![]() ![]() If that's all there was to it - poking fun at the fecklessness of an elite intellectual class so worked up waxing rhapsodic about their ideals that they completely forget to live them - I imagine Barton Fink would still be an enjoyably caustic time. The Coens have a great deal of fun mocking him - he is the most obnoxious protagonist in any Coen film, maybe even the only one who's genuinely unlikable - by shipping him off to Hollywood, where his extremely self-important awareness of his writing skills proves incapable of the laughably uncomplicated task of writing a formulaic B-picture about wrestlers, a perfectly everyday genre that this self-anointed poet of the masses has apparently never heard of. A message with absolutely no application to our own times, obviously. I mean, on the one hand, it's quite straightforward: Barton Fink (John Turturro), a fairly new playwright in 1941, is convinced that he's on the brink of telling a great new story about the American working class, one that will revolutionise American theatre he is, however a hypocrite and dilettante whose interest in the working class is strictly aesthetic and whose high-minded progressive ideals are mostly about declaring his virtue publicly and thereby impressing his high-minded progressive peers, and who blatantly does not care about the actual working class as it is constituted of individual people, but only as an ideal he has constructed. That certainly isn't the most outlandish reading I can think of for a movie with a calculated indifference to yielding up meaning. Maybe the whole thing is just an elaborate joke with a single, lame punchline: "writer's block is hell". And maybe there really doesn't need to be any more to it than that. To work out a bad case of writer's block, the brothers wrote a fable about a man with writer's block. The 1991 film, the fourth written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen, was written in a brief burst of activity when they were stuck on the labyrinthine script for Miller's Crossing, their third. If there's a key to cracking Barton Fink, and honestly I'm pretty sure that there isn't, it might be the simplest bit of production trivia of all.
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