Stream On: ‘Barton Fink,’ a nightmare on Hollywood Boulevard

There's only one thing stranger than what's going on inside his head ... What's going on outside.

In 1989, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, A Serious Man) began writing the script for their third self-directed film, Miller's Crossing. The story became complicated, and they found themselves lost in it. For a change, they went from Los Angeles to New York and began to work on Barton Fink, a story ostensibly about writer’s block.

BARTON FINK

/Streaming /Amazon /🍅90%🍿89% /Trailer /1991 /R

“Where there’s a head, there’s hope!” (Charlie Meadows)

Unlike the blocked Coens, playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro, Five Corners) goes from New York, where he’s unsatisfied with the authenticity of his work, to Los Angeles for a palate cleanse. His one play is a critical success, but, like Clifford Odets, Fink wants to create a “theatre of the common man.” (Turturro, as Fink, resembles Odets strongly. When public tastes turned away from political theater, Odets had little success, so he moved to Hollywood and spent twenty years writing film scripts.)

Fink moves into a huge, seedy hotel that reminds me of the Overlook in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, and may be similarly possessed. In his rooms, which feature peeling wallpaper, a stained ceiling and bloodthirsty mosquitos, he sits at his typewriter and looks from a blank piece of paper up to the only picture in the apartment, which depicts a pretty girl sitting on the sand by the Pacific ocean.

He visits the movie studio that has hired him, where his new boss Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner, Eight Men Out) requests a script for a “Wallace Beery wrestling picture.” Fink has no knowledge of wrestling, so some repetitive, unedited shots of Beery scowling in a wrestling ring are screened for Fink, who by now is feeling completely lost. Producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub, Monk) takes Fink out to lunch and suggests he consult another writer, and in the restaurant restroom he finds someone vomiting in a stall. It turns out to be “W.P. Mayhew,” Fink’s “favorite writer” (John Mahoney, Frasier, Striking Distance, who strongly resembles William Faulkner, who also toiled in Hollywood. In fact, Faulkner’s first job in Hollywood was a Wallace Beery wrestling pic, Flesh).

(The invocation of Odets and Faulkner goes no further than their resemblance to Fink and Mayhew and the few superficial similarities, apart from the Coens’ love of Hollywood history. There is nothing biographical or nonfictional about Barton Fink.)

Meanwhile, Fink meets his next-door neighbor in the hotel, Charlie Meadows (sly John Goodman, Fallen), a friendly and charismatic bear of an insurance salesman, who is not without his own quirks. Meadows is annoyed when Fink starts sounding off about a “theatre of the common man” but isn’t interested in Meadows’ own stories. Meadows is a common man! … apparently. Fink also doesn’t realize that Hollywood, which seems like Hell to him, is the actual home of the theatre of the common man.

And while Fink is struggling to come up with his first screenplay, he becomes involved in a murder that adds another genre to this film, which is already a postmodernist (you’ll see if you watch) buddy/horror film. Barton Fink is sometimes referred to as a lesser Coen brothers film, but that might be tied to its comprehensibility, which is faint—but that’s a feature, not a bug, as with many Coen films.

Sources include William Faulkner in Hollywood, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).

Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.