(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 4

10. Barton Fink, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen

"I'm having some trouble getting started."

So says our hero, and so says me. I always find that the beginning of a piece is the hardest part to write. Once you've got your beginning, all your decisions are pretty much made for you--that introductory section contains their seeds. And that's the pressure of writing the beginning in the first place: You know that this is the most important part, that this will dictate where you can go and what you can do when you get there.

Shall we test this theory? Please let's do: The beginning of Barton Fink consists of a close-up of wallpaper, then the prolonged and precipitous descent of a stage weight.

Staring and sinking--yes, that's pretty much how it goes from there on in.

Barton Fink is a very, very frightening film. Yet for all that it's rarely classified as horror. Perhaps this is because writers, when reflecting on the movie, find it difficult to get past the fact that it mirrors nightmares almost too personal to their profession to achieve the universality necessary for great horror. It is, after all, a movie about writer's block. But to paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola, this film is not about writer's block--this film is writer's block. It's as if the Coen Brothers managed to crack open their title character's brain and infect the entire world of the film with its ossified contents. Like writer's block itself, the movie is slow, sticky, with random intrusions of the disturbing and absurd. Everything drips--the temperamental wallpaper in the Hotel Earle, the infected ear of Barton's next-room neighbor Charlie, Barton's hands during his bathroom meeting with his idol Bill Mayhew, Charlie's mouth as he reacts to an unpleasant discovery in Barton's room. The camera, too, seems tacky and tensile, tracking in and out lugubriously like a strand of old chewing gum pulled from someone's mouth. Barton stares at his wallpaper, his ceiling, his bathroom floor, his typewriter, the pages he's writing on--stares and stares, and the camera just worms right into whatever he's looking at. Sounds--a bell, a mosquito, the hotel room doors, the noises of neighbors--cling to the ear like clothes to the body on a humid day. Even the music oozes, with eerie strings playing endless notes as piano chords trickle down around them.

Everyone Barton meets seems similarly stuck in behavioral quicksand. No one, except perhaps perpetually dyspeptic producer Ben Geisler and well-meaning agent Garland Jeffries, seems at all able to respond appropriately, or at all, to anyone else. The benefactors behind Barton's play prattle on as though (much to the writer's irritation) it were just a particularly moving excuse to dress up and get drunk. The staff of the Hotel Earle are disproportionately solicitous, albeit each in different fashions: Chet (who rises up out of the bowels of the hotel like Hell's bellhop) is almost relentlessly helpful, while Pete, the ancient-seeming elevator operator, formally declares the "next stop" even when Barton's the only person on the elevator. Studio head Jack Lipnick has his mind made up about absolutely everything, and it's all Barton can do to get a word in edgewise; his assistant Lou is beaten down enough to make Barton look like an athlete out of Triumph of the Will. (And trust me, I'm not the only person who makes Nazi references in the context of this film. Indeed, while it might be a stretch to say that this film is about the Holocaust, it would also be a stretch to say that this film isn't about the Holocaust.) The two detectives who call on Barton toward the end of the film (a German and an Italian--no reason, I'm just saying) treat him like the worst degenerate they've ever come across (in the process becoming the two most unsympathetic characters in filmdom this side of the Emperor from Return of the Jedi), as if they know no other way to behave. Legendary, Faulkneresque writer Bill Mayhew is immersed in pretension and drink, traps as formidable as any tar pit. Only traveling insurance salesman Charlie Meadows and Mayhew's "personal secretary" Audrey interact with Barton on a real, human level--the level of "the common man," as Barton might have it--and, well, for this they are rewarded, in a way.