By John M. Whalen
“Barton Fink†(1991), now available from Kino Lorber on
Blu-Ray, is the Coen Brothers’ version of the old, familiar story of what
happens to idealistic young writers when they go to Hollywood. Barton Fink
(John Turturro) is a New York playwright in the 1930s whose play about the
plight of the common man is a big hit. He’s Joel and Ethan Coen’s version of
Clifford Odets, and his agent convinces him to accept an offer from Capital
Pictures to go west and write screenplays for $1,000 a week. Full of his own
sense of self-importance, the naïve Fink believes he can go to Hollywood and
start a whole new movement of films dealing with the everyday struggles of the
working man.
Eschewing lodgings in a typical Hollywood hotel, Fink
choses the seedy and downright spooky Hotel Earle, whose only two employees are
Chet (Steve Buscemi), who mans the front desk, and Pete (Harry Bugin) the
elevator operator. He finds his room on the sixth floor in the middle of an
endless corridor lined with shoes left by guests who never make an appearance.
It’s perfect for his ascetic purposes. He sits his Underwood typewriter on a
desk with a picture on the wall above it of a girl sitting on a blanket at the
beach. Befitting his wanted need for isolation, she has her back to Barton.
The next day Barton meets his new boss at Capital
Pictures, Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner). Lipnick is basically a composite of Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, two
of the legendary studio heads of bygone days, and Lerner plays him as ruthless,
dictatorial, and crass. Lipnick informs Barton he’s been assigned to write a
wrestling picture that will star Wallace Beery. He tells him it’s got to have
plenty of action, but, of course, still have “some of that Barton Fink feeling.
Not too fruity. You’ll work it out.â€
Back in his hotel room, Barton starts to write the first
lines of the story about the dawn coming up over the tenements. But his
concentration is broken by the muffled sounds of a grown man sobbing in the
next room. He calls Chet to complain. A minute later there’s a knock on his
door. It’s the guest from the next room, none other than big, burly Charley
Meadows (John Goodman), asking if he had complained about him. What starts out
to be a tense confrontation soon turns friendly when Charley breaks out a
bottle of hooch, and the two men engage in some conversation. Barton soon
discovers that the common man he wants to write about lives right next door.
Charley is impressed when he learns that Barton is “writing for the pictures,â€
and apologizes for disturbing him. “So you’re a writer,†he says. “If you need
any help, let me know. I got stories I could tell you.â€
Charley offers his help several times in the course of
the story, but Barton is so full of his own glorious vision of starting a new
literary movement he never stops to listen. And then a peculiar thing happens.
After Charley leaves he sits down at the typewriter to write but is again
disturbed, this time by the sound of the wall paper starting to peel off the
walls. He stands up on the desk to press the dripping paper back on the wall
and hears more disturbing sounds—a couple upstairs engaged in what sounds like
some kinky kind of sadistic sex.
A major motif of “Barton Fink†is the use of grotesque
sound imagery coming through walls. It’s as though we’re allowed to eavesdrop
on the madness and suffering being endured in individual private hells. The
next such instance comes in the men’s room at the movie studio. Barton washes
his hands at the sink and hears a man vomiting violently in one of the stalls.
He’s shocked a few moments later when famous author William Mayhew (John
Mahoney) comes out of the stall. Mayhew is obviously based on William Faulkner,
with Mahoney playing him as a waste out alcoholic who once wrote great novels,
but is now working on the Capital Pictures assembly line. Barton asks him if
he’d ever written a wrestling picture. Mayhew assures him that there isn’t any
type of story that he hasn’t taken a crack at and invites Barton over to his
office that afternoon to talk about “wrestling stories and other literary
things.â€
Barton saunters over to his office later only to be
greeted at the door by his secretary Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), who says he’ll
have to come another time. In the background we hear Mayhew behind the door,
ranting and screaming in a drunken rage—another sound bite from hell.