Have you ever considered what part of you anatomy you might sell in exchange for two hours’ time spent inside another person’s mind? I don’t mean the body swapping bit; I’m talking about sitting smack in the middle of a person’s imagination, their own private world. You just lean back in a comfy pile of grey matter, popping down Raisinettes, while you experience the horrible wonders projected before you in the mind’s eye.
Everybody still with me? Good. Because I have quite a peculiar journey to set before you. Ladies and gentlemen, I submit for your inspection Barton Fink, the latest venture from those maverick film producers, the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan. I presume that most of you are already familiar with the Coens’ work and that anyone with a soul has probably already experienced this film. (Here I address the faithful readers of Mosaic and not the 9-to-5 layman queebs who somehow skagged a copy). So, if you came looking for a formulaic, cookie-cutter dissection of this film, let me kindly point you in the direction of The New Yorker or The Nation, and I’ll pick up where I left off.
Sure, the film raked it in at Cannes and both Turturro and Goodman command the silver screen like veterans, but what do we have to do with such things? We only know what we have experienced, what we have seen and felt! So let’s talk about what the film means to us and to our community in particular.
The movie Barton Fink takes place entirely in the perspective of a single mind. “Whose mind?” you ask. Hold that thought and file it away for later. From the opening frame, our new reality which we will experience for the next two hours is defined. We realize shortly that it is a world of stereotypes, with characters made out of plastic. Barton himself is a cardboard punchout of Clifford Odets. The snooty couple at the restaurant, the movie producer Jack Lipnick, the spooky bellboy — they all play upon caricatures which we have stored in our minds. It is this reason that makes them amusing. We see them portrayed in flesh and blood, and it is for that reason they become grotesque.
So from the very beginning, a sense of unreality is hinted at. As the film progresses, is seems that nothing is withheld from the viewers, all is laid bare. It’s as if we had a copy of the script and could read the character’s thoughts and intentions. This also lends to their plasticity. Yeah, at first it seems as though Barton may be a really good writer with high ideals about a “theater for the common man,” but this view is easily toppled when we see that he ends up writing the exact same story in the end as he did in the beginning and he really doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about the common man. It’s all so, well… obvious. While many will be tempted to expound upon what this says about Barton as a writer and writing in general, why don’t we take the path less traveled and see where it takes us.
I think that the Coens have tried to play a clever trick on us. They called the movie Barton Fink and Barton’s face occupies the majority of the celluloid, but the story really isn’t about him at all. Barton is rather a focal point for us, an excuse to be in this dream world in order to learn a lesson. You see, there’s just too much eye candy in the movie which steals our attention away from Barton for him to be all that important. I’ve already mentioned the colorful supporting characters. Then there’s the wallpaper curling off like the world falling apart, Barton stepping into Charlie’s shoes, the drain shot when Barton’s life really goes down the drain, the Bible transforming into his script, the hotel burning with the flames of Hell, etc.
One could go the route of the ridiculous and say that this is all exaggerated metaphor, but I’d like to take it deeper than that. You’ll have to break out the mental floss for this one, folks, so bear with me. I’d like to suggest that the film has carried the “Life of the Mind” motif throughout the entire “story” to the point that the movie itself becomes a mind. Think about it. Aren’t caricatures and metaphors translated from images in the imagination? In the film, we are seeing these images literally brought to life, as the affairs of the mind are faithfully translated to the screen. Barton’s world seems like it is falling apart, so the wallpaper starts to peel. His life goes down the drain, thus the camera shot. His life is becoming like Hell, so FWOOSH!, he’s in Hell.
Remember that thought I told you to file away earlier? Well, bring it back out because it’s time to examine the question “Whose mind is it?” Is the film a reflection of Barton’s own mind? Or does it reflect the opinions of the Coen brothers, what they see in their heads? Or is the answer closer to home? Enter Charlie Meadows (played by John Goodman), whom I believe to be the magnetic North of the film. He’s the anomaly in the movie. At first glance, he appears to be just like the other standard cut-out characters and we seem to be able to read him fairly well. Like Barton, we tend to dismiss him, thinking that he’s just a jovial insurance salesman. But we’re dead wrong. We see Meadows unmasked as a psychotic murderer.
We are taken aback, for we realized that, like Barton, we didn’t really listen to Charlie. Instead we paid our attention to Barton and what he was doing. Barton claimed that, as a writer, he created. But we all know that he created only delusions of grandeur and misconceptions of the common man. We, with Barton, failed to consider the life of Charlie’s mind, as we so often overlook the minds of those people we see every day, the people we think we know so well. I believe that the mind in question is our own, ladies and gentlemen. Barton Fink is a cautionary tale directed towards our society. It shows us that we, like Charlie, all have a private war inside of us. As in the climax of the film, if we stop to look and listen, we will see a smiley-faced bandage torn away to reveal the gaping wound festering underneath.
Barton Fink presents us with a radical departure from the beaten path of mainstream cinema and at the same time challenges us to examine our own minds. What carbon copy caricatures have we mentally set up in place of the flesh and blood souls that walk the streets with us? What pie in the sky ideals have so ensnared our attention that we fail to notice the “common man?” Will we dare to see the life of the their minds? And more importantly, will we listen?
If you’ve come within a stone’s throw of any press about Sin City, you already know Rodriguez hit a home run. I don’t have to tell you it’s fantastic.