wad that Charlie had inserted up his infected ear a little earlier. Barton flinches with revulsion and drops the cotton back into the sink, where it is immediately swallowed by the plug hole.
Particularly sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed that when Charlie steps back out of the bathroom (having gone in there, ostensibly, to fetch a damp cloth for Barton's battered head) the cotton wad has disappeared from his infected ear, but there is no explanation as to what actually becomes of it in the final cut of the film. Perhaps viewers are able to make their own inferences, but there is nothing to explicitly indicate that he disposed of it in Barton's sink.
Myself, I find it a bit unfortunate that this moment wound up being cut because, as noted in the previous entry, it disrupts a pattern that was visibly being established in terms of Charlie's visits to Room 621 and how each of these scenes concluded. That is to say, Barton's attentions fall back upon the picture of the sunbathing woman, only to be diverted by an aspect of his surrounding environs mysteriously unraveling, be it the wallpaper peeling or the bathroom sink overflowing. Whenever Charlie departs, he always leaves behind a little piece of chaos for Barton to contend with, and dripping liquids seem to be a recurring feature of this (dripping, we recall, indicates an underlying malaise and ugliness that goes beyond concealment or containment).
It is also, quite frankly, rather a baffling cut, because Charlie indirectly refers back to the occurrence during his third meeting with Barton, when he comments that he feels like he hears everything that goes on in the Earle, due to "pipes or something". In the absence of this particular scene, the audience is unable to make the connection between Charlie hearing everything through the pipes of the hotel and the cotton wad from his infected ear having previously been ingested by said pipes. Later still in the film, when Barton and Audrey spend the night together, a tracking shot shifts us away from the love-making couple and into the bathroom, where it closes in upon the plug hole and goes deep into the pipes, a beautifully sordid shot that nevertheless loses some of its impact without the knowledge that we are making the exact same journey as Charlie's cotton wad did prior. I can only assume that the Coens deemed Charlie's previous reference to the hotel pipes to be sufficient enough a callback to enable the audience to make sense of this sequence. In fairness, Charlie appears to have an uncanny enough connection with the Hotel Earle already without the need to infer that his knowledge of everything that happens therein is specifically due to him "bugging" the bathroom pipes with wads of cotton wool from his ear.
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