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.
