Barton Fink

I saw this movie last night and immediately resonated with it. I have thought a lot about creativity in recent years, particularly the obstacles in your own mind that you have to overcome in order to produce something new and beautiful. I think this movie depicts this creative process very inventively. The following is my internal mapping of the characters and objects in this movie to the forces they represent. This may have nothing to do with what the filmmakers intended, but here goes:

Barton is an observer. He watches the characters inside his head and feels their influence waxing and waning. He’s incredibly passive, mostly just watching and listening. The characters in his head are fighting each other for control of his writing. He’s also the narrator. He verbalizes the ideas that the characters act out. He knows, for example, that the best writing comes from the gut. He’s having a hard time following his own advice, though. He comes off as arrogant, because anyone who thinks they can create something new has to be at least a little arrogant. I suspect Barton also represents the Coen brothers, who took a 3-week break from another project when they needed some distance from it to write this script.

The Hotel Earle represents Barton’s mind:

• Creativity is messy. You don’t write something really new in a logical, directed way. You fumble around in the cloud, groping for clues. There’s lots of anxiety and self-doubt, fears that you will never find it, that you’re a fraud, that your past successes were flukes. You only know you’ve succeeded when you finally see something new and great and grab onto it. This can be a really painful, unpleasant process, but this is where new beautiful ideas come from. So the hotel is a dank shithole, because your internal state during idea generation is a shithole.
• To create something new, you have to burn down your old ways of thinking, your old structures. When you’re done, you think differently. The peeling, oozing wallpaper is the beginning of this process. The old is disintegrating, making way for the new. The hotel is burned down toward the end of the movie, after Barton has finished his script.
• Established 1909 — about right for someone of Barton’s age in 1941. This would make Barton 32 years old. Interestingly, Ethan Coen would have been about that age when Barton Fink was being written.

The picture of the girl on the beach on Barton’s hotel wall represents the final goal of his writing, a thing of beauty:

• Barton is writing in a shithole hotel. When he’s stuck, he stares at the picture, the one beautiful object in his environment, thinking about how he wants to get there — he wants to create a beautiful picture.
• At some point, Barton finds Detectives Mastrionotti and Deutsch in his room. Mastrionotti is reading the script out loud, while Deutsch is intently staring at the bathing beauty — the final creation — while listening to the script. Deutsch sees the beauty — “I kinda liked it”.
• At the end of the movie, Barton encounters a real girl on the beach who sits in the same pose as in the picture. She’s now real, because he’s completed his script. He says “You’re very beautiful. Are you in pictures?” She laughs, and says “Don’t be silly.” This is because his script is a work of art, too good for the B-movie studio he’s working for. I have no idea what the diving pelican represents.

Charlie Meadows represents the id or something like it, the gut, as has been said many times before. Real feelings, generated by deep, ancient brain structures, primal and more fundamental than the self-control granted by the cortex. Charlie is the key to everything — to create something beautiful, you have to actually listen to your feelings, and see what causes you to have an emotional reaction. Forget the formulas, forget writing to please others, forget the critics. The only way to make art is to listen to yourself, and make what you like. That’s it. If you do this long enough, maybe you’ll make something that other people will like too.

• We first hear Charlie laughing and sobbing in the adjacent room — uncontrolled emotion. This disturbs Barton. Emotions are unsettling and uncontrolled, messy. We think that we don’t want to let them go unchecked.
• When we meet Charlie, we see that he is obese (the gut) and sweaty, representing giving in to base desires and the lack of self control. He also likes to drink. He’s got dice on his suspenders — giving in to emotions brings chaos, ultimately productive but messy.
• Charlie sells insurance — fire, theft, casualty. Providing for basic human needs. Emotions are there to protect us, we feel them when something important happens. They prod us toward action and self-preservation.
• Charlie is unpretentious, the ‘common man’. Not well-read. He’s the opposite of the controlling cortex. He’s real.
• Charlie pinning Barton during wrestling is the first real thing that happens to Barton in this movie, something powerful enough to shake him out of his coma. “Don’t feel bad, though. I wouldn’t be much of a match for you at mental gymnastics.”
• When Barton has his first glimmer of a direction for his script — “a large man in tights” — he’s in Charlie’s shoes, literally.
• Does the ear infection represent the turbulent internal state that gives rise to great art? Charlie’s a ‘little funny in the head.’
• The heat is the rise of the emotions. This is when Charlie comes.
• Barton sticks Charlie’s picture in the frame of the picture of the girl on the beach. Listening to Charlie is the only way Barton can get to the girl, the beautiful picture.
• Charlie says “Most guys I just feel sorry for. Yeah. It tears me up inside, to think about what they’re going through. How trapped they are.” He’s here to liberate you from the rules.
• Barton says “But Charlie — why me? Why –” Charlie says “Because you DON’T LISTEN!” Barton isn’t listening to his emotions.

Bill Mayhew is a once-talented writer who has sold out.

• We meet Bill in the bathroom when he is vomiting, noisily and lengthily. Is he vomiting out… A SCRIPT?? He used to be a great novelist. But in recent years he started writing for the pictures and his stuff has become formulaic.
• He drinks when he can’t write. He wants to numb himself. He’s building a levee against the raging river of manure. He’s boarding over the door of his own shithole hotel.
• He says that writing is peaceful. Barton disagrees, and says that writing comes from a great inner pain, and that good work isn’t possible without it. Bill doesn’t want to feel that pain.
• He thinks about Estelle, his wife. She’s disturbed. His real talent, suppressed for many years?
• He gives Barton a copy of his book, Nebuchadnezzar. Later, Barton opens the bible and reads: “And the king, Nebuchadnezzar, answered and said to the Chaldeans, I recall not my dream; if ye will not make known unto me my dream, and its interpretation, ye shall be cut in pieces, and of your tents shall be made a dunghill.” In other words, Bill relies on others (Audrey, the formula) to come up with his ideas for him.

Audrey Taylor represents formulaic writing. The superego? Here’s how to succeed, just use this one weird trick. If you follow Audrey’s advice, you won’t create anything original, just the same old pap. She needs to be killed to free the original ideas within Barton.

• Audrey is Bill Mayhew’s secretary and girlfriend. He loves her and the security she provides — using a formula removes uncertainty and speeds things up — but he also hates her because of what she represents.
• Barton calls Audrey when he’s up against the wall and just needs SOMETHING to meet his deadline. An outline. The Coen brothers have talked about how they don’t use outlines.
• She comes over to Barton’s room to help him come up with the basic story. She says “Look, it’s really just a formula. You don’t have to type your soul into it. We’ll invent some names and a new setting. I’ll help you and it won’t take any time at all. I did it for Bill so many times.” Bill’s recent work is crap because ‘Audrey’ — or the formula — wrote it.
• Audrey is a siren. An alluring temptress. It’s so easy — just do it this way, how it’s been done so many times. So peaceful. But giving in to Audrey will lead you to artistic shipwreck. The Coen brothers reference the Odyssey in a number of their films.
• Charlie kills Audrey, because she could suffocates Barton’s creativity. Barton can finally start writing after Charlie kills Audrey because he’s finally stopped trying to use a formula, he’s following his emotions.
• Audrey’s got a padlock brooch on when we first meet her, representing locked down thought.

Detectives Mastrionotti and Deutsch represent self-control, the ego. They are the thought police, the internal critic. They want to keep order, snuff out disreputable forces:

• They want to catch Charlie, keep the emotions in check.
• They are the Nazis of the mind. They represent self-criticism, self-doubting, self-hating, what’s to code, what’s not. The judgers, they can stifle new thoughts with excessive criticism.
• When Charlie comes back to the hotel, the detectives cufflink Barton to his bed. Chaining him down, keeping him from following his emotions. Charlie later bends the bars and frees him.
• Charlie shoots at them, flames burst up behind him, and he starts shouting “I’ll show you the life of the mind!!!” Charlie’s chaos is the actual life of the mind, from which springs all original thought.
• Charlie says ‘Heil Hitler’ right before shooting one of them in the forehead. Death to rigid rules and regulations. The mind has been freed.
• If you’re trying to come up with new ideas, all sources of information are valuable, even if slightly crazy. Excessive criticism can shut down idea generation, so turn down your internal critic.

The bible. Genesis, the creation of heaven and earth:

• The first lines of genesis have been replaced with the first lines of Barton’s script. He’s wiping away all formula, starting anew with just his feelings (Charlie) to guide him. The genesis of a new thing of beauty has no guidance, no past. It’s a new world. Let there be light.

Chet. Less clear to me, but I love the CHET! note at the beginning. Maybe Chet is the blood? If the Hotel Earl is the mind, blood has to come up from the body to feed the mind. When we first meet Chet he does come from below, through a trap door in the floor. He does routine maintenance like shoe polishing, like blood brings nutrients and clears debris.

The studio is the studio. It’s a machine. Lots of money, clean, fancy. Looking for scripts that will make a lot of bucks. Have to read everything so quickly they can’t appreciate quality that takes time to digest. Broad strokes. They don’t see the genius in Barton’s script, they just see that it won’t make money.

Maybe this is all BS, maybe it’s not really an allegory. But it fits pretty well.