Barton Fink - I think I get it now
Recently, I rewatched Barton Fink. This is a complex movie that deserves some analysis. I enjoyed it again, as I saw more in it than I had previously. It is hilariously funny without a gag reel or obvious jokes. It is also a great work of art in that it does something that only art can really do: express an idea that is difficult to explain. Even the first time I saw it, there was some great truth in this film that I could feel, but I couldn't explain. It was like an phantom itch that you can never quite scratch, even though you can reach the area where you think it is. The answers came to me just now, so I felt the need to write down my thoughts before they evaporated: and in the act of writing them consolidated them into a coherent picture.
Barton Fink is a complex movie that says several different
things at once, and so taken as a whole, it is like a party of
conversations in which it is difficult to hear one voice over the
others. Barton Fink, in my mind, is one of the most brilliant films ever
made, and is an almost perfect cautionary tale of the value of sanity.
But, what was it really about?
We start out with Barton, receiving accolades for his play. People embarrass him. He is humbled by his success, but it also goes to his head. He contemplates doing something really inspiring, something that will make his earlier effort seem pedestrian. Being a New York intellectual, he wants to idealize the "common man," as he puts it. The whole feeling I get from him is one of a communist who glorifies the inglorious, and spits contempt upon people who he presumes think themselves better than himself. In this, he is a typical leftist elitist who simultaneously deifies mediocrity and assumes a superiority bestowed by his artistic genius. In an unironic conundrum, he derives his sense of superiority from the pretense of idolizing the inferior. Such a mind is not far from psychosis, as it requires tremendous effort to maintain delusions when all evidence points to a contrary reality.Although my first impulse is to hate him, his struggles as a writer are easy for me to relate to. You cannot force yourself to be creative. The creativity needs to come from somewhere deep inside, a kind of wellspring of the subconscious, or a muse. You can't rush it, nor coax it. You can only tempt it and hope that it comes to you. While in the dingy hotel, he is unable to get it up for the strongman story. He has little to go on, and he cannot conceive of why they would hire him to do such a script. Nor does he know anything about wrestling movies. In this is another area where I can relate to him: being in a situation where one is expected to perform well outside one's ability. On the one hand, he considers a simple script about a wrestler far beneath his ability. On the other hand, to admit such would be to admit to himself that he considers himself too good to write something that would appeal to the "common man." After all: these are the people that he pretends to be concerned with, but he doesn't actually understand the common man. What he understands is a communist idealized common man, a straw man, upon which he built his career. The target audience for his unique writing talent does not exist. The common man doesn't want his high falutin' frippery, and so his real audience is New York intellectuals. However, he cannot admit to himself that he really writes for intellectuals, because his self-image is based on idealizing the common man.
The Hotel is Fink's mind. Empty, dust-filled corridors of silence. This is the sterile emptiness of Barton Fink's dry consciousness. Its decaying former glory is indicated by the opulence and dilapidation. This is Barton's working space.
Enter Madman Mundt. Mundt seems to be the "real" common man. Barton Fink invites him into his room and tries to milk him for inspiration. Simultaneously looking down at him because he's a real regular Joe, a working stiff, and feeling guilty about himself for doing so, Mundt becomes a symbol of his failure of Fink to self-evaluate.
The walls of the hotel are paper thin. One can hear things going on behind them. Primal urges, a moaning woman can be heard. Mundt laughing and making a fuss just beyond the barrier. The walls of the hotel room are the veil that protects the conscious mind from the subconscious: that wild, untamed territory of the unreasonable urges that are kept in the dark. These walls between the conscious mind and the subconscious are falling apart. The wallpaper is peeling, and when Fink asks for something to be done, the bellhop sends him a box of thumbtacks.
Mundt is the madness of Fink's contradictory self-image. He is the main personality of wild territory of Fink's subconscious: a symbol of the common man, but also his muse, and Fink doesn't listen to him. Fink tells him to be quiet so he can concentrate. This is the reason why Fink has writer's block: he is trying to keep his subconscious quiet, out of sight, in the next room. Mundt is Fink's muse, his insanity, the inescapable truth behind Fink's self-doubt: the knowledge that he is a fraud, all in one. Fink cannot face his inner truth, so Mundt becomes more and more powerful, to the point where he burns down the hotel, murders two policemen, while shouting:
"I will show you the life of the mind!"
Mundt was trying to tell him all along: that the life of the mind is the subconscious, breaking down the door of Fink's consciousness, burning the walls between the conscious and the subconscious like an unstoppable demon from the underworld. The moment the conscious mind cannot protect itself from the subconscious is when the walls of the hotel burn down. The psychotic break has occurred.
After a psychotic break, there is a period of relative calm. The tension that the conscious mind has built up while straining against the underlying maelstrom of insanity is released the moment the conscious mind breaks, like a damn, and relinquishes control. The unacceptable truth becomes unstoppable as it floods in, and our protagonist remains a helpless drifter on a sea of insanity. He finds himself on a beach, with a box of mystery, contemplating a girl whom he had seen in a photograph in the exact same position. Past, present are meaningless. He doesn't know what is in the box, nor claim to own it. He is at peace with it. Rational cause-effect relationships are skewed. No matter: he no longer cares because the conscious mind has surrendered to the life of the mind.
The life of the mind is the the secret power behind art. Every real artist knows this, but few would be able to put it into words. It cannot be controlled, but only listened to and accepted. Trying to control it will lead to rebellion, if not destruction. The devil cannot be killed, only contained, and only as long as one has no need for him.
